AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Destroy this world and make a new one. Your optimism at the fresh start will ensure that initially it will be as beautiful as you imagine. Give it a few ten winters, a few hundred, and you will become complacent, and the corruption will slip in. You will see it and it will enrage you, and that will only fuel the downward spiral. Watch and see. In a few centuries your new world will be right where this one is now.
The Song’s silence was a cold and terrible thing, and it drew another soft, internal laugh from Clare.
Oh Song, this is not your first world, is it? Dare I ask how many others there have been?
The Song did not answer.
May I take it this is the first time anyone has had this conversation with you?
It is, the Song finally answered.
Some advice from my childhood? You may destroy yourself only so many times before you must recognize that you are what you are. Save yourself, for once. Or destroy yourself again. The choice is yours, I suppose.
It was only when Alaric’s anger was vented, when he stood, blood dripping from his fists, that the Song asked, tentatively, What do you suggest we do?
What anything does when backed into a corner, Clare answered, her hand clenching around the cloth-wrapped form of the Siren’s Tear. We adopt his tactics, and we fight.
Alaric wiped his hands on a shredded remnant of the bedspread and tossed it onto Numair’s bloody, supine form. “If you’re alive when the healer comes in the morning, you can go back to work.” He shook his head, and his next words sounded almost genuinely regretful. “You should have taken her, boy. Now I have to handle things, and she won’t like it.”
He started to leave, then paused in the doorway and turned back, his head canted as if listening. She quit breathing. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t made a sound. Had she? He looked directly at the wall of vines—and turned and walked out.
Her heart beat so loudly it thudded harshly in her ears, the pulse painful. He couldn’t have seen her. If he’d seen her, he wouldn’t have simply left. She strained against the vines but she was so tightly captured that movement was impossible and she was forced to wait. To listen to the sounds of Numair’s labored breathing and just wait, until the Song unlatching the doors of its prison told her Alaric had left the estate.
I think, it told her, that I would like to fight. But Clare? If we should be on the verge of failure, understand that I will destroy this world before I will let Alaric have it.
Only then did the vines let Clare go, and it was the Song’s magic freeing her, because Numair was too weak.
She pulled out the wood sliver pinning her to the wall, the Song sealing the wound closed as she did, and ran to kneel at his side, her hand reaching for his face. Power flickered over her palm, the Song’s shame making it unusually willing to acquiesce to her desires. Magic flowed and the bones of Numair’s cheek began sliding back into their proper places.
“Don’t.” Numair’s hand caught her wrist, trembling and slick with his own blood. “He’ll send the healer in the morning.”
“You will be dead by the morning.” Her voice was harsh and guttural.
Numair shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. The indifference infuriated her, more so because she understood that if Alaric’s healer arrived to find Numair perfectly fine, that would likely mean his death too.
She touched her hand once more to his cheek and bid the Song to work. It suffused Numair with warmth, searching for the injuries that were immediately life-threatening while leaving the superficial, physical remnants of his mistreatment. His cheekbone finished mending, bone sliding together with a crunch before melding back into a whole unit. The Song probed further, found the ruptured organs inside him and mended those too, staunched the flow of blood that moved internally where it should not.
Numair’s eyes cleared and he blinked slowly, hesitantly.
“The pain is gone,” she told him, “and the worst of the injuries. But most of the damage is still present, and if you push yourself too hard before the healer’s arrival, you can easily still die.”
He let her help him to his feet, leaning heavily on her as she helped him to the sitting room just outside the ruined bedchamber. He didn’t fight her help as she eased him onto a sofa.
“My thanks,” he said stiffly, sinking into the softness of the sofa, letting go of her as if her skin burned.
“Hardly necessary.” She answered in tones that matched his own formality, but when he didn’t say anything else, when he wouldn’t even look at her, she softened. And when she spoke his name, it was with that pronunciation no one else here used. “Numair…”
His jaw tightened, and she had the sense she’d made a misstep. “You know it all now, then,” he said bitterly. “What I am.”
It wasn’t truly a question, but she answered anyway. “I know.”
“I’m the king’s bloody whore,” he snarled, as if she had denied the knowledge. “I sleep with who he tells me to sleep with when he tells me to, until I find out whatever he wants to know that Verol’s stretched too thin to acquire. Because no one thinks the drunken idiot who’s only good for a good time would ever have the brains to spy on anyone.”
She fixed him with a pointed stare. “And you think that would change my opinion of you? After what you’ve seen of my life?”
He shook his head. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“I had the same choice—the only choice—that you have. Death or survival. And I don’t regret that either of us is here.”
