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Because you are lonely.
A soft sigh of air in the motionless void. If I help you, you will leave and I will be lonely again.
Help me, Clare answered, now and in the future, and I will not shut out your voice again. I will listen, though I may not speak, and my sight will be your sight.
For she did understand, now, walking into this place inside of herself, what she had done to the Song. Unable to see the world, its voice falling only on her own deaf ears, able only to feel what she felt, and of the things she felt, only anger was strong enough for it to latch onto and temporarily break the bonds of its confinement.
Clare had forced it to live as she had lived. But she was walking a small path from the darkness, and perhaps she should take it with her. Because if Marquin was right, she couldn’t keep it contained forever.
A long, ponderous silence filled the prison, then a spark of light blossomed in the abyss.
Take this, then, and let us see.
Clare clutched invisible fingers around the spark and traveled up, out of the darkness. As she breached the walls of the cavern she trailed behind her a thin line from the spark, a channel from the prison to her mind.
Clare opened her eyes to sunshine and an ancient, dying tree. Warmth fluttered and squirmed in the palm of her hand, and the presence of the Song looked out behind her eyes.
Place it on the tree.
Outside of herself the Song’s voice was blessedly muted, featherlight inside her mind where its voice, when they were both inside its prison, had been a roar.
She stepped forward and placed the squirming warmth against the silver trunk. The earth groaned and the tree shook. Roots gone dormant long ago woke and burrowed, old leaves cascading to the ground as new ones grew. Bark knitted across the trunk’s horrible cleft, sealing over the festering wound, expelling a stink of blackened, septic sap before it closed over entirely, hale and hardy.
She stood, the soft wind teasing at the edges of her hair, the silver of the tree’s bark gleaming in the sun, and felt an odd sense of peace.
“Clare.” Marquin’s voice, unsteady. “What have you done?”
“As you instructed. I negotiated.”
Marquin watched Clare disappear into the house, mixed feelings of pride and dread inside chest. Had he helped the woman, or simply damned them all? He pressed his hand in wonder against the warm bark of the tree, now whole and thriving.
The tree that had been slowly dying for the last twenty-one winters, its sickness beginning the day the last girl to bear Clare’s power had been buried beneath it.
He closed his eyes, felt the power echoing beneath the bark, and knew everything he and Verol had done up to this point would not be enough. That however much Verol hoped otherwise, she was too strong to be hidden forever.
But was she strong enough to kill a man who had made himself more god than king?
Chapter Forty-Three
The Official Title
Clare’s awareness of the Song’s gaze, looking out at the world alongside her own, gave her vertigo. Given that she was due to go riding with the Taellan proconsul in less than an hour and could barely walk straight, this was problematic.
I could fix it for you, the Song offered.
I don’t need your help. She thought the words more harshly than the offer warranted. Felt the Song’s mirth as its laughter rumbled through her.
Is not my help precisely what you made this bargain for?
Yes. When I ask for it.
And I am never to offer?
I don’t trust your offers.
You do not trust me at all.
Clare stopped trying to walk and pressed one hand to the hallway outside her room for support. Is there some reason why I should?
