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“I don’t remember. Now I must return to my room, and lie down, and in a few hours it won’t trouble me.” This explanation given, she resumed her forward motion. Clare stepped out of the way just in time, a frown furrowing her brows as she watched the woman walk serenely down the hall, disappearing through a door several rooms down from the Arrendons’.
She took a step towards that door before shaking herself and continuing on her original path. Lady Meraland—and whatever in Ferrian’s name was wrong with her—was not Clare’s problem. She descended the stairs, intent on reaching the ground floor, but raised voices caught her ear on the landing to the second. She might not have paid them any mind at present—Numair’s tour had revealed most of the rooms in this area were for matters of state and business—had she not been fairly certain that one of the voices was Verol’s. And there was something about Lady Meraland just now—her confusion and her placid explanation that she would soon be untroubled by whatever had happened—that made Clare suspect Verol’s hand in the matter.
A quick glance showed the area otherwise deserted, and she walked on quiet feet toward the sounds of argument. But though she reached the correct door, her proximity to it did not make the words on the other side any clearer. They were garbled, so much so that the words were completely unintelligible, and she felt the hand of magic in the obfuscation. That the one’s voice was Verol’s, she was certain, and she held little doubt about who the second’s belonged to.
The sense of risk thus heightened—and nothing to be gained from the venture—she retreated. She had taken four steps when the door opened behind her. She kept her speed precisely the same, nothing in her step or manner to indicate the increase in her heart rate the door’s opening caused. She could be any woman wandering these halls. There was no reason for him to notice her, no reason to fear that?—
“Miss Brighton,” Alaric called. Nothing more. Only her name.
She could keep walking. There was nothing to say the name was a command, rather than a question as to her identity. Surely the palace boasted dozens of brown-haired girls of her height and build. Except that everything the king said was a command, and any one of those other brown-haired girls would have stopped, whether they’d ever heard the name Miss Brighton or not.
She stopped and turned, granting him the bow that was his due, and trying to ignore the oily rot of foul magic that slicked off him in waves. How did everyone in this place stand it? Or was she the only one so blessed as to feel its taint?
“Clare.” Verol’s brow furrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“Well,” she said, affecting a chastising manner, “as someone left me without a proper tour, I got turned around looking for the library.”
“I was under the impression my nephew spent some time showing you the palace.” Alaric’s words and the tone he spoke them with were pure artwork. So lightly delivered, and yet the intended interrogation in them could not be mistaken.
“Indeed, Your Majesty. Forgive my saying so, but I am afraid your nephew is not the most thorough guide. Especially when he’s a bottle of wine into the afternoon.”
“Yet I imagine even then he’s capable of recalling that the library is on the ground floor.” He studied her. “I hadn’t realized you were an accomplished reader.”
She told herself it was only her own fears that made that statement sound like he knew she couldn’t read. “I imagine there are a great many things you haven’t realized about me, Your Majesty.”
“Perhaps I should correct the oversight.”
Her heart beat faster in her chest. Her voice remained steady. “That is certainly your prerogative, though I fear that after a few hours spent at the task, you would find my company rather boring. The library was on the ground floor, you said?”
“Yes,” Verol answered, “but you haven’t time to peruse it. You are, if I am not much mistaken, already late for your meeting with Marquin.”
“Of course.” She took the provided excuse for a hasty exit and made it. But she felt Alaric’s gaze boring into her back, and when one of those foul tendrils of magic snaked after her, licking at the skin of her hand, she almost jumped.
Clare’s heart was still pounding out an erratic rhythm as she fled to the stables. Much to the relief—and consternation—of the stablehands, she brushed and saddled Kialla herself, the task quieting her scrambling thoughts. She could still feel the oil-slick of Alaric’s magic against the outside of her right hand, and she longed to scrub at it until she tore the skin off.
It was ridiculous. He hadn’t left anything behind. It had been an inquiring touch, likely to see if she was sensitive enough to notice it, there and then gone in a flicker of time. He was curious about her—because she was Verol’s apprentice, and because of whatever knowledge had prompted him to build himself a white throne and her a white room.
He was waiting to see if she would flinch. So she wouldn’t.
She mounted Kialla, riding down the path that led to the road out of the palace, and found Fitz waiting for her just beyond the Inner Gate. She glared at him as she passed through, but he nudged his chestnut gelding into step beside her despite it. She wondered if her glare had lost some of its unhinged ferocity since she’d left Renault County, or if Fitz’s disdain for her simply made the look bounce off him.
They ambled in silence down the road, moving through the Outer Gate, and she would have happily continued the entire journey in that state. It wasn’t that far of a ride, and she was curious to find out if his ability to maintain a silence was as strong as her own. Clearly, it wasn’t.
“Verol thinks you need protecting,” he said finally.
“Verol, if he had his way, would no doubt wrap me in silk packing and hide me in a room somewhere until I died of boredom.”
“There are worse things in this world than being bored.”
She turned a dazzling smile on him. “And how many of those worse things have you perpetrated, assassin?” It was a guess, based on nothing more than the way he moved and watched people.
His jaw clenched. “Verol told you?”
“No, you just did.” At the surprised look that flashed across his face she snapped, “I can’t be both a conniving bitch here to take advantage of the Arrendons and a simpering idiot. Stop judging my intelligence by your general dislike of me. And while you’re at it, why don’t you go back to murdering people and leave me alone?”
“Can’t,” he deadpanned. “I made Verol a promise.”
“Because of poor, sweet, dead little Marie?”
