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“Family, not hoard.”
Marquin made a dismissive noise. “You call it family. Your magic simply calls it ‘mine’. And trying to explain that to a woman only works if you are roughly her age, have smoldering dark eyes, the body of a god, and are madly in love with her.”
The faintest hint of mischief flickered through the heartstone before Verol asked, innocently, “You don’t think I have the body of a god?”
Marquin barely had time to register that Verol had managed an honest-to-Ferrian joke in the full thrall of the Kinthing’s grip before his husband banged on the roof of the carriage and it jerked to a stop. Through the carriage window they looked up at an inn. A sign hung from its eaves depicting a hawk with a scepter clutched in its talons.
“Here.” Verol exhaled harshly. “She’s here.”
“Wait.” Marquin caught hold of Verol’s elbow, refusing to release it until he looked him in the eye. “How like Marie is she?”
He regretted the pain that flashed across Verol’s face at mention of the girl’s name, regretted the resounding tremor than ran through the heartstone in his staff, but the question had to be answered.
“She is exactly like her. Only stronger.”
Marquin let go, following Verol out of the carriage. From his perch on the carriage box, Fitz Draven made as if to come with them, but Quin motioned for him to stay. Verol had taken the return of his former apprentice in stride, but Quin still had misgivings about the man, and there were things that had to be said that Verol needed to hear, and Fitz did not. He kept his voice low. “She is twenty winters. Have you considered how she managed to survive this long on her own?”
Verol’s jaw clenched. “She is clever.”
“Oh, she is that.”
“What is the point you wish to make, Quin?” He threw open the door to the inn, thunder rumbling through the heartstone.
Marquin sighed. There was no reasoning with Verol about these things, because there was no reasoning with his magic. Perhaps if Marie hadn’t died…
He shook his head. “I mean simply that you may find she is much more like me, than like you. And given what she carries inside her, that is not a good thing.”
Predicting how people would react to various situations was a skill, one Marquin had honed over the decades, one he prided himself on. All of his knowledge, all of his observation of the human condition, told him that Clare Brighton was not looking for anyone to save her. Unlike little Marie, Clare was not looking for fathers. He suspected she had only accepted their offer to take her to Veralna because she was smart enough to realize she had no other options, and his and Verol’s obvious attachment to each other made them rank low as a threat in her eyes.
During the trip she had avoided learning anything about them almost as diligently as she had avoided answering questions about herself. Once through Veralna’s gates she had promptly—if politely—abandoned them. She hadn’t told them where she was going, nor asked where they were going, and her attempt to return the boots Verol had given her for the trip told Quin she disliked even the possibility of being indebted to someone.
Whatever danger they were about to rescue her from, she wouldn’t thank them for it. Or rather, she probably would, in a brisk, efficient manner that pointed out she hadn’t asked for rescuing and therefore didn’t owe anything for it.
Then she would disappear on them, and Marquin would be left with the difficult task of explaining to the upset magic overriding Verol’s rational senses that her leaving was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
Chapter Four
An Unwelcome Guest
Returning to her room took Clare twice as long as leaving had, because she had to spend chunks of the journey hiding from the night patrolmen now sweeping the previously empty streets. It convinced her more than ever that the not-drunk had known the guard rotation. When a light rain began falling, soaking through her clothes and chilling her skin to a numbing point, she wished she knew the guard rotation.
She took a few alternate streets when she felt confident in doing so, but she didn’t know this city, and retracing her steps was the only sure way of finding her way back to the Hawk and Scepter. But she didn’t mind the wait, the distraction, even the fear of getting caught. Fear, and the fine edge of danger that hovered by her throat and sometimes nicked her skin, was the most constant thing in her life. Its return settled her in a way the safety of the past two weeks had not. As if her baseline of normal was so far from other people’s that she didn’t know how to exist without the constant rush of danger.
After rubbing warmth into her fingers, she scaled the wall to her room, finding the handholds easily, the climb soothing. She’d always liked climbing, had never had a fear of heights. There were so many other things to be afraid of that a simple matter of height seemed a silly one to worry over. And at least when she climbed, the possibility of her death was in her control. Her skill, her nerve, her determination. Once, she’d descended the cliffs at the northern end of Renault County to Siren’s Cove, just to see the skeletons of shipwrecked hulls there, and to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to stand on the rocky outcropping and let the salt spray numb her until she fell asleep and never woke again.
After a few hours, she’d climbed back up, her fingers so numb she almost hadn’t made it. And then, for years after, she’d wished she hadn’t. But by then the stubborn streak in her was too well-defined, and she’d refused to die out of sheer defiance.
She reached the open window of her inn room and froze. Guardsman Moretz sprawled across her bed, a wine bottle dangling from his fingertips, spilling a drop or two of red liquid onto the cream bedspread.
Clare could climb back down, could do it quietly enough that Moretz wouldn’t wake. But while she might escape with her life—provided she remained hidden from the night patrols until morning—her life alone was not worth much. Everything she owned was in this room. Her guitar was in this room. Without it she might as well be dead.
Dead, or lost to the madness again.
For all that the night’s payment—the two silvers tucked into her breastband—were more money than she’d ever possessed, they weren’t enough to replace the guitar. And even if they were, she…couldn’t leave it. She had the absurd notion that her soul was somehow bound within its wooden frame, woven into the metal strings, and if she lost it there might be nothing of her left. There was so little of her to begin with—so little that was truly her. She couldn’t lose this, too.
She grasped the window ledge and swung herself inside, light and silent. Moretz didn’t move. Clare’s fingers crept to the inside of her left boot, to the knife hidden between the outer shell of leather and the soft inner lining. It was a near invisible opening, this makeshift sheath, the edges sewn carefully so they wouldn’t continue to fray, the stitching decorative. A useful thing she’d been pleased to find in a pair of boots not originally her own, though she doubted it had been made to hold a blade.
The one she’d slipped into the opening only fit because it wasn’t what most people would think of as a knife, wasn’t sharpened steel melded into a thick, clunky hilt. It was a short, thin strip of bone honed to a sharp point. True knives could be wrapped in the elegant artistry of their making, could be things of such beauty and craftsmanship that people forgot what their purpose was.
