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Then the door shut and the carriage slid smoothly away, and Clare was staring out the little window, watching Verol and Marquin grow smaller and smaller, and wondering why she suddenly felt like she wanted to throw up.
Chapter Twenty-One
Life Is Drowning
As it turned out, the Arrendons and Prince Numair were neighbors—though enough land lay between the two estates that the ride still took nearly thirty minutes with the horses moving at a fast walk. A woman met her at the front of the manor and led her down a path that skirted the outside of the house.
Clare wondered at the outdoor route, but figured maybe she was to be taken inside through a door in the back. The abhorrent cream cloak kept the cold at bay, but the thin, pretty slippers she’d chosen would do little to keep the chill of the ground from seeping into her feet.
She braced herself for it—it wasn’t like she hadn’t gone barefoot in lower temperatures than this—but the cold never came. It took her a moment to realize why. The walkway was heated, the smooth stones coated with warming spells.
Warming spells. On an outdoor walkway in the middle of winter. Because why not?
The walk itself was black stone, smooth and shiny as glass, and swept clean. No one stone matched any other in shape or size, though they were fitted together so seamlessly that Clare could not find the grouting between them. The end effect was a sort of ordered chaos made eerie by the inky dark hue of the glossy stone.
When she looked up and found precisely the same effect mirrored in the towering manse, where even the balconies appeared to jut like elegant outcroppings on some steep mountainside, it had the overall effect of making one feel as if they had wandered into the lair of a dark mage straight out of the old legends. It was an abode that said, in no uncertain terms, “You are unwelcome here.”
Even the landscaping kept with the message. Not for Lord Numair were the carefully pruned rosebushes, and hedges trimmed into lions and horses she’d seen adorning estates on the ride into the city that morning. Here, flowers ran wild, and every single one was the kind that bloomed at night.
Datura and moonflower. Night-blooming jasmine and wisteria. Queen-of-the-night and tuberose. There were dozens more, far more than she knew the names for. They claimed the terrain for their own, climbing plants woven into trellises here, scaling walls there, while the ground-ridden ones sprawled about in such perfect chaos that the hand behind their tending must be a masterful one indeed.
Not a single one of them should be alive in the dead of winter, much less all of them growing together in harmony, as if it didn’t matter that they had their origins in disparate climates. Clearly, Prince Numair had an army of nature mages he paid a small fortune to.
She wanted to be irritated about that, but the scent coming off the blooms was heady, intoxicating. The only thing she really wanted was to wander off the pretty, heated path, lie down in the mass of blooms and sing, not for the gilded nobles soon to be here, but for herself and the sky, and no one else.
“Is something wrong, miss?”
The voice jolted Clare back to the present. She’d frozen, staring out at the grounds, one slippered foot hovering off the edge of the heated path. Her guide was looking at her with a mix of disapproval and concern. Clare didn’t think the concern was for her so much as about her.
“Nothing wrong. It’s only a distracting view.” She resumed walking, though this time she kept her stride next to the woman’s, rather than behind it.
The path wound around the eastern corner of the house and split into two branches. One trailed around a small pond, the waters covered in night lily, small fish darting about beneath the surface. The other branch, the one they followed, trailed alongside the house. When they reached the back, Clare had the impression of being in a wide alley—hemmed in on the left by the back wall of the house, and on the right by a twelve-foot-high wall of living greenery.
Her guide stopped between two archways. The left, made of black stone, led to an inner courtyard of the house, its path blocked by iron railing. The right archway was formed of living, growing things, and it was through it that the woman led.
She entered into a wide, open space, easily large enough to fit two ballrooms, all enclosed by walls of green. The middle area of the ground was covered in temporary flooring that had been pieced together in seamless fashion to create a dance floor. At the far end of where she stood, on the other side of the dance floor, a stage had been constructed, vining plants trailing about and around it, leaving just enough space for one to stand or step between them.
On either side of the dance floor, carved wooden tables waited for the food and drinks that would no doubt be set out closer to the beginning of the festivities. Beyond them, in the remaining space, the living walls appeared to open here and there into a maze that Clare itched to explore.
“The sound crystals are on the stage. Will you require any assistance?”
Clare forced her gaze from the mesmerizing intricacies of the plants and found her voice. “No, thank you.”
She barely noticed when the woman left. She walked across the dance floor to the stage, because some primal part of her thought that if she didn’t move, she would remain rooted to the ground forever, until she became a part of the landscape, just another tree or bush.
She had the sudden image of people trapped inside the living walls, bodies still, gazes forever frozen as vines grew over them, grew into them, until they no longer knew if they were plant or person. With the image came the certainty that just such a thing had happened. Not here, not now, but in a past time, in one of those lives whose memories were always pressing at the edges of her consciousness when she least wanted them to.
She shook the feeling away, taking in the multitude of life teeming around her, still unable to fathom how it thrived in the middle of winter, or how the air in this space was far warmer than it should be. Warm enough that she shrugged out of her cloak as she climbed onto the stage. She took out her guitar, found a little hideaway beneath the stage to stow the case, and slipped the guitar strap over her shoulder. A sound key rested on the stage, a beautiful deep indigo stone. She took it and slid it into the nook on the guitar designed for such things. It flared to life with a soft, pleasant glow, and she looked around the enclosure for the accompaniment stones. They were spaced evenly in the area around the dance floor, soft blue light clutched by vines here, sitting on tree trunk pedestals there.
She strummed her fingers over the strings. The accompaniment stones fed off the sound key, taking the guitar notes and spreading them evenly throughout the space. Beautiful though the enclosure was, it should have been an acoustical nightmare, but the sound flowed perfectly, soft and delicate, somehow blending with the space rather than being hopelessly absorbed by it.
She looked about the stage for the voice key, but didn’t find it. She probably should have asked the woman how to call for someone if she needed something, but she hadn’t wanted to admit how out of her depth she was here. Not with the music, not even with talking to people, necessarily, but in knowing all the minutiae, the habits, that any other singer in this position would know.
For instance, who to summon to find lost voice keys. If she was meant to still be standing on this stage when guests began to arrive, or if someone would come to give her instruction before then. It felt a little strange that she’d been left entirely unattended. Didn’t princes worry about security and thievery? She hadn’t seen a single guard, hadn’t seen anyone other than the woman who’d led her here.
Her fingers brushed over the stiletto tucked into her hair. If things turned strange, she had a lifetime of practice stabbing things when the occasion called for it. The thought settled her, and she began plucking the guitar strings, idly working her way through comfort songs, ones she knew so well that she could play them in her sleep. Her fingers warmed and settled into the rhythm. She sang low, soft, and without a voice key, the song was only for her. She descended the stage and wandered as she played, getting a feel for how the music would carry in each area.
She stopped on the left side of the dance floor, where an opening led into the maze beyond. Her fingers stilled on the strings, gaze drawn by the twisting walls. It seemed darker inside the maze than it had any right to be without a roof, even given the severe overcast nature of the sky. She found herself gently setting the guitar against a chunk of wall, one foot taking a slow step forward.
