by Shana Abe
Of She Who Always Expected Him Home Again, however far he roamed.
Amalia, who was actual myth transformed. Who could soar and scrape the heavens with wings and who still could have been the better Helen, commanding armies to the fore with just her jaw-dropping, staggering beauty.
And who had used her quiet magic to peer past the famished child who still rattled inside Zane and seen something else, something Zane himself had never even guessed was there: a man who could love.
She loved him.
All the world could be scorched and ashed. Lia Langford loved him. She had no armies, his enchanted wife. She had him.
He sat in this chair, in this garden, awaiting the one who wanted her dead, because of that.
A pair of footmen approached from behind. He did not stiffen at their arrival, only managed a casual, upward glance at the closest one, his right hand not on the hilt of the rapier but instead the hidden dirk at his waist.
"Pardonnez-moi, monsieur."The footman was pulling back the empty chair, shifting again to guide closer the person Zane had not yet seen, the person who shuffled slowly forward between both men.
It was a woman. An old woman, at that. He felt a harsh burn of disappointment, also skillfully hidden, as she eased with her wide, quilted skirts into the chair. The footmen were angling her carefully nearer the table; Zane glimpsed a withered forearm poking out from a pink-embroidered sleeve, frail, spotted hands gripping the wooden arms for support.
The servants backed away, bowing. The woman lifted a hand to ensure her wig had not slipped awry, then turned her head and smiled at Zane.
His body went to ice. With a peculiar sense of inner shrinkage, of horror, he was aware that for the first time in his adult life he couldn't move at all, not even to save himself.
"Hello, Father," the old woman said.
Every guest of the king's feast had a personal attendant to serve them, with a beverage maid for every three and a carver for every seven. But damned Jerome had taken ill not ten minutes past; no doubt he'd been nipping from the cognac cart again. He'd fallen unconscious and was snoring behind the statue of Aphrodite in the labyrinth nearby.
"Fucking asshole," grumbled monsieur le maitre d'hotel, eyeing Dimitri balefully, as if it were somehow his fault. "There's no help of it, boy. You'll have to serve both Madame and the Hungarian vicomte until we can get someone else in his livery."
"Yes, sir."
From their hidden vantage point behind the hedges, they viewed together the unlikely couple, who faced each other without speaking. The sparkling fountain beyond them forced tears to Dimitri's eyes.
"God grant His Majesty comes soon," muttered the maitre d'hotel. "That Hungarian looks greener than Jerome."
One word engulfed him. One word, the only one that now mattered. Lia.
Oh God, and he'd left her alone with this creature, left her alone in Spain with her, the younger her—
"You'll be thinking of Mother, I expect," said the woman, nodding. She leaned back in the chair and crooked a finger for the attendant, who bobbed forward in an instant. "Un verre de vin blanc."
"Oui, madame."
She glanced back at Zane. The same eyes, dragon-blue, in a face so fine and wrinkled he might have walked past her a hundred times and not noticed the truth.
Honor. Honor in this elderly thing before him, a shadow of Honor's unnatural splendor still apparent in the cheekbones, in the lips.
Honor Carlisle, that skinny blasted snip of a drakon child, that girl Lia had dreamed about and fished from the shire to save—she was sanf—she was the sodding lead of the snake —and no sodding wonder the tribe wanted her dead and he'd left them alone —
Zane shoved back from the table. He stood and the inebriated marauise ceased her tittering, and the footmen behind him surged forward, murmuring concern.
"Please," the elderly woman said, staring straight ahead. "I could Weave to Barcelona in an instant and kill her. You must realize that."
He glared down at her, frantic, his jaw clenched so tight he was unable to speak.
"I won't," she said gently, and sent him a sidelong look. "And I'll tell you why I won't. But first, I'd very much appreciate your help with a riddle. Do sit," she added, when Zane didn't move, not even when the king's men had resettled his chair, urging him back to the table.
"Don't you want to hear my mystery, Vicomte? It's to your advantage, I promise you that." Everyone was staring. And she could leave in a blink of an eye anyway, he knew that. Zane resumed his seat.
"I want you to know," said Honor quietly, in her unfamiliar, elderly voice, "that I never despised you, or your wife. Even now, I can appreciate the risks you both took to save my life. So understand that what I say next is not motivated by any sort of intimate passion. I want you to help me to find a way to destroy the English drakon . All of them, save your wife."
He couldn't help it; a huffing choke of laughter escaped him. "You must be mad."
She gazed at him flatly. A serving maid in powder and an apron and gray-frizzed wig brought the wine, then slipped back into the shadows of the box hedges behind them. Zane waited until she was gone.
"You are mad," he said. "I wouldn't, even if I could. Which I can't."
"If you don't, I will execute Amalia. Without delay."
"Honor—"
"No," the woman interrupted. "I'm Rez now. Pray call me that."
He paused to breathe, to truly take her in. He'd seen all manner of wickedness before. It had been the meat and bread of his entire life, really, starting from his very first memories, that cutpurse gang of urchins who'd plied him with gin and taught him to sob on demand; Dirty Clem, the picklock who'd fed and tutored him and then stabbed him near to death. The streets of London held iniquity aplenty for a child with no protection but his own wits. Zane could full tell when a bloke was confident enough to play at being vicious and when he was cold enough to be sincere.
Rez, with her stylish tall wig draped with feathers and pearls, her embroidered gown of salmon-pink with curling mint leaves, her withered shoulders and her straight blue gaze ... Rez was sincere.
"Why?" he asked, blunt.
"Because." She tasted the wine.
"That's a bloody big venture, just for 'because.'"
She shrugged.
"Why don't you have your hired hacks do it?" he demanded, reckless. "All those poor bastards who think they're doing God's work, ripping out the hearts of your kind. Sanf inimicus," he sneered. "Did you make that up or just dead steal it from history?"
Rez spread open her fan, peering down the table. "Wherever do you suppose Louis is? Probably diddling about with his horse. I do wish he'd hurry, don't you? I'm quite famished."
A great wave of emotion swept over him then: hatred, mingled with nauseated desperation. Zane made himself very still until it passed. He picked up his absinthe, set it down again. The light from the fountain flashed and flashed in his head.
The old woman sighed, tapping the lace fan against her mouth. "All right. I had a plan like that, if you must know, not too long ago. It didn't work out. A great many of my hired hacks, as you say, perished underground, all thanks to a single dragon. Imagine it—one dragon, forty-five hand-picked assassins destroyed. Such a pity. It's taken longer than I thought to rebuild their ranks. I find I grow impatient. I find that . time is short."
He closed his eyes against the light.
"You are the only living being who knows the shire of Darkfrith as well as any drakon. I daresay you know it better than I. Plus, you have all those useful years of surviving as a criminal. I can't Weave back there undetected. I can't even walk to its borders. I'm ninety-one years old, Vicomte. I don't desire to walk. That makes you the ideal candidate for my proposition."
He shook his head. "How long have you been planning this?"
She sighed again, a quavering sound. "Questions regarding time are always so tricky. Allow me merely to say, since I was a much younger woman. Since long before I realized it was yo
u who has been stalking me these past few years, the wild-eyed Englishman everyone spoke of, who already knew about dragons, who could control them with his magical spells." Now she laughed; he heard the young girl in it, the girl he knew. "You used your ring, didn't you? You used those fragments of Draumr you once used upon me. But now your ring is gone. Yes, I took it. Are you surprised? It was never meant to belong to an Other, you know. I promise you I've made good use of it."
"Bloody hell, Rez. If you have Draumr, why not just use it to have them destroy themselves? Set them to fighting?"
"I do wonder if you're attempting to be devious or are merely that ignorant. Surely you realize that the chips from the ring work most effectively on one dragon at a time, perchance two. Had I the whole stone, unbroken, perhaps it would be feasible to take on the entire tribe. But as things are . no. Believe me, I've considered it."
"Go back in time. Steal it before it's broken."
"I've tried. Apparently as a whole it's untouchable. A few things are. The Weaves won't take me to it."
Zane twisted in his seat to address her squarely. The curls of his wig slid heavily along his shoulders. "I can't kill them all. It's not possible."
"No. You mean that you won't. I confess myself disappointed. I really rather thought you loved your wife."
Blood rushed to his cheeks; he struggled to keep his voice in check. "Damn you. I can't kill them because there's no clear way about it! They're fortified in there, they've an array of defenses. There've got to be close to a thousand—at least!—who can Turn, and that's just the males! Think about it. And in any case, there's—"
"What?"
Rue, he'd nearly said. Rue, amazing Rue. The one who'd begun this whole wretched, remarkable game that amounted to his new found life. Rue, who had saved him from those London gutters as a lad, and taken him in, and eventually had had the grace to give birth to the woman he would wed.
"Langford," Zane said. "The marquess. He's a wily old bugger, believe you me, even if he has given over the title of Alpha to his eldest son. I've dealt with that son of a bitch since I was a child."
"Ah," said Rez softly. "Ah, yes. You have in mind the marchioness, of course. Rue Langford. I'd heard you loved her. And not just as the mother of your wife."
"Shut up," Zane snarled.
"It's not really my concern. The Marquess and Marchioness of Langford abandoned the shire years ago."
"That's a lie."
"It's not. I swear. What have I to gain with a lie? You'll go there, you'll find out for yourself anyway. I suppose you truly haven't been in touch with any of the English, or you'd know. They left, oh, around eight years ago. In your time."
To say that he was staggered would have been a pitiful underestimation. Rue leaving the shire, fleeing with her husband, that by-the-book stickler of a leader with all his rules—
"Off in search of their youngest daughter," continued Rez evenly. "Who, apparently, they've never found. So all that's left in Darkfrith are those you don't love. Those you've hidden Lia from, who would harm her still if they could." She spread her palms, reasonable. "They're the ones I want."
One of the smaller acrobats ended a flip just in front of them, a boy in tight clothing and a sweaty, panting face. Rez and the rubied marauise offered a smattering of applause.
"Envision it," she said under her breath. "No more hiding, no more threats. Just you and she, free to live as you wish, where you wish. You have my word that I'll leave you both alone forever. But I need your help first, Father. I need your cunning, and your knowledge of the shire."
He picked up the absinthe, drained the glass in one shot. "I'm not a lunatic."
"I am," she said, simple. "I didn't choose this path, but here I am on it. Consequences of my Gift, consequences of my very birth. And I'll tell you something else, something I think you already know: Love is a demon that destroys your soul. It eats and eats inside you, it hollows you out, and you'll do anything to keep feeding it. That's all I'm doing."
"Hon—Rez. I've no notion what you're talking about."
"Don't you?" she said, smiling her old lady's smile.
From the other end of the garden came a flicker of silver and blue: royal bunting on poles, followed by a blare of trumpets. Louis had arrived.
Everyone at the table began to stir, but Zane never looked away from Honor's face.
"You do love," she whispered, nodding. "And if you wish her to live, you'll do as I request. The one thing I ever understood about you, Zane, was that you would be ruthless in the protection of your heart. Your heart is Lia. I merely expect," her smile grew wider, wrinkled, old and young, "you to be ruthless. It's what you're best at, after all."
She leaned over, gave his sleeve a motherly pat.
"I'm glad you wore the lemon satin. I've always admired you in yellow."
Chapter Sixteen
"Imagine," said Prince Alexandru, "that you were born a rather ordinary child. Ordinary for your kind and place, I should say. And you grow up living as any other child around you would. Mostly happy, sometimes not. Muddy, clean, fed. You don't live in a castle but you have a room with your own real bed, not a pallet, and parents who care for you as they can. But then one day, without warning at all, something extraordinary happens to you, something you did not anticipate in any possible way, but it befalls you anyhow."
"Ha," I said, from my place in my bed, covered in blankets and propped up upon pillows. The rainlight was thick as soup, but he'd found one of the Venetian glass candelabras from the dining chamber and had lit every candle; the single brazier in the cathedral, as I had already known, listed dangerously sideways, as it was missing a leg.
He'd placed the candelabra atop the commode. Light danced up the chiseled stone wall above it, smoothed thin by the time it reached the window; the glass branches had been shaped into snakes and flowers, glimmers of violet and sapphire blue.
I'd hung a long mirror on the opposite wall, which caught the reflection of the flat windowpanes. With the proper tilt of my head I could view an infinity of colored snakes and Sandus, each one tinier than the last.
He'd released my hand to go fetch the candelabra, and since he'd been back, even after pulling the chair up close to my bed again, he had not reclaimed it.
I kept both hands folded on my lap. The blankets were drawn up to my shoulders. It was still cold. "What was this extraordinary thing?" I asked.
"Two things," he said, holding up two fingers. "One, you're seven years of age, and your older sister comes to you in the dead of night and proclaims that you're the new Alpha of your tribe, because the old prince is dead."
"Your ... sister?"
"She was the bride of the former Alpha. Technically, even after his death, she had no power to rule, but she held on to it anyway. She passed that on to me."
"The hut," I said, understanding. "You were born in a hut, not a castle. I saw it."
"Did you?"
"Not the, er, process itself. I saw you as a baby. I'd been trying to Weave back to you after our conversation in your library, but I ended up there instead. You were with your mother."
Alexandru glanced downward and then back up, regarded me broodingly.
"I was only there a minute," I said, and paused. "She looked happy."
"Yes." He sighed, leaning back. "So now you are the new prince, and you do live in a castle. And for a while you have guidance, you have family who are there with you to aid you, and despite all the folk of your tribe who stare at you and judge you and find you lacking, you feel ... as if it might work. As if it might indeed be destiny. When the Turn comes to you at fourteen, you're beyond relieved. It means your position is just a little, a little, more secure. But one by one your family either succumbs to death or departs your realm, and you end up alone."
"How old were you then?" I wondered.
"Fifteen."
I'd been taken from my parents at nearly the same age. I remembered how that felt, to be young and solitary, a stranger amid strangers. Eve
n with all the excitement filling my days, the cacophony of astonishing new places and things, there remained that seed of fear—of rejection, suffering, pain—lodged in my heart that never withered.
I didn't wait for Sandu to take my hand again. I reached for his. "I'm sorry."
"No, don't be. I don't tell you this to gain pity. I'm telling you so you'll understand. Two great things happened to me. Two." His lips made that dry smile. "Would you care to guess the other?"
Me, I wanted to say, and bit my tongue.
"It might have been you," he agreed, reading my face, and his smile softened. "But I wasn't counting Honor Carlisle. Not for this tale. The second unexpected event that came upon me was a new Gift, one I'd never heard of anyone else having before, not human or drakon."
"Really?" I pushed myself up higher on the pillows. "What?"
He picked up the battered note I'd brought back from the meadow, which had been resting upon my legs.
"I Read," he said.
"Well, so do I, honestly, but—"
"No, Honor. I can Read, the way you can Weave. An utterly unique dragon trait. I Read the true lettering behind any words. I Read the true intent of the scribe behind the ink. Fresh words, invisible to everyone else."
One of the Roma below us in the atrium had begun to practice a song on his guitar. Someone else joined in with the harmony. I realized without an ounce of surprise it was the same tune I'd heard drifting through the dark green crystal forest.
"You Read true hearts," I guessed, and the prince inclined his head in acknowledgment. "Then—you must know mine. You had me write out all those things. That was why, wasn't it?" "That, and I wanted to see if one of us belonged in an asylum. It seemed like it might actually be me." I shook my head.
