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“Just one song, perhaps?” the king prodded.
“One song,” Clare answered for Verol. “The first.”
“And you can make a person feel anything when you sing?”
“Anything at all. What would you like most to feel?”
“Heartbreak.”
“An odd choice.”
He shrugged, his eyes so devoid of emotion it was like looking into the fabled void of Haidaera, where lost souls were said to roam eternal. “I have never felt it before. Every Songweaver I’ve met has failed to make me. I am…interested in experiencing what I am told is a common feeling at some point in a person’s life.” The words ‘common feeling’ skittered off his tongue as if he meant common failing.
I am not surprised you have never felt heartbreak, King of Faelhorn. You would have to be able to feel love, first.
Therein, Clare suspected, lay the reason no Songweaver had ever managed to make him feel the emotion. They had not understood that first, they must make him feel love—its longings and its trust, its joys and its hopes. Make him feel that, then wrench it away.
Clare’s lips curved into a slow smile that bore no trace of warmth. “I have just the song for you, my lord.” The perfect song, and she would enjoy making him feel every moment of it. A shame the rest of the crowd would be likewise subjected, but she would make certain they knew who to blame for the choice.
“I look forward to it.” The king inclined his head and left them.
Clare turned the full power of her formidable gaze upon Verol and Marquin. “What,” she hissed softly, “was that?”
Verol released a long, slow breath. “I wish you had not agreed to Songweave tonight.”
“I am aware. Your objection was as painfully obvious as the fact that the king was not going to take ‘no’ for answer. What exactly are you afraid of?”
Verol opened his mouth, shut it, lips pressing into a thin line. Shook his head. “I suppose there is no chance of you suddenly taking ill?”
Clare narrowed her eyes. “None. Why are you worried?”
“He is worried,” Marquin said, when it became obvious that Verol wouldn’t speak, “that something else might come through when you sing. Something other than Songweaving.”
Sick heat pooled in her stomach. They knew. They had known all along that she had something different, something other inside her. How long had they known? Since they journeyed together on the road? Before? Was it the reason they wanted her?
The Song woke just enough to offer her an image, a little girl with blonde curls, offering it to her as if it was the answer to all her questions. It wasn’t an answer, it was just a girl—a dead girl, she realized. One who’d been dead as long as Clare had been alive. The Song tried to push more at her—memories or knowledge, she wasn’t sure—but she pushed back. She didn’t want it invading her head, not here, not now.
She stumbled back, even as she had the sense that this sudden revelation was all tied to the king’s interest in her, and making a scene right now was a very bad idea. But she only managed a single step away before her back hit a solid warmth, correcting her course in the opposite direction and making it appear that the body at her back had stumbled into her.
Hands settled lightly on her waist and a deep, velvet voice whispered, so softly not even Verol or Marquin heard, so softly she doubted his lips were even moving, “Now is a very bad time to make that kind of scene. So make a different one instead.”
Numair’s words in her ear, the brush of human contact, broke through her blind anger and slammed her squarely back into the present.
Make a different one instead. Right. Because she stood in the midst of the most notable people in Veralna, company where it meant something if the prince came up and grabbed her.
She broke away from him and spun around, outrage on her face. “What do you think you’re—” She cut off abruptly, as if she’d only just recognized who’d touched her.
Numair looked as disheveled as it was possible to look in expensive clothing, his hair idly mussed, and his face bore a look of priceless consternation. Someone needed to put the man on a theater stage. “You,” he announced, loud enough Clare thought the birds three forests over could hear him, the slightest slur in his words, “are not Dahlia.”
Clare’s memory searched and produced Dahlia Klado, a young woman around Clare’s age with the same colored hair, and determined that a drunk man might very well mistake her for the Duke of Moria’s daughter from behind.
Numair appeared to mull his realization over, then shrugged. “But you’re here, so you’ll do.” He grabbed her hand and tugged her to the middle of the very empty dance floor, at which point Clare realized that she was now to be subjected to the nameday dance under the watchful gaze of every courtier present. With a man who was doing his damnedest to look like a drunken idiot, for reasons she could not fathom. He even smelled drunk, the scent of alcohol rolling off him in waves strong enough to blind a horse.
He pulled her in, clapping one hand to her shoulder. His other hand settled on the small of her back, and that was when both of them went rigidly still. Because while this particular glamour covered appearances, it was not good enough to cover texture, and his fingers had brushed the thick, raised scars that crisscrossed her flesh.
Her body still trembled with anger, unsettled from her interaction with Verol and Marquin, from being touched so much in so short a span of time when she’d avoided it since she’d left Renault County.
Like any creature backed into a corner, she snapped. “Speak a word of it,” she growled, “and I will suddenly become very interested in finding out why the second prince of Faelhorn would be pilfering letters off the nephew of a common duke, or getting random singers into the Rival Theater.”
