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His hand was on the door when she said, “And if I don’t? If I decide he isn’t worth it?”
“That would be very unfortunate for Numair. Because the thing about obsessions? They’re even harder to let go of than love. And I would have to dedicate all of my creativity to ensuring you had truly let that one go. Two weeks, little songbird, or I’ll make what I did to him while you hid and watched seem like nothing. You would be surprised, what I can do to a man and keep him alive.”
He opened the door. Verol and Marquin stood rigid on the other side, held motionless in the grip of his power. He looked at Verol, as if something had just occurred to him. “I suppose I ought to have asked your blessing. But then, I was never much given to the customs of the old country. But don’t worry, the public wedding ceremony is still several months off, I imagine. Plenty of time for you to come to terms with giving her away.”
Verol’s face lost what little color it had held, and when Alaric’s power finally released him, once the king himself was long-gone from sight, Verol took a halting step toward her. “Clare?”
She shook her head, too angry to speak just yet.
I’ve seen how angry you get. Over me. For me. Numair had no idea. She was incandescent with fury.
People like you and I—we do not love, Clare. We obsess. Perhaps Alaric was right. She had never loved before. It seemed improbable that she should begin now. Obsession made so much more sense.
But whichever it was, Numair was hers. And no one, she decided, harmed what was hers.
Alaric Tolvannen could not fathom how deeply he would regret making her his wife. How much more deeply he would pay for Numair.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
The Lake of a Thousand Sorrows
Clare refused to discuss what had happened, no matter how Marquin and Verol pushed. Later, she would have to. Later, they would plan. But at this moment she needed to act, not talk. So she led them, under the cover of silken darkness, down the single lane that led out of the village. When they came to the end of it she stepped off the path, walking through the scrubby vegetation that lay beyond. She followed a stone path only she could see, one that had been buried beneath centuries of change.
Marquin and Verol let her keep her silence, following without question until they came to a sheer, inland-facing cliff. The clifftop was so high above them they would have had difficulty seeing it even in the daylight. At first glance, no part of the cliff face looked any different from the rest. But the Song knew precisely where to draw her gaze so she might find the seams of a gate, its doors each spanning twelve feet in width and towering to a height of fifty feet.
Her hands trembled in anticipation. When she had asked the Song for its legends, she had never dreamed this one was true. Or that it would be in Dunen Province, and she could choose to weave the lie of her beginnings in the small village that was a remnant of a time when the gate had been ever open.
She approached, placing her hands against the stone and murmuring soft and low, in a tongue old enough these lands had nearly forgotten it. Thin tendrils of light snaked from her fingers, falling into grooves etched so lightly into the stone that they were difficult to see in the daylight, impossible to find at night. They shone with the light gifted to them, a brilliant glow in the darkness, illuminating the boundaries of the gate and the etchings high above.
“Are those words?” Marquin asked, finally breaking the silence.
“Indeed.” And since she knew what he wanted, she translated them for him. “Pass through this gate, all you who are troubled, and leave your sorrows with the lake.”
A mighty crack appeared in the center of the stone, stretching vertically along it. Dirt and rocks tumbled down, the earth shaking as the stone split in two, and the great doors opened with a terrible groan.
Clare led them through, came to a stop at the place where land met water. Here, the darkness required no magelight to illuminate it, for here the bright orange luminescent shapes flitting anxiously beneath the water lit the night.
“Welcome,” she said softly, “to the Lake of a Thousand Sorrows.”
This was my first failing in this world, the Song confided. My belief that if people could simply give away their deepest sorrows, they would live peaceful lives. Instead, I found they were worse for the absence.
Of course they were worse—sorrow was a teacher. It taught you what you valued. What you could make other people feel when you took what they valued from them. It was not pleasant, but without it, it would be too easy to value nothing. If the pain of a loss could be removed without cost, then loss itself became unimportant.
Ferrian had known that. Ferrian, whom the legends claimed had been so heartbroken that she had come here to lay her sorrows down...and gained a thousand more instead.
Was she real? Clare asked. Did Ferrian truly come here?
Yes. She was my most-beloved vessel in this world, and I will tell you now what I told her then. Turn back. There are other ways to fix what has been broken. This lake and its contents are not for you.
She survived.
She almost did not. I cannot protect you here.
I understand. And she did. Understood how unacknowledged sorrow could tear a person to pieces. To calm sorrow, one had to embrace it. To make it a part of oneself. To acknowledge what mattered, and the fear of losing it. But I need to do this.
She just needed to do one other thing first.
She reached into the pocket of Numair’s coat and pulled out a red envelope. The color was faded slightly around the seal, from the number of times she’d almost broken it since learning to read. She’d always decided not to at the last moment, certain that any words he could have written when they first met, given to her with a dress when he didn’t know she understood who he was, would have little bearing on her now.
