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She shook her head and stood, nearly running into Moretz. Her pulse raced, slamming hurtfully against the barrier of her body. Had he seen?
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“Yes.” Heart drumming against her ribs, Clare held up the key. “To my room.”
Moretz’s eyes narrowed. “Crenn, this girl staying here tonight?”
The innkeeper grunted by way of affirmation.
“I thought you was all booked up for the night.”
“She’s a singer, I needed a singer. Gave her the singer’s room.” Crenn’s voice held the flatness Clare recognized as the aftereffects of the Song’s influence, and the empty tone wasn’t lost on Moretz.
“Doesn’t seem like you to take on someone like her without any references.”
“Duke of Merlain’s nephew’ll be here in less than an hour. What was I supposed to do?” He slapped a towel on the bar, wiping at invisible stains on the gleaming mahogany. “Ain’t you got a break-in to investigate?”
“Yeah.” Moretz drew the word out, turning it into two syllables, his gaze never leaving Clare. “Suppose I do. Have a nice evening, miss. Maybe I’ll come back later and see the show.” He tapped her papers against the tip of her nose before he dropped them onto the bar. She refused to so much as blink—at the thinly veiled threat or his actions—and a scowl darkened his face as he turned abruptly. She didn’t do more than breathe until the door swung closed behind him. Then she very calmly gathered her guitar case and ascended the stairs to her room, each footfall measured, graceful, precise. She turned the lock, set the case down with the care it deserved, and made it to the washroom before she vomited.
Her stomach, empty, heaved up only yellow bile, the harsh liquid burning her throat as it rose. The aftereffects of the Song shuddered through her, but it was not its use that sickened Clare. It was the ease, the delight, she had felt in using it, the rush as heady as the first time it had shown itself to her.
It had taken her only the one time, the single use, to understand the consequences of giving that power free rein. To understand that if that power ever raged freely through her again, it would burn and burn until it burned her out. The magic inside her could save her from nearly any fate, if allowed—but there would be nothing of her left to be saved.
Clare closed her eyes against the memories that were now only too eager to return to her, but the physical action did nothing to staunch the flow of images that followed, blood and bloated corpses rioting behind her eyelids. The memory of something inside her snapping as she disconnected from herself, because it was that or die or let the Song have control. The scent of swamp water hit the back of her throat and she retched again.
Two years. She’d lost two years to the madness in that swamp. And if Verol and Marquin hadn’t come along when they did…she didn’t think she would ever have found her way back.
Clare scraped her hair from her face as the dry heaves abated. Her mouth tasted of acrid sand. She stumbled to the washbasin and stared at her reflection in the small oval mirror above it, eyes rimmed a harsh red and filled with a short but bitter lifetime of knowledge. Few things were uglier than knowledge, and Clare so hated ugly things. Hated them, and yet her life seemed destined for them.
She dipped a towel into the washbasin and dabbed it at her eyes, at her slightly puffy cheeks. She stared straight into the green irises looking back at her, unblinking, until the knowledge and the ugliness faded.
Her face blank, Clare took every emotion writhing inside her and imagined slipping each one into a bag, then cinching the bag closed tight. She envisioned a well, cold and dark and deep, so deep that if one dropped a boulder into it, one might listen for days and never hear it hit water.
Down this well Clare tossed the bag, and as emotion fled her, so did the remnant powers of the Song.
Chapter Two
The Strange Matter of the Drunk
An hour before Clare was due to perform, the innkeeper recovered from his exposure to the Song enough to send a maid to her door with a list of songs he expected her to play that evening, and some thinly veiled threats about what would happen to her if her performance embarrassed him. Clare didn’t bother to even glance at the list before she crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on the bed.
Even if she was inclined to play whatever Crenn had instructed—which she wasn’t—she wouldn’t have been able to read the list. The only language she could read was music, notes and lines and melodies, and letting anyone know of this deficit in her knowledge didn’t appeal. Besides, only a fool tried to pick a musician’s set for them. Crenn’s was probably full of overly complex, classical pieces he thought would impress a duke’s nephew. But since Clare’s memory served that the man in question was barely nineteen winters—somewhere in the vicinity of her own age, though she didn’t know hers for certain—she suspected pretty classical music would bore him to tears.
And angering the innkeeper was far less of a concern than boring the audience. She didn’t care what Crenn tried to do to her at the end of the performance, because he didn’t matter. They did, and she needed every single one to end the night in love with her. Needed them to talk about her and keep talking, because she needed another engagement after this one, and another after that.
She surveyed her meager dressing options, though there was little point; she only had the one option. A dark green gown embellished with silver embroidery that cinched tight at the waist. She hated it, and the thought of putting it on again…
She’d never intended to wear it, had brought it because it was fine enough that she could trade it for something else. But she’d had no opportunity to make such a trade on the journey here, and now this was the only presentable thing she had to wear.
Appearances mattered, a fact that irritated Clare to no end, for one of her first lessons in life had been that appearances held no intrinsic value. The body one was born with and how one chose to dress it gave no true insight to the soul, held no moral value, and yet it was by these things that one was judged.
But because they did matter, she gritted her teeth and put the dress on, tightening the strings that ran down both sides of the gown’s bodice, straightening it by feel rather than sight. She didn’t look at herself in the mirror as she picked up her guitar and went downstairs.
The stage in the common area was small yet tastefully decorated, and Clare immediately realized she had a problem. The acoustics in the room were terrible, and the inn had no voice crystal. Likely because any member of the Musicians Guild would travel with their own.
She took the small stool on the stage and started warming up, strumming through a series of notes and chords and simple melodies. There was hardly anyone in the room—just the drunk from earlier, who looked a little less bleary-eyed, and a handful of others—but her heart fluttered with nerves anyway and her stupid fingers wanted to tremble.
She closed her eyes and lost herself in sounds as her fingers found a familiar pattern, strumming a song that had no words and never would, because it was hers, and like her it was always changing. It had started as a simple thing when all she knew how to do was hum it inside her mind, because giving it actual voice was too dangerous. Had morphed into something she’d clumsily picked out in single notes on her first guitar, an instrument so broken it barely deserved the name. Had grown now into this, something intricate and yet clear, chaotic and yet grounded, and as she played it changed again, gaining a new layer of depth born from her nervousness. She gave that feeling to the song, and as her fingers wove it into the music, it left her body, the pulse of her heart evening out, the unsteadiness in her hands disappearing. She played until this new part of her had found its place in the song of her life and, when she was ready, she let the notes fade out.
