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Verol hesitated. “What you carry—it isn’t magic as we know it. I honestly don’t know if anything we can teach you will apply. And despite you being my apprentice on paper, I don’t think I’m the best person to help you. The Kinthing is too linked to the power you carry. I think you would fare better with Marquin, but I leave the choice to you.”
She thought she would too. Verol would be too easy on her. “Very well.” She turned to Marquin. “When do we start?”
“Tomorrow. Meet me here at the tenth morning bell.”
Clare nodded in return, and the relief that flooded through her was almost instantly replaced by a fresh wave of anxiety. Nothing had been solved, only delayed, and everyone in the room seemed to know it, so it was as good a time as any for Verol to change the subject.
“I do know I overstepped earlier,” Verol began, which told her well enough he was about to do it again. “But I must beg you to reconsider this…friendship with Lord Numair.”
“Why do you dislike him so much?”
Verol considered his words before answering. “Because he has everything, and he does nothing,” he said finally. “He has social rank, money, and most importantly, he has Alaric’s favor. He could use that influence to try to change Faelhorn for the better. I do not believe he is, at heart, a bad man. He is simply a useless one. Had he been born to a lesser family he would be just another drunk dying forgotten in a gutter somewhere as we speak.”
It was, Clare suspected, the most unforgiving speech she would ever hear Verol make, and she had to bite her tongue on half a dozen rebuttals, because Numair would not thank her for them. She couldn’t tell Verol the king’s favor was all for show, that Numair was no more a drunk than she, and that he was far, far from useless. Even if Verol believed her—and he wouldn’t—she would not dissemble with a few sentences the charade Numair had spent years building.
But it physically hurt to hold her tongue.
“I can see why you might feel that way,” Clare said, “but I’m not you, and I don’t. You don’t have to understand it, and I’m not asking you to approve. I am asking you to leave it alone.”
Verol’s eyes squeezed gently shut. “What kind of friendship do you think he can offer you?”
“We understand each other.”
Verol clearly didn’t understand her. But he did the right thing, anyway. “Very well. I won’t bring it up again.”
“Thank you.” She even meant it. Because no one had ever tried to convince her to their side by reason instead of force, nor had they ever given in when she told them to.
Verol gave her a half smile. “Only do not ask me to be civil to him. I am not certain I could manage the stress.”
“I’ll try not to ask it of you.” She looked at the clock and groaned. “Do I have time to bathe here or do you need to be back at the palace?”
“You have time,” Verol said. “And we need to send for a healer before you return, at any rate.”
Clare’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “A healer? For what?”
Marquin and Verol exchanged a look.
“For your face,” Marquin said softly.
Of course. She had forgotten. It wasn’t that the wound didn’t hurt, it was simply that she was so accustomed to being in pain from one thing or another, that the state had seemed natural to her, rather than something that needed fixing.
“I don’t want a healer.”
“Then at least let one of us clean and bandage it.”
“There is no need.”
“It will grow infected.”
Reluctantly, Clare relaxed her grip on the Song, letting it do what it had been clamoring to do since she’d come out of the lake water. It burned the beginnings of infection from the wound, pushing out old blood and foreign particles. Quickly—so quickly the wound seemed to close of its own accord—the Song mended vessels and tissues, knitting them back together. It pulled the sides of her torn cheek to each other and patched between them with new skin, until her face was as perfect as it had been that morning. Not even a scar remained to mark the event.
She leashed the Song before it could move on to the rest of her, before it could take the other scars that marred her body. Before it could destroy her identity, piece by piece. As it was, she was not quite quick enough, and she lost the reminder of the first time she’d been caught stealing food.
She gained her feet, ignoring the echo of power that made her feel as if those feet were slipping down into the ground, taking her body with them until she was swallowed up in dirt and roots and the thrumming, pulsing heartbeat of the earth.
“As I said, there is no need.” A new thought occurred to her, one that almost made the echoes fade, as she considered the fair amount of coin she had spent earlier and the patch of ground outside the stables where she had dropped her purchase. “I don’t suppose Numair found my package and had it sent here?” she asked brightly.
Marquin and Verol, obviously not sure what to make of a sudden miracle healing followed by a happy change in attitude, only nodded and pointed Clare in the direction of her bedroom.
