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Clare was still in a bad mood the next morning. The kind of bad mood that had her looking at every new dress she had and not wanting to wear a single one of them that night.
Except Battle Armor, which didn’t feel like a dress even if it was. While she was tempted to make a statement by wearing it to every single event she ever sang at, she didn’t have any glamour for her back, and even if she could afford to buy it each time she sang, she didn’t want to risk that eventually someone with the right abilities might decide to look underneath that glamour.
But what she absolutely wasn’t in the mood for was to be captured by long soft skirts and pretty necklines, making her into some kind of doll. That was how she always felt in dresses—like a Ferrian-cursed doll, made up into someone’s image of what she should be. No amount of high-quality fabrics, or the fact she’d been allowed to pick these garments out herself, could make her feel any differently.
And when she got into one of these moods, it took a far more dire threat than social disapproval to make her do something she didn’t want. Which was how she found herself shoving far too many coins into her pocket, then pulling Kialla out of the stables and riding into Hightown.
She did so unobtrusively, having avoided any further public appearances in the palace since yesterday. She’d told herself it was because she wanted to observe, unknown, gathering information on this new social world, and because her brief absence before her performance tonight would also serve to generate interest. It also served as a test to see how far the king’s interest in her went, and she had felt no small sense of relief when the prior evening had passed without anyone inquiring as to her whereabouts.
These were all good enough excuses, as excuses went, but the truth, as if often did, lay somewhere else. She’d been so irritated with Numair’s failure to either deny or accept her invitation—and irritated with herself that it should bother her—that she hadn’t trusted herself to maintain a calm public mask if she had to interact with him. His wavering yesterday told her he likely would not come, and she told herself that was fine. That it didn’t matter if he’d rethought his association with her. She had never intended to do this—to navigate this new world—with a friend at her side anyway. Things would be better—clearer—on her own.
She reached the city, digging in her memory for the streets that would take her back to the Mages Guild. Her apprenticeship to Marquin and Verol allowed her to rent a stall at the stables behind the guild, and she reluctantly left Kialla and walked to Chalen’s shop.
When she knocked, she once again got the man who’d opened the door when she’d tried to return the first dress. He smiled warmly at her, like she was some benevolent goddess descending upon his and Chalen’s home, and it made Clare feel like a fraud. She hadn’t done what she’d done for Chalen to help them. She’d done it because it had benefitted her, pure and simple.
At least, that was what she told herself.
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her inside.
“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name last time.”
“Lian,” he said. “Chalen’s in the back room working on some new designs, but I’m sure I can pry them loose. Would you like any tea while you wait?”
Clare shook her head and watched him disappear into the back of the house. When Lian returned with Chalen, she once again felt the Song’s contented rumble around them, once again had the sense that Chalen was missing something, and they weren’t going to be truly happy until they found it. She also had the profoundly irritating sense that she should know what it was they were missing.
“You wanted something custom?”
Clare nodded and explained what she had in mind.
A concentration line appeared between Chalen’s eyebrows. “You want fashionable pants?”
“I want extraordinarily fashionable pants. Ones every woman in the city is going to want after I wear them tonight.”
“If you want to leave here with something today then you stand where I tell you, you don’t move, and you don’t complain if I accidentally stick you with a needle.”
“I can work with that. There’s just one more thing.”
Chalen lifted an eyebrow.
“I’d like them to have pockets. Regular ones and…less regular ones, if possible.”
“Less regular ones,” they repeated. “Would they have the purpose of holding something like this?” A dagger was in Chalen’s hand, the movement so quick Clare barely had time to follow it. It was a slim, silver blade, and it was beautiful.
“Yes.” Clare suddenly had the feeling Numair didn’t choose his tailor solely for their excellent fashion design. Then she promptly kicked Numair out of her head. “I don’t suppose you sell those, too?”
She’d lost one of her bone knives in the alley with Numair, and perhaps it was time she had a proper blade anyway.
A glint of humor rolled into Chalen’s eyes. “I don’t sell this one.” The knife disappeared with a flash of silver. “But I sell many others.”
Clare left Chalen Mora’s shop significantly lighter in coin, and with the outfit they had rushed to completion for her tucked in a package beneath her arm. The new blade she had purchased nestled warmly against her thigh, a comforting weight as she wended her way back to the Mages Guild.
She knew as soon as she rounded the path to the stables that something was wrong, felt it in her bones even before she heard Kialla’s enraged cry, before she came to the mare’s enclosure and saw the wooden fence broken through. She followed another trumpeting cry around the bend of the neighboring barn and found Kialla run into a corner by three men, two holding the ends of ropes that had been thrown around her neck, and the third a bull whip.
Blood dripped down Kialla’s legs from a litany of cuts, no doubt from her flight through the fence, a thin sliver of wood protruding from her shoulder. One long, thick welt rose on her neck, blood dripping from the open gash. She snorted and danced, eyes wide and rolling, then reared.
The man readied his whip.
Clare was already running, package dropped and forgotten. Her muscles burned as the Song flared in response to her anger and she covered a hundred feet in the flicker of a candlelight, throwing herself in front of Kialla as the whip struck. Pain exploded across her face in a bright-hot flash, skin splitting. Her ears rang, sound coming to her distant and distorted. Habit had her refusing to scream, biting down on any sounds that might escape her throat, teeth sinking into her lip until blood washed over her tongue, copper and sick-sweet, the smaller hurt distracting from the larger.
