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Chapter Thirty-One
Has it Always Been White?
Quin and Verol exited abruptly in a soft rustle of cloaks, and Clare stared at the closed door, disliking the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. What did she care if they were gone? She preferred them gone. Better to navigate this new landscape without them hovering protectively and badgering her about her choices.
It was only the memory of Alaric’s throne that still unsettled her so. Only the dread that filled her at the reminder that the maid who’d exited with such haste had said it was Alaric who had ordered a room readied for Clare. A task that, had it been truly necessary, Marquin and Verol would have seen to.
The door to Fitz’s room was closed. Presumably he was in there, if he was to be “at her disposal”—which was, to her mind, laughable. Two other doors branched off from the main living area. Steeling herself, she pushed open the one next to Fitz’s room. The space within was done up in soft grays, the furniture polished cherrywood, and bore the telltale signs of inhabitation. Verol’s and Marquin’s room, then.
She pulled the door shut, the knots in her stomach pulling tighter as she went to the remaining room. Its door was not quite latched, and all it took was the light touch of her fingertips to swing it inward. She didn’t enter, couldn’t even bring herself to cross the threshold.
The walls were ivory, the smell of fresh paint still lingering in the air. The floors weren’t right, but she supposed not even the king could have a floor completely replaced in the span of half a day. And it didn’t matter, because placed in the direct center of the room, carved of pale wood and piled high with white linens and blankets, was a massive bed wreathed in gauzy curtains like thin white mist. Pure white fur rugs ran around the perimeter of the bed, stacked two inches deep.
The room wasn’t an exact replica of the one that haunted her nightmares, but it was close. Too close.
He knew. Alaric knew.
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears like rushing water. He knew, but he couldn’t know.
She turned, stalked to Fitz’s door and pounded on it until he wrenched it open. She considered, given how irritated Fitz looked, Verol’s suggestion that she apologize for forcing the truth out of him the previous night. Considered it, and ignored it in favor of asking, “The king’s throne. Has it always been white?”
He had a look on his face, like he was trying to be polite. His next words made it obvious he’d failed in the struggle. “Why? Are you thinking of having one commissioned? It’s a bit early for delusions of grandeur, don’t you think?”
Clare restrained her first—and most natural—urge to grab him by the throat and demand the answers. But he still had that air of something lethal about him that she’d first marked in the stables, and an innate sense told her she would be a fool to threaten him in that way unless she intended to fight for her life.
Since the Song had disappeared the moment she passed onto the palace grounds, it would be no help to her in loosening his tongue this time. She considered, once again, Verol’s suggestion she apologize. But she wasn’t sorry.
She settled on staring. Directly, unblinking, into his eyes, as she asked again, “Has it always been white?”
He held her gaze for longer than most did, but in the end he blinked, his eyes shifting imperceptibly just to the left of her. “Never to my knowledge, no.”
Dread unfurled its tendrils within her, curling around her organs and squeezing. Her thoughts circled round and round the problem of a white throne and a white bed and what they meant. Alaric couldn’t know. But the dread in her gut said he could suspect. No one who had seen her leave Renault County was alive to tell the tale of it. But he would be furious he had lost her, and she could well imagine her description might have found its way to Alaric’s ear.
The two had some way of communicating that didn’t involve him leaving Renault County, or Alaric entering it. Would he have used it for this? And if he had, what would he have offered Alaric for her return?
Would he have offered enough to make it worth the king’s while? It was clearly not enough for Alaric to actually search for her—there were no posters with her likeness on it splashed across the kingdom—but men of power were always curious about the things that interested other men of power and it might be that, having stumbled into his path, Alaric was now curious about her.
Curious if she was who he thought she might be. So all she needed to do was convince him that she was not. The throne, the room, were both a test. She had passed the first, if only because she had not thought it one at the time. She would pass this one, too. Because she was never going back to Renault County, and she had not escaped it only to end up in the same situation in another place.
Fingers snapped in front of her face. She didn’t jump, only turned her glare back to Fitz.
“Why does it matter what color it is?”
She answered with the truth, in a light voice that didn’t show the nature of that truth. “I detest white. It shows everything.” Blood. Dirt. Sickness. It was a blank canvas upon which to paint a litany of sorrows.
Fitz gave her an incredulous look. “Should I write His Majesty a letter, informing him of your dislike of his color scheme?”
She shrugged. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do.”
A knock sounded on the door and Fitz’s face smoothed over, irritation and incredulity replaced by the calm, neutral mask of a servant. He stepped in front of her when she moved to answer the door, holding up a hand to indicate she should remain where she was. Amused that, despite his dislike of her, he had apparently taken Verol’s instructions to protect her to heart, she let him answer the door.
She took only a single step of her own, to the side, in order to make out the visitor. A slim figure—it was impossible to tell the gender—stood clad entirely in dark gray, from whisper-soft boots all the way up to the cloth that covered their entire head. A small window existed around the eyes, though it was layered in a mesh so fine Clare couldn’t even make out an eye shape, much less a color. Not a single stretch of skin was exposed.
The individual would have set Clare on alert, except Fitz was so relaxed as to be almost bored, and where she would have expected a weapon, the stranger instead held a rectangular black box with a dark green satin ribbon tied around it.
“The Arrendons are not in,” Fitz said
The gray-clad figure only shook their head and pointed at Clare.
