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“This first song is a request from our king.” Clare inclined her head in King Alaric’s direction. The song began simply, and if one didn’t know what was coming, they would think it sweet enough. It was a story of first love, full of the tenacious certainty that only that first headlong fall into foolishness can bring. She let the emotions she had first captured to build the song flood her words, to echo alongside the guitar chords, insinuating themselves into every listening ear.
Everyone present felt the effect in the way they experienced the song’s events as if they had been their own experiences, but none felt it so strongly as Alaric Tolvannen, for Clare sang the song for him. She understood, for the first time, what it truly meant to weave emotions, for she interlaced them around the king as if they were a skein of yarn she wove into a pattern of her own devising, binding them tighter and tighter to him. While the other guests experienced the song as a deeply felt tale, Alaric Tolvannen lived it as if it were his own life. By the time Clare had sung through the first half, the Jackal King was in love with a person he did not even know.
Things went badly for the king from there, for he lived as the one he loved drew slowly away from him. When he asked, quite reasonably, for some explanation, she told him that the distance was in his head, that he was becoming hysterical with supposition, until he believed the truth of the words but could not quell the misery he felt inside. He saw less and less of his love, until he grew to hate himself for his own complacency. For the fact that he still loved. For the way his beloved could put him off so easily with slippery words that were impossible to combat when they were spoken, yet easily enough spotted for untruths when she was gone from his sight.
He stayed through it all, until he woke one morning and found his lover gone for good, and he came to understand that heartbreak was a twofold tragedy, both done to him and done to himself.
The final notes of the song whispered softly through the accompaniment stones, bringing an odd peace because the tale had finally come to its end; the heartbreak was finally over.
Clare strummed the last chord and allowed herself to look at her audience. Every last member of the Faelhorn Province’s highest-ranked nobility, who prided themselves on being above the petty emotional displays of the lower classes, wept. Some did so openly while others, cognizant at least of their condition, attempted to cover the spectacle.
Yet none struggled quite so much as King Alaric Tolvannen. His beard collected the saltwater of his tears while his face turned bludgeoned red with his attempt to hold them back. Clare doubted he even breathed, and she wondered if he had ever cried before today. His eyes met hers and she knew in that moment that, while the rest of the spectators tonight might pretend this event had never occurred and forgive her for their weakness, the Jackal King would do neither.
She had done what he asked of her, and he hated her for it—hated her more, because her own eyes were dry.
Gracefully, intentionally, the level of humility and deference just perfect enough to be cutting if one knew how to look, she bowed to her king. Rising from that bow, Clare’s fingers deftly found a lighter, happier tune and began to play as if nothing at all unusual had occurred. Her audience, skilled at taking advantage of given opportunities, suddenly found themselves eager to dance and prove that they, at least, were not shaken.
The Jackal King melded back into the crowd. Now that her song had ended, sorrow fled him and his countenance shifted toward hellfire. Her gaze found Verol and Marquin, the two deftly moving onto the dance floor in calculated avoidance of their king’s trajectory.
Clever men, Clare thought, watching them dance as if they hadn’t a care in the world. She wondered just how clever they were, and how far she could trust them. If, indeed, she could trust them at all. She had cooled somewhat from her earlier rage, and she observed them logically, or so she told herself. The revelation that they knew her power was something other was unsettling, but it did not necessarily mean betrayal. They obviously wanted to keep knowledge of it from the king. The question was, did they want that for her benefit or theirs?
She was still angry, and that would not change without explanation. But their acknowledgment of her power opened another door, one she knew she would walk through even though she didn’t want to. Because there was now a very good possibility they could tell her exactly what she was.
Abomination, Madame Aria’s voice whispered in her ear. Clare silenced the voice, fingers nearly, but not quite, slipping on the guitar strings.
She focused almost entirely on the performance from then on, sparing only the smallest of her attention to observing Numair, who grew progressively more intoxicated as the evening wore on. He flirted with nearly every female in attendance, if such a thing were possible, paying more attention to some than others, but never staying with any one too long.
No one but Clare noticed that his actions, punctuated here and there by the appropriate embellishments and gravitas, were the perfunctory motions of a trained actor. His drunken stumbles were perfectly timed, his inviting smiles so devoid of emotion Clare found it a mystery that women responded to them at all. He was like a spelled creature, carrying out a set of complex, expressly given orders.
Clare sang until she found she could no longer stomach the masquerade playing out before her. She spoke the right words for ending her set, and turned off the voice and sound keys. Later, she would realize she hadn’t a clue what words she’d spoken, only that they must have been the correct ones because they elicited the appropriate responses. She left the remnants of the party to the minstrels’ tender mercies, descending the stage as they took it. She had only just secured her guitar into the confines of its case when Numair, in a show of spectacular drunken confusion, knocked over an entire table bearing punch and sweets.
The resultant noise was so loud that every head in the party turned and Clare, never one to waste an opportune moment, shrugged her cloak on and ducked silently into the maze with her guitar. She followed the path she and Numair had taken earlier, smiling when she found a narrow stretch between the foliage open. As if he’d known she would exit the party in mysterious fashion, and had left her a way out. The opening was not so large a space as the one she and Numair had leapt through earlier in the evening, but a smaller one that wouldn’t be noticed unless one knew to look for it.
She slid through it easily enough and made her way to the front of the house, staying off the main path and following the Pearl of Evening flowers, whose soft blue petals glowed in the darkening night. She found a familiar carriage waiting in the circular drive. Butterscotch and Daisy, the perfectly matched palominos, stood hitched to the same carriage Clare had arrived in. Butterscotch, who had declined to sniff Clare’s hand earlier that night, looked bored, stamping a hoof in impatience. Daisy nickered a soft greeting, and Clare returned the recognition by scratching the mare’s withers before nodding to the carriage driver.
He smiled warmly. “Home, miss?”
Home. The word had never meant anything before. She wasn’t sure it meant anything now. So she simply nodded and climbed into the carriage.
Only once Clare arrived at the Arrendon manor did she realize she had no way to get inside. They hadn’t given her a key, and she’d intended to return with them at the end of the evening. She could probably force her room window open, though if she didn’t want to ruin this dress getting inside, she’d have to take it off first.
But as she exited the carriage, it didn’t move off. “I’ll wait till you’re inside, miss,” the driver said, because that was the sort of thing he was probably paid to do.
She walked to the front door, thinking maybe Fitz was here. She still hadn’t puzzled him out—what he really did for the Arrendons. Oh, he answered doors and drove carriages and cleaned tack, but he also had an air about him that felt…lethal. Whatever he was, she didn’t think it was anything as simple as a driver or a footman, and she didn’t know if he lived in the house or elsewhere.
Judging by the lack of a single light on, she didn’t think he was here now. She placed her hand on the doorknob and tried it. At first it held, then a spark of power licked out from the door ward. The magic tasted her, then settled, and the handle turned. As if the home recognized her and now counted her among its own.
She ghosted silently down the dark hallway, not turning on any of the permanent magelights until she reached her room. Her whole body itched with the need to move, to run. To pack everything in here into a bag and leave before she learned anything about herself or Quin and Verol that she didn’t want to know.
That feeling was familiar. Less familiar were the equally strong ones wanting her to stay. Wanting the Arrendons to have an explanation that didn’t make her want to leave. Wanting to unravel the walking contradiction that was the second prince of Faelhorn.
Practicality decided her in the end, as it so often did. There was no point in running. Everything she wanted, everything she’d sworn to gain, was here. Succeed or fail, she wasn’t leaving.
She changed out of Battle Armor, her fingers trailing over the fine silk as she placed it in the carved wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room. She could sell the dress. The material alone would fetch more than enough to ensure her security, and where would she even wear it again if she kept it? Somehow, she doubted Veralna’s elite liked it when a person recycled dresses.
It only made sense to sell.
Clare smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle in the gown’s bodice, Numair’s voice rising in her memory. “I confess myself dying to know what it is about that dress that puts such a look of consternation on your face.” She finished smoothing the dress and closed the wardrobe door.
