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“Has she what?”
“Hidden from them all her life?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense that she could have managed it for so long. She doesn’t make any sense. The way we found her… She’d obviously been through some kind of trauma. I thought that’s why she acted so strangely, but what if…” Verol trailed off, the only sounds the steady rolling of the carriage wheels.
“What if?” Marquin prompted.
“What if she wasn’t hiding from them? What if she doesn’t even know what the Hounds are?” Verol licked his lips. “What if, this time, the power was smart enough to be born somewhere not even the Jackal King can reach?”
Every muscle in Marquin’s body tightened. Because Verol was suggesting…
“We found her in the Valedon Swamps,” Verol whispered. “It’s the closest ecosystem to the Deadlands.”
The Deadlands. The ten-mile-wide circumference of Reaped ground that surrounded Renault County. The ground the Jackal King had vented so much of his fury on that nothing that touched its surface survived.
“It’s not possible. Nothing leaves Renault County and lives.” But even as he said it, Quin knew that if anything could, it would be her. And if she had come from Renault County, if she didn’t understand how the Jackal King’s kingdom worked…
Verol knocked on the carriage roof and it came to a halt. Marquin’s unease intensified as they exited the carriage and he found himself staring up at the glowing lights of the Rival Theater’s mage-lit sign. “She can’t be singing,” he said, unsure of whether he was trying to convince himself or Verol. “Vane is the performer tonight, and Clare would have had to be in town three very successful months to qualify as a rival.”
Verol didn’t look convinced, but he nodded, and the two of them went inside. They didn’t typically attend the theater, so they didn’t have reserved seats, and ended up with two in the row farthest back from the main stage. Closest to the rival stage.
Its black curtains were firmly drawn, and Quin exhaled a sigh of relief as they sat. The rival curtains weren’t open. She wasn’t singing. Because he hadn’t missed, during two weeks of Clare singing softly by their campfire on the road, that she was not only the ancient power that hungered in her veins.
She was something simpler, too, something she would have been even without the power—she was a Songweaver. And if that ability was no danger to her or anyone else, it was a danger simply for its being unregistered with the Mages Guild. And if Clare had grown up in Renault County—as impossible as that seemed—she wouldn’t know how dangerous it would be to let even that harmless talent slip. That in letting it slip, she might allow the other one to be found.
He told himself, as they sat, that the Kinthing had finally gotten it wrong. No branch of magic they knew of could truly tell the future, so how the Kinthing knew where and when to send them was a conundrum he’d never been able to solve.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd, and it only took a single glance toward the entrance to discover their origin.
“What is he doing here?” Verol’s voice held the world’s worth of vitriol. To say that Verol disliked the second prince of the Faelhorn Provinces was an understatement.
“He does own a permanent seat,” Marquin said mildly. That seat was, naturally, the principle one at the very front of the theater facing the main stage, placed dead center of the aisle that cleaved the other two halves of the theater’s seating. “And he is a renowned patron of the arts.”
Verol snorted. “He’s been too drunk to patronize the arts outside of the bedroom any time in the last half a decade.”
Quin made a noncommittal noise. He was more ambivalent where the prince was concerned, but he was unable to shake the feeling that the man’s sudden renewed interest in theater attendance wasn’t a coincidence. And that it wasn’t a good thing.
They waited in tense silence until all the lights except those on the main stage fell, the curtains drew back, and Estrella Vane began to sing. When two songs went by without incident, Quin relaxed. Verol didn’t, and he should have known right then it would all go to hell.
Estrella began her third song. And a mere handful of seconds into it, a second voice joined in, one Quin had heard many times over a smoky campfire. Excitement rippled through the audience as Clare’s voice twined with Estrella’s, the two working in tandem—until Estrella noticed the other voice and faltered.
It was a brief stumble, a quarter beat at most, but it was all Clare needed. Her voice rose in volume as she took the lead on the song, transforming it into something hers as the magic of the theater came to life under her voice.
Every head in the crowd turned as the curtains on the rival stage parted. Clare sat on a tall stool, her guitar resting on her lap, hands in position though she didn’t yet play, her head bent so no one could see her face. In the bright dome of light shining down on her, catching in shimmering ribbons on her silver dress, she looked like a goddess of old.
Estrella’s voice rose in volume, aided by the voice crystals scattered throughout the room that, for now, still answered to her. But though her voice was louder, it wasn’t as beautiful, as raw, as hypnotic as Clare’s. The look on the prominent singer’s face was nothing short of murder, and her magic slithered out of her like vipers from a den, her talent for Songweaving rippling through her words, willing the crowd’s attention, their adoration, back to her.
Marquin knew it was over the second Estrella’s magic poured out. Because if there was one thing he’d learned about Clare in their short time together, it was that she didn’t back down. Magic kin to Estrella’s spilled out in Clare’s voice, but where Estrella sought to coerce the audience to her side by brute force, Clare’s magic wove into her song. It gave her words—the ones that twined with and yet challenged the other singer’s, flowing in perfect harmony and perfect opposition at the same time—a raw truth that couldn’t be ignored.
That power rippled through the crowd like water—and the second prince of Faelhorn drank it down like wine. He rose. For a moment he simply stood there, as if wanting to make certain that every eye in the theater noticed he had stood. Then, slowly and deliberately, he turned his back on Estrella, lifted his chair in one hand, and carried it down the aisle. He placed it in front of the rival stage, less than five feet from Marquin’s own chair, and sat, staring up at the vision that was Clare Brighton as she finally lifted her head to let the crowd see her face.
Marquin’s gaze remained on the prince. Because in that first moment the man looked up at the stage, his expression wasn’t the bored indifference or drunken confusion Veralna knew him for. It was…peace. As if Clare’s music had reached into a tortured soul and pulled out tranquility.
Then his dark eyes flickered briefly to Marquin, noticing the attention, and that glimpse of a person beneath the prince disappeared. He leaned back in his chair and his expression cooled to one of indolent amusement.
The two rows of seating closest to the rival stage followed the prince’s example, standing practically as one to turn their chairs to face Clare, Quin and Verol turning their seats with the others.
The theater, designed to absorb the shift in the audience’s favor by the physical turning of chairs, took the corresponding number of voice crystals scattered throughout the auditorium away from Estrella and gave them to Clare. Her voice intensified as the magical aid granted it new sway.
He felt Verol’s magic as the Mindmage opened a channel between them.
