The Smoke Thief

by Shana Abe

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Also by Shana Abé

  Copyright page

  For Mom and Dad, always and ever.

  A book is just a dream, without pushing and prodding and heaps of encouragement; Wendy McCurdy, Annelise Robey, and Andrea Cirillo deserve full kudos for helping me make this dream real. Thank you!

  A very special umboogwa to Stacey, for using up all of her minutes on me. Ditto to Mandy!

  And of course, domo, danke, and gracias to Darren,

  who understood all that.

  PROLOGUE

  Imagine a place so ripe and thick with the promise of magic that the very air breathes in plumes of pearl and gray and smoky blue; that the trees bow with the weight of their heavy branches, dipping low to the ground, dropping needles and leaves into beds of perfume. A place of white sparkling mountains and black forests and one high, ancient castle. Of diamonds that churn up raw from the marrow of the earth to lace the woods, unseen, in necklaces of ice and fire.

  A place without small creatures. A place without easy sight, or breadth. A place so hidden even the sun cannot pierce the heart of it, but spreads her light across the top canopy of trees, bringing green high above and dark silence well below, and streams that flow in crystal blades over the rocks and leaves.

  Jasper and quartz tumble in the streams, dusted with flakes of gold. Garlands of diamonds settle deep into pools, hidden beneath the silt.

  Imagine that from this place is born a people. Special people, the sole beings of these woods. They live and hunt apart from the rest of the world, taming the forest, carving the quartzite mountains, building the lone castle that clings in cold splendor to the bleakest side of the tallest peak.

  They hear the diamonds in the earth. They sing to the clouds. They hold the dominion of thought and transformation; steeped in magic, they live splendid and aloof, and when the jealous Others begin to come, the people of the mountains and woods defend their home with a ferocity that shatters the sky itself.

  But the Others do not cease to come.

  Imagine blood. Imagine war.

  North, south, west and east—from every direction the invaders creep, muddying the streams, numbing the earth, with the castle and its mountain the very center of their ambitions.

  To the last of the people atop the peak, the future is as clear and cold as starlight. They pry up the diamonds and jasper that were pressed into the stones of their fortress. They gather their children and vanish into the smoke, blue and gray and pearl.

  But they did not take every diamond when they fled. And they did not take every last child.

  Now imagine . . . that these are not people at all.

  These are the drákon.

  For a very long while, the forsaken castle remained unbreached. There were no paths leading up the mountainside; all was sharp stone and a sharper still descent. Men and the sons of men studied it for decades, wondering at its grandeur, its absolute contempt for all things below. The scraped glacier valleys hugging the bluffs claimed many broken bodies.

  Yet as with so many things held out of reach, the dream of conquest simmered like a fever through the invaders. Eventually they began to understand how to scale the mountain, how to anchor their ropes, how to hack away the stone. In this way, over years, a track was hewn.

  It devoured lifetimes.

  Men were small and the castle so high; there were always new battles to fight, new crops to harvest, births and deaths and fleeting seasons. The people who lived in the woods now were merely Others; they did not hear the diamonds beneath their feet, and they never traveled the clouds. The flecks of gold threading the lakes and streams were said to be the final thoughts of the vanquished gods.

  The fortress began to seem more and more a mirage than a goal, ever wrapped in mist, the rough quartzite bleeding clear crystal streamers down its walls and ramparts and parapets. Eventually even the creatures who once occupied it became woven into legend, their grace and ferocity fading into tales no more tangible than the moan of the wind.

  The mountains garnered a name: Carpathians. And the castle at the highest peak: Zaharen Yce. The Tears of Ice.

  Time had its way. Occasionally a block from a turret would loosen and fall, striking thunder off the cliffs. The villagers below would pause and look up. Some would joke, The gods awake.

  There came at last the day the Others finished their trail to heaven. But the olden castle held one more surprise for those first few who stepped foot inside.

  Despite their uneasy jests, everyone believed it to be abandoned.

  It was not.

  The Carpathian Mountains slice a crescent moon across Europe and into the imaginary lines of men, jutting up through provinces and dukedoms and even kingdoms without regard for human boundaries. With windstorms and staggering heights, they remove any final weakness from civilization, savaging the frail, the unprepared; exalting only the powerful. Winter and snow and alpine flowers, meadows and opaque woods: from the most remote of these peaks a new noble family slowly began to blossom.

  They were proud and very few, gaunt and beautiful.

  This was the legacy the drákon had left behind with their castle: one son and one daughter, and from them generations of new life to dwell amid the mist and haunt the Others below, until they learned the secrets of their enemies. Until they learned, in fact, to become them . . . to look as they did, to breathe and eat and speak as they did. To plod the earth as the Others did, all the while hiding their true faces, and their true hearts.

  So this is what those first invaders saw upon entering the castle, before dropping down to their knees: a handful of people, pale and stunning, with lips that smiled in welcome, but eyes that burned.

  Centuries passed. The family grew. They began to command the respect of allies and foes alike, gathering towns and serfs at the flanks of the mountains to serve them. Monasteries, blacksmiths, smelts. Commerce, mines, walled cities. As the illusory borders of countries bulged with people, the family spawned warriors, and then aristocracy.

  They lived in a mountaintop castle that gleamed sugar and salt in the sun, that vanished into ice with the snowfall.

  They kept their dark secret very, very close.

  Over time, they prospered. Their source of wealth was not merely the natural abundance of their beloved mountains, but also the absolute fealty of their people. The family had lived in The Tears of Ice for as long as anyone now could recall. They alone controlled the road winding up the mountainside. They alone controlled the mine shafts, and the smelts, and the bishops and merchants and snow-blinded passes leading to and from the many towns.

  And they alone heard the diamonds in the ground, could taste the waiting gold buried in the black, rich earth. The beings once hunted by the Others were now protected by them. They were cherished, admired, feared.

  The family became known as the Zaharen, after their ice-crystal fortress, and tales of them abounded. It was said they were blessed, and that they were cursed. That they were touched by the finger of God—or by the devil. Occasionally even hints of the o
ld legend would resurface, whispers that the Zaharen were not all that they seemed. That in the skies late at night, against the slick black shadow of the castle, sinuous monsters could be seen hunting the moon.

  Only the foolish ever spoke such a thing aloud; no one risked the wrath of the family lightly.

  But the truth was, for all the rumors surrounding them, the Zaharen truly heeded only one whisper: that of the stones.

  The castle became filled with diamonds once more. Every hollow, every pocket from the old stones that had been pried loose from the walls was refilled. To the few Others who were invited up into the stronghold, the unpolished gems appeared stark and oddly gleaming, an uneven mosaic of drab, spectral colors lining the halls.

  But when a member of the family walked by, when they touched their hands to the walls, stroking fingers, the melody of the stones would fill them like nectar. The Tears of Ice was once again steeped in music that only the drákon could discern.

  There was one stone that was not embedded in the walls. It was kept in a vault, in a pit, in a dungeon, left behind from the early days when that first wave of the drákon had fled the land. None of the Zaharen were allowed to touch it, although everyone in the family knew of its strength. It sang even from the bottom of the castle.

  This diamond was called Draumr. Too powerful to be destroyed, too dangerous to look upon—because to look at it would be to ache for it—it was the only known fragment of earth with the potential to eclipse the family itself.

  The Zaharen were, above all, strategists. They understood that the secret of this diamond was the secret of their undoing. It was forbidden even to speak its name.

  Great wealth is certain to inspire great resentment, and the Zaharen were among the wealthiest families of the civilized world. It was fully believed that their treasures rivaled those of Rome herself, and that the pope fell into such envy upon his sole visit to the castle that he would not depart without a handful of cold, pure diamonds pressed upon him by the youngest maiden of the family.

  She was a princess, lovely, brutally protected. Considered the living gem of the mountain, poems were recited in her name, flowers bloomed at her feet. Mortal men braved the winter passes just to glimpse her; when the pope touched her bare hand that morning, bending down to her from his mount, it was said he wept with joy.

  Betrothed at birth, at the age of fifteen she was to wed a noble cousin. But on the eve of her marriage the princess was stolen from the castle. She was carried off to the slopes below, and with her the one thing in the world that could prevent her from escaping her abductor, that would keep her family from following.

  Draumr.

  The Zaharen began to fall into ruin.

  The loss of the princess was a grievous blow; the lack of her recovery a worse one yet. The man who took her had wed her. There were children. There was tainted blood.

  Yet when the Zaharen attempted to steal her back, to crush the mortal man who dared to defy them, they vanished utterly, one by one.

  None of the Others could understand how.

  This man was no one. He was a peasant, a laborer. But he had the princess and he had Draumr, and they were all he needed. Against knights and assassins, against fearsome beasts, the peasant began to pull apart the mightiest family the land had ever known.

  Without the command of their drákon leaders, the armies dissolved into corruption and disarray. The prosperous cities began to empty of people.

  Foreign princes smelled their weakness; new armies encroached. The borders of humankind crept closer and closer to Zaharen Yce. By the time the family realized they could no longer defend their castle or their lives, there were fewer than a dozen of them left.

  And the half-blooded children far below, stunned under the spell of the dreaming diamond.

  It was the princess who at last broke the spell. It was the princess who realized that her life was worth less than that of her kind, of her children, and so one night put a dagger into the peasant's heart and took the diamond that had enslaved her from his body.

  For years, Draumr had sung in her head like a symphony. It had promised paradise, sweet dreams forever, and despite her resolve, she could not demolish it. Instead she crept away—far, far away—and with the diamond in her fist, she flung herself into the wet bowels of the earth.

  The Carpathian Mountains are riddled with mines. Copper, gold, iron; their empty sleeves snake through bedrock and dirt.

  She chose the deepest of the shafts. She made certain no one could ever follow.

  Neither she nor anyone else realized that the true roots of the drákon had been divided centuries past, when the first of her people deserted the castle. She could not know that when she savored her last slow breath, that when she closed her eyes and took that slight, leaning step forward into black nothing, that she was merely a passage in the song of her kind, not the end note.

  Because although the Zaharen had grown tainted and few, the other half of the drákon were green lands and an ocean away: secretly, savagely in bloom.

  And their story was just beginning.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Chasen Manor

  Darkfrith, England

  1737

  The Right Honourable Christoff René Ellery Langford, Earl of Chasen, was bored.

  He had decided to demonstrate this fact by slouching in his chair, his legs outstretched and his blond head turned idly away from everyone else in his father's study. One sun-darkened cheek was propped languidly upon his fist; his green eyes were hooded, masked with brown lashes. He listened to his father talk with the haughty, brooding air common to either the young or the powerful.

  Kit, as it happened, was both. Sixteen years old and well-acknowledged as the heir to the tribe, he endured these meetings as his duty. He did not speak. He did not bother to meet the eyes of the other men present. When he looked up from his boots he chose to contemplate the view from the Tudor windows, the summer lush hills and rich black trees. The beckoning woods.

  He listened to the same debate the council had at every meeting now. He could practically predict, verbatim, who would say what.

  “The safety of the tribe is paramount. We must ensure our survival.”

  Parrish Grady again. The man never let up. Eldest member of the council, blue-eyed, sharp-toothed. Kit was beginning to consider him his own personal nemesis, if for no other reason than these meetings crawled on hours longer than they would without him.

  Outside, just over a distant hill, appeared a flock of girls. About Kit's age, white skirts, frilled aprons, straw hats with ties that dangled in the wind. A few carried armfuls of flowers. He watched them come closer.

  “Naturally, Parrish, our survival is paramount.” Kit's father, the marquess. “No one debates that.”

  “We need a full-blood female!”

  “I'd say we've been doin' our best there,” retorted Rufus Booke, brash and newly wed, “though mayhap you'd prefer to check our beds every night.”

  Kit snorted back a laugh. He felt his father's gaze flick to him, then away.

  “Aye, we need a female,” the Marquess of Langford agreed. “But we do not appear to have one. Yet. There are several young tribeswomen on the verge of the rebirth. We may hope one of them will complete the Turn.”

  “Hope,” repeated Grady, derisive. “Four generations it's been, and no female to make the Turn! What will happen to us—all of us—when it becomes impossible for the menfolk as well?”

  Silence greeted this. It was the great, simmering fear among the tribe, that the Gifts would be taken. That their powers would fade.

  “We cannot force our fate,” said the marquess, harder now. “We all understand that. We are what we are. Our more immediate concern is the perimeter of the forest. There have been signs of recent disturbance, not our own. Strangers are prowling our lands. Christoff reported horse tracks up to Hawkshead Point.”

  “Hawkshead? But that's not even ours! What the devil is the boy doing all the way out there? We have
rules! He left the boundary!”

  Again, the distinctive prickle of his father's gaze. Kit allowed himself the slightest curl of his lips.

  “Let us focus on the matter at hand,” said the marquess smoothly. “Hawkshead is adjacent to our boundaries. If someone has chanced that far . . .”

  The girls had paused in a soft valley between the hills, clutching their hats as the breeze turned brisker. Sunlight showed honeyed locks flying and flaxen, strawberry blond and ginger red. Four girls, smiling and chattering amid the green. Someone loosed her flowers, and the August wind blew them into bright confusion.

  Parrish Grady thumped a fist on the arm of his chair. “The boy's too wild, even for our kind. He needs to be reined in. You know it yourself, my lord.”

  Kit stared a little harder at the girls, his eyes narrowed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Grady, but I take the responsibility of raising my son as my own.”

  “If he is to be Alpha—”

  “There is no if,” hissed the marquess, coming to his feet. “You will do well to understand that right now.”

  Silence fell once more across the study. One of the men cleared his throat, nervous, but said nothing.

  Outside, the flower girls had gone very still. The strawberry blonde turned her face into the breeze—and the other three did the same. Kit recognized them now, Fanny and Suzanne, daughters of the smith, Liza from the mill. And Melanie, their leader. Melanie, of the apple cheeks and soft petal lips. Melanie, with her quick, cunning smile. He stirred in his chair, leaning casually on his elbow to see what they did.

  Sky, grass, woods . . . and a shape in the trees. Another girl.

  “There is the matter of the runners,” volunteered a new voice, George Winston.

  “Aye, the runners,” began the murmurs across the room, and the marquess sat down again.

  The woodsgirl realized that she had been discovered. She stood frozen as well, smaller than the other four, pressed up against the trunk of a tree. Kit could make out one pale hand against the bark, fingers splayed. He could not see her face.