Sleep claimed me for much of the following day.
I woke to the sound of the early afternoon bells, thinking Agatha would likely charge me a handsome sum for the room. I washed, shaved, and dressed in the simple shirt and trousers left out.
Refreshed, I avoided the entertaining areas and searched for Agatha, discovering her seated with a young well-to-doer woman in the sitting room, the both of them enjoying tea from porcelain cups. A boy, no older than Daryn, strummed a tune on the guitar, occasionally missing a note. A fireplace roared, and others, not yet entertaining, lounged about the room like cats sprawled in sunlight.
“Ah, Vance, my dearest.” Agatha beamed and set her cup down in its saucer. I opened my mouth to ask after Shaianna, when Agatha introduced her companion with a flourish of her hand. “Your friend here was telling me how you escaped some unsavory types on the streets last night.”
I blinked at the woman seated opposite Agatha. The girls had pinned some of her dark hair back in elaborate swirls—I couldn’t imagine her doing it herself. Her dress—a subdued combination of gray silk and lace filigree—sloped from her shoulders and flowed over a figure I struggled to tear my gaze from. She looked like the type of woman I’d steal from, but only if I’d missed her smile, for it was a bright and honest curl of her ruby-tinted lips. Gone was her snarl and the sharp set of her glare.
“Vance?” Agatha inquired. She might have asked something, but I hadn’t heard a word.
“Agatha, can I speak with you? Privately.” I smiled tightly at Agatha and turned away from Shaianna’s coy expression.
Agatha gave Shaianna the polite Please excuse my friend look and excused herself. The only private area was by the window, opposite where the boy played guitar. I waited until Agatha had shuffled her many layers of skirts over and then asked, “What are you doing?” The strain was back in my voice, and I didn’t care that she had heard it.
“Vance, don’t get ideas above your stature. You’re in my house,” she hissed.
“Shaianna isn’t one of your whores to dress up and loan out by the hour.”
She straightened, affronted. “You misunderstand me.”
I laughed dryly. “No, I understand you all too well. She’s different, and you think your punters will pay a high price to have her all to themselves.”
“You are wrong, Vance. Although it did cross my mind. She has the most astonishing designs painted on her body. And her bone structure—” Agatha cut off at my scowl. “She asked to borrow one of the girl’s attire. Did you know she’s never worn a gown? I don’t know where you found her or why she’s with you, but I see loneliness and I understand it. You should not be so quick to judge. She wanted to dress like my girls, and I’d say she wanted to dress like my girls for you.”
My gaze flicked to Shaianna. She was watching the room, her smile still playing on her lips. She sat too still to be real, and even dressed like a lady, there was an edge to her that no one else in the room possessed.
She caught me looking and sadness softened her smile.
I gritted my teeth and forced my glare back on Agatha. “She’s not for the likes of you.”
Agatha reached for her necklace and teased the fake gem between her fingers. “My house was good enough for you.”
“And what am I? A thief among whores. I am nothing.”
Agatha bristled at my words. “She doesn’t think so.”
Because she is well stuck with me. “We can’t stay, and I can’t pay you for that dress—or my clothes. I appreciate your hospitality, but the longer we stay, the likelier it is that trouble will find us. And you do not want the kind of trouble that is chasing us.”
I expected her to frown and demand I find a way to pay her what I owed, but she sighed. “Then go, but before you do, have you considered what she wants?”
“All the time.”
“Well, you’re clearly missing the obvious. I once saved a boy, took him off the street, clothed him, put a roof over his head, and gave him somewhere safe to call home. It may not have been perfect, but it changed the boy and put life back into him. Perhaps your friend just wants some company and to live a little, Vance. Have you considered she doesn’t know how?”
“And you’re going to teach her?”
“Me? No.” She laughed. “You. Oh Vance, sometimes you look so hard for things to steal that you miss those things that are freely given.”
Agatha turned to leave, but I caught her arm and whispered, “Listen. Brea isn’t safe. Before you ask, I cannot tell you why. Make sure your women are armed. And be ready. A storm is coming.”
I didn’t want to tell her it might already be here, dressed like a lady and drinking tea from a china cup.
Her smile faltered. “Before your storm strikes, sit with her awhile, Vance.”
Agatha tugged her arm free and joined some of her women across the room.
Sit with her? We should be fleeing the city. I returned to Shaianna and sat in Agatha’s chair. “You’ve healed remarkably well.”
“As I said.” She inclined her head. “Time was all I required. I am much restored.”
Restored … I replayed the image of her crushing the Dragon’s Eye in her hand. The very jewel she’d said she needed to help restore her. Now it was gone. I wasn’t sure what to make of that and set the thought aside for another time, perhaps later when she tired of the dress and returned to her assassin garb.
“You seem to have charmed your way into the old woman’s heart.”
“There is a strength in her. I admire that.”
I waited too long to reply and forgot what I’d been about to say, something about strength and hardship, but I lost my trail of thought in the mesmerizing contradiction of her. “You deny you’re a lady, yet you play one rather well.”
“A dress does not a lady make.” She smoothed her skirts with a faint smile. “I wanted to pretend, just for a while—before it’s gone.”
“Before what is gone, exactly?” I’d given up expecting a straight answer from her, but I hadn’t given up asking for one.
The guitar player picked up a merry tune, and Shaianna’s smile from back in Calwyton, when she had danced through the night, returned. “What it means to be here, with you and them.”
I settled back into the comfort of the chair and watched her as I had at the inn, not long after we met. The aloofness was all but gone, replaced by a rare warmth. This woman would be the death of me.
“What do you see?” I asked softly, inviting her to read the room.
“I see people. Some old, some young, some yet to decide. I see sadness, and hope, and sometimes fear. But mostly, I see faith.”
“Faith?” I looked at Agatha’s men and women and tried to picture how Shaianna saw them, but to me, they all looked like hardened survivors dealt a rough hand of cards. They’d battled with their fingernails to carve themselves a life out of something hardly worth carving.
“Faith in one another,” she added. “Faith in the other people they hold dear. They walk this world alone, but side by side.”
The guitar player picked up his beat, finding his rhythm.
She was right, I supposed. They were alone in their depravation, but they had each other. I’d left that behind when I struck out on my own. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the company.
“Your people,” I said, drawing her wandering attention back to me. “What were they like?”
“Beautiful. Deadly. Swift to strike … Feared.”
“Like your queen?”
“She was my queen, but I was not of her people. You assume I am something I am not.” Her smile sipped sideways as the touch of that sly knowledge she never went without narrowed her eyes.
“Then tell me.” I leaned forward. “Tell me who you are.” She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off. “Not shadow and dust. Something tangible. Something real.” I took her hand, placed it in mine palm up, and brushed my fingers across her palm. So smooth. So perfect. Not even a sign of a s
car like the one that marked my palm. “Tell me who Shaianna is today.”
She leaned forward too and looked down at our hands. “She is afraid, and alone, and lost in a world much changed from the one she remembers. Her life and her loves are gone. She remembers them as though they lived yesterday, but hundreds of years have passed. Nothing remains. And for that, she regrets. The people here know nothing of the gods before they were restless. They do not remember the ways of the past. They have forgotten her.”
Her head stayed bowed, her gaze fixed on my fingers as I trailed them around her palm. I watched her dark lashes flutter against her pale skin and how she measured each breath carefully behind her control. Even now, while she appeared so small, there was danger in her. In her stillness and in her glances. A sharp, deadly mind worked behind that beauty.
“She is anger.” She sighed. “It burns harder and brighter with every passing day. She knows what she must do, but doubt distracts her. It has been so long. She wonders whether some things are best left buried.”
“Not you,” I said and smiled when she lifted her head. “You are too bright a treasure to bury, Shaianna.” I closed my hand around hers. “Come with me …” I pulled her gently from her seat.
We wove through people, leaving the chatter of the sitting room behind, climbed the staircase, and veered down one of the hallways toward what had once been the servants’ wing. A few steps away from the end of the hall, I ran my fingers along the painted paneling. Shaianna watched curiously—her eyes full of questions. The panel beneath my hand clicked and popped inward. Shaianna’s smile came alive at the sight of the secret door. She followed me up the cramped, winding staircase.
The hidden staircase brought us out onto a narrow balcony. A bitter winter air embraced us, misting our breaths despite the winter sun hanging high in the sky. I followed the balcony to the back and onto a flat section used to access the roof for maintenance. Hardened snow provided sturdy footing. Shaianna battled with her skirt, but once she’d joined me, the view spreading out before her, she lost her scowl and her eyes widened with delight.
Brea shimmered and glistened before us. Softened by snow, the city had never looked more beautiful. Stone turrets rose to the east. To the west, sunlight sparkled off the steaming dock waters. The breeze carried the smell of burning coal from a nearby forge and the sounds of traders brave enough to venture into the cold.
“It is so like Arach.” Her eyes went to the spire, and it occurred to me that Brea could have once been part of the great city of Arach, making that spire—the oldest structure here—an ancient remnant of her home.
“I used to come up to this spot,” I told her. “Many times in fact. From here, I mapped a path from the dock to the eastside and everywhere in between. There, you see where the slate roofs sag under the snow? Those are merchants stores—great warehouses used for storing shipments prior to being loaded onto ships. Five ridges to the west, where the small spire rises. That was once a children’s home. It’s now the workhouse.” A shiver trickled down my back. “I often came up here to get away.”
“From what?”
“Wrong choices,” I replied, eyeing the workhouse. Even from this far away, its massive, gray stone bulk hunched over an entire block.
Shaianna wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
“We should go back,” I said. “I just wanted you to see the city from above, while we had time.”
She hugged her arms close. “Not yet.”
“It’s freezing.”
“I don’t want to go back.” She looked again across the city. “The spire—it is at the center of all we see.”
She slipped her hand in mine, closed her warm fingers, and leaned in close. Her shivers slowed, and I felt her body relax against mine. For a few precious moments, we had the world spread before us. Her hair smelled like ginger lily, warm and evocative. I steered my thoughts away before they wandered too far into trouble.
“Thief, I have watched your people, and I do not believe it is customary for a lady to stand so close to a gentleman.”
“Then it is good we are neither.”
A light chuckle shook her shoulders and sent a curious shiver shuddering through me, one that had nothing to do with the cold. This impossible woman was killing me in the slowest possible way.
“Had you not found me in that alley,” I murmured, “I would surely have died. Perhaps not that night, but soon after. Robbed, beaten, left to bleed out in the street. I was playing the odds and deliberately losing. Did you know that when we met?”
“How could I know your thoughts when we were not yet bonded?” she asked, still admiring the city. The breeze had teased a few locks of hair free of the pins. I watched them trail in the air, black against the snow-white Brean rooftops.
“The woman on the moors, Jodelle,” I said. “She told me you would have known my weakness from the moment we met. Did you?”
“That old woman was filled with regrets and bitterness. She lived on the moors with many ghosts. Her words may have meant nothing or everything.”
I brushed my chin against her hair and whispered in her ear, “Did you?”
“No, thief.” But she smiled. I could see the side of her cheek lift. “I saw only a drunken fool. Someone easily persuaded to do my bidding.”
That wasn’t entirely unexpected. When we met, I hadn’t thought much of her either. “And now?”
She shifted, bringing her hands up between us and lifting her face. Her warmth and the feel of her pressed close led my thoughts on a merry chase that headed toward desire. What might it be like to slowly kiss her? Not the rush of a kiss, like the one we had shared in the tomb, but a kiss with meaning?
I started to step back, but she rested her arms over my shoulders, holding me still. “Now I see a man no longer running from a fear he cannot change. Someone who could, one day, stop falling and rise above the rest of his kind. I see a friend, perhaps the only friend I’ve ever known.”
I slowly, deliberately eased my hand around her waist and spread my fingers over the curve of her back. A hint of curiosity sparked in her eyes, and I wished I knew what her riddles meant. “Did you come back to Brea for me?”
“No.”
I steeled my expression but couldn’t guard my heart. I didn’t realize I’d harbored that hope until her denial stole it from me. “Then why?”
“Revenge,” she said.
Her lips touched mine, stealing the shock of the word and replacing it with a surge of hunger. She tasted sweet, of things too good to let go. I forgot her answer and what it meant as I gathered her close. She matched my hunger and drove it higher. The heat in her kiss, in her touch, burned through what doubt I may have had until I could think of nothing else but the feel of her pushed against me, the rush of her kiss, and the tears on her cheeks. She pulled away too soon, and the cold rushed back in.
I thumbed the tears away but could do nothing about the sadness shrouding her. “I wish I knew you.”
A half smile lifted one corner of her lips. “You’re the only one who ever has.”
Chapter Twenty
The hour I was forced to wait for Fallford gnawed at my restlessness. At some point, I started pacing the space in front of his reception room fireplace, debating whether to leave Brea with Shaianna, or leave her behind, or share with Fallford all I knew and somehow reveal the truth about the Inner Circle before it was too late. The clock above Fallford’s fireplace ticked in time with every step I took. Six months ago, the answer would have been easy: board a ship and leave this wretched land and my responsibilities with it. But I couldn’t turn my back on this. I couldn’t live with myself, knowing I could have somehow changed things. If the mages got free, people would die. Normal, everyday folks who weren’t prepared for mages and magic. I would have been one of those people if not for Shaianna.
The rooftop kiss had scored itself into my memory and tangled my thoughts in a web of hope and doubt. Hope that maybe I didn’t have to be alone, and d
oubt that she wasn’t for the likes of me.
I couldn’t go anywhere, or do anything, until I’d exposed the truth of the Inner Circle. To do that, I needed facts and evidence. I needed allies.
I’d left Shaianna with Agatha at the coach house, promising to return before dusk. I had a choice to make: stay or go. Do right by the Brean people who had no idea what waited in the center of their city, or live another day in another city, somewhere far from responsibility. Was this my wrong choice the moorswoman had spoken of?
On Fallford’s return, he greeted me with his usual subdued smile and eager handshake, and then commented on how I looked as though I had aged months in the days since we last met. I laughed and told him it was more like years.
“I have some answers for you, Mister Vance. Come, allow me to show you.” He ushered me into his study, to a table where a parchment had been arranged alongside others just like it. “I made some inquiries and was able to borrow some of these antiquities from private collections. I looked again at the images, using the story you’d told me to search for reoccurring events or phrases. Goodness, what I found …” He pulled on silk gloves and spread the parchments across the table. “As is clear, there was a battle between an invading force and the existing people of these lands, those who lived in the great city of Arach. Just one battle. No war to speak of. It was over in days. The casualties were too great, rendering a war superfluous, but I am getting ahead of myself. Sit, man.”
I didn’t sit, but leaned closer and examined the artwork. “Tell me.”
“They came by sea.” He pointed at one scene on a new piece of parchment. It depicted a string of rowboats landing on a beach and tall ships on the horizon. “Translations suggest from a lowland country, probably Lanskewly, a three-month sea voyage, but that’s by the by. They came seeking treasure and resources and found a city so vast it”—Fallford trailed his gloved finger across the parchment to a faded line of writing—“swallowed the highest hills to the farthest lands.” He looked up at me. “Arach.” Then he continued with a quickness that had my heart racing. “The people welcomed them, with the understanding that nothing would be taken from the city. Riches, knowledge—nothing was to leave Arach. Of course the newcomers eventually stole something, though my colleagues and I cannot decipher what. Either way, the Arachians summoned a formidable force. Magic flooded the city and brought with it the Wrath of the Earth. It is given substantial emphasis in these texts, so we can assume it’s an it and not a generalization. The queen controlled this great power with the Eye of Arach. The Dragon’s Eye, Vance.”
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 18