by Shana Abe
Zane turned back to the view. “Is the diamond with the prince?”
“No.” She waited, but he didn’t ask anything else, so she added, reckless, “Don’t you want to know where it is?”
It was a long while before he answered. “As long as I have you, I don’t need to, do I?” He tapped a finger against a saffron tassel, and watched it as if it held the most valuable secrets on earth.
No one greeted them at the portcullis, nor at the ancient iron main doors. No one came forward to tend to the horses, but the coachman seemed perfectly at ease with the absence of any help. He guided the carriage along the graveled lane that wound inside the castle walls, slowing to a halt beside a courtyard of frosted grass and alabaster fountains dribbled with ice.
Zane stepped out quickly, the carriage tilting with his weight, and waited almost a full minute before reaching inside for her hand. She joined him on the gravel, squinting. The castle, the walls, the fountains and snow: all brilliant, blazing white. She couldn’t help it; Lia pressed a hand over her eyes, just a moment, to save her vision.
The horses began to snort. Zane pulled her closer by the waist, so close he crushed her skirts, and drew her away from the wheels. The coachman gave them another cheery grin before gibbering something; he touched a hand to his head and snapped the reins. The carriage jolted away, following the lane around the inner turn of the wall.
They stood alone before the great castle, listening to the wind howl. And Lia, turning her head, listened to more than that: she listened to the stone walls and the dirt and to Draumr, a songbird trapped beneath her feet.
“Welcome home, little dragon,” Zane murmured.
Before she could respond, the iron doors began to grind open, magnificently slow, and between them something bolted from the dark to the light-a pair of dogs, huge ghostly shadows, swift and silent, leaping straight at her.
She had no time to move. She had no time even to flinch. She saw teeth and tongues and very black eyes-and then Zane had shoved in front of her, raising up both arms.
He caught both of them. She couldn’t see how he’d done it, only that he had and that the dogs were pinned against him, struggling. He dropped to a knee. His hands were fisted into their necks, buried in white fur. The dogs squirmed and whimpered in his grip, their heads twisting. One of them managed to lick his cheek.
She almost squeaked a breath, and it felt like fire. She caught herself in time, her lips pressed tight, her hands over her heart, and looked wildly at the stranger standing in the gloom beside the doors of the keep.
“My guardians,” he called in French, and clapped his hands. “Forgive them. They’re brutes.”
Zane opened his arms and the dogs bounded away across the courtyard, returning to the other man.
He was drákon. She realized it past her pounding heart; a part of her must have been preparing for this from the moment she’d heard the legend of her kind. She felt him before he even stepped fully into the light, a peculiar, subtle current that pushed like a bubble around him, that encompassed the doors and dogs, and the shadows engulfing them. And then he breached the shade from the portal, and the sunlight illumed him in blazing color.
He wore a robe of gold foil and dark teal velvet that spread behind him like open wings, revealing beneath a ruffled shirt and black breeches. His hair was extremely dark-under the sun it lit to nearly indigo, long enough to brush his cheekbones and shoulders. His features were aquiline, his eyes a deep sapphire blue. He was close to Zane’s age, Lia guessed, or a little younger, smiling now as he came toward them, his arms lifted, his fingers bejeweled.
He was very, very comely.
And he was not alone. He was flanked by Others, arranged in a human V behind him like geese following their Alpha. And this man, this prince-was definitely Alpha.
“Welcome!” His voice was rich. “Welcome, friends! Excuse my presumption in bringing you here. You were spotted down the mountain, walking alone along the road. I assumed the worst, of course-few venture this high, and no one without transport. Was I mistaken? Have I intruded?”
After releasing the dogs, Zane had not moved except to stand and brush at his coat, remaining half in front of her. But at the end of the other man’s speech he shaped a bow, his back straight, his extended arm and leg flexed and graceful. The rope of his braid slid long over one shoulder.
“We are in your debt,” the thief said. “You have spared us some trouble, kind sir. My wife and I”-he glanced back at Lia; she sank into a swift curtsy-“encountered a small misfortune. A minor inconvenience. I beg your pardon for our ill-timed arrival.”
“Nonsense.” The prince walked up with his entourage intact. “Was it your Roma who absconded with a fully fitted coach?” Zane drew breath and the man smiled again, rakish. “We have your horses in our stables, and the bandit in a root cellar. We are a simple people, perhaps, but not fools. No one believed for an instant the fellow was an Englishman on Tour.”
One of the dogs ventured a stiff step past his master’s robe, staring at Lia. Zane very casually took her hand.
The drákon prince noticed. For the first time, he lifted his gaze directly to hers. “Please.” His curved fingers touched his forehead, an elegant echo of the coachman’s tribute. “Gentle one. Come inside my home.”
The castle was a mirage. It had to be. She was overwhelmed from her first step beyond the doors, slammed with voices, with music, Zane and the prince murmuring sentences, the dogs ahead and the people behind them rustling with taffeta and fustian, their footsteps echoing, the very walls of this place soaring in song.
It was a fortress without but a manor house within. There was nothing rustic here, nothing archaic. The entire place was as modern and refined as the most lavish Mayfair mansion, with Chinese silk and plastered walls and frescoed ceilings, and chandeliers hanging in ice-crystal palaces over their heads. The floors were piled with Turkish rugs; fires warmed every chamber they passed; clocks ticked; dust settled over harpsichords and chinoiserie vases and marble bowls filled with walnuts and figs. The halls were painted sky-blue, or summer pink, or warm, clean ivory…but some of the corridors they traversed had no plaster. Some of the corridors had only the castle’s bare base. Between the quartzite blocks shone cool, colorless lumps, unpolished and uncut, smaller stones set within the mortar.
They were diamonds, every one. Lia traced her fingertips along their bumpy surfaces. If Zane hadn’t kept such a firm grip on her elbow, she might have floated from the floor.
God, this place. She could get lost here. She could remain lost and be happy about it, as long as she could touch these walls and hear these stones.
“My lady,” said Zane, and she realized he and the prince had paused in their conversation; everyone drew into a knot around them. The thief slanted her a penetrating look. “What would you prefer?”
She lowered her hand. She tried to drag her thoughts back to what they’d been discussing.
“Tea, I think,” announced the prince, decisive. “The English love tea, I do know that. Tea at once, and then you may rest. Tonight you will tell me all your tales.”
Lia curtsied once more. Zane smiled and inclined his head, but she saw how his eyes rested cold and pale upon her.
They took tea alone in the suite of rooms the prince had provided them, seated silently together before the fire in a pair of silver-striped wing chairs. Their trunks were carried in by the human footmen; the tea was served by human maids. There were diamonds trapped behind these walls as well, hidden, and Lia sat with her gaze on her clasped hands, letting their notes wash over her, smelling hot sugar and baked cloves and curling her toes in her shoes.
Zane handed her a cup. From somewhere inside the castle, a harp was being played. Its melody blended with the stones-with her yellow sapphire-swelling and falling, mournful and delicate.
And behind the wall to her left, sly as mice, were the prince and four Others. She’d needed no special Gifts to know they were there. It was a child’s gam
e to pick out their scents, their heartbeats past the wainscoting and quartzite, and she couldn’t imagine why a drákon man wouldn’t realize that. Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was a test of some sort, to see what they would do.
Lia accepted her cup. She locked eyes with Zane and lifted her chin to the wall; he answered her with a bare nod. He was the one who had found the listening holes drilled through the flowers of the wallpaper in the first quick, stolen moment they’d been left alone.
“Out from the frying pan,” he said in English, and tried his tea.
It was excellent, she knew. Everything was excellent, the tea, the vanilla crepes and syrupy little cakes flecked with shaved almonds. She ate as if she hadn’t taken food in weeks, not days. When the platter was empty, the servants arrived with another, this one heaped with fried pastries and sour cream, and apples dusted with flakes of real gold.
She drank her tea and listened to the harp and the diamonds and the small shifting noises of the dragon-prince. She turned her head and gazed out at the sky beyond their windows, hazing slowly into a turquoise sunset.
Zane had already searched his trunk for his weapons and found them all intact.
She’d never dreamed of any of this. She did not know what would come next.
The great room was enormous. At last the ancient roots of the castle became apparent, because the chamber was long and narrow with arrow-slit openings high above, letting the dusk slant through in thin blue pieces, braziers and candelabras illuminating the medieval shields with painted crests fixed upon the walls.
Dragons writhed on the shields. Crescent moons. Six-pointed stars.
The main table was fashionably new, mahogany. The service was china with gilt, and miniature peacocks and columbines painted over and over in exact sameness. The table was set for four, although besides the prince and themselves, there were only serfs in the room.
The prince’s name was Imre, his family the Zaharen. He’d laughed as he introduced himself, by all appearances abashed that he had not thought to do so before.
He shook Zane’s hand-in the course of the introductions, Zane had elevated them from lord and lady to earl and countess-and bowed over Lia’s. He gave no indication he’d spent half the afternoon spying on them.
Behind a lacquered screen in their bedchamber, Lia had changed into her lemon-yellow gown. She wanted to be visible, brash, a distraction enough to allow Zane in his plain gray coat to melt into the night if need be.
The fireplace at the end of the hall was large enough to roast oxen. Prince Imre’s chair backed against it, so when he sat, the high, carved wood kept a corona of flames. His pair of white dogs sprawled nearby. They were panting from the heat, their eyes following Lia with jetty interest.
“We don’t receive many visitors, especially this time of year,” Imre said. His gaze flicked to the manservant nearby, who stepped forward with a decanter of wine. “But of course, you are the Englishman on the Grand Tour, and a very intriguing one, if I may say so. I find your face far more credible than the gypsy’s! That reminds me”-he watched the servant tip the wine into his goblet, the decanter mouth held high, a narrow golden-green stream splashing neatly against the crystal-“what shall we do about your thief? Shall we hang him?”
In spite of herself, Lia started. Imre fixed her with a laughing look. “I’m joking, of course. We are not so uncivilized, my lady, even here. But in these mountains, in the passes and steppes, our laws are sacrosanct. He’s a Roma and so born a savage. If I let him loose, he’ll only steal again.”
“Some thieves may be redeemed,” she said, as the servant drifted toward her glass.
“Do you think so? You have a tender heart, well paired with your beauty. I fear you’re much too kind. But I shall leave him to your mercies. He’s your thief; I will do with him whatever you say.”
She did not for an instant glance at Zane. “Let him go.”
“Alone? In the winter woods?”
“Give him a nag. Give him blankets. My lord will compensate you.”
Imre tapped a riff against the table, his mouth quirked. “Anything else?”
She thought quickly. “Matches. Candles, and a cloak. Enough food for a week.”
A rimmed bowl was placed before her. She did not look down to see what it was; it smelled like cold strawberries. She held Prince Imre’s blue gaze and would not blink, not even when the fire behind him began to hurt.
“A noble heart as well,” he said eventually, very soft. “It’s fortunate for me you’re not my wife, Countess. Zaharen Yce would be overrun with the dregs of mankind within a month.”
“Indeed.” Zane sounded bored. “You should see our little estate in the country, Your Grace. She’s already commissioned a parish school and a workhouse, for all we’ve been wed just under a year.”
Lia picked up her spoon. The bowl held a soup, although it still smelled like fruit.
“A noble heart,” repeated the prince, nodding. “Most becoming in a lady.” His voice raised slightly. “Don’t you agree, my love?”
From the doorway at the far other end of the hall, a new figure approached. It was a woman, garbed in gold and emerald, similar to the colors of the robe the prince had worn this afternoon. But this was a gown, a robe à la française, shifting and flowing, elaborate and modish in a way that Lia’s simple lemon frock could never be.
Candlelight glimmered over her face. She wore a topaz choker about her neck and a matching butterfly in her powdered hair.
It was Mari.
The dogs began a deep-throated whine.
Imre stood; Zane followed suit. Lia remained in her chair, staring, as the girl-not a woman-glided forward and lifted her hand to the prince. Both dogs climbed heavily to their feet.
“May I introduce our guests? Lord Lalonde, Lady Lalonde, I present my wife, the Princess Maricara.”
The girl acknowledged them each with a curtsy. Her face was powdered too, her cheeks rouged. She lifted kohled eyes to Lia and spoke in a solemn voice.
“I’m late. I apologize.”
“Not at all,” said the prince, as one of the footman pulled back her chair. He flashed a beaming smile around the table. “We’ve only just begun.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was the most delicious and unpleasant meal he’d ever endured. Zane had dined with all manner of evil before, thieves and murderers, rapists and cutthroats, and he’d felt more comfortable in their company than he did seated in this luxurious prison of a chamber, reminded with every glance that he was the sole person at the table who didn’t have another life involving scales and smoke and wings. That-hell, that he was the sole person at the table.
This princess could only be the dragon-girl Lia had told him about. Zane was practiced at hiding his true face, but Amalia was not. Days and nights he had spent with her, waking and sleeping; he was attuned to her now, to her every breath and movement, the tilt of her head, the fall of her hair. When Imre’s wife was still four chairs away the light had crossed her face and Lia had shivered-slight, swift, a fractional disturbance in the air that passed from her to him, and he knew what it meant.
The girl was a dragon. He would have figured it even without Lia’s reaction. The complexion, her face, her bottomless eyes. She did appear older than the child Lia had described, but Zane had spent too many years learning Darkfrith not to recognize the drákon in their human disguise. It was how he knew that, despite the dogs, Prince Imre of the Zaharen was one of them as well.
He’d not yet had a chance to discuss any of it with Lia. He regretted that, but they’d not been significantly alone since the woods. A man who spied on strangers behind walls was a man wallowing in something far beyond ordinary suspicion. Zane had no desire to provoke him into defense.
He had most of his weapons back. He had his training, and his nerves. But now he had something more precious to consider than just his life.
From the corner of his eye she was amber and yellow with winsome flushed cheeks. She’d threaded
ribbons through her hair that shone with the firelight. She sat a little forward in her chair for the meal, alert, mostly silent. Her plates were being taken away still nearly full; she’d hardly eaten. But she was listening, he saw that. She was following his story. Good.
He’d stuck with their fiction about the Tour, since the prince seemed inclined to accept it. He’d woven in riches for good measure and a family seat in York. He droned on about tenants and wheat and the varying qualities of English wool, and all the while the prince nodded and ate and asked vague questions, and no one said a bloody word about Draumr, or the drákon.
Lia had told him already that Imre didn’t have the diamond. No sense in stirring the waters. The sooner they could skip this place, the better. Thank God the Roma had been clumsy enough to get snared.
At the end of the meal Imre caught his wife’s eye; she looked back at him tranquilly. Like Lia, the princess had not spoken except when directly addressed.
“I trust I won’t offend you,” announced Imre, turning to Zane, “if I suggest we forgo the English custom of separating the ladies from the gentlemen for port. Maricara and I, we seldom follow the strictest rules of society.” He shrugged a little. “Perhaps because there is seldom anyone here to mind. My lord, my lady, will you join us for dessert abovestairs? I’ve something I’d like to show you both.”
Abovestairs was not another parlor, or an armory or solar. With the dogs trotting ahead, Prince Imre took them up a new labyrinth of halls, up stairways that were at first marble, and then limestone, and then wood. They climbed and climbed, Lia at his side with her hand resting lightly atop his, the prince and his wife leading, and just when Zane was reassessing the moment, was considering the location of his dagger and the speed with which he could reach it, the prince stopped at a landing.