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All of this was odd enough, but the thing that brought him and Verol to the end of their patience was when the local innkeeper recounted, in vivid and what he believed to be truthful detail, the night Verol and Marquin had “discovered” Clare.
“What a stroke of luck, your carriage breaking down outside our little village, eh? Why, if you hadn’t had to spend the night at the inn, you’d have never heard her singing, and I wager the world would be the poorer for it. Why, the way I hear it, even the king himself adores her song.”
“Indeed,” was the only word Verol could manage in response.
“Her uncle tried his best, you know, but he was never a true father and always in poor health, that one. It’s such a relief to us all, knowing she has the two of you looking out for her now.”
Marquin murmured a polite response, and Verol seized an opportunity to pull Clare away from a group of villagers. “Could we talk to you in private?”
“Of course.” Clare made her excuses and they followed her to a small receiving room.
Verol rubbed at his forehead, as if the confusion of the night were a physical spot on his skin he could simply rub off. “Clare, you did not grow up here,” he began, and carried on before she could respond. “These people do not know you and yet they are telling stories about you like they saw you every day of your life. Stories they believe are true. I cannot find a trace of magic on them, not a spell, not a compulsion. The recollections are too detailed and varied for them to have memorized crafted tales, and even if they could have, it wouldn’t explain how I can feel the memories. What is this?”
“It is a life,” she answered simply. “It is detailed, because it was real. As you surmised, there is no spell compelling them to lie, nor any story for them to memorize. There is no need for either, because they simply remember.”
“You…implanted false memories?” Marquin asked.
“Not false. As I said, the memories are real. They simply did not originally belong to these people. The man who died here? My ‘uncle’? He was not a good man. He wielded a great deal of power in this village, and he made life difficult for its inhabitants. So I offered them a choice—to keep the memories they had of him, and be miserable, or to take the ones I gave them, and be happy. They chose the latter. Only two parts of their memories are false. The girl whose life this was died of a fever at nineteen, along with her father. I altered things so that she—I—was raised by my ‘uncle.’ And I replaced the memory of her death with the one where I met you.”
Clare made a fist and then opened her hand, palm up. Two dots of pure white rested in the center of her palm. “This is that memory. And I am thinking it would be safest if you both had it as well.”
Quin didn’t move. Neither did Verol.
“Can you do this to anyone?” Verol asked.
Clare shook her head. “Something this extensive must be chosen, or else it will not last. You, of all people, know how difficult it can be to find purchase in a mind. It is why you can only force small changes without shattering a person’s sanity.”
Verol reached for one of the white dots, his fingers halting just shy of it. “Will we forget how we actually met you?”
“No. It is such a small crossover that it is not necessary. It will be more that you can recall two different versions of the same event, each one feeling as real as the other.”
Marquin’s hand brushed past Verol’s, taking up one of the white dots. “What do I do?”
“Put it on your tongue.” Clare smiled. “It tastes a bit like spun sugar.”
He did, and Verol followed suit. The memory washed over him in soft waves. Their carriage breaking an axle outside the village, their journey delayed while it was repaired. Staying at the inn and hearing Clare sing. Verol’s recognition of her Songweaver talent and his offer to her of an apprenticeship.
He frowned. “I remember it all”—and it was such an odd thing to remember, so clearly, something he knew had not occurred—“but I do not feel anything about it. Not the way these people seem to.”
He could see the events in his mind as if he had lived them, but there was no emotion attached to it—to her.
She hesitated. “I did not want to force you to feel anything for me. Foundational memories are tricky things. If I created the emotions you supposedly felt upon meeting me here, I could not prevent them from trickling through and coloring our actual history. It might alter how you feel about me now, and I would not induce you to think more kindly of me on the basis of a lie.”
Part of Clare had wanted to put those emotions into the memories she’d given them. Because part of her was now living alongside the girl whose memories she’d stolen. It was not enough for everyone in this village to remember Clare being here. To play the part, she had to remember it all too.
It was another life inside her mind, the way the Song had often tried to shove the lives of others at her when it suited its convenience. She remembered being this alternate version of herself. She remembered growing up with someone who had cared about her and done his best to keep her safe and make her happy, while she was surrounded by a small community that adored her.
She remembered being the kind of woman a person could actually love. And though she was not that woman and never had been, the fundamental knowledge of what it felt like made her want the reality of those connections. Made her want the Arrendons’ adoption rumors to be true—not a diversion meant to confuse Alaric, but a result of their actually caring about her. She had seen how easy it would be to shift their feelings in her favor. How the right emotions, sunk into an alternate meeting that had never happened, could twist through the memories they did have and make them think of her as a daughter.
But while they might never realize that their feelings weren’t real, she would. And she cursed herself, just a little, for being unwilling to live a slightly altered, slightly happier lie, the same way she was unwilling to let the memories she’d absorbed change her. At her core, she was who she was, and for all the grief it might bring her, she was unwilling to be anyone else. She had fought too hard to be Clare Brighton, and now she fought to stay her.
It had been the most difficult, in the first few days of taking this other life into herself. A battle every second to partition it off from who she was. To keep it close enough to delve into the memories when they were needed, to slip into the shoes of the Clare the people of Farthenam Village knew, and yet keep those memories from altering her.
Only once she was certain she had attained the requisite control had she set the date of the wake and sent for the Arrendons. So she could be certain that she would give them what she had—an emotionless, factual memory they could recall when needed. And once she was done here, she could lock this alternate Clare in a box in her mind and never have to look at her again.
Verol and Marquin shared a look, and if that was pity passing between them, she did not want it. She stood. “I should return.”
“Wait,” Verol said. “Is this the only reason you wanted us here? A memory could have been handled in Veralna.”
