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Looking at Clare, feeling the power emanating from her, Numair did not doubt that she was right.
He should run.
Dust stirred at her feet, the ground far beneath them rumbling and groaning as the air grew thick and magic-charged. A great fissure split the ground at the cliff-base, cracking the earth through Renault County all the way to the heart of the quellstone mine. It spiraled out from that white heart, carrying quellstone dust with it, snaking white-dusted wounds in ever-widening concentric circles until the faults in the earth encompassed the entire county.
He watched the figures of the guards, small as ants from this vantage point, this distance, flee in terror, only to fall into the ravine that opened to swallow their escape. The inhabitants of the county, released from Clare’s thrall, scurried about like cockroaches. Some simply ran, panicked, in the first direction they found. That, Numair could understand. What he couldn’t—didn’t—understand were the ones given over to a spree of butchering, as if they knew their world was ending, and all they desired was to commit one or two more injustices before they were finished.
The earth stilled, and for a moment, it was quiet. But it was the kind of quiet that heralded the coming of a greater noise, a greater work.
He should run. But running from her was beyond him.
He stepped to her right, leaving a couple feet of distance between them. Close enough to offer support, to bear witness, but not close enough to get in her way. Not close enough to be seen, by the thing giving its power to this act, as a threat.
Clare’s eyes were opened wide and they held a sheen of rapture, whether hers or its he didn’t know. But when she spoke, her own voice was a bare thread beneath the other’s, the cadence of speech bearing no similarity to Clare’s.
“Did you know, Prince Tolvannen, that it takes heat one thousand times hotter than that of mages’ fire to set quellstone alight?”
Numair did not answer, as the thing clearly did not wish a reply.
“Once burning, no water, no smothering, can quench its flames, and it is a long-lasting fuel source.” Clare’s lips pulled back into a grim baring of teeth. Her arms bent at the elbows, hands lifting from her sides, palms up. “Renault County is going to burn for one-thousand and twenty-seven years. And I am going to savor every one of them.”
Clare’s hands began to rotate, moving around each other as if she wound a massive, invisible spindle. The concentric faults in the earth began to rotate around each other in mimicry, until the whole of the ground beneath the cliff was one giant mass of shifting, spinning ground coated in white dust. Then heat blossomed in the air and fire burst into life, the flames so high the ones nearest licked upwards a foot from the clifftop, turning Renault County into a sea of writhing flame.
Numair knew that as long as he lived, he would never forget the screams that issued forth from that ocean of fire, nor the look of sleepy pleasure from the thing inside Clare before the air around her whipped into a frenzy and flung him away.
Clare had made a mistake. In striking her deal with the Song, she had been forced to allow it more egress from its prison, and the once-thin path from that cage was now a wide channel down which the Song’s power rampaged.
It had helped her get Numair out, and in return she had given it the death of Renault County. They had each given the other what they’d promised, but in the doing she had lost much of the Song’s prison, much of her control, and nearly two decades of pent-up power and frustration now raged against her.
The winds howled and her feet left the ground, her body buoyed up by the incandescent fury of the entity within. She contained it by sheer force of will, the clash between her own desires and the Song’s creating the contest that bent the air around them.
Give. Up. Her voice, a silent growl inside her own mind, pushed against the flood of power streaming from the Song’s prison.
You do not even understand what I want, the Song answered, sounding faintly amused. But beneath that amusement, Clare detected a hint of strain.
I know that you would use me to do it. This is my body. And she was tired—so, so tired—of having it violated. An image of Simian rose unbidden in her mind.
The Song recoiled and Clare pounced on the opening, holding the exodus of power in check.
You would compare me to him? Me?
He may have raped my body but he could not rape my soul. You violate me just by being here. You know what I think, what I feel. And whenever it is convenient for you, you seek to use me for your own ends.
And do you not seek to use me for yours?
Maybe I have. But I have only sought to use what was forced upon me. I had no choice in your presence. But you chose me. You chose to be born into me. She knew it for the truth, felt it deep within her bones.
Yes, I chose you. Shall I show you where your life ended had I not chosen you?
Her vision clouded over with memory, the Song taking her back to a moment that was, objectively, not the worst in her life, but that felt as if it was because she had lost, then, the last shred of illusion that she had control.
Closing her eyes did not staunch the assault on her vision, her senses. She saw and felt everything as markedly as the night it had happened. The dimly lit hovel surrounded by the smell of musty rags. The rough, oily hands pawing at her, the warm press of flesh and the sick-sweet smell of rotting breath pouring over her nose.
Her small hands fumbling for the bone shard kept always beneath the pile of rags she slept on because she had known, instinctively, that the way he looked at her was dangerous. Wrong.
She whipped the shard out, sinking it into his eye with a frightened yell. His cry of pain mingled with her mother’s howl of rage, and the memory was twice as painful re-lived because she knew how foolish the relief in her younger self’s mind was. Relief that her useless, drunken mother was coming to help her.
But her mother, when she leapt, did not leap on the man but on Clare, knocking the bone shard from her hand, bony fists slamming into her face again and again and again.
