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“Because,” she said softly, so softly her voice barely carried to him, close though he was, “you have not yet realized that I’m not the orchid. I am the wreckage left behind in the aftermath.”
“Don’t sell yourself short—I see no reason you can’t be both.”
A throat cleared at the edge of the enclosure.
Clare turned to look at the woman who stood in the archway. It was the guide who had met her at the front walk earlier.
Numair’s gaze had yet to leave Clare’s face, even as he asked, “Yes?”
The woman held up her left hand, dangling a silver chain with a single black icicle stone. “We couldn’t find the voice key earlier, but we’ve located it now.”
Numair crossed to the woman and stood for a moment, talking to her in low, measured tones that Clare could not pick up. The woman left and Numair returned, holding the voice key out to Clare.
Her lips stretched into a wry smile. “You aren’t going to offer to place it about my neck yourself?”
Amusement danced in his dark eyes. “Forgive me, but you seem like the type of woman who might snap at a man for doing so.”
“I see you aren’t entirely without intuition.” Clare took the voice key from him, securing the chain about her neck, twisting the crystal at the base so the spell remained inactive.
Numair’s staff arrived, filing in from the archway, bearing trays laden with meats and vegetables, fruits and nuts and other delicacies. The trays bore the telltale engravings of containers spelled to keep their contents hot or cold, and the people carrying them arranged them on the polished wood tables with the kind of careless efficiency born from years of practice.
She’d never seen so much food in one place.
Clare took staff and bounty in against the backdrop of the enclosure and the mansion towering behind it. Her mind’s eye juxtaposed the scene with the grime of dirt streets and half broken-down, mold-infested quarters, of rats and people scrabbling about in the streets, and it not always obvious which was which.
Restlessness overcame her, the desire to flee gripping her hard enough to leave invisible bruises.
Impossibly, Numair seemed to notice. “Do you want to get out of here?” he murmured.
Yes.
Except she couldn’t.
“The guests will start arriving in less than an hour. I can’t be late.”
“The joy of being the evening’s centerpiece is that the celebration doesn’t start until I arrive. And even then, tradition demands the damn minstrels play their nameday song before we cede the stage to you. So you see, it is quite impossible for you to be late.”
It was a terrible idea. “Lead the way.”
He slipped around a bend in the maze and she followed. Out of sight, the need to run reached a fever pitch. As if, by virtue of the fact she couldn’t be seen, she was now even more likely to be caught. Mad laughter bubbled up in her throat. She pulled the light, silken skirts of the dress to an improper height and ran. The muscles in her legs sang, the breath in her chest coming freely as the wind caught the stray curls of her hair and sent it streaming behind her.
Clare loved to run. It had often been a necessity, a means of fleeing pain, but when it was not—and even sometimes when it was—nothing compared to the feel of muscles bunching and relaxing, propelling her forward, of the way the world seemed to spin around her, as if for just that moment she was its center, and everything else simply drifted about her.
Just when she thought she would have to slow, a solid wall of greenery ahead, vines and branches curled in on themselves, creating a space just tall and wide enough to leap through. She cleared it in a single bound, landing on the other side to find a world filled with trees. Their canopies reached endlessly towards the sky, their trunks wide enough to fit twenty of her inside one. She looked back and saw Numair on her heels, the hole in the greenery closing behind him.
She didn’t realize she was grinning until she recognized that his smile matched her own.
She stopped abruptly beneath the towering overhang of a tree, its exposed roots curving to form a perfect, smooth seat, which she took.
“Do you always run like Ferrian herself is chasing you?” Numair asked, gliding to a stop a foot away.
“What makes you think she’s not? I notice you had no difficulty keeping up. For a reported drunk, you seem quite easy of breath.”
“Ah, well. Cherish this moment of my sobriety, for once the festivities start you won’t see it again.”
The clouds were back in his eyes, gloomy and overcast, and for once Clare regretted her insistent need to figure everyone out, to merge the man she had met with the rumors she kept hearing. She had gotten nothing for her troubles, and she had lost the energy from his soul, the lightness that had matched her own as they ran. It was as if while they ran Numair had slipped a set of chains, and her words had allowed them to bind him once more.
“It seems that we have run, but we have not quite escaped,” she said softly.
