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Her hands relaxed, shoulders settling down and back, the set of her body turning fluid and graceful. On this side of the gate the stone road split around a long, rectangular pool over three hundred feet long and a third as wide. Streams of water jetted in arcs from either side, giving the surface of the water the appearance of perpetual rain. The water itself was so blue Clare felt certain it must be spelled, or otherwise chemically altered. Soft, smoke-white tile etched with gold symbols formed the edges of the pool and tall, carefully cultivated rushes lined its edges.
To either side of the path the land gave way to hedge-grown mazes, the greenery towering upwards of twelve feet, and Clare wondered if they were positioned to make visitors feel lost. She followed the carriage as it split off to the left side of the pool and came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the palace entrance, the sides flanked with an explosion of greenery wildly incongruous with the season.
Marquin and Verol dismounted, exchanging words with one of the waiting valets attired in the palace livery. The valet’s face, which had taken on a taut, uneasy expression at their arrival, glanced from them to Clare. Then his gaze landed on Kialla and he paled.
It turned out that both the horse and Numair had a reputation. Kialla’s was for kicking, biting, and bolting, and Numair’s was for raining hell down on anyone who mishandled his horses.
She was about to offer to take the mare to the stables herself when a young man ran up wearing the black and green livery of Numair’s stables. He looked terribly familiar, and Clare realized she was looking at a younger version of the carriage driver that had taken her to and from Numair’s home.
He gave her a short dip of his head and didn’t appear the least bit winded for his run.
“Miss Brighton, I’m Connor. If it’s acceptable to you, I’ll handle Kialla for you while you’re in the palace. She’s familiar with me.”
The look on the palace valet’s face pleaded for her to accept. She was not a complete monster. “Thank you.” She slipped her feet from the stirrups, placed her hands on the mare’s withers and pushed off gently, swinging her legs up and clear of the mare’s body to land fluidly on the ground at her left side, flowing skirts turning the move pretty and artistic.
Kialla bumped her nose into Clare’s stomach, and she rubbed her gently beneath her forelock. Her fingers brushed over a ridge she hadn’t noticed before. A small circle of raised flesh just beneath the hairline, as if from an old injury. “I’ll come visit you soon,” she promised the mare, and handed the reins to Connor. Kialla followed him with the resigned air of a monarch who fully recognized that this was all beneath her.
Clare ascended the palace steps, Marquin and Verol hemming her in on either side like a pair of sheepdogs intent on keeping her precisely where they wanted her at all times. The double-doors of the palace, easily twelve-feet tall and curving to form an arch at the top when closed, currently stood wide open, two guards to either side.
Marquin and Verol swept her through the entrance without a word. Neither of them had said much since they’d locked the doors of Arrendon Manor behind them. In fact, Verol had only spoken once, looking over her shoulder at some point in the distance rather than meeting her eyes, to say, “Whatever you may hear at Alaric’s court, try not to think too harshly of us.”
They were both so quiet most of the time that she still couldn’t fathom what they had done to earn their monikers. But she had not missed the air of tense respect, bordering on fear, that had hovered over the valets outside, nor the way the guards at the door seemed to be fighting an instinctual desire to step away as they walked past.
She had also not missed how everything kind and soft about Verol had on the surface disappeared. The fine, almost hauntingly beautiful features of his face had turned harshly so, and he emanated a coldness she would not have guessed he possessed. Marquin, too, had turned stony and silent, but where Verol radiated coolness, Marquin gave off an air of dispassionate boredom.
They entered the palace anteroom, a space so large it could have held half-a-dozen average dwellings. Hexagonal in shape, the ceiling vaulted straight to the top of the building’s three-story height, grand six-foot-wide staircases on either side leading to first one, then another, mezzanine level.
Glittering, gold-flecked amber tile covered the floor, cut precisely around a six-tiered fountain that spilled into a shallow pool in the center. The ceiling, situated so high above, was a dome of clear glass through which the sunlight filtered down. The bright rays reflected off the tile and made the falls of water from the fountain shimmer, so that the overall effect of the room was one of almost blinding brilliance.
The white stone walls were uninterrupted bas-reliefs, and Clare’s hands ached to think of the hours that must have gone into their carving. Whole sections were of intricate, geometric designs, yet others bore images that seemed to tell a story, though she hadn’t the time to look over them and deduce what that story might be.
When Marquin and Verol would have led her through the door directly opposite the entrance, a throat cleared to their right and a stiff, impeccably attired man in the palace colors said, “Lords Arrendon, His Majesty has requested your entire party’s presence upon arrival.”
Clare felt the tightening of the shoulders to either side of her, but Marquin and Verol only turned her in the direction of the door located to the right of the entrance. It was opened for them and closed behind them, and Clare found herself in a throne room, looking down a long gold runner that traveled the length of the rectangular room and up six steps to end beneath a massive throne of carved white marble.
She met the cold, hard eyes of the man who occupied it and she wondered, in the space between one blink and the next, if he knew somehow. If he had chosen the color of that throne specifically to torment her. But it was not marble that had made that other throne white, and the man who sat on this one bore no semblance to the man who had sat on the other.
And however much she suspected Alaric wished to be, the man before her was not a god, to see inside her soul with only a look. Even if the Song did hide in his presence, so deep within her that not even Clare could sense it now.
Courtiers dotted the room, holding murmured conversations that halted as she traversed the golden runner, locked neatly between Marquin and Verol. The gazes of those courtiers carefully skipped over the Arrendons, an undercurrent of fear rustling through the room as it had when the pair had entered Numair’s party. They landed on Clare instead, because it was safe for them to do so, eyeing her openly and speculatively, as if she were on display with a traveling comedy troupe.
She surreptitiously surveyed the room, but Numair was absent. As for the king…he had clearly not enjoyed his brush with heartbreak, if the harsh way he eyed her as she bowed was any indication. A muscle ticked along his jaw, and she read resentment in every inch of his demeanor. Clearly, he’d never learned to be careful about what he asked for.
He let the silence rest a beat before he said, “So, the Arrendons have brought their little songbird to court. What do you all make of her?”
The response was not immediate, and the glances at Verol and Marquin—but mostly at Verol—made it clear where that reluctance stemmed from. Finally, someone answered.
“She sings prettily enough, but I have to wonder if she speaks half as well.” The saccharine voice belonged to a pale, voluptuous beauty barely older than Clare, with a river of shining blonde hair collected in artful, cascading ringlets about her face, tumbling over her shoulders and down to her waist. The light tittering that flowed from the other young women told Clare the speaker was popular. That, or she ranked highly enough to merit the response regardless.
The door opened behind her, but Clare knew better than to turn to see who had entered.
The blonde’s smile widened, emboldened by either the laughter or the newest entrant. “Given her hasty disappearance last night, one wonders if perhaps she can’t speak at all outside of song. Is that the cost of a black diamond?” she suggested mockingly. “That one must be mute the rest of the time?”
Clare took in the king’s expression before deciding how to respond. He was bored, and he was watching Clare. He’d invited his court to speak, but he didn’t actually care what they had to say. He was interested in what she had to say.
A woman who was afraid of him would try to win this situation with politeness—to try and convince this woman, whoever she was, to accept her, in the hopes she might be a buffer between Clare and the king. A woman who wanted Alaric to like her would deliver a cutting remark, but one given skillfully in the hopes he would think her clever.
An indifferent woman was allowed to be blunt. “Even if I only speak half as well as I sing, that’s more than twice as eloquent as you. I’d ask your name, but I can’t even guess if it’s preceded by ‘lady’ or ‘miss’. Or neither.”
