by Shana Abe
Zoe didn't bother to glance up at it as she passed. She kept her gaze on the center tiles that stretched before her in a straight pale arrow, smoother and cleaner than everything else.
They led her to the fifth doorway on her right, the painted black-and-gray door, closed as she had left it. As all of them here were.
The hinges did not squeak. She had ensured that after her first night.
The apartment she'd chosen was cold, almost colder than the open night beyond its windows. She kept the heavy velvet curtains pulled shut across them, not just to keep in whatever heat she herself managed to generate—obviously she couldn't light a fire, even if the chimney would draw—but also to conceal the set of candles and the oil lamp tucked away in the bedchamber, her sole means of light.
The curtains had faded from maroon to reddish pink and reeked of old smoke, and there were moth holes cratering the trim, but they functioned well enough. On her second night here she'd left a candle burning and then slipped outside, and she hadn't been able to detect even a tiny glow from the gardens below.
Although the majority of the palace had been divested of its finery, this suite was still furnished, perhaps because it was not so elegant as some of the rest—or perhaps because the massive antique gilt bed squatting in the bedchamber and cracked walnut mirror across from it were too cumbersome to move. Even she had a hard time shifting the mirror to where she wanted it, and that was saying something.
The bed, however, dominated the room. It was heavily carved into a profusion of scrolls and garlands and swirling vines; the canopy supported a silk tapestry cover and drapes—also with moth holes—featuring woven roses still so purple and fat and lavishly petaled they seemed ready to drip from the folds. The gilt was curling away from the wood around most of the edging; she crossed to one of the posts and pressed a thumbnail beneath a loosened flake, lifting it free.
The gold warmed her nail like a tiny, tiny sliver of a summer day, sending heat down into the bones of her hand. Zoe let out a sigh and the flake floated away, zigzagging down to the bare maple floor.
There had been no bedding left, but that was easily remedied. Chests of linens and coverlets were scattered throughout the occupied apartments at the far other end of the palace; she reckoned no one would miss a sheet here, a blanket there. The plain covers looked oddly out of place against the succulent colors of the rest of the suite, but they were comfortable, and that was all that mattered to her. She sank to the edge of the mattress and studied the mirror from the corner of her eye.
It had been removed from its hooks to lie propped against the crimson-papered wall, an angled tilt that caught the ceiling in its reflection, the nearest window with its curtains, three-quarters of the bed, and her. The crack had splintered the enormous square of glass into two nearly equal halves: on one side, shadow Zoe and the shadow chamber, a pale figure of a woman against a ruddy gloom, the faint foxing of spots near her shoulder trailing down in a curve to the frame.
In the other half, the room—bed and curtains and woman and all—had vanished.
The other half showed her the deep blue darkness. The cloak, and the ghosts within it, their edges smoking and writhing. Waiting. None of them crossed over to the normal side of the mirror; it was as if that shining, uneven crack was a mighty river they could not breach. The blue darkness dissolved upon its edge.
This Gift, whatever it was, was growing stronger. She didn't know why she saw ghosts in glass now, the cloak manifest. She didn't know why it was becoming easier and easier to draw the blue void of it near to her, to hear the whisperings from inside it. To use it to capture the thoughts of the living.
Perhaps it was Paris, or her, or both. Perhaps she was doomed never to dwell in true silence again.
Her eyes cut away. She didn't want to see it now, any of it. She didn't want to feel the lost souls caught in that blue. She'd been out all day, and now all she wanted was to sleep. If she'd had an extra blanket, even another sheet, she would have tossed it over the glass, but she needed what she had.
Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow she'd borrow another blanket.
Zoe stood and walked to the closet where she'd hidden her valise, and began to undress.
From the mirror lifted the voices, pleading, soft and indistinct. She bowed her head to watch her hands, frowning, focused on loosening her bodice. Without turning around, she murmured, "Not now. I'll try again tomorrow."
But she knew they wouldn't really quiet. They seldom did.
Once properly in her nightgown she bent down, scooped out a handful of jewelry from the valise, and went back to the bed.
She sat again upon its edge and began, piece by piece, to adorn herself for the night.
The choker of diamonds and topaz, strands of stones three bands wide.
The earrings of gold and coral. A bracelet of emeralds, and one purely of diamonds. Three bangles of gold.
A ring for every finger, gold, gold, gold. Even a pair of anklets, opals that sparked green and blue and pink from their milky depths.
When it was done, she blew out the candle. She inched down between the chilly sheets and closed her eyes again, this time letting the metal slowly warm her entire being, her mind drifting with the songs of the stones, drowning Paris, drowning her, until at last she could sleep.
But the ghosts in the glass never ceased watching. They glided back and forth and back, drawn by the living radiance of the dragon who was their only voice in the Other world, their only eyes and hands and means of vengeance.
She slept with her back to them all night, as if she knew.
Chapter Three
Legends of the Others often preach of how we hoard and guard our trove. They paint us as snarling fiends crouched over chests of stolen jewels, coins of gold and copper and silver piled recklessly about, plundered from terrified innocents. They say we like to dwell in caves— freezing damp caves, can you believe it?—and ruthlessly devour any humans who dare to venture near.
Yes, I know. That part might be somewhat true.
None of them realize the whole truth, though. Of course, we do guard what's ours. But we don't need to steal gems and gold. Not usually. We're given the Gift of their music, all the harmonies and chants and descants that soar to the stars, far more dulcet than any human composition. And in return, we give them the Gift of our protection. Our veneration. There's no stealing. If we unearthed all the diamonds and rubies and amethysts and emeralds—all the rocks and ore and crystals and boulders that constantly clamor for our attention—there would be little left to shore up the mountains of the world, would there?
So we accept only the very finest of these things for ourselves, to adorn our bodies and our homes, to keep close to our hearts.
And if the humans occasionally happen to beat us to the finest . well, I suppose nature should have given them fangs and talons to defend it.
One certain way to tell a drakon from an Other is the manner in which they wear their jewelry.
No matter how many gemstones embellish them, humans merely bear their weight.
A dragon may wear a solitary ruby tear, and still we sparkle with its might.
No doubt you've noticed how good you feel when you touch certain minerals and stones, the hum of their voices thrilling up your spine, surrounding your senses. Diamonds, so hard and cold and glittering, are the ones most like us, I think. Perhaps that's why we use them most often in our baubles; why they comprise the majority of the ancient treasure guarded by our tribe. Some of our diamonds are as old as our history itself. They have names and stories. They have heartbeats.
Think back. Can you remember a time, ever in your life, when you did not wear even a single diamond pendant around your neck? The Alpha ensures that every drakon child receives at least this one small gift at birth, the first of many to come.
We were clever to have settled in a place that offers us so much earthly wealth. The silver mines of Darkfrith are vast and deep, and keep us all well adorned. And really, who deserves t
hose metals more than we? Who appreciates the cut of a sapphire, the clarity of an emerald, better than the dragon for whom they sing?
Now imagine being without your lovely gems. Imagine having to endure the loss of warm gold and cooling silver, of fiery copper too. Imagine all you have is darkness, and iron around your wrists.
And the shards of a once-mighty diamond that sing and sing and sing in your head, pushing out all your better thoughts, keeping you dull and alive and only very distantly wishing you were dead.
The diamond was once named Draumr. And the dragon trapped in its ruined world was named Rhys Langford.
* * *
I wish I could tell you only joyful stories of our history. I wish I could assure you that the many Gifts Nature has blessed upon you will be your salvation against all comers. Yes, we are More than the beings surrounding us. We are Better, and what graces we exhibit today we have earned, I promise you. Our sinuous beauty. Our native intelligence. Our ability to steal the shadows for a hunt.
But we are not invincible. And to prove it, Nature took the very same stars and lava and sky that melded and made us, and from them forged the most exquisite and sinister stone ever to come to be:Draumr.
Nature is the veriest Bitch sometimes.
Once Draumr belonged to a dragon-princess of the Carpathians, many centuries past. To be clear, it belonged to her Zaharen family, and then was stolen, and then, at the cost of her life, she stole it back. Draumr sparkled like a drop of arctic blue sky, frigid cold and absolutely flawless, nearly too wonderful to behold. Its name means dreaming diamond, and here's what more you do not know about it. It was the sole stone carved from this Earth that had the power to enslave us. Yes, enslave us. Anyone who held it could command us. Any low, simple human scum.
You may well imagine what disasters befell us then.
Why was it never destroyed while the Zaharen drakon still possessed it, before it was ripped from our castle by human hands? There's no certain answer for us today. Perhaps our ancestors were more trusting than we, thinking no Other would dare to even attempt to take it. Perhaps they were overly confident, or overly foolish. I don't know. But it was taken, more than once, found again by us, and finally shattered into evil little pieces.
You'd think that would break its power, would you not?
You'd be wrong.
Even those tiny pieces, scattered and floating like thin blue needles through the warp and woof of the universe, have the power to harm us still.
Poor pretty Rhys. He found that out too well.
Chapter Four
The body of the creature was kept in the cellar. She was unhappy about that, because the cellar had been in full use before the thing had been brought here, and like any good cook, she regretted its loss. Unlike many other cellars, this one was pleasantly large and well designed, and tiled all the way around in limestone. A wine rack had been built along one wall, and on the opposite, convenient shelving for all the many cheeses and jellies and kitchen herbs she enjoyed. True, the darkest corner was constantly damp and had a patch of blackish mold, but she'd devoted two barrels of mushrooms growing in sand to it and they'd been doing very well, in fact. Everything had to be removed to the upper level once the creature came, and now the mushrooms had shriveled, and cheeses were cracking, and the herbs were beginning to taste more like grease than rosemary and fennel and dill.
But at least she didn't have to go down there any longer. She'd seen the body once, and that was enough.
It was kept in manacles that were oddly glinting, as if they'd been sprinkled with tiny blue stars. There was a blanket tossed over most of it, hiding the face, but just one glimpse of those gold-clawed, twisted hands frozen in the air had given her a nervous stomach for a week.
She let the others manage it. She had other matters to attend to.
***
He had been born into a world of glorious secrets: in a bedchamber of ivory and gilt, in a mansion of glass and stone, to a sire and dam of unspeakable beauty and ferocious power, held tight behind their polished human masks. He was not born first or even second; Rhys was the third of five children, firmly in the middle, all of them different yet all the same. Blessed to be a lord, blessed to be drakon, he had celebrated his good fortune at full tilt for as long as he could recall. There had been no real reason not to. Unlike his father, he would never assume the honor of becoming Alpha to the tribe. Rhys had an older brother to take care of that. Let the two of them put their golden heads together to wrestle the ancient drakon rules and traditions into the modern day. Let his mother and three sisters fuss over their human facade, planning balls and soirees and high teas like the fiercest of war generals.
Rhys's world was slightly ... more feral than all that.
He was comely, because all the tribe were. He was aware of that, even as a boy. He'd been granted his father's ice-green eyes but his mother's deep chestnut hair, a decided advantage with the females in a clan of creatures that tended to be redheaded or blond. It didn't hurt also that he possessed a certain piratical nature—his eldest sister had called him that once when he was eleven and she thirteen, /?iraftca/, to his enormous and open delight—that seemed to soften even the hardest of feminine hearts.
Most of them, anyway.
Despite his face and title, he'd found it rather easy to slip away from the undue notice of his parents and nannies and tutors. In fact, it became one of his more valuable skills, the ability to fade into backgrounds, to listen without speaking, to see what he wouldn't otherwise if he didn't stick to the shadows. He supposed it might have been a natural talent; his mother, after all, had once been one of the most notorious thieves London had ever known. Rue Langford alone would find him lurking around corners and merely smile.
So he grew to be a child of extreme stealth and cunning, known for his rakish grin and wild tousled looks and not at all for stealing out alone at night to go swimming in the lake, or to prowl the woods, or snatch an extra pastry from the kitchen pantries, just because he could.
And then came the Turn.
God, yes. What a catastrophe.
As he was the son of the two strongest members of the tribe, no one had any doubts about his ability to survive this particular rite of passage. Even he had assumed it would happen just as it should, perhaps when he was fourteen or fifteen, as it had with Kimber, his brother.
But the Gift hadn't come to him at fourteen. It had come to him two days after his twelfth birthday, by thin gray starlight, when he was by himself in the most ghastly place of all the shire.
The rough earth of outlaws, the Field of Bones.
He'd had no business going there. Had he been caught, his parents and the Council would have reacted far more strongly than the usual confinement to rooms with bread and water. There would have been a lashing. There would have been blood, at the least.
The Field—bound from the waterfall past Blackstone Fell, to the half circle of oak and rowan woods to the west, to the bog marsh that fed small muddy streams into the River Fier—all of it was labeled profanus. Profane. To cross those boundaries without permission was considered one of the most grave offenses possible. And the Council of Darkfrith enjoyed a very long list of possible offenses.
Certainly there are few swifter ways to capture the interest of a pubescent boy than to tell him something is forbidden to him. For years Rhys had cherished the notion of the Field with the same awestruck, morbid wonder as all the rest of his friends. The elders would whisper tales of the drakon outcasts buried there, their bones scorched and scattered, no markers, no memories of them beyond what passed from lips to lips over generations. The dead strewn there no longer even had names; the remains of their lives and passions and crimes were now little more than terrible, uneven lumps beneath wild grasses. Only a very few of the living had ever even seen those lumps, and then only for the most dire of reasons.
A tribe member went there to execute, or he went there to be executed. A handful of witnesses were allowed for the burnin
g. That was all.
Rhys had slipped past that particular law just once, and never again. Once was enough.
He'd gone on a moonless night, of course, because there would be legions of dragons overhead, no matter the light or the weather. At nightfall, the tribe's true nature reigned. His kind always flew if they could.
So it had been dark. And it had been easy. His heart had kept up a hard, sick hammer in his chest, but he had managed to breathe through it, finding his way out of the manor house, following all the secret paths he knew, easing from cover to cover. He had a story prepared in the event he was discovered: He was out because Thomas Hawkins from the village had told him there was a pair of red foxes that ventured into the Fell deep at night, and Rhys had never before seen a live fox. It had the virtue of being true, and he thought he'd be able to say it with credible sincerity—but he hadn't been discovered. So he'd saved the foxes for another time.
The Field appeared just as he had imagined it, a murky darkness between the trees, the path that led to it faint with sparse use. It seemed more a large open hollow than a field; the path peaked upon a hill above it and then curved downward, so that when he reached the end of the woods the shadowy depression gave the illusion of rising inexorably to meet him.
He saw no lumps. Not at first. He stood beneath the boughs of an oak and stared for a while as he chewed at his thumbnail, abruptly reluctant to take the step that would free him from the forest and lead him down into the long grasses.
Overhead were clouds and stars and his kin very distant, stealthy as reapers, gaunt streamers with wings that hissed and cut into the night. He glanced up once but no one was in sight; Rhys listened to them instead, far more preoccupied with detecting any sort of worrisome stirring below.