The Smoke Thief

by Shana Abe

  “This wound is infected,” she said, sharp.

  “You can't even see it.”

  “I don't need to. Sit down. Let me take these off.”

  He dragged the shirt over his head and subsided into an armchair, watching her go to one knee before him. With her waist and breasts hidden and her chin tucked down, she almost looked the part she meant to act . . . but for the braid of her hair, sliding over her shoulder. Sunlight shifted autumn through it, a play of reds and rich browns shining along the strands. She leaned back on her heel with the loose bandages in her hands, her breath coming out in a hiss.

  “It is infected,” she said accusingly, her eyes flashing up to his. “Look at that. What did you clean it with?”

  “Water. Soap. You were there.”

  “Well, it wasn't enough.”

  “I beg your pardon. The next time a crocodile chooses to dine upon me, I'll be certain not to forget my pharmacopoeia. And as fetching as I find this little tableau, you needn't fuss. It's not that bad. I'll still be able to dance with you tonight.”

  Her brows drew together. “Dance with me?”

  “At the masquerade, love. We are invited.”

  “You are invited, Lord Langford. I'm just a lowly footman. Even the Comte du Lalonde isn't graced with Marlbroke's regard.”

  “Rue,” he said, laughing, leaning forward in the chair, “it's a masked ball. People sport all manner of asinine disguises. They drink too much and talk too much and pretend they don't recognize one another as they grope their neighbors' wives. You don't have to be a footman.” He captured her braid, letting the ends curl against his cupped palm. “Be a queen. Be a milkmaid. Milkmaids wear the most charming outfits.”

  “I'll keep that in mind.” She flicked her hair free. “But if the comte isn't invited, I doubt very much the runner will be. The last time I saw him he was a tea dealer, and before that, he was a gardener. He won't be a guest, he'll be a worker. That means he'll most likely be at the house today, not tonight.”

  “If he's there at all.”

  “If he's there at all,” she agreed, matter-of-fact.

  He sat back again, considering her. “You know, with Herte in hand we're well ahead of the game. Why not take the day off?” He tried his best smile. “We could have a picnic. Visit Covent Garden. Terrify a few swans, perhaps.”

  “I've a better idea. On your way back from the apothecary, why don't you purchase some decent food? I won't eat porridge again.”

  “Dear me. Is it that bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “I suppose,” he said, “if you are a footman all day today, you won't have much occasion to dine.”

  “Marlbroke provides three meals a day to his servants. I won't starve.”

  Kit tapped his fingers against the armchair. “You've done this before.”

  Her smile caught his breath, almost blinding in its quick, teasing glow. “Naturally.”

  He wasn't going to let her go alone. He wondered if he even needed to say it, saw the lingering mischief of that smile on her lips, and decided that he did.

  “The Earl of Marlbroke knows me. I cannot pass as a footman.”

  “No. You're going to the apothecary, remember? You need a salve for your leg.”

  “Rue—”

  “I won't do anything without you,” she said, her smile vanished. “I'm only looking for the thief. I only want to see if he's there.”

  “While he will see that you are there as well,” he pointed out.

  “Mutual surveillance. There's no harm in that.”

  “Mouse.” He came to his feet, pulling her up to stand before him. “This is the man who decided to steal the tribe's most valuable diamond and then threw it away when he realized he couldn't sell it. Who has a great, great deal to lose by even being in proximity to another drákon. Who obviously risked everything for his life here, and will, in all likelihood, risk everything over again to keep it.”

  “As would I,” she said soberly.

  His fingers tightened over hers. “Damn it, you can't go alone. And I cannot plausibly go with you, at least not by daylight. We'll slip in together tonight, for the ball.”

  “He might not be there tonight!”

  “It's a chance we'll take.” He made an effort to soften his tone. “We have days yet, Rue-flower. It doesn't all have to happen this afternoon.”

  “No.” A crease had appeared between her brows; she pulled her hands free. “I won't let you spoil this. The masquerade is tonight. Lady Marlbroke will have her pearls out of the vault by teatime at the latest. I must be there.”

  “It's not possible.”

  She backed into a ribbon of sunlight. “You swore you would help me!”

  “Not help you place yourself in needless danger! Put it out of your head, Rue. We'll go tonight.”

  “That's not good enough.” She strode to the window. For an instant—with his temper rising and the angry bite on his calf sending terse, steady spasms of pain up his leg—he thought she would Turn to smoke and just leave. The chamber was hardly secure.

  But instead she stood before the glass, her hands at her sides, haloed with relentless bright light.

  “Marlbroke has a daughter,” she said suddenly.

  “And?”

  “Marriageable.” She cocked a glance back at him from over her shoulder. “It's her second season. Her name is Cynthia. She prefers to be called Cyn.”

  “And?” he prompted again, struggling to keep the aggravation from his voice.

  She turned to face him. “It occurs to me that she must enjoy having callers for tea. Certainly wealthy, eligible, gentlemen callers.”

  Cynthia. He couldn't place her. He barely recalled even the earl himself, much less a daughter.

  “I could wait until teatime to go, I suppose.” Rue made another small shrug. “It would give us the chance to get your salve first.”

  He stared at her, all layered in gold like a girl dipped in gilt.

  A girl in men's breeches.

  She was going to do it. He could try to stop her, but at the very best it would earn him her enmity. And at the worst—hell. He was tired of her hostility. He was tired of trying to woo her and manage her at once. She was too intelligent for blandishments and too independent to bow to his will just because he wanted her to.

  He realized, surprised, that what he really wanted was to see that teasing smile once more.

  Kit sighed. “You would need Marlbroke's livery.”

  “This is his livery.” She plucked at a worsted-wool sleeve. “Cost me three pounds off some fellow who lost his position for making eyes at the earl's sniffy daughter. How do you think I know so much about his affairs?”

  “Is she sniffy?” he inquired, very mild.

  “She called me a jumped-up Frog behind my back, the first time we met.” Rue began to peel off the coat, tossing it to the bed. “If the runner were out to steal her pearls, I'd probably help him.”

  Lady Cynthia Meir was the sort of young woman, Kit supposed, who would attract a swath of gentlemen callers. At first glance, her face held the pretty oval serenity of a medieval madonna, with wide-set, greeny-blue eyes and perfectly plucked eyebrows that winged up at the ends, lending her a look of playfulness. It might be easy to assume those eyebrows told the proper story, until one noticed her mouth: also pretty, but for when she smiled. And then Kit was reminded of Melanie. She, too, smiled like a cat with all the cream.

  He was the recipient of that smile rather a lot this afternoon. She'd tucked a stem from the little posy of violets and freesia he'd brought her into her bodice, while all the other bouquets languished on a side table. He felt the damnedest fool, posed amid her green-boy admirers like a schoolmaster surrounded by smirking pupils.

  She could not be more than eighteen. He sipped his tea and kept an eye out for Rue and wondered if he had ever been so young.

  There were footmen passing back and forth along the hall beyond the parlor doors, murmuring voices. He'd felt Rue's pre
sence, her lovely frisson of lightning and clouds, at times closer and then farther as she went about the house. He did not feel any other drákon. Not yet.

  What a ridiculous plan. His sole comfort was the thought that if the runner truly did show, the instant he noticed Kit he'd likely just flee. Rue would be chasing shadows. She'd be safe.

  Time dragged. His calf throbbed. He resisted the impulse to open his watch, following instead the shade cast from the pianoforte by the window, crawling gaunt across the rug. Surely the masquerade would begin soon. He watched Lady Cynthia lift her shoulders from her gown as she leaned forward to spoon more sugar into her cup. She seemed in no hurry to free her crowd of besotted swains, but if Kit could manage to excuse himself, he could find Rue and take her with him, even if it meant escaping up the chimney—

  “What of you, my lord?” Cynthia glanced up at him, still holding the spoon. Kit looked at her uneasily, trying to remember what they'd been discussing. Seed cakes? The weather? This was the very thing he'd always hated most about society, dealing with giggly girls and small talk, when usually all he really wanted could be found high in the wild, open sky—or else in some dark, soft bed.

  Cynthia's smile puckered into a pout. “Oh, you are coming, are you not? Do say you are. It simply won't be the same without you.”

  “I say,” exclaimed one of the beaux, “I'll be there, Lady Cyn. I'll be a pirate! You can count on me!”

  The lady didn't bat a lash. “But Lord Langford . . . ?”

  He thought of Rue, so very beyond him in the halls. He thought of all the things he'd rather be doing tonight, every one of them involving her, than lurking about at a masked ball.

  “Of course,” Kit said smoothly. “I would not dare miss it.”

  Lady Cynthia recovered her smile. “Marvelous! But what will you come as?”

  “It is a surprise.”

  “But how will I know you?” she protested happily, setting the spoon upon its lavish silver tray. “You must give me some clue! I insist!”

  “Why, then . . . I'll be the one watching that you cannot see,” Kit said, and took another sip of tea.

  The theme of the mask, Rue was informed by the head footman, was the Mysterious Orient. It was unclear to her precisely which aspect of the Orient the ballroom was supposed to represent: the walls and alabaster pillars were veiled in mulberry silk with glass-beaded tassels, and the linen dressings on the punch table had scarlet-maned chimeras woven throughout. Long loops of pearls swayed from the chandeliers—all paste, she checked—and the potted plants ranged from sickly palms to enormous elephant's ears. Rose petals were to be scattered around the food platters and the pyramid of champagne glasses, and the pungent scent wafting from the kitchens was definitely curry. And cheesecakes.

  The earl, a most modern man, had moved the house vault from belowstairs to above, so that the heavy safe that held his wife's jewelry was now bolted to the floor of his own quarters, discreetly concealed in the master dressing room. Rue had managed to examine it just once before, late last year. Even smoke would not penetrate its lock; anyone wishing to lift Marlbroke's pearls would have to wait until the steel door was opened. Or until the pearls were on the countess.

  Or her silly daughter.

  Rue did not approach the safe. As day help she had no good reason to be anywhere near the family quarters, but so far she didn't need one. She knew the pearls were still safely stowed. On her way to the wine cellar she passed a red-faced trio of maids, the three of them arguing fiercely over who had last dressed milady's best wig, and where the clutch of orchid-dyed ostrich feathers meant for it might be.

  Trouble abovestairs, it seemed. If the countess was not yet in her wig, then the pearls would still be locked away. Jewelry was always reserved as the final glory.

  Rue worked efficiently, as strong as any of the men, careful not to stand out in their numbers any more than necessary. But once she found herself lingering outside the main parlor, sent to polish the ormolu pier glasses framing its doors. The wedge of Christoff's shoulder was just visible to her, his waistcoat of gunmetal blue, his arm as he lifted his teacup. He was seated with his legs out and his ankles crossed, looking elegantly masculine and uncommonly relaxed. She could hardly make out the bandages she'd rewrapped around his calf beneath the stocking.

  Cynthia's laughter seemed to wash out of the room with irritating regularity.

  Rue exhaled hard through her nose. Lady Cynthia. For heaven's sake, he'd be better off with Mim than that nittering twit.

  She stared down at her hands, the rag she was using crumpled between her fingers. Her nails were short, dirty, with dark rings of tarnish outlining the beds. There was a scratch along her left palm from carrying a chipped bottle of port. She was perspiring beneath the cheap horsehair wig and wool livery, and getting a cramp in her back from all the polishing. She felt hot, and grimy, and as far opposite the cool and haughty daughter of Lord Marlbroke as anyone could be.

  She had told Mim the truth, so long ago: Rue wasn't a lady. She never would be. She could steal as many royal tiaras as she wished, but it was foolish, foolish thinking to envision her life as anything beyond that of a thief.

  The marquess's ankles uncrossed. He set down his tea and leaned forward in his chair, glancing idly around him as if to take in his surroundings. Before she could pull back, his eyes captured hers, clear green attention. She nearly flushed, to be caught spying, but just then the butler strode by. Rue bent her head and applied her rag hastily to the bronze frame of the pier.

  “You there, boy,” said the butler, pausing to look down his nose at her. “Follow me.”

  It seemed the pulley used to raise and lower the ballroom's main chandelier had jammed halfway down. And that was how she came to be perched at the tip-top of a very wobbly ladder with an open flame in her hand, gently lighting each of the one hundred and twelve beeswax candles in their cut-crystal cups, when the runner walked in below her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I tell you, I saw him,” she hissed at the marquess. They were standing facing away from each other outside the stables, Rue rubbing the tarnish from her hands, Christoff apparently pretending to wait for the horse he had not brought. The dusk was stretching into a thin blue translucence around them.

  “I'm not saying you didn't,” he responded, hardly audible. “But I never felt him there.”

  “But he was,” she began, and choked off as a pair of stable boys sauntered past, ignoring her, tugging their forelocks to Christoff. “And I don't think he noticed me,” she whispered, as soon as they were gone. “He never looked up at me.”

  He spoke down to the dirt and straw. “Was he a servant?”

  “Right, then,” came a new voice, very loud, “that's it for you blokes.” The head footman was herding a group of workers toward the stables, shooing them along with a lantern and gloved hands. “You'll get your pay from Hendricks—that's him over at the gate. Come on, come on. Leave them coats with Mrs. Tiverton. We've got toffs coming through in less than an hour, and they don't bleedin' need to see you lot, do they?” The man spotted Rue. “You there! Oy, you! Get along with the rest, eh?”

  Rue nodded and raised her hand to hide her mouth, scratching at her cheek. “He was carrying a viola. He's a musician.”

  She had to walk away before she could catch Christoff's response.

  She vanished into the twilight, a slight figure soon devoured by shadows and the restless flicker of the torches the stable boys were embedding in precise intervals along the drive. Kit looked back at Marlbroke's mansion, at the warm golden windows and colored drapery, the ornate plastered ceiling of the ballroom visible behind glass like distant icing on a wedding cake.

  He gathered himself. He let his mind float, let his senses rise . . . past the stables, past the cool evening air . . . past limestone and mortar and bricks, to the people behind the walls, to footsteps and babbled conversation, to spices and fruit punch and the dry singe of champagne just popping open . . . to blood
rushing, to hearts beating, and something else, something not quite right—

  “Sir? Get you a coach, sir?”

  Kit turned his gaze to the scruffy stable boy now standing before him, shifting nervously from foot to foot.

  “A coach?” offered the boy again, remembering to remove his cap.

  Kit glanced down at the cocked hat in his hands, at his gloves and stick, none of them conveniently forgotten back in Marlbroke's front hall. Beyond the stable boy someone else approached. The footman of before, closing in with a heavy stride.

  “Your pardon, milord,” the man said, sending the boy off with a scowling jerk of his head.

  “No,” said Kit, as if answering a question. “No, I'm fine. Good evening.” And he strolled out the main gates like a man who knew what awaited him in the dark.

  Which he did.

  She was huddled with her arms crossed over her knees on the front stairs of a dark, empty doorway two blocks down. She must have surrendered her coat with the rest of the workers; he felt her first, as he always did, but just after that he saw her, her plain shirt and wig a dull paleness in the unlit night. As soon as he approached, she stood.

  “Did you see him?” Rue demanded, her voice hushed.

  “No.”

  “He's there! I know he is!”

  A coach and four rushed by in a thunder of creaks and jingles and snorting horses. Kit resumed walking, looking straight ahead. She kept pace, three steps behind.

  “If you won't go back with me—”

  “Kindly do not jump to conclusions,” he said abruptly. “I said I didn't see him. But I did feel something. I just don't know what it was.”

  “I do.”

  The night felt heavy about him, the air damp. The pain in his calf was a haze of red biting insects, climbing inexorably up his leg.

  “We must go back,” Rue said, and stopped walking. Kit swung about.

  “We cannot Turn to smoke in there. We certainly cannot appear unclothed, or as dragons. There's only one way back into that place.”