AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So show him that we’re not. Show him enough, more than the last vessel contained, but not everything.
Slowly, reluctantly, the Song rose, opening its prison door and suffusing her with power. It built and built, far more than she’d channeled in Renault County, until it felt like her body would burst from the strain of containing it. So much, and yet the Song had told her Alaric possessed more.
Catching her thoughts, it whispered, He has carved the world up to become my equal.
Bitterness swept through her. As if you didn’t butcher it first.
She wondered if it mattered which of them came out on top in the end—the Song, or Alaric. The rest of them, they were all just pawns in a game between two gods—one born, one made.
“There it is.” Alaric’s voice was as close to ecstasy as ever she’d heard it. It blazed in his eyes, a deep, burning hunger that could never be sated.
Go, she told the Song. Now.
It vanished within her in a blink and Alaric squeezed her throat. Pressure built in her temples as her blood flow restricted, her breath becoming an audible wheeze. He released her abruptly.
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting. Didn’t move, didn’t reach for her bruised throat.
“You control it,” he said. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but she didn’t disabuse him of the fact. “Good. That should make it easier for you to give me what I want.”
“And that is still your people’s love?” Love is power, he’d said to her. It shackles people to each other. It destroys them. And all without you ever having to lift a finger to make it happen. I hold power over them, yes. But I am forced to remind them of it at every turn.
“My wants are not so fickle as the average creature’s. They remain constant.”
“I wonder that you don’t like it,” she murmured.
“Like what?” A dangerous edge laced his voice.
“Having to remind them that it is you who holds the power. Or does it simply prick your pride when they defy you?”
His fingers curled, and she suspected he wished they were still wrapped around her throat. “You think I am a tyrant, that the ends I desire are self-serving. Perhaps, to some degree, they are. But not entirely.
“You did not see this world as it was before I molded it into something different. How much discord and chaos reigned. These people decry what I have done as if I took their kingdoms in order to endlessly murder and torture.
“But there is far less death than there was before me. I waged war when it was necessary, yes. I smother rebellions when they occur. And yet all that is a mere drop of blood in the ocean that bathed this continent prior. Twelve provinces, but those provinces only managed to unite within themselves to oppose me. Each held dozens of small collectives before me, miring their people in endless bloody squabbles, wasting lives.
“I have brought them more stability than they could have hoped to find in another ten centuries. I can continue to hold them with the bloodshed that seems to be the only thing they understand. But I want a better way forward.”
He sounded so calm and genuine, and she realized it was because he was both. He was a man who felt his vision was the height of morality simply for the fact that he held it and had the power to enforce it. And now he wanted everyone else to believe it too. She wondered, if he simply gave it another hundred years, if they wouldn’t. Because his sincerity had an almost hypnotic quality to it, and were it not for the lives clinging to him like extra skins, she could see how a person might be persuaded by the words.
Making people love him would not be all that difficult. All she had to do was make them forget. But she would never forget. She would never not feel the rot clinging to him, never unsee the look on his face as he broke Numair’s body.
“And if I refuse to help you?”
“You already know you don’t want to refuse me. This could have been easy—for you and Numair. His…duties have been too damaging for him to understand how readily you would have complied if he’d asked it of you. The two of you could have been happy together. I wouldn’t have begrudged it.
“And I might still have convinced him to take that route, if you hadn’t been hiding in his room that morning. I almost missed you. A masterful touch really, hiding a life behind so much other life. But unfortunate for you, as now you understand that play, you won’t yield to it. So I’m afraid you’ve forced my hand.”
He took her left wrist, splayed the fingers of her hand wide, and shoved a band of cool silver onto her ring finger. A small spike on the underside drew blood as it slid. Blood that dropped onto a parchment that appeared, floating in the air beneath her hand. He forced her thumb into the pooling blood, her print appearing next to his own on the royal marriage contract.
“Now you get to be two things you never wanted—a wife, and a queen.” She didn’t try to hide her anger, and he laughed. “This was your idea, little songbird. You told me to marry a commoner. And you have made yourself one here, with this pretty lie you’ve woven about your past.”
He rolled the contract up, tapped her on the nose with it like she was a dog. “This is settled, between us. But to the world, this is a courtship. Make them all believe you’re falling in love with me.”
Her blood boiled. “I wonder you don’t expect me to actually do it.”
He smiled. “I don’t imagine you’re any more capable of the emotion than I am. People like you and I—we do not love, Clare. We obsess. It can be almost as dangerous—the objects of obsession can control a person every bit as much as love can. That is why I chose the world as mine—because it can be manipulated, but it cannot be used in whole against me.
“It is why I do not mind that Numair is yours. Because I do control him. And I will use him as I need to. I’ll give you a few days to conclude your business here. Then I expect you to leave for Veralna.”
