Charles looked at Clarence then his gaze shifted to Clara. As if compelled he spoke in a fierce whisper, “We are not through with these discussions, my queen.” He looked at Matthew, then Daniel. They stared back unflinchingly.
“Let us leave,” Clarence said, guiding Charles away. Charles stared at Clara another moment than spun on his heel and strode away.
CHAPTER 33
Clara was a coward and studiously ignored and avoided Charles for the forthcoming two weeks. Instead she rolled up her royal sleeves and worked to rectify the lopsided mess that was her sphere. There were now many tasks and chores needing accomplishing that could not be executed.
There were not men enough to do it.
Bracus called many of the clansmen and temporary housing was erected and they began the odious process of learning the oyster fields and all the other dailies that made the sphere viable. The worst of the processes were disposing of the bodies. So many needed burial that they were forced to establish a large cemetery Outside.
Clara would walk the cobblestone streets of her home and look through the wall of her sphere and see the wooden stakes which marked each grave. They floated like ghostly beacons above the mounds of earth. It was vaguely disturbing. The clansmen had insisted on fashioning the wood into an elaborate cross for each grave. The saws which moved by steam became a constant sound within the sphere.
There were hundreds of graves. There had been more than twenty of the fragment. The sentry had been killed at the intersect. His keys used to open the great brass doors to the Outside, where the remaining fragment had poured in unabated.
A portal of destruction. The doors were now barred with a huge arm that slid across them. It took four men and two of the Band to move it. The fragment would need more than locks with keys to penetrate again.
Clara walked the tunnel with Bracus, Rowenna and Matthew. Edwin was busy with one of the many tasks for the Band.
Men of the Clan were already at the doors, sliding the bar away from the front. They crouched down and unlocked the two locks at the top and bottom. The doors opened, the sunlight and late autumn heat poured into the sphere tunnel. Clara closed her eyes and let the moment of fresh air, so much drier than the interior sphere warm her skin, stealing her breath in a pleasant rush.
When she opened her eyes, she found Matthew's on her. She smiled up at him. He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, squeezing it, saying nothing as they walked Outside.
Clara watched the clansmen as they dug graves but one stood out to Clara.
Her eyes took in Daniel as he speared the ground with a stout spade. The ground broke and he dug and flung, dug and flung. His muscles flexing under the movement. He looked so much like Matthew it was startling. Until his eyes met hers and a smile overcame his face, the whiteness of his teeth a slash in his sweaty face. She watched as he stabbed the ground beside him and jogged to where she and Matthew stood. She could not help but notice he was very well put together, his stomach muscles bunching and flexing with the run. The sweat glistening on his skin, tanning under the sun at its zenith. Clara had far less difficulty with the immodest expanse of skin than she once did. This was probably not to her benefit, she mused, disconcerted.
“Clara,” Daniel said. “It's good to see you.”
Clara had become accustomed to his strange speech and tried a phrase that he had taught her most recently. “It's good to see you too.”
He laughed, delighted. “That's so much better then, 'and I, you'.” His face took on all the emotion of the moment: pride, happiness, purpose and the one she feared most.
Love.
Daniel and she had just finished a tense discussion the day before where she fruitlessly tried to explain her alliance and future courtship with Matthew and Edwin. Although Band in his blood, he had been raised amongst the fragment and did not ken to the formality or procedures that were so common amongst sphere-dwellers and to a lesser extent, clansmen.
In the fragment, they simply took what they wanted. It was survival of the fittest. The best fighter, the most clever intellect, or in combination, had the best of all. The cream rose to the top, so he said.
He wanted Clara.
Not because she was queen. No. That had not mattered. As a point of fact, he had not known she was anything but a lowly princess when they first made their acquaintance. No, as he explained it, she was his. She was the thing that he had been waiting for, fighting toward.
Underscoring the meaning of why he existed...
*
Clara felt uncomfortable. Daniel had asked for an audience alone with her, and Matthew had come undone and they had needed to be separated. Brothers reunited and both wanting Clara. However, she was not flattered by the attention. She was aggravated. She had found some measure of relief when Bracus had been swayed to her natural mother's side. Rowenna deserved another after the death of her mate, Rolland. She did not begrudge her that.
Clara had always been slightly more drawn to Matthew. She and Bracus were too much alike to make a good ruling pair. She would need someone different enough from herself as a compliment. That is what Father had made clear to her on more than one occasion. Two different minds were meant to come together and make a well-thought-out dictatorship.
She reasoned with Matthew, “He will not hurt me. So there is nothing to fear,” she had said, her eyes searching his.
“It is not all that I fear. I already share a courtship with Edwin. It has been over a year since the Rite of the Select and still we are not mated. And neither are you with another. My patience is not limitless, Clara.”
He crushed her to his chest, his hands everywhere and nowhere, pinning her to his body, his lips covering hers as they moved over hers in a rhythm that brought a gasp from her mouth, his hand finally winding around her neck and pushing her against himself, deepening the kiss. He suddenly broke the kiss and put her away from him.
Clara felt hazy, the kiss stealing her good sense like smoke through a chimney. “Tell me you do not feel as I do and I will leave you and you may be with another.”
Clara could not. Instead she stood there, warm in his arms, aching for more kisses, her feet rooted to the spot where she stood, helpless before the fire of their attraction.
She was weak.
He drew her closer again. “Not everything is about duty, Clara,” he said softly, his forehead pressed against hers as he covered her bosom with his warm hand, the fingertips to her left shoulder and the heel of his palm against the other. “Some things are about the heart. Your happiness is important as well.”
A tear escaped from her eye. Her body trembled on the brink of wanting just what Matthew offered. Security, devotion, protection, love...continuity.
The door opened and Daniel stood there, taking in the scene with the two of them.
He smiled at Matthew and shook his finger. “My turn brother. You'll not sway her so easily.”
He held out his hand to Clara and looked at her face. “You promised to speak with me.”
She began to walk away and Matthew grabbed her from behind and pulled her in against him, kissing the top of her head as he did so. Finally he let her go. His reluctance and subdued possessiveness filled the room like a tangible scent.
Daniel just smiled and kept his hand out. Clara moved to take it, and he grasped her small hand in his and moved her into the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Clara looked behind her as Matthew's face disappeared from view, his expression unreadable.
He turned her to face him and she was stiff in his arms. “I do not know you, not really. Keep that foremost in your mind as we converse. I have a history with Matthew. I have agreed to court Edwin of the Clan of Cape Cod.”
Daniel scowled, his finger tracing the contour of her jawbone, trailing down to her collarbone. He did not address what she said.
“You are too thin,” he said absently and bent to lay a kiss at the hollow where her heart beat and she pulled away from him, the spot bu
rning where his lips had been. His hand snaked out and latched onto her wrist and she was suddenly afraid.
His eyes looked into hers. “I would die to protect you, Clara. You know this. When you were taken by the fragment...”
“Yes,” Clara nodded in agreement. “Let us discuss the fragment.”
His expression darkened and she knew she had hit on a nerve, as he would say.
“Your culture is all about taking. Our culture is not. We compromise, we interact, we deliberate. We are civil.”
He shook his head. “That's not true and you know it! Look at that sap, Charles...”
“Which?”
Daniel thought about his wording. “The fool...the sap.”
“What an odd expression.”
Daniel shrugged, continuing, “He has been taking his whole life. From what I hear, he has been pressuring you for years.”
Clara was flustered that he may know so much. “I do not know who has given you this account...”
“Sarah,” he said, putting his large hands on muscular hips, long boots laced up calves that had seen physical labor aplenty.
Oh, Clara thought, Sarah.
“Doesn't she tell the truth?” he asked rhetorically.
His eyes sparkled, he knew the answer.
“Aye, she speaks true,” Clara admitted, not liking where the conversation was leading.
“I don't know what Matthew has said. But the courtships grow old with him. He is Band. He is more purely Band than I. If he feels more than I do for you. It would be an exquisite torture. Daily.”
Clara shifted uneasily under his scrutiny. She had never been one for ambivalence but now found herself mired in it. She was pulled in so many different directions. Who should she choose? It would make her mother happy to have her with Edwin, to connect their people and hers with Massachusetts. It would strengthen the alliance with President Bowen and the Clan of Ohio if she chose Matthew. It would be of no benefit to choose Daniel.
“I've got nothing to gain, except my feelings for you. Maybe that fool Charles has that one thing right. Possibly your allure is not for you as an individual but what you bring to the table.”
Clara understood the core of what he said but the delivery puzzled her.
Seeing her expression, Daniel rephrased, “Mayhap what you are is more intoxicating for the political advantages than who you are.” It was blunt but effective.
Clara bit her lip, it was a terrible possibility. Of course, had she been any different? She had been thinking about herself second to all the variables of her position and what the kingdom needed. And now the clan.
“Do you see my point?” Daniel asked, then quickly added, “the possible objective?”
He moved forward very deliberately, until the space of their bodies were but a hands length apart. He put a finger underneath her chin and lifted it until their eyes met. “Tucker has seen the Travelers. He knew where the Pathway lay. He used it to further his end. Ask yourself this: do you think if you're the key for their sustainability, that they'd allow him that knowledge?”
Clara shook her head. She knew that somehow she was vital to their future, but not exactly how.
“It is foretold by the Travelers that the key would be the one to change the face of all we knew. Tucker knew who you were and had a plan that included your termination.”
Clara shuddered, stepping away.
He prowled closer. “Do you think this'll all be here forever?” he threw his hand around, encompassing the greater sphere.
The spheres had been all she had ever known.
“You need to be with someone that is adaptable to the climate of change the fragment had foreseen.”
“What has been foreseen?”
“The demise of the spheres. All of the people coming together to forge unity.”
Clara scoffed, “That would never occur. There are too many factions that war, who collide with their ideals.” She turned her back on him.
He whirled her around and cupped his hands around her shoulders, slightly stunned by her size. She loomed so fierce and large in a delicate package, a paradox. “They would not be so unwilling if they had a pair that led them with everyone's blood running in their veins!”
Savage.
Fragment.
Clan.
Daniel watched her mind work and was ready for her retreat when she grasped the logic he presented.
“Maybe they would follow a mixed pair...”
Clara pulled away from him. In that moment she hated him.
Loathed him.
Just as she was settling into a mindset that may actually work for her he threw this in her face.
Once the seed of the logic took root, it spun out of control in her mind. Bashing about and letting her think of nothing else. She actually put her hands over her ears.
“What do you think already happens in your sphere? Half your males gone. No Royal Guard. The clan-dwellers in dire need of females. You're vulnerable here. Now, because of circumstances set in motion, you must accept clan-dwellers and the Band's protection. They will soon meld into the population of the sphere. There is not another way now.”
She knew he was right. She had hoped to gradually integrate their peoples. But with the fragment's genocide of her people, it had greatly accelerated her objectives. And Tucker had escaped. He would not stop until she was dead. Her existence somehow threatened his. It was a fact she could no longer dispute. That Prince Frederic had given up coercing her and digressed to attempt her murder proved it.
He pulled her into his arms. “Let me in, Clara. Let me try to be the one that helps you, protects you.”
She squirmed in his arms, feeling an echo of the attraction she had with Matthew and the intense guilt which followed it. “And what of your brother?”
His face clenched, his eyes tightening at the edges, his hands around her arms. “He is kin. I acknowledge this. But there's something greater at stake here. If my joining with you saves the future, or gives it a greater chance of survival, then the feelings of my brother are not as important in the face of that. As it should be for you also.”
He looked down at her intensely. She made a move to step away and then his lips were crushing hers with bruising force, it was open to him or be hurt. She did and his tongue came into her mouth, his hands jerking her forward and she gasped at the thinly veiled violence of his kiss, the hands on her body. Their blood became warm between them, the song of it trilling a note that their bodies knew, her mind rebelling against.
Matthew entered the room and saw nothing but his brother, bending Clara back in an embrace she looked entirely too comfortable in and he charged, reaching around Clara and yanking Daniel's head back in a savage jerk.
Daniel pulled away from Clara and gently pushed her away.
That is what struck Clara, his hard mouth and firm hands, grabbing and holding her with a violence that shuddered just beneath the surface then moving her out of the way as his brother came for him.
So she would be unharmed.
Clara sank to the floor while they beat each other until neither was standing.
She wept.
*
As she gazed at Daniel in all his half-naked glory her face turned red at the memory of those last moments together with him. The tension between the brothers a thing she could reach out and touch. Clara elected to make a decision to ignore them both for the moment.
“I have asked the kingdom come together this eve for a mandate for our future. I believe my people are ready to hear what they can expect with regard to the integration of our peoples. The circumstances...” Clara faltered, tears welling in her eyes as she thought of the grievous loss of the males of her sphere.
Matthew and Daniel reached out for her at the same moment and glared at each other. She sighed.
Still ignoring, she thought with determination. “Our neighboring spheres do not offer help in the rebuilding of what has occurred and do not see the integration as beneficial.”
Clara gasped at his language even though she agreed completely.
“Aye,” Matthew agreed.
Clara soldiered on, “We meet this night at six chimes.”
“Has the great clock been repaired?” Matthew asked.
Clara nodded. “It was one of the first things I asked to be done, beside the...” her eyes took in the mass of graves, the whitewash of the crosses standing sentinel above their charges.
Matthew nodded curtly then Daniel said, “We will get done with what we can today and attend your side tonight.”
“All of us,” Matthew said, his eyes narrowing.
“Yes, all,” Daniel agreed without rancor.
CHAPTER 34
The metal of the crown she wore still felt cold, Clara thought. Of course it had been Ada's. Her things always felt awkward to Clara. Nevertheless, Clarence had come to her and was acting as adviser since her falling out with Charles. He had said it was important to look every bit the queen tonight as she was determined to go through with her foolish plan.
She did not think she was foolish, but pragmatic. It was exactly as Daniel had outlined: her men were dead, there were not sufficient enough to protect the sphere from future assault. The horrible Tucker was still about with his mind festering as an open wound to kill her. She needed the support of the sphere firmly seated at her back.
Clara had never worn violet. Instead, she chose a gown of aquamarine and as Olive laced up her corset, Clara had thought how nice it had been having not worn one these months past. She made her way to the Gathering Room with trepidation.
Finally, she stood on the dais and finished the last of her words as the face of the crowd looked upon her. Hope and expectation squeezing her heart so she could hardly breathe.
“As you can see, a melding of our two peoples in this manner will allow several things needed for the continued viability of sphere-life as we know it.” She swallowed, suddenly desperate for water. As the next thing would be a surprise of the nastiest variety.
The Savage Blood (Savage Series, Book 2) Page 24
