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Was he irritated, to have been dragged to the southern reaches of the continent simply for this? He didn’t sound irritated, but she couldn’t place what he did sound like. What he wanted her answer to be.
“Not entirely,” she said. “But I would prefer to show you the other reason, in lieu of an explanation. And that will require the cover of darkness. Meet me at my uncle’s house an hour after sunset.”
She returned to the wake. Returned to becoming that slightly different Clare while repeating, over and over in her mind, Not me. This isn’t me. This will never be me. Nothing could have proved it truer than when, twenty feet from her “uncle’s” home, the Song went silent, and she walked in to find Alaric Tolvannen in the receiving room.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Two Things You Never Wanted
Only the Song’s desertion of her kept Clare from doing something truly stupid. She could still see Alaric’s fists breaking Numair’s body. The casual way he’d wiped the blood off his hands and left.
She forced calm, indifferent words out. “Your Majesty. To what do I owe this honor?”
“I came to thank you. For Renault County.”
Cold stole through her. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, come now. We are so very far past denials.” He gripped her chin in his hand, as he had that day in the garden, looking into her eyes as if he could see through her to the Song and asked it, “Do you recognize me?”
The Song did not rise to the bait. Seconds passed, her blood rushing wildly. Adrenaline demanded action while logic demanded stillness. She had watched Brennan Tolvannen drive a blade into Alaric’s heart and felt the remnant of another person take that death. To kill the Jackal King would require doing so thousands of times. She alone could not do it, and the only thing that had any hope of accomplishing it now cowered within her.
For someone who said they would destroy this world before they let Alaric have it, you can’t even look at him, Clare snapped at the Song. If he tries to kill us, are you even going to protest?
No answer—and then there was. Only it wasn’t in words. It was death with Alaric’s face, coming for her over and over again. She stood there, with his hand gripping her jaw, living and feeling every time he had killed the Song.
It was, she realized, in shock. Caught in a loop of death and terror, this immensity of power that had made itself mortal time and time again, only to die as mortals so easily did. It would be of no use to her in this moment. Without it, she had what she always had: herself.
When Alaric saw no traces of what he sought, he let her go.
She tilted her head up and didn’t let a trace of fear show. “How long have you known?”
“Since that day in the gardens. One footstep too many, little songbird.”
That first day in the palace gardens. It felt like a lifetime ago. So long. He’d known what she was practically from the moment they’d met. “Why didn’t you kill me then?”
“Kill you?” He shook his head. “Why would I do that, when it would destroy everything I’ve built?”
So he understood, then. That each time he killed the Song’s vessel, it took a part of the world with it. He thought if he killed her, the Faelhorn Provinces would be destroyed. He didn’t know she was the Song’s last attempt. That if he killed her, the Song could not rebirth itself.
He studied her. “Did you know that every time I kill one of you, the next one is a little stronger? All that power, in a single shell. I’ve tried Reaping it, but you can’t be Reaped, even at the moment of death. So I kept going, pushing it to grow stronger, until I ended up with you.
“And you should be the strongest, but none of it escapes you. You are…so different from the rest. They were all kind, all innocent. You are neither. It made me doubt, on occasion. Especially with reports of so many unexplained happenings in far-off places making their way back to me.
“But then, just when I was going to explore those happenings, I learned Renault County was burning, and my little songbird was missing from her cage.” He tapped his fingers against her collarbone. “You were playing the game so well. What prompted you to show your hand?”
She would have to tread carefully, here where there was no path to follow. He needed a reason he could believe that did not involve Numair. “You told me I couldn’t escape the threat of Renault County through death. So when you left and gave me the opportunity, I removed that threat in a different way.”
“You removed the threat. That is…interesting phrasing.” His fingers, still resting on her collarbone, slid higher, his hand curling around her throat. Tightening but not yet squeezing. “I want to feel it.”
“What?”
“I want to feel it,” he repeated. “You hide it well. Mere inches from you and I don’t feel even a whisper. Yet somehow it destroyed a place even I could not reach. So I. Want. To. Feel. It.”
She felt that careful line she walked grow even narrower. She spiraled deep inside herself, down and down, until she found the Song hidden far within its prison. Do as he says.
The Song responded with blind panic, quivering, making her wish it had a physical body that was not hers that she could slap. He wants to know if we’re stronger than him. Or if we are strong enough that we could become stronger.
Because destroying Renault County was something he had never managed to do.
