by Sarah Ash
Kostya shrugged.
A group of women and children waited in the cold, to wave them farewell.
A small boy ran up to Gavril, cheeks burnished apple red by the wind.
“Drakhaon,” he piped.
Gavril recognized Danilo, the child he had saved from the wolves.
“Thank you for rescuing me.”
So close to Danilo, Gavril suddenly became aware that there was an extraordinarily luminous bloom to the child, a gilded aura that seemed to breathe from every pore. A delicious freshness emanated from the boy’s body. Gavril could see the blood coursing in the child’s delicate veins, could smell its life-giving fragrance. Before he knew what he was doing, he had begun to stretch out one blue-clawed hand toward the child’s slender neck to draw him closer. . . .
Brown eyes stared trustingly up at him, wide and innocent.
What in God’s name was he doing! Trembling, Gavril hastily withdrew his hand.
“Good boy,” he said in a choked voice, dry as cinders. “Go back to your mother.”
Danilo scampered back and hid behind his mother’s skirts.
“Why?” Gavril said as they rode away, his voice harsh with self-disgust. “Why the child?”
Kostya glanced at him and Gavril saw his eyes were cold as honed steel in his scarred face. “This is how it is. You must learn to accept what you are. You must learn to be Drakhaon.”
“How did my father live with it?”
Kostya looked at him warily.
“This terrible craving. How did he control it? How did he—”
“There were times,” Kostya said flatly, “when he had no control.”
The words burned into Gavril’s mind. No control.
“What did he do? Did he go out and just take what he needed? How . . .” and he faltered, his imagination conjuring obscenely vivid images: crushed tender young flesh, warm blood flowing, red as summer rose petals . . .
“In the old days, there was a tribute paid to the Drakhaon. Young girls. The Drakhaon’s Brides. That was stopped by your grandmother Marya.”
Gavril gripped hold of Kostya.
“Tell me what my father did.”
A sad look dulled the old man’s eyes.
“He went out hunting. He took what he could find.”
“Young girls? Children?” Gavril gripped Kostya tighter, claw fingers biting into the old man’s bony shoulders.
“Only when he was half-mad with the hunger. And afterward . . . afterward he was sick with self-loathing. He would lock himself away for days. I would hear him weeping and beating his fists against the walls.”
“How often?”
“As often as he used his powers.”
“And did no one come looking for these . . . lost children?” Gavril could hardly say the words.
“No one dared to say a word against him. He was Drakhaon. Sometimes it was said a wild beast had mauled them in the forest, sometimes that they had died of a virulent wasting sickness.”
“And the children in Kastel Drakhaon? Were they spared?”
“The only way to protect them is the bloodbond.”
“Even little Artamon?”
“No need. Artamon is Nagarian, like you.”
Gavril slowly loosened his grip on Kostya’s shoulders.
All his dreams of a life with Astasia Orlova now seemed like a cruel delusion. Once she learned the truth of his monstrous heritage, she would run from him, just as Elysia had fled his father.
Out of the mists he thought he glimpsed Astasia, hovering like a Snow Spirit, dark eyes staring down at him in horror and loathing.
“Welcome back, Lord Drakhaon.” Sosia stood on the kastel steps to greet him, clutching a woolen shawl tightly to her. Her voice spoke the customary words of greeting, but her eyes betrayed her agitation.
Gavril swallowed hard. He had been dreading this moment. He dismounted, and while one of the stableboys held his horse’s reins, he undid the saddlebags, taking out the damp bundle of Kiukiu’s few possessions.
Sosia still hovered on the top step as though unwilling to move closer to see what he had brought back to her.
“I know,” she said in an unsteady voice. “Michailo brought the news. The steppe wolves got her. Got my Kiukiu.”
Gavril could not find any words to say to comfort her. He placed the little bundle in Sosia’s arms.
She nodded, then turned and walked away. He noticed then how stooped she had become, how slowly and uncertainly she moved, almost as if grief had aged her overnight. Had she been hoping against hope as he had for some last-minute miracle?
Gavril followed, fired with a grim purpose.
Kiukiu’s death would not go unpunished. Those responsible would pay dearly.
Starting with Lilias Arbelian.
Gavril hammered on Lilias’ door with Kostya at his shoulder. Then, without waiting for anyone to answer, he turned the handle and flung the door wide open.
Dysis was sitting at her embroidery. As the door burst open, she jumped up with a little shriek, the bright silks falling from her lap to the floor.
Gavril strode on past her toward the doors to Lilias’ chamber.
“Wait, my lord—” Dysis ran to block his way but he moved more swiftly, throwing open the double doors.
Lilias and Michailo were sitting on one of the silk couches, deep in conversation, auburn and flax-fair heads so close together they almost touched. They sprang apart as Gavril came in and Lilias rose to her feet.
“Lord Drakhaon,” she said formally, although her green eyes glinted.
At the sight of her, so beautiful, so unrepentant, he felt the dark and dangerous anger begin to simmer again. He clenched his fists, willing it away.
“I want you to pack your bags and leave my house, Madame Arbelian,” he said with equal formality. “You will be gone by first light tomorrow.”
“You’re turning me out?” she said. “By what right—”
“I am merely fulfilling the conditions of my father’s will. I suggest you don’t even try to charm or wheedle your way out, this time.”
“If this is about Kiukiu,” Michailo said, rising from the couch, “then I don’t see why Madame Arbelian should be punished. The girl tried to smother little Artamon. She had to go.”
“In all this we have heard only Madame Arbelian’s version of events.” Gavril turned to stare at Michailo. “Were you here, in this room, when it happened?”
Michailo held his gaze a moment—and then, slowly, sullenly, his pale blue eyes looked away.
“Michailo,” Kostya growled. “Out. Now.”
Michailo looked as if he were about to answer back—and then thought better of it. He saluted Gavril and then turned to leave with a defiantly insolent swagger. Kostya, shoulders stiffly squared, marched after him.
There came a small, hiccupping sound from the crib in the corner, and Lilias moved to pick up her baby, cuddling him close. Suddenly Gavril was seized with an inspiration. She had schemed and plotted against him. Now it was his turn to play her at her own game.
“Perhaps I’ve been too hasty,” he said, forcing himself to hide his anger. “The winter weather is so severe. And your little son is so young, so vulnerable. I’d like you to stay here until the blizzards die down.”
She stared at him. He saw with bitter satisfaction that he had caught her off guard. She had not expected this. At last she said, eyes narrowed to slivers of jade, “You are very gracious, Lord Drakhaon.”
“I shall send word to Azhgorod so that your house will be prepared for you—made warm so that little Artamon doesn’t catch a chill.”
“My lord is too generous,” she said, unsmiling.
He turned to leave—and at the door, stopped, as if suddenly remembering.
“Oh, and as I was not here at the time of his birth, I will arrange for a gift to be sent to Saint Sergius so that the monks may say prayers in thanksgiving for your safe delivery and ring the bells for the birth of your son.”
&nb
sp; This time she said nothing. If what Kiukiu had overheard was right, Abbot Yephimy had been sheltering her lover, Jaromir Arkhel. Now, he calculated, she would live in constant dread that Jaromir would risk his life to see the child—and in coming back, expose her treachery. He would have a watch kept on her rooms, day and night.
Kiukiu’s death would not go unavenged.
The Drakhaon’s rooms were cold, the fire in the grate unlit. Tending the Drakhaon’s fire had been Kiukiu’s task.
Gavril stared at the empty grate, remembering how he had first met her. Little details seemed so poignant now that she was gone—like the way she had smudged soot on her nose in trying to rub it away. He had not realized how much he missed her till now.
Disconsolate, he went into the dressing room to strip off his stained travel clothes. A bath, a long hot bath to ease away the aches of the winter ride, was what he longed for. But as he stripped down to his shirt, he began to notice little discolored marks on his arms and shoulders, blue-flecked, like bruises—yet no bruise ever glimmered like these. They were more like the scales of a snake.
Dear God, was it not to stop with the fingernails and the face?
He heard the outer door open and close—and froze, hoping no one would enter the dressing room and see him naked. Then he heard the clank of a bucket and low scrape of a shovel. Someone had come to make up the fire.
Hastily he searched for clean clothes, pulling on a linen shirt to conceal the telltale marks of his blood inheritance.
“What’re you moping about like a wet washing day for, Ilsi?”
“None of your business, Ninny.”
“Don’t call me that. And hand me that kindling.”
There were voices, girls’ voices, inanely bickering in his bedchamber. He hoped they would light the fire quickly and go away.
“Ninny. Ninny Ninnyusha.”
“Just because your handsome Michailo hasn’t talked to you in over a week . . .”
“He’s been busy.”
“Yes,” in a smirking tone, “with my lady Lilias.”
There was the sound of a sharp slap, followed by an aggrieved little cry.
“He hasn’t.”
“Has so. I saw him sneaking out of her rooms early one morning when Lord Gavril was away.”
Gavril began to listen with attention, his earlier irritation forgotten.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Sosia sent me to do her fires. And I saw him. Why don’t you go watch for yourself if you don’t believe me?”
“I will, then. I will so.”
Ninusha’s snide comments might be no more than kitchen gossip, sharp-barbed to wound her friend’s feelings, but Gavril saw a way he could put the situation to good use. Taking up his wallet, he pushed open the dressing room door. The gossips dropped shovel and tinder in the grate with a clang, and sprang to their feet.
“We didn’t mean to disturb you, my lord. We didn’t know . . .”
Gavril recognized the two maids now; dark Ninusha with the languorous eyes and tart-tongued Ilsi, her pretty face pinched in a sulky frown.
“So you’ve also been working in my lady Lilias’ rooms?” he asked, affecting a careless tone.
Ninusha pulled a face; Ilsi nudged her sharply in the ribs.
“I want you to tell me if you notice anything—or anyone—out of the ordinary.”
He saw the maids glance uncertainly at each other.
“Here’s money for your pains,” he said, “and there’ll be more if you have anything to report.”
Ilsi darted forward and took the coins from his hand, as delicately as a little bird pecking crumbs. For a moment a strange sensation swept through his whole body and he found himself wanting to reach out, to seize her slender wrist and pull her back toward him. . . .
“Dismissed,” he said, turning abruptly away. They scurried off and he heard the door click shut behind them. He put one hand to his burning forehead and found it was damp with pearls of sweat.
There had been an irresistible perfume in the room, the fresh scent of young, sweet flesh and blood.
Drakhaon’s Brides.
An unnatural chill lingered in the Kalika Tower, as if the spirit-wraith had left behind some ineradicable taint of winter. The broken windows in the study had been mended with plain glass, yet the room was still as cold as the snow-encrusted gardens far below.
Hidden in a drawer in the desk lay the self-portraits Gavril had sketched before the coming of the steppe wolves. Now he took them out and gazed at them, comparing them to his reflection in the mirror.
Trick of the winter light, or had his face altered again?
He stared at himself in the mirror, frowning. His brows had become even thicker and more slanted, dark midnight gashes across his temples. And his eyes . . . He leaned closer into the mirror, almost squinting in his efforts to see more closely. His pupils had narrowed, and there was a glint of gold flecks in the striated blue of the iris.
Inhuman eyes. Drakhaoul eyes.
Had he begun to see the world differently through these alien eyes? Did the light fall differently; were the shifting colors and shadows of his world subtly altered? Still staring, he reached for the pen and inks and began a new sketch.
When it was finished, he set down his pen and waited for the ink to dry.
What he had drawn both appalled and fascinated him. It was a distortion, almost a caricature, of the earlier self-portraits—except there was no humor, not even of a maliciously capricious kind, in the portrayal.
The face with its brooding serpent’s eyes glowered back at him from a crosshatched background of shadows.
It was a face to terrify children, a daemon face, cruel and alien. And this was just the start. What his father had written down was true. The process would only accelerate from now on.
The more his powers increased, the more monstrous he would become.
Astasia would no longer recognize him.
He sat in the cold staring at the portrait until it was too dark to see any longer.
“My lord! My lord!” Someone was tapping insistently at the door. He got up and went to open it to see Ilsi on the spiral stair outside, clutching a lantern.
“You said,” she said in little gasps, “if anyone came—” She had been running.
“Who is it?” he said. The words came out more roughly than he had intended, and he saw her flinch.
She shook her head. “Don’t know. Don’t know how he got in. Thought it was Michailo—but I’ve never seen him before—”
Gavril’s heart began to beat too fast; had his ruse worked?
“Go get Kostya. Tell him to meet me outside her rooms. And hurry.”
“Just you try to stop me!” He caught a spark of malice in her eyes as she pattered away, fleet-footed, down the spiral stairs.
Jushko One-Eye, Kostya’s taciturn second-in-command, was waiting outside Lilias’ rooms with four of the druzhina.
“The Bogatyr’s on his way, my lord.” Jushko silently opened the door to let Gavril into the antechamber. Two druzhina stood guard outside; two followed them inside.
“Where is Dysis?” Gavril whispered to Jushko.
“In safekeeping.” Jushko went to one of the candle sconces on the wall and twisted it to one side, revealing a peephole cut in the paneling.
Gavril came forward and peered in.
Lilias’ room was warmly lit by firelight and scented candles that let drift a drowsy scent of sweet summer meadows. Lilias was sitting on one of the sofas, her loose silk gown drooping off one shoulder, feeding her baby. Firelight gleamed on the soft curves of her bare shoulder and breast, glinting russet in her unbound hair. Gavril felt his face begin to burn. He turned away, ashamed to be playing the voyeur.
“When I heard about the child, I had to come.” A man spoke, his voice huskily deep. Gavril turned back to the spyhole, straining to see and hear. “Did you really expect me to stay away?”
“And are you insane? If you’re caught,
it’ll be the end for us both.”
“At least let me see him. Hold him.”
Lilias began to laugh, a low, throaty laugh that seemed to tremble on the verge of tears.
A man moved into Gavril’s field of vision, a tall man, wrapped in a long, dark, caped coat. Gavril felt his heart miss a beat; he knew him now.
Jaromir Arkhel.
CHAPTER 23
Gavril watched as Jaromir Arkhel moved into the warmth of the firelight and gazed down at Artamon. He put out one hand to gently stroke the baby’s cheek.
“He resembles you, Lilias,” he said. His voice shook.
“What did you expect? Scales? Claws?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he said, less gently. Artamon stirred, as if sensing the tension, and whimpered. “Is he my son?”
Gavril heard Jushko’s sharp intake of breath.
“Why couldn’t you wait?” she said. “As soon as the snows stop I am to leave for Azhgorod. Why endanger us all by coming here? They are watching my rooms, day and night.”
“You haven’t answered my question.” There was a roughness in Jaromir’s voice now that betrayed raw emotion, barely suppressed.
“I’m told that Nagarian children show no sign of their inheritance till puberty.” Lilias went to lay Artamon down in his cradle, more intent, it seemed, on tucking in the embroidered sheets than on her conversation with Jaromir.
“Don’t you know, Lilias?” Jaromir went up to her and placed his hand on her shoulder, gently turning her around to face him.
So this was Jaromir Arkhel, the man he was blood-bound to kill? Gavril saw only a tall, gaunt young man, whose dark eyes had haunted his dreams ever since the Drakhaoul first possessed him.
“Jaromir,” Lilias said, “you have powerful friends. Why haven’t they come to your aid?”
“Jaromir?” muttered Jushko. “An Arkhel name . . .”
“Can you be sure your last communication was received?” Jaromir said. “If they’ve heard nothing from us, they must believe we are dead.”
“We’ve both tried, Dysis and I, day and night, but since the snows started, nothing seems to work anymore.”