by Shana Abe
But no,she had gotten invisibility. Lovely. Especially when it manifested upon the slightest degree of stress. Or a splash of warm coffee.
Zoe lowered her foot again and wished gloomily for a bath. A real bath, with a full tub, and hot water, and lavender soap and—
The hairs on the back of her neck abruptly prickled.
She was no longer alone in the room.
Even as leapt up she was vanishing; the blanket slithered in a rumpled heap to the floor. She stood there half-crouched, frantically scanning the chamber.
Crimson walls, faded drapery. The bed and broken mirror, silent. No breathing or foreign scent. No heartbeat but her own.
Yet she was not alone.
It was close to teatime and the setting sun was trying hard to slice past the break in the curtains. A thin streak of topazed light fell against the far wall, cut downward to gloss the dark wooden floor. Slowly she backed to the gloom of the nearest corner; the grime on her feet was still quite visible.
Nothing else stirred save a tiny plume of motes, rushed to life by her ankles. She sucked in air past her teeth and spoke, her voice coming harsh. "Who's there?"
No one answered. Her heart thumped so loudly against her breastbone she wondered it couldn't be heard all the way across the palace.
"I know you're there," she snarled, "whatever you are. Show yourself and I won't—"
"Zoe?"
Despite herself she jumped a little, and the motes swirled anew. "Hayden?" She eased a step forward, still seeing nothing. "Hayden?" There came a new sound, softer than a sigh, low and long. She turned a circle. "Where are you?"
"Ah ."
The mirror. Of course, the mirror. She snatched up the blanket and sank to her knees before it, but it was empty. It showed only the room, her face, the blue.
"I don't see you," she said, frustrated. Her fingers curled into a fist against the glass. "Hayden, where are you?"
"Here," he said, behind her.
But he wasn't. There was only the wall and window, and the band of sunlight that now arrowed hard across her chest.
"Here," he said again, quieter, right in front of her.
She reached out and felt the empty air, then the curtains. Velvet met her skin in a push of heat, a heavy resistance as she inched it aside with the back of her hand. She angled out of the light and the chamber warmed to flame with the sudden sun.
"Hay ." she began, but didn't finish because her throat dried up, because he was there after all. There, in the glass of the window, the shadow man of before, smoke and wicked darkness paled to nearly nothing against the brilliance of the sky.
"No," murmured the shadow, shimmering thin. "Sorry, love. It's Rhys. Rhys Langford."
He watched her lips part. Astonishment, he thought. Or perhaps indignation. With Zoe, it could be difficult to tell. But she'd been expecting her lover, clearly.
Too damned bad. She got him instead.
"Where are we?" he asked, and looked her up and down. "Why are you naked?"
Her mouth snapped closed. She gathered the sage wool blanket she wore—and he was fairly certain it was all she wore—tighter about her shoulders.
"Not that I'm complaining," he couldn't help but add.
Ah, yes. The color in her cheeks again, growing brighter. That was anger.
He was happy enough to see it, that blush. He was happy to see any part of her, all the beautiful, living, vivid parts of her, her hair shimmering gold and coral with the waning light, long silky locks caught against smooth arms and shoulders, those pillowy lips. She wore no kohl now, but her lashes and brows had never been the same pale blond as her hair, rather a darker, gentler brown; even as a boy, he'd found it endearing.
Not that he'd ever told her that. Trying to compliment Zoe was like trying to tell a rose why he liked thorns. She wouldn't believe him and he'd likely end up fumbling it anyway.
She drew up taller with the blanket. "Are you dead?" she asked flatly.
"I don't know," he replied, interested. "What do you think?"
"One would hope for a certain grace in death. But you seem just as crass as ever."
He smiled. "Excellent news for me, then."
She only shook her head, one hand knuckled into the twists of the wool. "Are you alone? Is there . is anyone else with you?"
"You mean your darling husband-to-be? No. I'm alone. There was a rat not so very long ago—as least, I think it wasn't long ago. A rat and a bush and a door—" He was beginning to babble, the joy and sharp relief of finding her peaking into something more volatile. Rhys took a breath and cut himself short. "Where did you say we are?"
"I didn't. Paris."
He looked past her to the room. It was bare, remarkably so.
"Is this a hostelry?" he asked. "I must say, your tastes have always been a bit peculiar to me, but—"
"This," she interrupted frostily, "is the Palais des Tuileries." She dropped the curtain and he lost her, just that easily. He was left to gaze at yards of pinkish velvet gradually fading to gray.
"Zoe," he called, no longer smiling. "Zoe, I'm sorry. Come back."
The curtains began to lift back into color, although he caught no glimpse of her, and they did not stir.
"Please," he said, and hated the edge of desperation in his own voice. "I just—please."
Her fingers parted the folds. She gazed back at him warily, saturated in light that was rapidly deepening to cherry dusk. He tried his best smile—don't run; don't go; everything's fine; all of this is perfectly, perfectly normal—and reached out to touch her.
He wanted, very much, to graze those fingertips so close to him, to feel her, just as he almost had before . but instead Rhys only met that resistance again, the unseen glue that kept him fixed. He remained vapor and shade, nothing like the fiery, firm colors of her.
He concentrated on her nails, neat little crescents, pushed harder, sensing tension like the clear skin atop water—and then sudden freedom: When his fingers met hers, they stabbed straight through.
Zoe yanked back with a muffled yelp. The curtains slapped closed once more. Ghost.
"I don't understand." It was barely a whisper. "God help me, Zee, I swear I don't understand what's happening to me. Have I gone mad?"
"It surely seems one of us must have," she muttered from the other side. Very slowly, the velvet parted. She stood a little farther back than before and looked up at him through strands of tumbled hair, pressing the hand he'd touched to her chest as if it hurt. "You don't remember?"
Rhys shook his head, unable now to stop staring at the thing that should have been his own hand, lifted between them. The peculiar dark shape of his spread fingers. For an instant they seemed malformed, too long and bent—and then they shifted back to normal.
"You were—captured. By the sanf inimicus, back in Darkfrith. No one else was there. We never knew really what happened."
"The sanf . what?"
"Inimicus. The Soft Enemy. Human hunters, Rhys, they came to the shire—all we found was your blood in a field. Truly, you don't remember?"
"No, I ." he started to say, but the room beyond her took on a slow, dizzying tilt, everything sweeping to the left, cherry Zoe and the bed and walls, he couldn't stop it, the colors merging and swirling into dots, into darkness—
—he'd been out walking, hot and angry about something. It was the soft ashen glow just before daybreak and he'd been pacing through a meadow. A wet meadow. Dew. There were bracken and wildflowers and he had been blind with his thoughts, careless, and they had surrounded him so quickly—in the shire! in the bloody goddamned shire!—and there had been a Voice telling him not to fight them, not to Turn, although he was trying like hell to anyway, sharp pain and the taste of grass in his mouth and then—music. All that music, the symphony that had never ceased until—
He felt ill. He felt himself fading and this time let it happen, surrendering to the smooth dull gray until it was all that was left.
* * *
Zoe sat cro
ss-legged on the floor, the mirror on one side, the window on the other. She was stiff and sore and her feet were still a mess, but she'd managed to dress and get out long enough to find food, a bottle of dry white wine, and a basin of clean water for washing.
By the flame of her single candle she ate fried hamsteak and a wedge of sharp Cantal, bread smeared with butter gone hard with the chill of the night and still delicious enough to melt on her tongue.
The candle in its holder dripped gobs of honeyed wax, puddling fat along the pewter rim. It was beeswax, not tallow. Tallow smoked too much.
She didn't quite dare to crack the curtains to see the windowpanes—it was crisply cold out there, and even by this weak light she glittered with jewels—but she supposed if he did return, she'd hear him.
She flexed her toes in her stiff buckled shoes, wincing at the ache. Outside the window the wind began an eerie moan; it was echoed by the sound of birds very far off. Owls, she thought, though she'd only heard owls a few times before in her life. They groaned to match the weather, a pair of them somewhere out there in the stone forest of the city.
She lifted a bite of cheese to her mouth and cut her eyes away from the tiny fierce sparks of the diamonds on her wrist.
"Zee."
She didn't rise or startle. "I'm here." "I can't find you."
"The curtains have to be closed. I can't risk the light."
"Oh."
The wind caught a loose pane in the window, a hard rattle of glass against its metal seam.
"Zee, I think I ... might be dead."
"Yes," she agreed, quiet. "I think you might be."
She heard his sigh. "I don't remember it. Dying. I don't remember that at all."
"But the sanf? Do you remember them?"
"Aye. Them. The fight. The woods. How long ago was that?"
"A few months."
"That's all?" He gave a laugh, short and bitter. "It seems like forever ago. Seems like forever I've been in this damned dark place."
She pressed a thumb into a pool of cooling wax; it smarted, but she didn't move her hand. After a moment, he spoke again.
"Why can you hear me? And see me? Why only you?"
He sounded so real, just like he had in life. There was no unearthly echo to his words, no spectral sensation at all beyond that steady wind moan rising and falling beyond him. He sounded bewildered, and hurt, and beneath that, angry. All those things, and by just the pitch of his voice she could envision the expression on his face. She didn't need to see it, green eyes troubled, chiseled lips drawn to a line. That single sly curl of chestnut hair that always seemed to flop down to his eyes no matter how often he shoved it aside.
"It's a curse," she said, and lifted her thumb free of the wax.
"What? Really?"
"Yes."
"No." He was stronger suddenly, excited. "It's a Gift, isn't it? You've got a Gift."
She shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and said, "Have it your way."
"By God, Zee—that's ... that's ..."
She rolled a piece of wax between her index finger and thumb, waiting.
". lucky for me," he finished, more sober than before. "I suppose. Lucky for me, eh?"
The wax was tacky, turning gray against her skin. She flicked it across the chamber.
"Is it just me? Or can you talk to anyone dead? Are there others like me?"
"Yes. And no, not quite like you. They're here, they're around me. I can nearly hear their voices at times, a whole chorus of them . and then in glass, in mirrors especially, I see them, small lights. You're much clearer than the rest. With the others, it's more like . I feel them. I can feel them reaching for me. But they're slight and thin and distant, as if they're on the far side of a lake, perhaps." She traced the oval imprint of her thumb in the wax. "You're the only one who speaks audibly."
"Tell me about my family. What happened to them? Was anyone else hurt in the attack?"
"No one else, only you. The Princess Maricara was briefly taken, but she made it back safely. There was a girl, a young girl from the village, she was taken too ."
"Honor Carlisle," he said, sounding surprised. "Yes. I remember. I was there for that. I was part of the hunt for her."
"She's still missing. I don't suppose ... Are you certain you're alone?"
The wind rattled the pane, shifting directions, whistling a note so low and keen it almost hurt.
"I'm not alone," Rhys said. "I have you."
Zoe leaned forward and snuffed out the candle. She climbed to her feet and pulled apart the curtains, just enough illumination from beyond to discern his outline: darkness against dark, smoke and stars and charcoal clouds pushed across the sky, a pale lemon moon shining behind them. The pane of glass that held his heart shivered; it was the loose one, the one the wind took.
She could nearly see him. Standing so close, even without the candle, she thought she could nearly see his face. An acrid trail of fumes from the pinched wick rose up in loops to sting her eyes.
"I want you to know," she said, "that I will do everything in my power to avenge your death. I swear it."
Shadow Rhys shook his head. "Don't say that. What could you do?"
She gazed back at him, silent.
"Ah," he said, very soft. "Aha. Here you are, in Paris. Unaccompanied. Gifted. Did you run away?" He answered the question before she could speak. "Of course you did. They'd never let you leave." He lifted a hand, fingers curved, just like on the coffeehouse patio. "But did you honestly think these Others, these enemies of ours, would fail to notice a dragon hunting them, even in a city this size?"
"I wouldn't know," she said. "There is no dragon hunting them."
"What are you then?"
"I cannot Turn."
His head tipped. She could feel the speculation in his gaze.
"I'm not lying. I can't Turn."
"That's bloody bad news, love, because I don't think I'm going to be much help to you." He seemed to push against the glass. "Not from where I am."
"I don't need your help. I can do this on my own."
"You can't be ser—"
"Look around you, Rhys Langford," she hissed, struggling to keep her voice subdued. "Look at what I've already done. Against all the council's precautions, I've escaped Darkfrith. Against all their dire predictions, I've made it single-handedly to the Continent, and I've been here for weeks. Undetected. If I can't find the sanf inimicus here, I'll keep going, all the way to Transylvania if I must. I will find them."
"Why?" The anger was back, full force. "I don't want your vengeance. Don't be a fool. Whatever they did to me, it's not worth your safety."
She stepped back, drew a steadying breath. "Did you really think that this was entirely about you?"
He paused as the moon was swallowed by a thick rushing cloud; trees and gardens and sky: everything pitch, a spill of ink all the way across the heavens.
"Ah," he said again. "I see. Hayden."
"Hayden."
From somewhere far below came a telltale footfall, nothing nocturnal—heavy steps across gravel. The subtle sisss of a phosphorus match.
"Listen." Rhys turned his head. "Do you hear it?"
She nodded, afraid to speak, scanning the grounds, straining to make out more. "That music," the shadow whispered. "It's so damned ... beautiful."
He misted away. She was left with a clear view of the emerging moon, a rime of yellow glow just beginning to devour the edge of the cloud.
Chapter Seven
My Dearest Friend,
I hope this note finds you happy and well.
I have reached the shores of France. My passage was Uneventful. I've a coach and four and a Man to take me as far as Paris, where I shall have to hire someone New for the leg to Dijon. (You will understand that I remain Inside the carriage as much as possible, away from the Horses. Yet I confess I long to be free of such confinement. The coach is ill sprung and the roads of France are choked with carts. Their condition is Quite Atrocious.)
Thus far I have witnessed Woods and Plains rolling on for many miles, with Vineyards and Cathedrals sharing space in seemingly equal measure. I have dined upon Fried Trout with cream, and beered-Beef Stew, and a Fine Onion Tart they call Zewelwai , none of which Compares to your Cookery, of course.
I found you a small trinket today in the Town of Amiens, a very little Stone but one I trust will Please you, and it is from here I shall Post this Message. You are in my Fondest thoughts and dreams. I pray you remember me the Same,
Yours,
H.
The morning was not quite warm enough to melt the sludge of the coach yard entirely, and the turned-up edges of mud sparkled with frost under the sun like sea glitter with Zoe's every step. There were cobblestones visible under the mud, but they appeared and disappeared like red rock islands in that dirt-and-straw sea. It had rained late last night and then dropped to freezing, and the yard still hadn't been scraped clean.
Travelers clumped back and forth along wooden planks laid in paths over the muck, a great busy swarm of men and women and children hastening from plank to plank, and stable boys not bothering with any of it, stamping in their boots straight alongside. Everyone was talking, moving, pointing. An incoming post boy blew his horn as hisberline clattered through the brick-pillared entrance, a set of six matched grays and a crest on the door, the heavy wheels spinning so close to the path that more than a few of the people jumped from the wood to the mud on the other side, cursing.
Zoe lingered near the entrance of the yard, fingering the letter she kept in her reticule, observing the commotion.
Hayden had been correct: Horses were a problem. And as this particular coach yard was the busiest she'd seen so far, it held many, many horses, most of them fresh from their stalls and eager for their paces. A few were already beginning to notice the scent of predator in the air, skins twitching beneath their harnesses as they turned their heads toward her, curled back their lips.