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“Madame Aria.” A whip of power cracked through the room alongside Verol’s words. “A moment of your time.”
Clare barely registered the color leaving Madame Aria’s face, her hand dropping, the way her, “Of course,” came out a little too monotone. She barely registered Marquin guiding her out of the room, his soft, “Let us wait downstairs, so Verol and Madame Aria may…talk.”
They weren’t going to talk. Verol was going to do whatever Verol did because of that single, cold-spoken word. Abomination.
A noise like rushing water pounded through Clare’s ears. She never should have come here. She should have run the second Marquin gave her the option. But where would she run to? Where was she going to go that things wouldn’t be exactly the same as they were here? Her only option for staying hidden was the same one she’d always had: hiding in plain sight.
If she hadn’t just ruined that.
Step by step they moved out of the bowels of the building, the pressure on her chest easing as the guild’s labyrinthine halls lost their grip on her. Outside, the frigid night air cutting easily through the fine fabric of her dress, the rushing in her ears finally dimmed. Enough for her to notice how calm Marquin was, as if nothing at all was the matter, and that calm made Clare question her initial reaction to that word.
Abomination.
Had the woman recognized that something other lived inside Clare? Or had it only been a word, spoken in anger against someone the woman had already proved she looked down on? Madame Aria had thought Clare nothing on their first meeting. And now that she had shown she was worth something, the woman wanted to own her.
What was more likely—that the word was an indictment, or merely an insult? She hadn’t imagined that whip of power from Verol but maybe…maybe that was just anger too, Madame Aria’s reaction only the recognition that she’d overstepped in the presence of two men the entire Mages Guild seemed to fear.
Their carriage pulled up and she followed Marquin into it, out of the chilled air, and finally made herself look at him. He wasn’t looking at her any differently than he had before, wasn’t looking at her like Madame Aria’s word had meant anything. And surely, in a guild full of mages who knew precisely what Verol could do with his talents, the man wasn’t in there realigning a woman’s memory.
Still… “What is Verol talking to her about?”
Marquin grimaced. “Her conduct. I am sorry you had to be exposed to that.”
Clare laughed. “I have been called far worse, and far more often.”
Marquin gave her an odd look, and she reminded herself that probably wasn’t something normal people would say. And she needed to know those things so she could act normal because she wasn’t normal.
Abomination. How many times had Clare wondered it herself? Images flashed through her mind. The endless swamp, lost so deep within that the light could not penetrate the canopy. Muck and bones crunching beneath bare feet. A memory of madness.
The carriage door swung open. Verol claimed the space next to Marquin, his face a mass of thunderclouds. He handed her a small box, which she opened to find a black diamond in a setting identical to the ones Verol and Marquin’s diamonds were clasped in. A sign, to everyone who saw her, that she belonged to the Mages Guild now.
She touched her fingertips to her earlobe, the skin unmarred by any opening.
“We can have your ear pierced tomorrow,” Marquin said. “If you will be remaining with us.”
He’d understood, then, when she came to the Mages Guild tonight that she hadn’t accepted anything. Verol hadn’t, if the way he tensed was any indication.
Her thumb stroked over the stone. “For now. We’ll see how things look in the morning.”
Silence held sway the rest of the ride, until the carriage halted. The two horses hitched to it, Ginger and Skye, stomped their hooves impatiently, and it eased a little of her tension. They’d had a tendency to express their impatience in just such a manner every time the wagon had stopped on the two-week journey from the Valedon swamps to Veralna City, and she found it comforting that the horses, at least, had not changed.
She followed Marquin and Verol out of the carriage, noting it had stopped outside the barn, rather than by the front door of their home, as she’d expected. Either she had an unfair opinion of what the nobility were like, or Verol and Marquin were every bit as unconventional as she suspected.
A young woman, perhaps a couple winters older than Clare, stood by Ginger, helping the driver unhitch the gelding’s harness. The first thing Clare noticed was that her clothes—breeches and a long tunic, well-worn but quality boots—didn’t match her. It was the way she carried herself, like clothes were an ornament and she was the main fixture, except this wasn’t the type of clothing that accentuated anything.
The second thing Clare noticed was the scar that started at the top of her left temple. It slashed across her left eye, leaving a distorted iris in its wake, ran just shy of her nose to cut across her lips to her chin. And Clare shouldn’t have been able to see it.
Glamour covered the mark, and wasn’t that strange? Glamour wasn’t cheap—her day of comparing prices in the market had taught her that—and here someone was, wasting it to cover a scar in the middle of the night.
Except…Clare blinked, humming a note under her breath and her vision shifted again. Oh, the glamour was good. The first tug of it, should anyone with the ability care enough to look beneath, only revealed the scar. And it was so obvious why someone might hide it that likely no one bothered looking any further. But if they did, as Clare did now, they would notice that the first glamour masked a second. One that subtly changed the features of the woman’s face.
Instead of auburn hair the world would see a common brown. Instead of high pronounced cheekbones and an angular face, the glamour showed one less sharp, rounder and fuller, still pretty but nothing like the true face beneath.
The woman’s eyes—hazel from the glamour but blue beneath it—swept over Verol and Marquin, fell on Clare. She stilled. “My lords?”
“This is Clare,” Marquin said. “She will be staying with us. Clare, these are Fitz”—he nodded to the carriage driver, who only grunted in response—“and Alys.” A nod to the woman.
The look Alys gave her made it clear her battles weren’t over for the night.
