The Dream Thief

by Shana Abe

  “Here we are at last,” he said, and pushed at the narrow door before him.

  It opened without sound, revealing a rectangle of fireglow and stone.

  It was a balcony off the rooftop, wide and open, with two towers behind and a terrace deck that jutted out over the vast drop down the mountain below.

  There was a table in the middle, set with sweets and champagne. There were braziers glowing and liveried footmen waiting against the wall with their hands behind their backs. And beyond all that, there was nothing but stars.

  The night absorbed them from their first step, midnight blue seeded with silver, a river of light scoring the vault above their heads: sparkling and infinite, vanishing against the peaks of the high mountains.

  He heard Lia make a small noise of wonder. She walked forward, all the way to the edge of the terrace, and stood with her face to the wind.

  It was impressive, he had to admit, the contrast of heaven and earth and the starlight polishing everything from the Carpathians to the castle elfin silver. Below them stretched air and the dark descent of the mountainside-and up above was only air. He couldn’t glance straight up for more than a few seconds at a time, in fact; it dizzied him, an uneasy sensation that crawled along his senses, that warned he might tumble free from the terrace and fall backward into the sky, lost in the thicket of stars.

  The prince joined them, handing a glass of champagne to Amalia, then to Zane.

  “Inspiring, is it not?”

  “Yes,” agreed Lia, warm. “It’s extraordinary.”

  “I’m pleased you like my little surprise. The snow has ended, the clouds have blown west. Tonight turned out especially well.” Imre lifted a hand for his wife. She walked forward silently, standing at his side. “Shall we indulge in a game?”

  “What manner of game?” Zane asked instantly, before Lia could speak.

  “One of the imagination.” The prince smiled at Lia. “Imagine this, Lady Lalonde. Look out at my realm and imagine you are not quite what you seem to be. Imagine you are something else entirely, a creature who might spring from this balcony and swoop upward, following the wind as far as you can go. Imagine-you are a dragon.”

  Lia fell very still.

  “This castle, all these lands, were said once to belong to the dragon-people of the mountains, did you know that? No? It’s a well-known tale out here, but perhaps not in England.” Imre tasted his champagne, his hair glossy blue, his expression thoughtful. “Legend holds they built this castle themselves. For generations they defended it, guarding their home and their blood. But despite their magnificence, there became fewer and fewer of them, until there was but one left. He died alone, many years past.”

  Zane switched his glass from his right hand to his left. He flexed his fingers, an instant from the dagger at his waist.

  “Yet it happened that this last pure-blooded dragon was not actually the last dragon. There were others, you see, spread throughout these valleys and slopes, dragon-people of tainted blood, not pure. Would you like to hear how they came about?”

  “Yes,” said Lia, facing him squarely.

  “It is a boring story,” declared Maricara. “I’ve heard it too often. I’m cold. I wish to go in.”

  “By all means,” replied the prince, and bowed to his wife. “We shall join you soon, my dear.”

  The girl curtsied again. As she was rising, Zane thought he saw her dart a last look at Lia, her face a starlit mask, but then she’d turned and walked off. She circled wide around the pair of plumy white dogs; two of the footmen accompanied her inside.

  “They were known as the drákon, these creatures. They ruled this mighty land, and very well too, at least for a while. But they had a secret weakness, one they did not wish anyone to know. It was a mystical blue stone, a diamond. And the diamond’s name was Draumr.”

  Zane set down his glass. He meant to watch the prince, to follow the man’s eyes and his hands, to be ready-but he found instead that he was watching Lia. Her expression was suddenly wiped as empty as the princess’s had been: wooden, polite, her hair drifting free from its coils to toss about her face.

  “Once, you see,” said Imre, “there was a princess…”

  Time slowed down. When Lia’s hair moved, it was a silky, languid motion. When she blinked, it was like she was sleeping, like she was drifting between dreams and awake.

  Zane heard about the princess. He heard about the stone. He heard about the peasant boy who’d shattered the rigid, icebound rules of the drákon and used the dreaming diamond to steal the bride he wanted. About their children, and their deaths, and the diamond lost to the copper mines, and he looked at Lia, awash in starlight, and thought, She knew.

  She knew.

  And all at once everything he had not known, everything he hadn’t been able to puzzle together, made a dark, lucid sense. Why Rue or her husband hadn’t come themselves. Why Lia had risked tribal punishment to steal away. Why she stuck with him like a burr no matter how he’d tried to shake her off; her evasions; her restless dreams. She was steeped in magic herself, a child of dragons who could close her eyes and peer into the future. She had seen what he could not. And he’d bet his life it wasn’t Tuscany.

  A diamond to control the drákon. A diamond, a physical thing, that would allow someone-anyone, even a common thief-to take command of the most god-awful incredible beings on the planet. To have them do whatever he willed.

  It was more dizzying than the stars. It was…perfect.

  In that slow-moving dream on the castle terrace, Amalia turned her face to his. Her eyes were deeper than midnight, her skin silver-blue. She gazed up at him without words, without acknowledging the prince or the story or anything else but him.

  Zane smiled at her.

  “My lady,” exclaimed Imre at once, taking up her hand, “are you well? It’s only a legend, I promise you! I meant it as a pleasant trifle, a little history of my home to enliven the night.” He snapped his fingers at a footman, who hurried forward with more champagne. “Pray do not concern yourself over it.” The prince held out her glass; bubbles fizzed up to the brim. “There are no such things as dragons, after all.”

  She did not remember what she said to excuse herself. She left Zane and the prince standing at the precipice of heaven without her, a footman at her heels as she descended the stairs from the terrace, moving from cold air to cool as the door was shut behind her.

  She’d forgotten about the dogs. They’d rumbled as she went past but she had not slowed, and before they could do more than that, she was inside the castle again.

  It seemed darker here than the night. There were lamps, but their flames were so dim, she could hardly see where she was going. But she had to go-she had to walk. She could not stand beside Zane for another instant and witness that awakening upon his face.

  She was glad now that her dreams had been blind. She was glad she’d never before seen that chilled hunger as he looked at her, that wolfish, glimmering calculation.

  At the foot of the marble staircase Mari awaited her. She stood with a hand atop the banister, gazing up at Lia with her striking clear eyes.

  “Leave us,” she said to the footman, who bowed and backed away.

  Mari crossed to a doorway and allowed Lia to enter first, latching the door behind them.

  It was a music room. There was the harp Lia had heard hours ago, golden and silent in a corner. There was a pianoforte at the other end of the chamber, and chairs and a carved ivory folding screen. The rug was latticed with roses and lavender, the walls were apple-green. Lights glowed from frosted-glass sconces. It was a feminine place, peaceful and pretty, as genteel and contained as the night outside was not.

  “Do you play?” Mari indicated the harp, and crossed to it when Lia shook her head.

  “I do. I’ve learned.” She plucked a few notes, then stroked her fingers over the strings, releasing a waterfall of sound. “I never told him we’d met. He doesn’t like it when I leave the castle. I hope you didn’t m
ention it.”

  “No.”

  “Are you still going to try to find Draumr?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to. I’m meant to.”

  Mari gave her a sideways look, gray ringlets framing her face. “Many have thought the same. They all perished. I can tell you what it’s like. You go down there in the mines, you fly or you walk, and the song beats in your head like a kettledrum until you can’t think any longer. Until you’re mad with it, and you have to leave or else lay down and die. It won’t let you have it.”

  Lia sat upon a chaise longue and dragged a pillow to her lap.

  “And even if you found it, Imre would never let you keep it,” the girl continued. “He’s jealous of us. He’d steal it from you as soon as he found out.”

  “Jealous?” Lia repeated carefully. “Why?”

  Maricara strummed a new waterfall. “He’s powerless. Couldn’t you tell? He’s the last of the pure-blooded drákon-he’s the one from the story he was telling you. But he was born without the Gifts. It’s why he took me from my village, even though I was just a serf. It’s why he’s welcomed you into his home. He can see us, and he can touch us. But he cannot be us.”

  “He said it was a game. He said it was a legend.”

  “Yes,” said Mari flatly. “The game is that he is toying with you. He enjoys it. But he knows what you are. He knew the moment he first saw you, just as he did with me. I’m the only female alive who can transform-at least I was, until you. Are you truly wed to the Other?”

  “Yes. Are you truly wed to the prince?”

  “Yes.” Her fingers found a descant, floating soft and sorrowful through the room. “But he would divorce me, I think, for you. He wouldn’t have to wait for children then.” Another descant. “I wish you weren’t wed.”

  Lia squeezed her pillow. “I wish you weren’t either.”

  Maricara gave up her standing tune and took the stool behind the harp, spreading her skirts. She leaned forward, her white arms stretching, and began a new song with her cheek pressed to the gilded frame.

  “They’ll come down soon,” she said under her music. “When will you go for the diamond?”

  “Tonight. I suppose-tonight.”

  “It’s dark now. It’s cold. Better to wait.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Why?”

  Lia was quiet for a moment, listening to the tiers of the song.

  “I dream the future,” she said finally. “It’s a Gift. And in my dreams, my people are destroyed. My home is abandoned. My husband is my enemy. And it is all because of this wretched diamond.”

  “Then you should kill him,” said Mari, calm. “It’s why you came here, yes? You can’t let him have it.”

  “I know.”

  The girl’s fingers skimmed a heavenly scale. “Shall I do it?”

  “No.”

  “You love him.”

  Lia tried to laugh; it caught in her throat.

  “You do,” said the princess. “It is unfortunate.”

  Lia stood up with the cushion in her clenched hands. “You will not harm him. Do you understand me? You will not touch him.”

  Maricara bowed her head. “We’ll see.”

  “I swear to you, if you-”

  “What’s it like, to be in love?” Mari’s chin lifted; she stared once more directly at Lia, painted and pretty, not a cloud behind her gaze. “The servants speak of it when they think I can’t hear. I only wonder.”

  Lia turned around and tossed the cushion back to the chaise longue. She found that she didn’t have an answer to Mari’s question. She couldn’t say what she’d heard her sisters always say, It’s thrilling, or It’s bliss, or He makes me so happy. She raised her head and swallowed the strangeness in her throat, walking to the fireplace, to the pianoforte, pressing a finger against the honey-buffed wood.

  “It is,” she said at last, “the most terrible feeling in the entire world.”

  And she meant it.

  “Yes,” the girl agreed, examining her face. “I think it must be.”

  “If anyone is to kill him, it will be me.”

  “As you wish.”

  The song concluded. Maricara’s hands lifted from the strings for only a brief moment before she closed her eyes and began the same piece again.

  “Perhaps none of it will come to pass. They’re only dreams.”

  “Not mine. They come true. They always come true. And no matter how I dream it-he’s always the one who ends up with Draumr. He’s always the last one to hold it in his hand.”

  “If you kill him,” said the child, practical, “he won’t hold it at all.”

  “Then it would just be someone else, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mayhap. It’s been lost all these centuries. It could stay lost.”

  “No.” Lia went back to the fire. “It won’t stay lost, because I’m going to get it. And then I’m going to destroy it.”

  “You think you can change the future?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I have to. I have to try.”

  “Countless lives have been sacrificed seeking that stone. My uncles and grandfathers. My older brother.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Lia held her hands to the flames and spread her fingers, watching the heat pink her skin. “But it doesn’t alter anything. My people know it exists now. Zane knows it exists. They’ll never stop searching for it. But I’m the one meant to find it. Draumr wants me to find it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It told me. It’s always been telling me.”

  Zane was not a man susceptible to flights of florid imagination. He was cunning; he recognized that about himself. He was intelligent. He was intuitive. He had the gift of invisibility when necessary and a quicksilver tongue that had gotten him out of more disasters than one. He was not soft, not romantic, and not gullible. One of his very first memories was of being taught by a black-haired prostitute with pocked skin and no teeth-her name had been Dee-how to rub dirt in his eyes hard enough to make himself cry. He had been five, the cloying hook in a wiry gang of street children; as soon as he’d managed the trick, he helped lift his first purse from a drunk skinner. At the age of seven he was doing it alone. At ten he was the leader of his own ragged gang; they’d squatted in a tottery ruined warehouse by the docks, sharing quarterns of gin and roasting rats for supper when the days had gone lean. Most of the windows had been broken out by stones or birds. He’d spent those first years of his life smelling the Thames, day and night, silt and manure and rotting fish.

  He’d never dreamed. He’d worked. He hated the warehouse, so he schemed for a better place. He hated the taste of rat, so he’d found Clem, who fed him meat pies and puddings in exchange for copper coins and snuffboxes. He hated the effects of the gin-the loss of dominion over his own body-and so stopped drinking it.

  Prince Imre’s diamond tale was so tragic and far-fetched it was better suited for a nursery than a starry night among French champagne and adult company. The street urchin inside him wanted to laugh at the mere notion of it. But Zane was more than that child. He was grown, and he’d seen and touched wonders that would have sent an ordinary man into spasms of denial.

  He never dreamed; he did not dare. But he watched Lia Langford walking away from him across the terrace of the cold, glinting castle, heard the click of her pumps against the hard stone, her skirts trailing wide, her head bowed, the nape of her neck revealed, and he was gripped by a desire so strong he nearly couldn’t breathe.

  If he had that stone…if he held the diamond…then there would be no stopping his dreams. Not any of them.

  And the boy who had chewed upon rats to survive thought:

  She could be mine.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She waited for him in their sitting room. She waited a very long while. The longcase clock down the hall struck half past two, and still he did not come.

  There was no one now
behind the walls. She made certain of that; she opened her ears and her nose and took in the silence behind the wallpaper flowers. There were no Others keeping watch. The prince was somewhere else, far else. She felt only dimly his presence within the castle. Far stronger was Mari, secluded in another wing, alone and unmoving. And Zane…

  She cast out her awareness and encountered nothing of him. He would not have left, not without her. But she was used to his presence now, to the warm energy of him, his quiet strength. Perhaps it was the chorus of diamonds surrounding her-among all the Others, she couldn’t find him.

  And he did not come.

  She was too restless even to sit down. Lia paced the connected chambers, passing the canopied bed and the rosewood nightstands and the washbasins painted with vines and blue larkspur. She crossed to the windows and looked out at the harsh lucent night and realized Maricara was right. She should wait.

  As smoke she couldn’t carry anything with her into or out of the mines; she would be truly alone. Assuming she could even find the right entrance to the right tunnel, she’d have no light, no clothing, no guide but Draumr’s beckoning. She’d likely freeze before finding it. Everything she’d accomplished so far would have been for naught. The diamond would still exist. The threat to her people would still exist. Only she would be gone.

  She lifted a hand to the pane in front of her, pressing her palm to the glass. It was bitterly cold, drawing the heat from her body into a mist around her open fingers. She held it there as long as she could stand, thinking, This is what it’s going to be like inside the earth.

  When she turned around again, Zane was standing beside the bed, watching her with a half-lidded gaze.

  This is what love was to Amalia Langford:

  It was to carry a secret in your soul for all your days and nights, a secret so heavy and terrible it changed you, made you smaller and more frightened than anyone you knew, a secret so harrowing you couldn’t share it with anyone, not your family, not your private journal or closest friends.

  It was to know that the man who had captured your heart would also capture your future, relentless, absolute. To always wonder if he was truly friend or foe. To realize that if you spoke your secret aloud to anyone of power-to your father, to your mother, or the council leaders of your kind-the best and worst you could hope for was that they might actually believe you.