by Shana Abe
Not officially. Officially, she was still drakon , and the hunt for her had never ceased. She was considered a runner, someone who had committed one of the most egregious of all tribal crimes, and should she ever have been caught, her punishment would have been dire. It was why she and Zane lived in careful anonymity, far from the shire. It was why he and I slunk about now, on the bustling, pungent streets of Harrogate, with our shoulders rounded and our heads down as we made our way to the hotel she had procured for us.
I felt her at once as we entered the lobby. It was nearly as crammed with people as the lane fronting the hotel, but the men and women here wore no simple homespun. The Coppice Court catered to the ton , mostly those traveling to and from the hunts in Scotland, and even the plainest frocks to be seen were layered with fringework and beading.
Gentlemen and ladies minced across the checkered marble floor. They prefaced each deliberate step with walking sticks of cherry or ebony topped with ivory, and carried small china cups of what appeared to be muddy water. Their faces were powdered; their lavish wigs were powdered; their lips and cheeks were painted uniformly red. They chirped at each other in civil tones that sounded a bit too pinched to me ... perhaps it had something to do with those cups of sulfur water.
Zane abandoned his slouch as if it had never been, shedding rain from his cloak in an impressive ring along the floor. With his pale amber eyes and tanned face and his braided rope of tawny hair, he looked abruptly like a corsair barging into a tea party. Several of the elaborately bejeweled women nearby gave gasping little twitters and snapped open their fans.
He paid them no mind. His gaze had gone instantly to a figure only half visible behind a green granite table spilling over with flowers and piles of fruits in crystal bowls. She wore a gown of coral, low cut, a wide sash of Prussian blue tied around her waist with the ends left to drape behind in a fashionable flutter along the polonaise of her skirts. Her hair was also powdered, her lips were also painted. Were it not for two wildly unusual discrepancies about her, she might have blended in seamlessly with this clutch of silk-cinched, cane-tapping humans.
One was her face. She was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Beneath the dusting of flour I knew her hair would be golden. I remembered that of her. Her eyes were deep brown, barely lined with kohl. Her skin was flawless, her teeth were white and straight and she showed them in a smile as she caught sight of her husband, turning to us fully. And when she smiled, it was startlingly clear that she was nothing like any of the other females around her. She glowed .
The other discrepancy was far more subtle, and far more ominous to me. It was a delicate glitter of blue from a heart-shaped pendant around her neck, a pendant that hung from a black velvet ribbon.
Lady Amalia, it seemed, had her own version of Draumr.
Zane handed his hat and cloak to a doorman without looking at him and strode away. It was clear I had ceased to exist.
I watched them reunite with an unabashed curiosity. I'd been traveling for days with this man, who'd barely spoken more than a handful of sentences to me. He'd been curt and brisk and sharp-tongued whenever I displeased him, but he'd always ensured that I ate well, that I slept enough. That I was comfortable and clean and not afraid. He'd told me that at least four times: Don't be afraid.
He'd given me his handkerchief in the street.
Lia met him with her hands outstretched. Her smile was truly melting. Zane took her hands in his and bent over her fingers with an elegant bow. I could smell his pleasure and hunger and relief even from all the way by the main doors, even through the horrible wafting sulfur. Lia dipped her chin and pulled him closer and murmured something too low for me to catch. Zane gave a ragged sigh. He brushed his lips to her cheek, and then to her mouth.
I stood there soggily, dripping water, openly gawking. For all that they were both fully dressed and standing with a good foot between them, it was like they were making love to each other right there in the foyer. A white-hot heat seemed to envelop them both, sealing them away from all the rest of the people in the chamber.
My parents would barely even touch fingertips in public. I'd never seen adults act anything like this. It was rawly intimate, and I felt a spear of pure envy stab through me.
For the first time in my life, I thought: That. I want that. I want to be that loved.
A liveried footman carrying a tray of empty cups bumped into me, apologized over the clatter of china, and when I glanced again at Zane and Lia, they were both looking back at me. A pretty flush now stained her cheekbones—not rouge at all.
"Honor," she said warmly. With her hand still clasped in her husband's, she came to me by the doors. "Honor. I feel as if I know you already, but how happy I am to meet you now."
I gathered myself. I averted my gaze from her face, from that too-entrancing wink of blue at her throat, and gave my best curtsy. It was a little shaky.
"I'm very pleased to ..." I began, but trailed off, because despite all my mother's rigorous lessons in social discipline, I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I'm very pleased to be abducted by you? So sorry that I don't know you in the least?
Men and women swished back and forth across the lobby. Their voices were birdlike, their jewelry offering sporadic bursts of song that washed bright and loud through the air.
Lia released Zane's hand—not before giving his fingers a quick squeeze, I noticed—and took up both of mine. When I lifted my eyes again, her smile had returned. I couldn't help but begin to smile back.
"Dear girl," she said. "My dragon-girl. How would you feel about coming to live in Spain?"
Yesss, Ssspain, the fragments of Draumr whispered, from him and from her.
"What is in Spain?" I managed to ask.
"Your future," said the Lady Amalia simply. "I've dreamed it."
A runner and a thief. Fugitives, the both of them, with such prices on their heads that would make even Blackbeard shudder. They stood before me and offered me what no one else ever had, a chance to live beyond the rigid rules of the shire, beyond bruises, beyond my own deep-tendriled fears that had bound my every breath.
"Yes," I said, relieved. "Spain. Thank you."
Chapter Three
The first time he saw her wasn't in a fashionable Viennese opera house, or strolling down a street in Bucharest, or framed in the glass window of a carriage. It was in the middle of a spring-swollen river in the mountains. He was eighteen, and she was crouched alone upon a rock, stranded.
Sandu noticed her hair first. It was the only thing about her that moved. He was high above her, very high, gliding along a jet of northern wind, enjoying the brisk cold bite of it that whistled along his scales and rushed tears to his eyes.
He'd been practicing kiting most of the morning, winging high into the luminous center of the sky until he found the perfect upsweep of air to support him. With his wings spread and his legs extended, Sandu would hover in place like a solitary fragment of midnight, fixed to the heavens.
It took mastery and stern concentration, an instinctive knowing of the gusts that would flip him if they could, slam him back to earth. The winds that howled along the spines of the alpine gorges would like nothing more than to turn Prince Alexandru of the Zaharen into a fine smear of blood upon the dirt below.
But he was better than that.
He was, in fact, better than anyone he knew at flight, and he took a secret pride in that. Although he'd been born a human-shaped child, it was a distant memory to him now. Without his will, without his even trying, he'd shifted into Something Else as he'd aged: more than just a man or a prince or even a dragon. Sometimes he thought it was like he'd snared a thread of blue from the heavens and swallowed it, and it had enwrapped his heart.
They were joined now, Alexandru and Sky, perfect reflections of each other. Up here, alone, he could at last be himself. He could be free.
His people, human or dragon alike, would gather in the hamlets and all along the crenulated edges of his castle when Sandu chose to soa
r. Those who could would sometimes follow him; day or night, every drakon of the mountains burned to fly.
But on that particular morning, he had been unaccompanied. He'd slipped out before dawn without any fanfare, restless and eager to escape the formality of the day he knew would come. Stretching his wings was a necessary solace.
When the mists caught between the highest eastern tors had lifted from pink into pearl, he knew it was time to return home. Duties awaited him. Papers, plans. All the winds of the world would not spare him from that.
Then came that flag of color beneath him that had snared his attention. It was bright, much brighter than the dark rock around it, or the raging green-and-foam river that had carved its path through the granite of the canyon. The flag glinted in shades of copper, dancing above the rapids.
He passed it, circled back, staring. A woman's hair.
He'd made another full loop before his mind accepted what his eyes were showing him. Yes, there was a woman in the river, hunched low upon a drenched rock with her arms around her knees, her face upturned to him. She seemed without clothes.
The wind shifted and her hair blew across her eyes. She lifted one arm—white skin, a quick and nervous push of her hand along her forehead to clear her vision—and stared back at him.
Sandu Turned to smoke. Instant buoyancy, all resistance to the wind gone, all the mechanics of flight and angles and gravity rendered moot. There were times when being smoke was even better than being dragon.
Smoke could maneuver down to the river in a way a dragon could not. Smoke could twine as thin as a whip against the channel of air that rushed atop the water, regroup without effort into the thickness that resembled his human shape. Smoke gave him weight upon the rock in front of her, feet that found a reasonable footing against the slick stone, a body and head and a face, inches from hers, because, honestly, it wasn't much of a rock and there was hardly any room.
The woman had stood too, staggering a bit to find her balance as he Turned to man in front of her. She gazed at him with wide blue eyes. Very blue eyes, dark as a bruise. She was pale and thin and much younger than he'd first realized—not a woman at all. A girl still. A maiden.
And drakon .
It was the second-most obvious thing about her, after that streamer of hair. It washed over him now in pretty little sugary waves, that sense of one of his own, a pulse that throbbed and matched his heartbeat, his blood. Electrical. Unique.
Even with her youth, she felt strong, stronger than most. The people of the mountains had mingled for centuries with the Others, and so their talents waxed and waned according to the whims of their ancestry. But this girl's power thrummed over his skin.
She didn't look like anyone he knew. The drakon ran the gamut of colors in their human shapes, but he'd never seen anyone in the castle or any of the villages with splendid hair like that, copper and rose and gold.
Still, she'd know him . She had to. All the peasants knew their prince.
Sandu smiled down at her, benevolently, because her eyes were still so wide. He offered her the traditional greeting her blood entitled her to. "Gentle One. What are you—"
The girl shoved him off the rock.
The surprise of it kept him whole, and when his back hit the water he went all the way under, thrashing like a fish. The river flowed from the glaciers lodged in the basins above and was shocking cold, a frigid slap all along his senses. He actually inhaled a mouthful before managing to Turn back into smoke, wisping free of the torrents.
As a cloud he lifted, found his bearings and the rock and no girl.
He Turned to man atop the stone—dry again, his long black hair snapping in the wind; nothing remained on them from Turn to Turn—raised a hand to his eyes and scanned the waters.
There. A flash of copper, a pair of arms splashing helplessly as the currents tumbled her downstream. The spring runoff was high and she was already halfway to the falls.
Sandu sighed. It didn't look like she could swim at all.
He caught her at a bend, where she was hanging on by the tips of her fingers to another rock jutting above the froth. For an instant he debated about which would be more efficient, plunging in as a beast or a person, but there was really no question: Four clawed feet beat two human feet slipping over mossy stone.
He took his shape midstream, creating an instant barrier that fountained the rush of water into lather, splashing into his eyes. Alexandru lifted his chin and curved his neck to glare at the sodden girl. He couldn't speak or even growl, couldn't make a sound in this shape, and so only gave a jerk of his head to the ebony wing he held outstretched toward her, the river boiling up white between them.
Take it.
She was gasping, tendrils of hair tangling across her face and arms, her lips bloodless. She looked from him to the wing. Without warning, she let go of the rock.
He didn't know if she meant to slide under him or catch hold, and didn't give her the opportunity to choose. The open spread of his wing dipped down and caught her. She was scooped into a clumsy weight that mashed against his ribs.
She began to struggle. He closed his wing to hold her tighter. With the girl pressed to his side, he lumbered up the steep stone-and-mud bank, talons digging deep into the earth.
At the first stretch of level ground, he released her. She collapsed, still gasping, and curled into a ball on her side. Her body trembled, all that pale skin now tinged blue, very striking against the hair.
Sandu Turned again.
"One of us," he said, standing over her with his arms crossed, "appears to be rather stupid. Can you guess who I think it is?"
She rolled over, found her feet, scrubbing the muck off her palms and thighs. She backed up a few paces, glancing around them, stumbled over something and came to a halt. Her gaze met his, dropped down to his unclad body, and twitched up again to his face. Panic sketched across her features.
"Oh, yes," he drawled, unmoving. "Excellent notion. After all that fuss, I'm quite in the mood for a bit of fun. Besides, you must be all of twelve years? Thirteen? Kindly don't insult me. I have plenty of women," he gave the word a delicate emphasis, "who like me well enough not to drown me, anyway."
"Get back," squeaked the girl in a high, wavering voice—in English. "Get back! I'll hit you, I know how, I swear!"
Sandu blinked. He understood English, understood it very well, in fact, but it was hardly his native tongue. He'd been addressing her in the patois of the mountains, a lilting combination of Romanian and Latin, a touch of Hungarian thrown in, the language everyone from the gentry to the masses used.
As far as he knew, none of the commoners spoke English. Not more than a few words, and definitely not in that unmistakable, patrician accent. And she wasn't a royal of the Carpathians. He could count all the noblewomen on two hands.
"Who are you?" Alexandru asked flatly, also in English.
"Who the bloody hell are you?" she countered, still squeaky, and skipped back another step when he uncrossed his arms.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, impatient. "Look here, child. I'm turning my back on you, yes? I can't see you, you can't see me. We're both properly modest now. Just don't—"
"—run," he finished, as he heard her scrambling away.
He rolled his eyes to the sky, went to smoke, and funneled down in front of her at the brink of the forest, catching her by the shoulders with both hands.
She hadn't been lying. She did know how to hit, a flurry of punches aimed wildly at his face and chest. And for all her skinniness, she was still a drakon. He'd have bruises tomorrow if she kept this up.
"Stop it. Stop. Girl, you need to—damn it!" He freed her with a small push, wiping the blood from his lip. "That one hurt. Don't run." He examined the slick of red across his fingers, then glowered down at her. "If I'd wanted to harm you, don't you think I would have by now?"
She only stood there, panting.
"I could have just left you to the river," he added. "And ruddy good riddance.
" "Where am I?" the girl demanded, all hint of the squeak gone.
He lowered his hand. She was yanking her hair across her shoulders and down her body now, trying to cover herself, but it was still dripping water, and not long enough. He made certain to look straight at her face.
"There are exactly two tribes of drakon in the whole of the world," Sandu said, slightly sharper than he should have, but his lip stung like the devil. "Where do you think you are? And don't bother to deny your heritage. I feel you. I know you feel me."
Her mouth dropped open. "This is ... these are ... the Carpathians?" "Very credible. Did they choose you because you can act so well?" "Choose ... what?"
"The English," he said, and ran his tongue over his upper lip. "Your Alpha, Langford. Your Council. It seems a bit desperate, even for them, to send a little girl to spy upon me in the midst of hostilities, but then your ways have always struck me as odd."
"Spy? Hostilities?"
"This is going to get tedious. You needn't repeat everything I say."
"Why, you—you—ruffian!" The words seemed to burst out of her. She drew herself fiercely upright. "I'm not little!"
"Oh," Prince Alexandru said, smiling a cool, unpleasant smile, one that had been known to drain the blood from the cheeks of grown men. "But you are a spy."
A frown crinkled the pallid forehead; she clenched both hands above her heart. The wind returned and stirred the drying strands of her hair. She was a wet skinny twig of a child with a halo of coppery rose and flesh covered in goose pimples, as unlikely a scout as he'd ever seen.
But she was here, and she was drakon , and she was English. What else could it mean?
He held her eyes, now welling with tears. He was struck, once more, by the intensity of their blue.
"I'm l-lost," the child said. Her lips pressed into a quivering line; her voice came small and broken. "Please, sir. I'm lost. Can you help me get home?"
Before he could open his mouth to reply, she vanished.
