by Shana Abe
“It was that rooster, wasn’t it?” he said, after a moment. “I recollect that. You called him a pet. Nasty thing. Kept attacking me, even if I was just strolling in the remote vicinity of your cottage. I vow it hid in trees just to ambush me. I never harmed a feather on his malicious little body, but by God, he hated me.”
“Yes.” She rocked a little, started to laugh, but it choked in her throat. “All right. You win. We’re meant to live happily ever after.”
He eased down another step. “Is your favorite color blue?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“Ah—wait. I do know. You don’t have a single favorite color.” She felt something inside her fall into silence. Waiting and still and arrested.
“It’s three colors,” Rhys said. “Gold, silver, and pink.”
Zoe lifted her head, scooted around in place to stare at him. “You found my diary.”
He lifted his terrible hands. “No, love. But I’ve seen you, the other side of you. Your dragon self. Those were your colors.”
“What are you talking about?”
“From before, when I was a ghost, and you were my light. I saw you once as a dragon in the palace. You were asleep.” He looked down, curled his fingers closer to his palms. “Gold and pink and silver. We’d look very well together, I think. As dragons. In that ghost world.”
The children next door had been set free into their yard. The dog on the other side was gone, but high-pitched laughter and shouts began to punctuate the clear morning air.
“I do not know the ages of your nieces,” the monster confessed in a low voice. “I don’t even know their names. I left the minute details of our tribe to my father and my brother. It seemed to matter more to them. I was a flippant fellow, Zee. You know that. I was more concerned with the cut of my coat than the ways of the shire. Mostly.”
She surprised herself with his defense. “I don’t think that’s true.
“No? You’re too kind. But it is true that I went adrift for some while. I let the shallows move me, when I should have not.”
A little girl next door let out a furious screech, then a babble of words. Another girl shrieked back at her.
“We’re all meant to learn our lessons,” Zoe said at last, under the screaming. “If you drifted, at least now you have the chance to head home.”
“Yes.” Metal ribbons at the corner of her eye; the soft, slight pressure of his hand upon her shoulder. “I’d like that. I’d like to go home.” His talons skimmed her dress. “Will you come with me, my heart, my compass and anchor, Zoe Langford?”
She did not answer. In time, as the sun climbed and climbed, as the shadows shortened and the children tired and returned back inside their home, he rose. And then he left.
The prince departed that evening. He truly meant to fly, something that would have been unthinkable back in England, but he would carry a satchel and the female Zaharen, and claimed they’d reach the borders of his realm within days.
The backyard was too narrow for a grown dragon to take flight, and the front was far too open and visible to all the other homes. So the four of them climbed up into the garret—even Rhys, though he arrived minutes after the rest of them—and waited for the last of the twilight to thicken into true night.
No one spoke. Enough had been said already; she’d refused over and over to leave Paris, and the prince had finally given up asking. Rhys had made it clear he wasn’t leaving if she wasn’t. And that was that.
The cook maintained that petrified stillness she had perfected whenever Zoe was near, the prince’s hand on her arm. Rhys lounged against a box shoved against the canted attic wall. The slant of the ceiling nearly matched the curve of his back.
Zoe amused herself briefly imagining the councilmen’s faces should they hear of this: an unshielded dragon atop an unshielded roof, soaring off across an open city sky.
“I think now,” said Sandu, breaking their silence. They’d opened the skylight to monitor the heavens; he was barely visible, a face and vanished hair, a sheet wrapped around his shoulders for propriety. He wore, of course, no clothing beneath it.
They climbed out to the roof, first the prince, then the cook, then Zoe and Rhys. The great blue bowl of heaven was cloudless. Stars fought the yellowed haze of the streetlamps below them in fierce prickled dots.
The prince made his way to the most level section of the roof. He glanced around him, took in the hills and mighty spires and steeples of the horizon that was Paris unfolded.
“Come to me whenever you wish,” he said to Zoe and Rhys. “If you need me, come to Zaharen Yce.”
“Yes,” said Rhys. “Thank you.”
The boy inclined his head. He lifted a hand to the cook, said something in Romanian, and released the sheet.
Before it even finished rumpling to his feet, he Turned to dragon. In the space of a heartbeat his human shape was gone, smoky twists that expanded, re-formed into a being of silent, glistering magnificence.
He was ebony with bands of sapphire and deep purple shaded along his sides, silver-dipped talons and wingtips. Zoe’s people were more colorful, living rainbows in the sky, but the prince of the Zaharen had a sober, serpentine beauty she’d seldom seen.
The dragon turned his great head and gazed at the cook. They could not speak in this shape; they had no vocal cords to command. But the woman moved forward without hesitation, picking her way across the shingles, carrying the satchel. She climbed onto his back as if she’d done it a hundred times before, settled the bag against her stomach, and dug her fingers into his mane.
“Farewell,” murmured Rhys, and the prince nodded in return, tensed his powerful haunches, and leapt from the roof.
A sharp wooden clatter from below: shingles tumbling free, striking the cobblestones.
Neither Zoe nor Rhys looked down. They watched Sandu instead, his beating wings, his sharp ascent, the skirts of the cook flapping hard around him like laundry stolen by the wind. They watched until he was nothing more than a speck against the indigo heavens, a black star in the east that gradually shrank to nothing.
By mutual, unspoken agreement, Rhys slept in the princes old room. If it could be called sleeping, which he didn’t think it could, as it really didn’t involve anything like rest, or dreams, or blissful relaxation. It was far more a matter of him attempting to get flat upon the surface of the bed, small fluffy feathers kicked up every time he moved, tickling his nose and sticking to his lips, because no matter how he tried, he could not stop his talons from piercing the mattress.
He had pulled a quilt across his chest. He felt too cold and then too hot, too restless, but knew better than to attempt to rise and pace or read or brood alone in the dark. It had been far too much work just to get here, right here, in the center of the bed.
So he remained as he was. He kept his claws embedded in the ticking because it was easier than not, and he was tired of accidentally cutting his skin.
Zoe was in her room. He felt her. He couldn’t tell if she slept either, but at least she was in the maison tonight. He’d half feared she’d want to start her hunt at once, that she’d wait for nothing, especially not him.
But after the prince had left, they’d shared a small meal and each retired, no more than five words spoken between them.
He was relieved. If she’d wanted to leave tonight, he would have had to find a way to stop her or else stay by her side. And he honestly didn’t think he was capable of either at the moment.
The prince’s room contained a looking glass. Nothing so ominous as the one back in Zoe’s palace, just a small square mirror mounted in pewter, set at an angle upon the chest of drawers. He glimpsed no other faces in it but his own. His own was surely alarming enough.
He hadn’t realized it was there at first. He’d walked by it, caught the motion of his reflection from the corner of his eye, and instinctively turned.
He didn’t know the creature there staring back at him. It looked like him, but some exaggerated, gruesome version of himself.
He’d brought his hands to his face, touched his palms lightly to his cheeks. Stubble—that was familiar. And the shape of his jaw, that too. Same eyebrows as always, black and straight. Same nose and eyes. A series of shallow nicks across his lips from before he’d mastered breakfast.
His hair, that dark vanity of his youth, now a mix of limp human strands and gold metal dragon.
His earlobe was torn. He’d worn an earring before, an emerald on a hoop; he supposed the sanf had stolen that as well. And he was emaciated. Their kind was lean in general but if he brought the lamp in his hand close enough, he could see the outline of his skull. He must have been without food or drink for months, without breath, all that while.
Worst of all was the scar that began above his hairline and ripped all the way down the right side of his face, halfway down his neck. He was lucky not to have lost an eye—or his head.
The fight in the woods. The sanf coming after him with swords and knives and bullets, and a hood. The spell of the diamond sinking over him even as he fought them, telling him not to Turn—but he was—look at his hands, he was—and someone clouted him in the face with a sword—
He’d backed away from the mirror. He had not looked into it again.
Rhys centered himself better in the bed, closed his eyes. He thought of Darkfrith. Of the woods and the lake, and the falcons and gannets that would sometimes venture to hunt fish in the River Fier. Crickets, serenading him from the bracken. Waterfalls. Swimming, weightless. Diving like smoke through the cool waters …
His eyes opened. His body clenched, and more feathers puffed free.
After his discovery of the mirror, alone in this room, he’d tried to Turn to smoke. He’d tried three times before it worked, and even then, he’d only been able to hold it a few minutes.
Smoke should be so easy. Smoke was the most elemental of Gifts, and it should have been easy. It had not hurt, per se—not like his human body did. But he hadn’t been able to hold it. Against his will, he’d felt himself gathering weight again, felt his limbs solidify, felt the floor beneath his feet.
Three more times, he’d done it. Each time he’d been able to remain vapor a little longer than the last. But when he’d tried that extra fifth Turn, nothing had happened. His Gifts were numbed.
He closed his eyes again, tried to relax the knotted muscles of his back. At least he was clean again: with his Turns, all the dirt and grime of his imprisonment, the dried sooty sludge from the rain, had been left behind.
His hair, he thought with a trace of self-mocking humor, must look much better. He supposed that was something.
Paris was an unquiet beast. He heard no crickets here, no soothing splash of waterfalls. He heard humans. Many, many, humans. He heard dogs and cattle and chickens, and somewhere far overhead, a flock of geese honking lovelorn to the moon. He was certain he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, not even in the midst of this soft bed, and so when he awoke at some undefined time later, he thought he must have simply been lost in thought for too long.
But it was darker, and it was more quiet. Not so many sounds of people. Not even animals. Just breathing. His own, a deep, slow, rasp that scraped from the bottom of his lungs. And Zoe’s, lighter, more even, no rasp at all.
She sat beside him on the bed, unspeaking. He felt the curls of her hair brushing his arm.
“Zee,” he whispered. He didn’t have to whisper, it wasn’t as if anyone else was going to hear them, but she was here, and she seemed naked, and his first raging instinct was quick hard lust—followed instantly by guilt. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She whispered as well. She leaned closer, touched her fingertips to the quilt; he felt that, all the way through the cotton. How her fingers bunched the material and dragged it slowly down his chest.
Perhaps he was asleep after all. Perhaps he was dreaming. Only an idiot would think to lift his hand and wrap his claws—gently, very gently—around her wrist to stay her. But he did it anyway.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t imagine you’re that obtuse.” He thought he saw her smile, a little smile, hardly there. She did not release the quilt. She pulled it farther down, all the way past his stomach. And his hand did nothing to stop her. His hand only moved with her, not resisting, no longer a part of his best-of-intentions resolve.
“I really don’t think this is what we—should be doing right now,” he tried. He swallowed, fighting the incredible sensation of her fingers rubbing a circle against his skin through the cloth. “You’re tired. You’re grieving.”
“This is what you wanted.” She turned her wrist until his fingers opened; she used both arms to inch closer to him, leaned her face down to his. “All those nights you watched me. All those times you stared at me, tried to touch me. All those pretty words about love. You said you wouldn’t lie.”
“You weren’t listening. I said I was proficient at lying, actually. So listen now. This isn’t what I want.”
She came so close her lips met his: sweet, so sweet and warm; short, teasing contact that rippled pleasure all the way down his body. He felt himself arch with the power of it, rising to her.
“I don’t think you’re proficient at all. You’re doing a terrible job of it.”
“The circumstances,” he gasped, trying not to move or inhale, “are somewhat intimidating.”
“Are they? Good.” She kissed him again, full and hard on the mouth, with her hair fragrant on his face and her soft tongue tasting his and Rhys lost himself. He pulled both hands free of the mattress, and goose down floated about them like snowfall.
Easy as silk, she slipped above him, rubbed her bare skin to his. He felt her breasts crushed to his chest, her nipples peaked. As carefully as he could he raised both arms to embrace her, to urge her closer still.
It was the best, best—God, the most amazing dream ever. All his pain forgotten, drowned in her touch, in her heat, in the heavy curtain of silver that hung between them. He wanted to run his fingers through the strands and it killed him that he could not. He wanted to stroke her as she was stroking him, her hands hot and urgent all up and down his body—and he couldn’t, he wouldn’t.
Because he might hurt her.
Because he might bring her hurt.
“Zoe. Zee. Stop.”
She cupped his face and held him for her kiss, and despite himself Rhys felt his neck strain as he reached up to kiss her in return. When he couldn’t breathe any longer, when he thought he’d black out with the hunger for her, she turned her face and pressed her lips to his cheek. To the scar.
“I’m not going to do this with you now,” he said, as quickly as he could; he wanted the words out while he could still speak them. He squeezed his eyes closed so he wouldn’t see her face. “I love you, and you’re not ready, and I’m not going to do this.”
“This is just another way to love.”
“No.” He turned his head away from her. “This is one of the most sacred ways. It’s meant—between us, between mates, it’s meant to be sacred.”
He felt her chest rising and falling against his. “More pretty words. Where were your principles the other night, when you were in another man’s body while with me?”
“It’s different now.”
She stilled.
“I love you,” he whispered again.
She rolled away and off the bed, gone in a tempest of stale-smelling feathers. He still couldn’t bring himself to look, so he only listened as she walked, very swiftly, out of his room.
When he finally woke up the next afternoon—he thought it must be afternoon, judging by the shadows—the maison was empty. Zoe’s belongings were missing. James’s belongings were missing.
Even the diamonds from the garden were missing.
He couldn’t believe it. He did not want to believe it. She’d actually abandoned him.
Rhys stalked a final circle around her room: the neatly made bed, the washbasin and chamber pot empty, the drawers of the bureau and the door to th
e closet politely closed, everything left tidy as by a houseguest departing who did not mean to return.
“Right,” he muttered. “We’ll just see about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
She gave the diamonds away, one by one. She ventured down the back lanes of St. Antoine, boulevards that grew smaller and more crooked with every step, buildings pushed and crammed together so tightly that the only way to tell one from another was by the changing colors of paint. Wan-faced Others stared at her from stoops, out from windows. When she wandered too near a cluster of grubby children gathered around a spinning top, they surged toward her, hands reaching.
Zoe gave them each a gemstone.
A man with a red beard who was missing an arm and smelled of beer.
A girl with a baby on her hip and a toddler behind her crying soul-sobbing tears.
An elderly woman.
A toothless young man.
The last diamond, heavy and round and colored canary yellow, went to a gray-haired fellow surrounded with cats—he’d been feeding them before she walked up, feeding them painstakingly the crumbs of something from a greasy sheet of waxed paper. All the cats scattered, and the old man looked after them without trying to call them back, his hands trembling.
She took up his nearest one, pressed the diamond into his palm, and then added a louis for good measure.
It took some time after that to trace her way back to a street respectable enough to house a grocer’s market. A few of the very first children she’d encountered recognized her as she walked the other way down their lane, cried aloud and stampeded across the cobbles to her, and persisted in begging even after she told them she had nothing more to give.
“Madame! Madame!” followed her for blocks, and those children picked up more as they went, starveling boys and girls trailing along behind her like she played a magical pipe to lure them.
She had dressed too well for this faubourg. It was difficult to judge sometimes; everyone in Darkfrith was the same, barring the marquess and his kin, all the villagers were the same. The same fine houses, the same clean streets, the same fresh foods and imported wines in every home, even the farms and shepherd’s huts.
