by Shana Abe
Lia was ready in fifteen.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ages ago, fairy-tale years ago, it was said that the Gifts of the drákon pulsed through the veins of every single member of the tribe, male and female alike. As certain as the phases of the moon, the children of the shire would grow into adults, would Turn into hunters and warriors and splendid beasts. Back then, all were equally blessed.
But over time, the Gifts began to fade. It began with the womenfolk first, those who were more naturally earthbound in any case, caring for the young. Females who could complete the Turn-human, smoke, dragon-became scarcer and scarcer over generations. They grew more used to roaming the woods than the skies. With a lack of wings, they transformed their ferocity and flight into fierce devotion to their children, into a love of jewels and wedlock and long, wistful glances at the moon. Darkfrith was rich with women who only ever dreamed of soaring.
Then the Gifts began to thin through the men as well. The birth of a male child who could not Turn was still rare enough, but the Turn itself was growing darker, more treacherous. That initial, violent moment that usually began around a boy’s fourteenth year-that wild and frightening instant when the self first dissolved into smoke, when something new had to come in its place or nothing else ever would-became, for some reason, harder and harder to complete.
Lives were lost. Young men, promising, bright, vanished into screams and agony. And the women of the tribe would secretly wonder if they were the better blessed, after all.
Yet dragon or human, male or female, every member of the drákon still had an animal side. The taste for the chase, the longing for the sky, the power to hear the stones and metals of the earth singing ballads and chants and arias: none of these things ever faded.
There was a reason no other creatures dwelled in Darkfrith. It was hard enough to keep sane horses for the stables. Even the black-faced sheep ran wild.
So Lia was unsurprised when she walked out of the King’s View-at the august and sophisticated edge of Óbuda; far, far from the hills of home-and every steed downwind of her immediately began to stomp and tremble.
At the bottom of the hotel’s horseshoe steps, a foursome of grays hitched to a polished new carriage bucked against their restraints. Zane, standing by the carriage door, glanced up at once. His eyes found hers.
By and large she’d avoided the typical beasts of burden on her journey here. She’d sailed, in fact, from Edinburgh to Rotterdam, and that had been lovely. The clipper had been small and cramped and very swift. Every day she’d stood at the prow to let the wind tear at her. Her cheeks never burned. Her hair never tangled. But she’d never felt salt in her tears like that, and she’d never felt her skin smart quite so beautifully.
When she had closed her eyes and stood very still, Lia imagined she was flying.
Darkfrith had succored sixteen generations of her kind. Of the past five, only three females had managed the Turn: Rue. Audrey. Joan.
Lia had grown used to the veiled, speculative looks from her people as she’d aged. She’d grown used to the gossip, the subtle heartbeat of excitement and expectation that throbbed through the tribe whenever either of her sisters took to the air.
They were silver and gold and red and green, magnificent. With Rue a white pearl in the sky beside them, they were the best hope for the future of the drákon. Villagers would gather outside to watch whenever they left the ground; Lia could only gather with them, her face upturned, and try to pick out the glitter of her family against the glitter of the stars.
Her birthdays passed: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Whatever other Gifts she possessed, whatever else she took pains to hide from her parents and her people, this was the Gift she craved most: to be complete. To lift from the earth, to dance around the moon.
It had never happened. The heartbeat of expectation around her gradually faded. She was patted gently, and smiled at sadly, and told of her great good fortune to be the earl’s daughter, after all. Amalia would always smile back and agree, while her chest ached and her nails clenched so tightly into her palms that her skin bled.
She supposed if she never had anything else, at least she had the memory of that clipper ship. The taste of tar and brine and freedom on the wind.
The carriages she’d hired once ashore were large and slow, so swollen with passengers that her scent was buried beneath everything-and everyone-else. Lia kept a veil across her hat to hide her features. She kept her hands stuffed beneath her mantle and tried not to move very much. Whenever she exited a coach she angled at once behind it, to get away from the other animals, and for the most part her tactic had worked.
Except for today.
She stopped where she was on the hotel stairs, surrounded by footmen and her trunks, the hem of her mantle whipping sideways with the breeze. The grays were not calming; the one nearest her began to scream, shrill and angry. Lia sighed and took a step back, glancing up the curve of marble steps as if searching for assistance. The head manager was already hurrying down.
The wind swept from the east, from the water. If she moved enough to her left-
A hand took her elbow.
“Oh, no, snapdragon, no turning back now.”
It was Zane, escorting her down the final few stairs. With the horses bucking, she was half pushed inside the carriage, catching herself with both hands as the floor lurched, falling into the seat as the door slammed hard behind her. The abrupt lack of sun dazzled her eyes.
Her mantle had twisted beneath her, a slippery knot of silk and wool caught against the cushions. She twisted to free it as she heard Zane stride to the front of the carriage. The coachman was there too, swearing loudly in what sounded like Latin, but somehow it was easier to hear Zane, his pace swift and nearly inaudible under the great huffing squeals of the grays.
Her mantle came free. Lia settled back as the darkness began to melt into shape and textures and dull mustard squabs. Past the confines of the coach, past the wooden walls and the wind and the racket of the street, Zane began, very softly, to speak.
Because she was alone, because he wouldn’t know, she closed her eyes and fully opened her senses. She allowed, for this brief moment, the relentless drone of her surroundings to sink into her skin:
The rough suck of air into massive lungs. The muffled, grinding chink of horseshoes pushed into gravel.
The creak of the leather harnesses; the straining joints of the walls and floor.
Sweet, my love, be still…
The smell of the river. Of stale tobacco from the window curtains, the curl of pine resin in her nose, of walnut, and iron nails-and then, more faintly, of soap and spice. Of him.
Heartbeats, like thunder. Birds breathing. Water lapping. The breeze slipping through his hair.
The whisper stroke of human fingers down an equine nose, through a mane…
…good hearts, bravest souls…
…and she then lost the shape of his words entirely and followed only his tone, that low, soothing grace of his voice that somehow made everything better, that somehow took away the fear and anger and left in their place peaceful stillness. And nothing, not the water or the tobacco or the gathering thunder, mattered over that.
Amalia pulled back. She opened her eyes and pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead to fight the sudden ache.
She’d once overheard her mother say that Zane could charm the fish from the streams and a tiger out of a tree. Lia believed it. She believed he could charm a dragon, if he wished. It was one of her deepest fears.
The horses were quiet now. They smelled her, they sensed her, but the change felt like a balm in the air. The need to bolt was gone.
The carriage door opened a crack. Animal tamer, master thief: he wrapped a hand around the edge of the wood and held it in place, his sleeve and shoulder outlined with sun. The interior of the coach lit like a flame.
“Do me a favor,” Zane said. “Don’t come out.”
And before she could answer, the door closed to darkness
again.
It did not occur to him until that afternoon to ask her which way to go.
He’d held his peace up on the driver’s perch again, keeping an eye on the horses and the road. Without discussion, the Romanian coachman had crossed the Danube and pulled them out of Pest. It was what they had agreed upon days earlier, to head deeper into the vineyards and woods, to head for the mountains. It was what Rue had suggested in her sparse rice-paper note, after all.
But he had within his grasp a living, breathing compass to what he sought. At least that was what she’d claimed.
For a very long while, Zane only stared at the rump of the horse hitched in front of him.
He did not want to ask her.
The entire business of Lady Amalia Langford made him uneasy. Despite what she’d said, he wouldn’t be surprised if he awoke one night soon to a knife-or worse-at his throat from one of her exuberant family members. Clearly she’d been planning her escape for some while. It seemed unlikely not a single member of the drákon had noticed her behavior.
He studied the rough countryside just beginning to unfurl from the clutches of the city. Everything was cold and raw and damp, burnt colors that blended up into clouds and hazy sky. She did not belong here, just in the way a precious gem did not belong with dirt or stones. It put them both at risk. He’d seen it already in the coachman’s face, in that of the hotel workers, even in her swains at the ball:
She was different. Her body, her face. The way she moved, as if the very ground did not exist beneath her feet. Different.
Intoxicating.
Dangerous.
God. It’d be a bloody miracle if the peasants didn’t end up tossing torches at them as they passed.
The carriage jolted through a rut, and Zane thinned his lips. He was overreacting. Another bad sign. He was used to operating alone, in the dark, letting his spiders spin webs for him while he remained hidden in corners, directing, reaping. He’d let greed tempt him out into the open, greed and curiosity, and now it truly appeared he would suffer the consequences.
But he had come all this way. Damned if he was going to run home now with his tail between his legs just because some brown-eyed sylph had latched on to him and would not let go.
He did not want to think about this. He didn’t want to think about her at all, with her primrose skirts and her trunks stacked over his and her hair glinting summer gold by the cool autumnal sun.
She had duped her people and broken away from Darkfrith, which meant she was crafty. She had journeyed alone all the way to Hungary, which meant that she was audacious, if not reckless.
She’d willfully ignored the rules of her kind-barbarous rules, ironclad rules-which meant she might be desperate.
She had found him at the hotel. She had lured him to the ball.
She had worn a dress that shaped her in ways he’d never dreamed a woman could be shaped; she’d tilted her head and smiled at him and sent a goddamned tremor down into the marrow of his bones.
She was dangerous.
And it would be foolish not to ask her.
He glanced at the coachman-bearded, wrapped in scarves, as fine a gypsy as Zane had ever seen-and then turned around in his seat. He opened the panel inset behind him, showing a metal-laced grille and the black interior of the coach.
“Lia.”
She moved into view, a dim, pale shape, wrapped in dusk.
“We’re headed east of Pest, for-Jászberény-”
His mouth twisted around the foreign word; he heard the Roma’s subtle snort. But Amalia only nodded and sat back. From the depths of the carriage her voice sounded very sweet.
“That’s good, then. Keep on.”
She did not come forward again. He allowed the panel to slide shut, turning once more to stare at the horses.
It was his imagination. He could not smell the winter rose of her from here.
But the animals in front of him shivered and tossed their heads.
Reaching Jászberény devoured most of the day. They breached its outskirts just as the sunlight was beginning to slant into long, heavy rays, throwing shadows sapphire-rich across the buildings and roads.
It was an ugly place, with little of the airy glamour that had marked the cities dotted along the Danube; instead, there were boardinghouses and crooked streets and taverns belching smoke from their chimneys to cloud up the dusk. People actually stopped and stared at the coach as the driver maneuvered their way through the troughs and potholes that pocked the roads. It wasn’t difficult to find the better part of the city: a single wide square of pillared shops and businesses, flanked by a butcher’s quarter and a park with a pond and a few November-dried trees.
Zane chose a hotel in the middle. He couldn’t read the name on the sign, and he didn’t care. He’d seen enough of inns to know that this one would have fleas and gilt and a chance at letting two rooms together. It was enough.
He leapt down and over a mud puddle, glad to stretch the ache from his unused muscles. A pair of doormen were already rushing forward, but Zane reached the carriage door first. He turned the handle and-without even meaning to-held his breath.
Skirts and petticoats rustled from within. She lifted a gloved hand to him and emerged cautiously, hoops first, a dainty foot forward, the hood of her mantle pulled low over her face and her hair. As soon as she was standing, the wind twirled between them; her hood flipped back and the horses let out a whimpering protest. Zane motioned the Roma to the back of the hotel. With a crack of the whip, the coach rolled away.
Lady Amalia stood unmoving on the sidewalk, one hand cupped over her mouth and nose. She threw him a short, distressed look.
“What?” he said, forced to exhale.
Her brows pinched together. “It reeks.”
He angled his face away and tried a deep breath, relieved to smell only town and evening frost. “No more than any other place.” He shrugged at her expression. “You said this would do.”
Her chin lowered. He saw her gaze flit to the alley that led to the butchers’ quarter, where a sign depicting a slaughtered pig swayed helpfully from a post. The alley entrance was narrow and already layered in gloom, a liquid line of runoff and water reflecting a silvery sheen down the middle of the flagstones. A pair of cloaked figures splashed briefly into view, shattering the silver into pools.
Ah. Zane knew what would be prowling in those shadows. He knew now what Amalia sensed, the death and hunger and those faceless, impoverished people. It was a stench that lurked in the blackest crooks of his memory, and always would.
He kept his home in Bloomsbury as clean as a monastery. He kept a maid, and Joseph to cook, and enjoyed the luxuries of delivered coal and ice and imported fruit from sun-warmed lands. He used his wiles to gain himself whatever he wished, be it silk or jewels or paintings, and he was cold and clear enough in his own heart to make no false apologies for any of it. Zane earned what he had, as sure as a baker earned coin for his bread; he had been raised to steal, and if he didn’t do it, someone else surely would. He kept a careful order in his realm of shadows, made certain his people followed a strict set of rules, and culled anyone who either flouted them or challenged him. It was how he had reached his place today, and how he had kept it.
In his world of violence and sawdust and gin-soaked taverns, the scent of blood in the air didn’t even raise his hackles.
But Amalia’s world had been different. However bold she acted, however mad her schemes…she wasn’t truly like him. Not in any way. She had been raised as a gentlewoman, in a manor house, by beasts disguised as men.
He watched her lips turn down as she gazed at the sign. Beneath the folds of her mantle, he watched her shoulders square.
“No, my lady,” Zane heard himself say, and he moved to stand between her and that shining furrow of blood. His arm lifted to guide her the other way, toward the park. “Look over there instead.”
Mist was rising from the sod, ethereal, sweeping coils that rose up to embrace the copper-leaf
ed trees. It was blue and slate against the darkening horizon; the grass had blurred to lavender and emerald and brown. Far in the distance, past the town’s steeples and spires, a jagged hint of mountains sliced purple into the sky. The moon hung white as chalk above them.
Her shoulders relaxed, just a little.
“Over there,” Zane murmured, “are rabbits tucked into hollows, and blackbirds coming awake in the trees. Can you feel them?”
“No,” she answered, soft.
“But they’re there. And I’m quite certain they’d appreciate it if we moved indoors. What say you?”
And she smiled.
It was just as he’d thought: the interior of the hotel presented a surfeit of gilt and mirrors, peach-painted walls, and at least two footmen scratching at their wigs.
Zane sighed. It didn’t bode well for the mattresses.
They took supper in the public room, amid country gentry and a handful of gray-powdered nobles, seated at a holland-draped table in a corner by a wide glass window. The skyline was fully dark now, broken only by street lanterns and a few lonely flames set beneath casements.
Lia kept her teacup in her hands when she could; the glass threw a chill, and even her cashmere shawl didn’t help.
They dined in near silence, listening instead to the chatter of the room, the civil bustling of the waitstaff, the babbled conversations among the patrons in French and Hungarian and a few tongues she did not know. The chandelier above them flickered with the draft; colors danced along the table and dishes, and the steam from her soup became a fog upon the panes.
The thief sat across from her with a platter of creamed fish and parsley between them. She watched him through her lashes. He ate neatly, sparingly, his hands deft, his body relaxed. He’d undone his coat of fine biscuit wool and was gathering the glances of every woman in the room, from the pair of dowagers in amazing high wigs to the little serving maid, no more than thirteen, who fumbled the cheese plate when he smiled at her.