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Silence greeted her. Not the absence of people talking, but the pure silence that came from a frozen world. And when she opened her eyes, she discovered the world had indeed gone still. Every eye was trained on her, from the innkeeper and the drunk at the bar, to the group of five men who’d halted at the bottom of the stairs, as if mesmerized, and that—that ability to enrapture, to ensnare—that was power.
Her shoulders straightened and her muscles relaxed. She let a soft, slow smile spread across her face, and greeted her world. “Hello. I’m Clare Brighton.”
Clare played for hours. Each song drew someone new into the inn, until the common area was packed and people had spilled out into the halls. Crenn was doing a brisk enough business behind the bar—with three women now in the fray with him, serving drinks—that she expected to hear nothing from him on her failure to play his song choices.
She played anything and everything, songs that had dug their way out of her soul over every year she had survived, songs born of hope and fear and determination. She sang plenty of common tunes, interspersed with her own, but it was hers the crowd came alive for and she…she hadn’t realized how much she’d needed that acceptance until she had it. Hadn’t realized the dark void inside her could be sated by their attention. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know her and never would. It only mattered that they stood before the stage that was her altar and worshipped.
She finished her current song and reached for the glass on the little table by her stool. The table had appeared by way of a serving woman when someone from the crowd had bought her a drink. It had been ale, so she hadn’t drank it, but once the guests realized she didn’t drink alcohol the offers had turned to sweetwater and iced teas, and she hadn’t wanted for a beverage all evening.
The ice alone—so common in Veralna and so scarce in a place like her own Renault County—would have made the evening worth her effort. And yet she’d gotten so much more. The crowd called for another song—just one more—even as the first of the night’s warning bells rang, alerting Veralna’s citizens that it was only one hour until the city’s curfew laws went into effect. Her fingers itched to touch the strings again, to give the crowd that one more song. But that need—to give what they asked for and bask in their adoration—felt a little too much like dependence.
So instead she told them her name one more time and slipped off the stage, confident that by tomorrow afternoon enough word would have spread of her to gain her an engagement—and a room—at another inn. This one a little further into the good part of Midtown. She could see it lining up for her, moving further up in the city day by day, until she caught the right eye. It wouldn’t take much—playing the right festival, the right noble’s nameday celebration, could be enough to grant her the firm foothold she needed in society.
She dodged invitations to talk, avoiding them with the little smile she knew would make her look either playful or shy, rather than rude, her gaze trained cautiously on the bar. Leaning against the end of it, where he’d been all night, was guardsman Moretz. He’d stared at her with an eerie focus all evening, and she knew the look. Earlier, she’d been a fun distraction for a petty man who liked to feel important. Now he’d heard her play and that pettiness had morphed into something darker, something that was predatory in a different way. It was desire and possessiveness, in the way so many broken people seemed to want beauty and grace only to hold it in their hands and destroy it.
His gaze didn’t stray from her as she walked, and when he pushed off the bar and took a step toward her she stopped and turned, passing a smile and a hello with a girl who had danced every song of Clare’s set, whether she’d had a partner or no. She was a plain girl but her smile and that energy that beat from her was extraordinary. Clare found it easy to keep up a discourse with her and it was…strange and heady, how special it seemed to make the girl feel that, of all the people in the room, Clare had stopped to talk with her. Clare’s attention had never been that important to anyone before. It had been commanded and demanded, but it had never been…cherished.
The feeling was so unsettling that the second Moretz’s eyes slipped off Clare she made her excuses and turned quickly around the corner, moving past the kitchens and down a service hallway. But once out of Moretz’s line of sight she couldn’t stop herself from pausing to look back at the girl.
Something harsh and savage bit into Clare’s chest and she realized, with unwelcome clarity, that it was envy. Envy, because the girl looked carefree and happy, as if her life was an easy, simple affair, and in this moment Clare was tempted to settle for easy and simple. But her life had never been either, and no passing temptation could lead her to settling.
Besides, looks were so often deceiving. Give the girl an hour, a day, a year, and she wouldn’t be carefree or happy anymore. Nothing lasted forever.
Clare turned from the girl and the emotions she’d stirred, moving further down the hallway. Six feet from the stairs she passed a window, soft light spilling out, and her eye caught on a familiar form within. The drunk from the bar lay on a small couch in what was probably Crenn’s office, snoring away at a volume easily heard through the walls, his hand cuffed to a rail above.
So this was where he’d ended up, then. About halfway through Clare’s set, the man had picked a harmless enough fight with the Duke of Merlain’s nephew. She’d have wondered at him having the bad sense to choose a minor noble, of all people, to engage in misbehavior with, if she hadn’t seen a brief flash of silver slip from noble to drunk during the fight, one that had disappeared quickly enough into the latter’s pocket.
A drunk, yes. But one that was adept at thieving. Something about it didn’t add up to Clare, in the way something about his snoring from inside the room also bothered her. She just couldn’t place her finger on what precisely the irritation was. Nor had she expected to have the chance to find out. The duke’s nephew, in a fit of kindness uncommon to the nobility, hadn’t wanted to press charges, just wanted the man thrown out. Crenn had, of course, loudly objected to letting go of what he perceived to be a major grievance. In all likelihood he’d tried to get Moretz to arrest him and Moretz, being off duty for the evening, had refused.
So now the drunk was here, languishing in Crenn’s office until the innkeeper convinced Moretz to do something with him.
Clare eyed the door and its lock. She could pick it easily enough. No more than a few seconds and she would be inside, and whatever it was about this situation that didn’t make sense and tugged at her could be solved. But opening the door brought risk—the risk of being caught once inside, the risk of inviting suspicion if someone came across her while she was at the door. She could not afford suspicion.
She swallowed down her curiosity and left. She was halfway up the stairs to her room before she realized what it was about the drunk’s snoring that had bothered her so. It had been too perfect, too much precisely what one expected to hear when one said the word “snore.” It was so real that it lacked reality.
She turned the thought over in her mind as she slipped into her room. It wasn’t a particularly small room but it felt small, the way all enclosed spaces felt to her, the walls seeming to grow closer the longer she stayed within them. The window to the outside beckoned and she went to it, pushing the glass panes open, exhaling in a rush as the evening air drifted inside. The breeze was frigid but she drank it gratefully, even as it teased at the annoying wisps of hair near the front of her scalp that were forever too long to simply cut away, and too short to remain tethered in any hairstyle.
The night air caressed and enticed, calling to the wildness in her. Clare wanted to be down on the streets with it, running until her muscles ached, then further until the ache in her muscles stretched into her bones, so that by the time she returned to her rooms she wouldn’t need to hide her feelings down an imaginary well because she would be too exhausted to feel anything at all.
She let the dream go with the next sigh of the wind and set about pulling off her dress. She did it with her eyes closed, so she didn’t have to see it, and wished she couldn’t feel the texture of the fabric as she carefully rolled it into a bundle that wouldn’t wrinkle and shoved it into the case with her guitar.
Her pants and tunic from earlier that evening might have the dirt of travel permanently ground into the fabric, but they felt cleaner than the dress. More honest, even if Clare didn’t necessarily appreciate the honesty they told. Crossing to the window, she leaned her head out and looked down just as the final curfew bell rang.
The streets were empty save for the occasional carriage—Veralna’s nobility were exempt from the curfew, as was any family with enough money to pay the exorbitant fee for an annual exemption. The office the drunk had been locked in was on the same side of the inn as her own room, and she’d seen that the interior window in the office had an exterior twin.
A culmination of thoughts and desires led her to swing her leg out the window and carefully climb her way down the wall. The stones of its facade, conveniently staggered unevenly for aesthetic appeal, provided far better handholds than she required. It wasn’t that Clare particularly cared about the drunk. While he had ironically been the one to deduce she didn’t drink alcohol, and his purchase of an iced tea for her the only reason the rest of the crowd understood to make the switch, that wasn’t enough to endear him to Clare on any meaningful level. Wasn’t enough to make her risk being caught breaking curfew.
It wasn’t even that she felt sorry for him. He had gotten himself into this mess, and her capacity for sorrow required a great deal more to stir than a once-wealthy drunk fallen on hard times. Nor was it entirely that the drunk’s disappearance would anger Crenn and perhaps, by extension, Moretz.
No, mostly it was Clare’s curiosity that had her nimbly working her way to the office window. It was those things about the drunk that didn’t add up in her mind, that too-perfect snoring. She might not learn anything from him for letting him free, but then…she just might.
She was ten feet from the ground when the creak and rattle of another windowpane opening made her freeze. Carefully, she looked down. The drunk climbed out of the window, looking remarkably nimble for a man who had been drinking heavily since well before the evening bell. He dropped the five feet from the window’s sill to the ground, landing in the alleyway below without a trace of a stumble.
He walked away in a drunken zigzag-pattern, but having witnessed his graceful exit from the window, Clare saw the zigzag as just that—a pattern. His bothering to keep up the pretense, and the slow, careless manner in which he did it, told her another thing about him that didn’t add up. Her supposedly broke-enough-to-steal-from-nobility drunk could afford a curfew exemption.
The decision to follow him was not a decision at all. Curiosity called her, and no threat of guardsmen or city curfews could keep her from knowing what secrets this man hid. Secrets were decent enough currency, and had too often been the only currency Clare could put her fingers on. Not that they had helped much, in the end.
She waited until the drunk rounded the corner of the next building then quickly finished her descent. She hit the ground and ran quietly for the alley corner, confident the man would not be too far ahead given his dedication to his feigned drunkenness.
