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Clare stumbled back into the horse as her hooves hit the ground. Kialla, who could have been forgiven for startling and kicking, did neither. It took a moment, back braced against Kialla’s side, for the world to rush back in past the ringing, for Clare’s eyes to focus. She raised a hand trembling with adrenaline to her face, touched the blood weeping from the open wound.
“What do you think you are doing?” Her voice came out low and feral, the Song’s contralto rumble beneath the words, and the two men holding the ropes dropped them.
Clare knew the fear in the men’s eyes should bother her, knew they stood in a semi-public place and she should care about who might see her.
She did not. She straightened and stepped forward, and instead of fighting the rush of power that thrummed through her, she welcomed it. The man holding the whip, the only one who had not stepped back at her words, had eyes that burned with cruelty. His hand twitched on the whip—eagerness, not nerves.
“Damn horse tried to escape, miss,” blabbered one of the other two. “We was just trying to get her back in.”
Clare didn’t need the Song, whispering lie, to know the falseness of his words. If Kialla had wanted to leave her enclosure, she would have leapt the fence. To run through the fence, she would have to have been driven into a terrified frenzy.
Clare focused on the man who had spoken and slipped the Song’s leash another notch, let its power inundate her. He turned and ran. The horror on his face before he fled was a soft stroke of pleasure down her spine.
She turned back to the whip-holder, spun the power of the Song into her voice, and felt her words grip him as surely as any vise. “I asked you a question. What do you think you are doing?”
“That horse is worth a fortune.” His words were hollow and monotone, caught as he was in the Song’s—in Clare’s—fury, but his eyes blazed with undiluted hatred even as he was compelled to answer her. “Lord Tolvannen outbid everyone at auction by double. How much do you reckon he’d pay to get her back?”
“How much do you reckon you will pay for harming her?”
The Song squeezed, a phantom hand clenching around the man’s wrist, shattering delicate bones to splinters. The whip fell from his nerveless fingers. Even as he opened his mouth the Song stilled his voice, trapping the howl of pain that would have followed.
When had she ever had the luxury of screaming from the pain dealt to her?
Another flare of power brought him to his knees, the crack of breaking kneecaps filling the air. The second man tried to flee but the Song brought him down next to the other.
Clare didn’t know whether she or the Song was in control, and only that uncertainty held her back when the caress of power coldly and precisely whispered how simple it would be to sever the two thudding heartbeats in front of her. Footsteps approached, voices shouted, and the reality of her situation asserted itself viciously. She stood in the Mages Guild stables, for Ferrian’s sake, wielding a power she didn’t even understand.
If anyone discovered that fact, she would be locked in a cage and never released. If the king didn’t kill her first.
“Stay here,” Clare ground out. “Stay on your knees and tell everyone what you have done to Kialla.” The words, and the nuance of power that ensured they would be obeyed, were specific. The men would tell everyone what they had done to the horse. They would not mention her at all. It should be enough of a distraction.
Clare settled a hand on the mare’s neck, the Song reaching out to slide the piece of wood painlessly from Kialla’s shoulder, to heal over the cuts and take down the swelling. Using the man’s shoulder as a mounting block, Clare vaulted onto the mare’s back, twined her fingers in Kialla’s mane, and squeezed her sides gently. The mare bolted but Clare had anticipated that. She held her seat, using leg cues to guide the horse out of the city, back to the road they had traveled in on.
Only once they were outside the city proper did she lean her head over the side of the mare’s neck and vomit, her body aching, her head throbbing.
She was done with the Song, but the Song was not done with her.
Why do you fight me? Its voice, low and hypnotic, filled her mind once more. She’d heard it once as a child, before she locked it away, had the sense she’d heard it endlessly when she’d been lost in the madness. They are all like those men. You have seen it, time and time again. Let me loose, and I will make them pay. Make them all pay.
No.
The Song bristled, its fire spreading through her. Why?
But Clare didn’t answer. She relinquished control of their destination to Kialla and turned her attention to the internal battle that consumed her. She did not in truth care where they ended up. Horses, at any rate, tended to return home when given their head. It was simply a matter of where Kialla considered home.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Still Invited
Clare surfaced from thoughts both incoherent and frightening to find herself surrounded by forest, rain tumbling through the trees, tripping off leaves and branches. Kialla slowed to a walk when she found a river and followed along the bank, a distant roaring growing louder the farther they traveled. When horse and rider at last emerged into a small clearing, the roar had grown to a crescendo, its source the waterfall descending from a six-hundred-foot apex.
Kialla relaxed almost instantly, clearly at home enough in the space that neither storm nor rumbling thunder could trouble her overmuch. Clare slipped from the mare’s back, feet sinking ankle deep into the growing mud. Kialla, freed of burdens, strode forward and lowered her head to the lake at the base of the falls, drinking deeply.
Clare found a large, flat rock nestled against a larger rock and climbed onto the former, settling with knees drawn up to her chest, letting her back and head rest against the larger rock. She took comfort in the steady pelting of the rain, in the frigid cold that overtook her body with shivers and froze her fingers stiff.
She wanted the cold to freeze the tendrils of Song that still clawed at her. She’d allowed it too much, had given it the most freedom it had seen in years, and it raged against her defenses, wanting to keep it.
No amount of exterior cold could chill the fever in her blood. She tried to ignore it by watching Kialla, the mare leaving the lake for the relatively dry cover provided by a towering evergreen. She shook out her coat and folded herself down, more content than any sane horse without a herd ought to be in such weather conditions.
