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His eyes flickered shut, reopened. “I can’t do this anymore. But I don’t get to stop just because I had the idiocy to fall—” His mouth slammed shut so fast Clare heard his teeth click.
Inexplicably her body came all over with pinpricks of gooseflesh, nervous heat coiling restlessly inside her stomach. She felt as unsettled as the first time she’d been struck, and when her hand reached for his, he took it.
“He asked you after we came back from Deleen, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you agree?”
“Because he’d want me to make you do things for him, and glamour can’t hide from you the evidence of what happens when he doesn’t get what he wants. I’ve seen how angry you get. Over me. For me. You’d either do what he wanted to make it stop, or you’d try to stop him yourself. I wasn’t going to be the reason you either became his puppet or got yourself killed.
“So I thought if you hated me, he couldn’t use me against you.” He sighed. “But then I fucked that up too, because you didn’t believe it and I wasn’t strong enough to make you. Today I thought if he was angry enough to finally kill me, well, that would solve the problem too.”
Her hand tightened on his. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. And I’m not worth it. I never have been.”
“That is bullshit.”
“It’s—”
“Not.” She cut him off. “It’s not the truth, and it never has been. You saw what I came out of. I left that and I came here wanting an actual life, but I didn’t even understand what that meant. And then I found you. I wanted you. So don’t tell me what I want isn’t worth it. Don’t tell me what I care about is cheap.”
“Clare…” He struggled to rise onto his elbow.
She shoved him back down. “And do not reinjure yourself.”
A hint of a smile finally ghosted his lips. “Is there anything I am allowed to do?”
“Yes.” Her throat tightened. “Promise me you’ll be here when I come back.”
The shadows returned to his eyes. “Back from where?”
“Dunen Province. I need to fabricate a dying uncle and make myself difficult to forget.” Alaric might know exactly where she was from. But that didn’t mean the world did. It didn’t mean she couldn’t paint a very different picture of her life for them. A life where she’d grown up known and loved and adored. And wasn’t it convenient that she’d been in public mourning these last weeks? “And then I am going to fix this.” She had legends to track down. And she had a Song that knew where every single one of them was. “So promise me you’ll be here.”
He looked tired, in that way that only years of hopelessness can make a person, grinding them down day by day. “Does it mean that much to you?”
“It means everything to me.” For a moment, she was afraid that her deepest truth wouldn’t be enough.
But he blew out a shuddering breath and said, “Then I’ll be here.”
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Foundational Memories Are Tricky Things
Marquin was not certain what to expect when he and Verol arrived in Farthenam Village. They had come in response to Clare’s letter, which had stated only, My uncle has passed on. I would be grateful if you would attend the wake.
They had had no other communication with her. She had said nothing of Renault County, which by now the entire kingdom knew was burning. While Phoenix had, in response to his inquiry on the matter, confirmed she was responsible, and that she had the Siren’s Tear in her possession, they refused to say anything else about what had happened there.
Alaric had accepted their explanation of Clare’s absence with too much unruffled calm, not asking a single question. Had, in response to their own departure for the wake, merely bid them a fair journey. Experience had taught Marquin that Alaric’s calm often came before his most violent storms. Yet he couldn’t sense the building of this one, could not predict when it might break.
So now he and his husband stood in a small, unremarkable village nestled in the heart of Dunen Province, attending a wake for a man they had never heard of. A man Clare had never met. She had never stepped foot in this village until two weeks prior—if there was one thing the pit of fire that was Renault County proved, it was that—and yet every single inhabitant of Farthenam Village was utterly convinced Clare had grown up within the bounds of their small slice of the world.
Each person he and Verol spoke with had some story about her. Clare running about the village as a toddler, terrorizing everyone and keeping her dearly departed uncle on his toes. Clare racing horses with the other village children. Clare sneaking into Mr. Thompson’s apple orchard. Clare singing her first song at seven at their spring festival.
The stories were too richly detailed to have been made up, Clare’s “life” here too intimately woven into everyone else’s to be the result of even the most careful coaching. It was, none of it, the truth of Clare’s past, and yet Verol’s careful sifting through minds could produce no hint of a lie, nor mental manipulation. Each person they spoke to believed they told the truth.
And as they had only just arrived in Farthenam in time for the wake, they had not yet had an opportunity to get Clare alone to have her explain. She was relentlessly popular with everyone, who could not stop offering her sympathy, or this or that creature comfort, or this or that amusing anecdote meant to honor her uncle’s memory.
