The Treasure Keeper d-4

by Shana Abe

  Zoe lit the candles. She lit the fire in the parlor hearth. She warmed her hands before it for a long minute, feeling the steam beginning to form in the clammy mess of her petticoats and skirts, then turned around and faced the others behind her.

  The cook, sans cap, rocking inelegantly in a chair with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her mouth.

  The raven-haired prince standing sentinel beside her, still regal in his simple workman's garb.

  And the monster, a broken shadow upon a chaise longue, his feet deformed, his legs unable to straighten. The scar drawn down his face an angry hard line. Hair hanging lank along his cheekbones, that very dark brown now oddly streaked with strands of bright silky metal. He was bony and ashen and frightening. Only his eyes remained unchanged from the ghost who'd haunted her, from the boy she'd once kissed: pale, winter green that watched her unwaveringly.

  "What will you do with her?" Zoe asked in French, jerking her chin toward the cook.

  "Take her home, for now," replied Prince Sandu. "Get her back home."

  Zoe felt herself smile, a horrible smile, arctic and unkind. "Shall we not punish her first?"

  The woman closed her eyes, kept rocking.

  "Is that what you wish?" asked the prince, unmoved.

  "It is your right." She kept her smile, gazing at the woman.

  "Zoe," rasped the monster in his broken voice.

  "Shall I?" She stretched her fingers by her sides, felt the fire behind her begin to rise and gain strength. "Shall I, female? Shall I offer you what you deserve? No doubt there's a great deal we may learn from you before ... matters are concluded."

  The cook didn't answer, her cheeks apple red, her knuckles blanched. Her rocking increased. Now that Zoe knew what she was, she could feel the woman's deep white panic, the spiral of blind, total fear that cinched her heart and clogged her mind. A true drakon never would have surrendered to such blank sedated fear. A true drakon never would have betrayed her own kind.

  "But I don't know, I'm undecided," she said gently. "I do have a certain sympathy for your position. You say you have a son. It's a great pity. Yet perhaps I don't like you well enough to kill you when I'm finished with you. Perhaps I like you only enough to make you suffer."

  "Zee," said the creature who had been Lord Rhys. One of the clawed hands twitched against his chest. "Stop."

  "Why should I?"

  The monster shook his head. "It should not be you."

  The woman had bent over completely, hiding her face between the skirts at her knees. Her hair was sand-colored and wet and fraying from its braids. Zoe gazed at her, then gave a flick of her hand.

  "Fine. Live." She looked back at the prince. "I'm leaving. Don't follow me."

  "My lady, it's not safe—"

  "Do you imagine," she said, in the same gentle tone of before, "that I care even the slightest jot about your opinion? I'm not asking permission, Highness. I'm leaving. I will return. That's all you need know. If you've left for your home by the time I get back, Godspeed." She moved to the doorway, paused with one hand upon the wooden frame. She spoke her next words to the red-and-cream runner in the hallway; she didn't face the parlor again. "Make certain you take her with you, or I won't be responsible for the consequences."

  The Palais des Tuileries was also unlit. The rain remained steady, which made it simpler for her to walk there. She'd shed the cook's gown and moved unseen along the streets, but they were nearly deserted anyway, despite the fact that it was a Wednesday and the bells of the cathedral upon the Ile de la Cite were ringing over and over for the midnight Mass.

  The gate into the royal gardens had a new lock upon it. Zoe cupped the weight of it in both hands, water beading and rolling along the metal. It was shiny and thick and each little piece had been fit together like a clever puzzle. The king's crest was stamped across the front. The bolt felt warm against her rain-cold fingers; she hooked her thumbs through the loop of it, gave it a swift jerk.

  The lock broke into its pieces, and without nearly the fuss of the iron manacles.

  Her path through the gardens felt familiar enough that she hardly paid attention to it. Her feet knew the way. She passed hedges and faceless eerie statues, fallow flower beds and the entrance to the labyrinth. Her favorite door into the palace was a hidden servant's entrance set behind an overgrown yarrow, still unlocked. She eased inside.

  It was vast. So vast. How could she have forgotten it that quickly? She went from invisible to seen with scarcely a thought, no longer worrying about footprints, or sound, or human eyes peering past windowpanes. She was small as a flea in such a space.

  There was no one else about. Tuileries greeted her as it always had: with marble hush and the promise of echoing solitude. Even if someone were to discover her footprints, she'd be indiscernible before they could speak a word.

  Her apartment was just as before. Clearly no one had discovered it since she and the prince and—

  Her apartment was the same. The bed, stripped of its covers; on the night they'd come, she'd returned each piece to its rightful owner. The broken mirror, still propped massive and hulking against its wall.

  The fissure of silver that marked the divide in the glass. The stark-faced woman on one side, and the deep bottomless blue on the other.

  She stood motionless a moment, taking it all in. Rainfall peppered the lead gutters outside, cascaded down the slick walls. It penetrated the stone palace, changed the song of the foundation from sleepy to sleepier, notes that suggested undiscovered quarries far and away, mountains untouched, rivers undammed. A world flowing free.

  Zoe walked across the chamber. She knelt before the mirror, her palm pressed to the cold flat glass. She felt naught but that: the cold, hard and unforgiving.

  Her head bent; her forehead touched it. Nothing.

  Her breath clouded it. Nothing.

  Even the usual spirits were gone; nothing bright moved before her. She gazed at an endless span of dark cobalt blue, the silver fracture, unrelenting.

  The air changed then; it went so thin her lungs closed. She could not breathe any longer. She could not breathe or think. He wasn't there. She thought he would be, and he wasn't. He wasn't anywhere anymore.

  Something hot at last—her tears, chilled already by the time they reached her chin and dripped upon her thighs.

  Zoe curled slowly down to the floor, one hand still braced against the glass, and wept into the crook of her arm, making hardly any sound at all.

  The world hurt. It was a bitch of a thing, because it wasn't an ordinary sort of hurt, not the kind of pain he'd shrug off as a lad at school after a hard game of cricket, or a harder night of carousing. Rhys had had his share of bruises and bleary mornings. Once he'd even severed the primary bone of his right wing from a rushed landing in a burst of wind amid the downs, and that had been one of the most atrocious moments of his life.

  This was different.

  It hurt like someone had ground mounds of serrated glass into every crevice of every joint. Like he'd gone to sleep one night in his very prime, a twenty-nine-year-old drakon, and awoken an old, old man, so old his skin had shrunk and thinned and his body no longer obeyed him and little children would stare and point and run away if he beckoned to them. His hair was strange and his hands downright grisly, each a blasphemous mix of his human shape and dragon. His body was stooped. Clambering up the steps into the carriage he'd caught a smeared glimpse of his face in the window glass, and then he better understood Zoe's constant, horrified calm when she looked at him.

  He was a corpse. All that time with her, he'd thought he'd been dead, and it must have been true. Nothing living would look as he did.

  He watched her leave the maison and knew there was nothing he could say or do or hope to stop her. He even knew where she was going. The risks she took walking alone in this colossal city of peasants and nobles and poisonous enemies. Had he a wisp of the bravado he'd possessed months before, he would have leapt up, taken her in his arms no matter what she
said. Let her shed her grief and fury upon his chest; he could accept her blows, her physical rage. That would have been all right.

  It was her eyes that tore him apart. Her eyes, jet-black and beautiful and still brimming with all the tragic, shimmering sorrow he'd never before seen shining out at him. That last look she'd sent him before leaving, a mere sidelong glance from beneath brown lashes, and it had flayed him to the core.

  He'd been wrong. He knew that now. She had loved Hayden James. She'd loved him, and now, because of his quest to free Rhys, a good man—a noble drakon —was gone forever.

  And poor Zoe Lane. She'd be given to the second son of the Alpha anyway. Even like this, even mangled and destroyed as he was, as truly, truly fucking sorry as he was ... when they got back to Darkfrith, after all her dodging and hiding and intricate devious plans, she would be given to him.

  The beast inside him—the dragon that yet smoldered as a cinder in his heart—was green and selfish and glad.

  So he'd let her go for now. He let her slip back to her palace, to her looking glass of sallow spirits. He hoped that James was there, actually. He hoped she got to say good-bye, and that afterward James drifted away to his eternal peace.

  It was the least he could hope for them.

  Because one way or another, Rhys's future with Zoe was just about to begin.

  He gazed down in unwilling fascination at his malformed hands, opening and closing the gold metal claws.

  He was alive.

  * * *

  The prince and his small-blooded female were asleep when she returned. She'd checked on them, slipped into his room to be certain that what she sensed was truth: The boy was in the bed, still fully clothed atop the covers. The cook was wrapped in blankets upon the floor, her hands lifted to her face as if to hide her shame, even in slumber. A weak fire glowed orange from behind the grate.

  Neither drakon woke. Zoe allowed the bedroom door to finish its well-oiled click behind her.

  Rhys had remained in the front parlor. He might not have stirred since the last moment she'd seen him, hours past. His scent was nowhere but there. There was nothing in the air that suggested food to her, or drink, or movement. He was still angled awkwardly upon the chaise longue with his feet up; the blanket was a heap beside one slanting wooden leg, but other than that, nothing had changed. Ragged clothing. Jutting bones. Bright eyes and talons that rested across his stomach in ribbons of curling sharp gold.

  The fire in here had been fed, so the light and shadows were better defined. He watched her in silence as she came to stand by the ash-colored chest placed near the parlor entrance. Finally he spoke.

  "Did you find him?"

  She closed her eyes and raised her face to the ceiling. "No."

  "I'm sorry. I am," he added, when she opened her eyes and looked square at him. "I'd hoped ... for your sake, Zee. I'd hoped he'd reach you."

  "Well. He did not."

  The monster seemed to retreat into the shadows of his longue. In this shifting dark he seemed closer to what he'd once been. But for the taloned glint of metal where his hands should be—but for the dim streaks of dragon silk in his hair—he might have been Lord Rhys again. Thinner, yes, more watchful, but still he.

  "Perhaps he will later."

  "Why? Do you suppose time is measured differently in death?" He didn't rise to her baited tone. "I don't know. Perhaps."

  "Perhaps." She smiled and lifted her arms to tug her sleeves straight. She'd taken the trouble in the back room to drag on the cook's gown again, and the material clung heavy and damp. "Everything perhaps," she said to the sleeves. "Perhaps he'll come to me. Perhaps he'll speak. Perhaps he'll haunt me as you once did. Would you ever even know? Perhaps, perhaps." She skimmed her nails along the surface of the chest. "Perhaps he'll even forgive me."

  "Forgive you? For what?"

  She let out a laugh. "I don't know. Any of it. All of it. The entire bloody fiasco."

  "Zoe. None of this was your fault."

  "Aren't you the gentleman still."

  "No," he said. "I'm really not. And none of this falls to you."

  She tipped her head to rest against the mahogany frame of the entrance. "I like you better when you don't lie."

  "I'm not lying.

  "Then you're in worse condition than I'd thought. Have they robbed you of your wits along with your fine looks?"

  "Supposing I ever had any, then no."

  Her lips began to quiver; she pressed them tight, and when they were back in her control, spoke again. "The very last thing he saw of me was our kiss. Do you realize that? The last time he looked at me, and I was kissing you."

  "Ah," Rhys said quietly. "Yes. I admit those first few moments of rejoining the living are a bit fuzzy to me now, but I do recall that. I was kissing you, Zee. Not the other way around."

  "And it's so easy to perceive the difference from a distance. In the dark."

  "Of course it is. James wasn't stupid. You'd never have betrayed him, no matter whom you loved. He knew that."

  Despite her best efforts, a tear leaked from the corner of her eye. She ducked her face and swiped it away.

  The monster's ruined voice turned acerbic. "Does this amuse you? This self-imposed flagellation?"

  "Oh, certainly."

  "It does not me. Pathos does not become you."

  Zoe slid a menacing step into the firelight. "Say that once more."

  "Pathos. Does not. Become you."

  Her words thinned to a breath. "Why you self-besotted, small-minded little boy. How dare you judge me? How dare you imply all this—all my feelings—his death—is an act?"

  There it was—that smile, that damnable arrogant smile, and it sharpened his face just as it always had. It made her fingers itch to slap him.

  "Yes," he whispered. "I'm to blame. Come over here, Zoe. Come over here and show me what you'd like to do to me."

  She trembled at the edge of her intentions. She stood there and trembled, her hands balled into fists. He only smiled at her.

  She took a step back into the safety of the night. She loosened her hands, expanded her lungs, and slipped into the striped chair closest to her. The one she'd sat in before, only days past, when she'd been reciting to Hayden the story of how she'd tossed her life upside down and come to France.

  "Listen," she said, crossing her ankles. "Do you hear it?"

  The monster tensed. "What?"

  "The music, of course." She fished into the pocket of the apron, withdrew the bundle she'd taken from Sandu's room.

  He'd stuffed it beneath his pillow. It might have made a difference had he not slept so deeply; it might not have. Either way, she was getting what she wanted. Removing the manacles from him had been as easy as slipping her hand beneath his cheek. He'd sighed and lifted an arm to his head but by then she was finished. Prince Sandu had returned to his dreams before she'd even tiptoed back to his door.

  Foolish child. Had the cook the slightest degree more valor, she might have stolen the manacles instead.

  But they were still tied snug in their sheet, firmly in her possession. She worked at the knot, let the corners fall across her lap in great folds of wrinkled cotton.

  "Here they are. The secret to your internment." She lifted her eyes. "Tell me. What do they sing for you now?"

  Rhys gazed back at her, unblinking. "Opera. German. Dreadfully overwrought." "How nice."

  "Clearly you haven't been to many operas."

  She regarded the torn iron cuffs in her hands. "No, you're right. Like most of our kind, I've lived my life according to rules imposed by others. Rules to keep me where I am, rules I must abide without question. Opera never figured very prominently in any of it."

  He never moved; the parlor seemed clinched in an absolute stillness. Even the fire dimmed. "I can take you there, Zee. London. Edinburgh. Even Vienna. Opera and theatre, street festivals, games, whatever you like. I can show you all you've missed."

  "Hmmm. I suppose you could. Or ... I could simply ignore a
ll those rules and take myself."

  She lifted up both manacles. The rolling sparkle of blue diamonds seemed blinding against the rest of the tame darkened room.

  "Listen," she said again.

  The monster made a slight, serious curve of his lips. His eyes locked to hers. "I swear I am."

  She opened her mouth and spoke the words she'd practiced all the long walk back through the rain. "You will never again fall prey to this spell. Should Draumr sing to you, any fraction of it sing to you, should anyone who holds it charge you, you will ignore it all. Never, never again will you hear its song or give yourself to its commands. From this moment on, I will it. Let it be."

  For a good while, nothing else happened. The ravaged, glinting creature upon the chaise longue still only stared at her.

  "Did you think I meant to do you harm?" Zoe asked, lifting her chin.

  "Not for an instant."

  She stood, crossed to him, and dropped both manacles into his lap. "In that case, you're more naive than I ever imagined. Congratulations. You're free."

  No, beloved, Rhys thought, watching her walk away. Not nearly.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "It's no longer secure here. I think you must both come with me."

  The dragon-boy clasped his hands to his elbows and leaned across the table with an ease Rhys envied: such a simple move, the fingers compressed, the stretched spine and the working jaw. He'd wager the boy never considered for an instant how he did it, what muscles needed to labor instead of atrophy. He studied the taut, unblemished face of the prince and remembered how it had felt to rub his own fingers over his chin. To feel unscarred flesh. To touch without severing anything within reach.

  That was before the cellar, of course. B.C., he'd decided to call it, in another one of those spurts of inappropriate black humor.

  B.C. Before he'd spent months lying motionless against ice-cold stone, every fiber of his body tensed, withering into slow starvation.

  Before he'd been struck down and scarred and stuck in this weird, in-between state of dragon and man.