by Shana Abe
“Are you unwell?”
He shook his head, tried the wine. Cinnamon and tannins, a welcome rush of flavor. He took another swallow, then replaced it carefully by the chains of bells.
“I must confess, Mistress Carlisle … I’ve never known anyone like you.”
“I know,” she said.
Far and away, the first of the thunder began to rumble across the Mediterranean.
His hostess was running a finger over the crystal rim of her goblet, lightly, around and around. “I feel that … for the sake of utter honesty between us, I should tell you that, technically, you purchased this cathedral for me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. And thank you.”
He began on the bread. “What a generous fellow I am. When did I do that?”
She ducked her chin and smiled. “As I said, a few years back. I have no income of my own, you see. Had I remained in Darkfrith, I would have been considered something of an heiress. But here, I’m as penniless as young Adiran over there with his begging songs. Zane and Lia feed me and clothe me. You provided my shelter.”
He paused, watching that smile, small and not quite abashed but knowing, a slight curve that spoke plainly of mischief.
“You have,” she said, after a moment, “a great many gemstones embedded in your castle. Uncut diamonds, right there in the mortar. Every room.”
“Ah.”
The last of the Zaharen wealth. The last glimmering, corporeal link to their heritage, the overflowing riches of those first few dragons.
“I’ve taken only the slightest of them. You’ve not even missed them, have you?”
“No. Not yet.”
Her smile erased. “I apologize. I wish I could say I wasn’t raised to steal, but truthfully, nearly every aspect of my adult life has been shaded with thievery. It feels rather natural to me now. And it seemed to me, that if, in the future, I’m the mistress of your castle, or even just a consort, it couldn’t really be considered stealing …”
Alexandru pressed his fingers back against his nose.
“Sorry,” she said again.
More thunder. The notes of the fiddle, rising and falling. The room felt heated now, the scent of food and her surrounding him, flooding him, erasing all thoughts of practicality and caution, promising pure magic in return.
“I’m enjoying the wine,” he said, when he could speak again.
“It’s from the Roma,” she responded gravely.
Jasmine and honey, her smoky voice, her luminous skin. He wanted her so badly he thought his blood would boil dry.
Sandu dropped his hand.
“Do you realize what it would mean, were we to wed? To be involved at all? The trouble it would cause?”
She tipped her head again, impassive.
“We are at war,” he said. “Perhaps you don’t know that. It seems impossible that you wouldn’t, but it’s so. It’s a silent war, one without blood, but very real nonetheless. Your tribe is determined to oust me, to take what is mine. For years they’ve been stalking us, sending spies, attempting to feel their way around my grasp on my kin. I think perhaps the only thing holding them back now is my sister—her last, lingering loyalty to me—but she can’t keep them out forever. I know our ways. I know what I’d do, were I the English Alpha. I would have sent an army a full five years ago, and done what I could to win. War is pitiless, and war is cold, and I guarantee you someday your tribe will strike. We’ve done what we can to prepare, but I don’t need you to be their excuse.”
She regarded him without moving. “The English are no longer my tribe, Sandu.”
“I don’t believe they view matters quite the same way. You disappeared from their shire, you claim they want you dead. Do you even know why?”
Her lips flattened. She shook her head.
“Because they think you are sanf. That you are a member of the sanf inimicus.”
The fiddle song died. Honor leaned forward, biting off her words. “That marks the second time you’ve accused me of that. I don’t appreciate it.”
“I don’t accuse. I repeat to you what I was told.”
“It is a lie.”
“It doesn’t matter. Lie or not, it’s what they accept as truth.”
She shoved back from the table. “Then someone is lying to them! The sanf are an atrocity! I’ve never had anything to do with them.”
Yet.
It lingered in the air over the fading echo of her voice, that single unspoken syllable, sinking heavy between them.
One of the serving girls inched forward, placed a hand on Honor’s arm. Slowly she resumed her seat, a well of satin puffed around her. Her face shone even paler than before.
“I would never,” she vowed softly, her beautiful eyes vehement. “Never.”
Alexandru lowered his own, finding her sheet of paper on his lap, their ardent sideways sentences.
“Da,” he murmured, without lifting his own gaze. “Gentle One. I believe you.”
He left her at the door to his chamber. Rather, she left him. It was, after all, her cathedral, not his, no matter how she’d managed the payment. She’d taken a lamp from one of the alcoves and guided him here, to this small square room with a faded mural of what appeared to be apostles and cherubs, and a bed with feather ticking, and a basin of water on a stand.
There was no scent of her within. It wasn’t her bed, and the disappointment that jagged through him at that realization was tempered only slightly by strained, prudent relief.
He hardly knew her, or even what to think of her. If nothing else she was a gentlewoman, and the gentleman in him—serf, sneered a malevolent voice from the black corners of his mind—would respect that, no matter how bright her skin or smoldering her gaze.
She would mean war. He knew it down to the marrow of his bones. Taking her, claiming her, would unquestionably shatter the frigid, watchful stalemate he and the English had managed these past few years. Sanf inimicus or just a stolen child: They’d never abide his mating to her.
“Good evening,” Honor Carlisle had said to him, her hand on the door.
“Good evening,” Sandu had replied, a bow to her curtsy.
She’d left trailed by that Gypsy boy, who was the only one throwing glances over his shoulder as they faded into the gloom.
Outside, the autumn storm drew nearer, promising wet and wind.
Tomorrow Alexandru would return to the belfry, fetch the satchel he’d left there, and go.
CHAPTER TEN
Across the city, across the man-built grimy peaks and turns of the many rooftops that made up this particular quarter of Barcelona, above all the other noises begat from the Festes de la Mercè, Lia heard the music.
She was standing at the balcony off their bedroom, modest enough in her wrap of flowing silk that was pale as peaches, as the first light that would spill over the long blue horizon of the Caribbean and break into opals across the waves. She kept her hands fixed to the iron railing before her, because it hurt a little—iron always did—and that kept her grounded to earth. That kept her from Turning.
But the music would not cease.
Like the roofs, it was also made by man. A fiddle, she thought. Perhaps a viol.
She did not know why it struck her so coldly on this warm night. She did not know why she felt a chill as the melody pulsed around her, tantalized her, repelled her. It was a song she’d not heard before, she was sure of that much. Yet it spoke to her as if they were old familiar friends.
I’m here. You tried to stop me. But I’m here. It has begun.
Perhaps it was just because of the festival. Perhaps she was oversensitive to this particular night, to the parties and drunken carousing. The smoke in the air.
One year, their second autumn here, she and Honor had ventured out to become swallowed by the Festes. It had been a first for them both; for all her years away from the deliberate isolation of the shire, Lia’d never grown comfortable in truly large crowds of Others. There was something abo
ut them that whetted her animal instinct, some subtle, tingling, disquieting thing: beyond the smell of them, beyond their bodily noises and emissions, their garish loud ways …
Shoulder to shoulder with them, unable to see her way clear, Lia felt ensnared. And ensnared was a dangerous feeling indeed for a barely leashed dragon.
But the festival swarmed the streets with its own siren call, and Honor had stood here—right here, just beside her—on the balcony, watching, inhaling the smells, and whispered only, “All that laughter. What must it be like?”
So they’d abandoned the balcony, dressed up in crisp Spanish lace and shawls and descended their tall, locked-away palace down to the crooked streets.
It had been every bit as noisy and stinking as Lia’d feared. Beneath the veil her eyes were running from the smoke, and her ears were throbbing from the drums and bells and people shouting, and Honor’s smile was so wide and delighted that when she flashed it toward Lia, the extravagant, drákon beauty that only just waited beneath the surface of her youth shone more brightly than all the torches.
They’d remained out all night. They’d danced with strangers, dined upon warm fruit and sweetmeats, shared wine. At the tail end of the celebration they were seated together alone upon the damp brink of a beach, shoes off, their veils discarded into long twists of lace snakes that rolled with the breeze against the sand.
An abandoned bonfire had mumbled down into a pile of embers upwind; the air smacked of charred laurel and brine.
Lia’s coiffure had begun to weigh too heavy upon her head. She was working on removing her pins, collecting them carefully to her lap, when Honor spoke.
“Why did you save me from the shire?”
She glanced over with her hands still up in her hair; Honor only gazed fixedly at the sea. She sat curved with her arms wrapped around her knees, her shawl a tender bunching of cashmere against her chin and cheek.
Amalia lowered her hands, the last pin between her fingers. There were so many things she could have said.
Because the dreams told me to.
Because you were innocent, and did not deserve to die.
Because parents should always protect their children, even drákon parents.
Because I was heartsick for a family. And so were you.
“Because we’re kin” is what Lia finally answered.
“You’re not my mother.”
Under the inexorable slap of water to sand it wasn’t an accusation, only a softly stated fact … but oh, it stung.
She kept her face to the breeze. “Do you remember the wild dogrose that would grow in Darkfrith? How it’d wrap along the hedges and creep into the rye, and come back every year, even when the farmers pulled it out?”
From the edge of her eye, she saw Honor hesitate, then give a nod.
“Love is like that. It grows in thorny fields as well as fertile ones. It’s inexplicable, and undeniable. There was a hole in my life, and a premature ending for yours. So fate gave me my dreams, and you a longer ending. A much longer one, I hope. We were chosen for each other. We were meant to be.”
“You … love me?”
“Yes. You’re my daughter now. You’re of my heart.”
Honor had said nothing else, only hunched down deeper into the sand.
It was a sennight later, long after the last of the smoke had cleared from the air, that Lia had discovered the note shoved under her pillow, written in an unmistakable girlish hand.
Thank you. I will love you too.
She was not Mama or Mother or even Mare. Honor had never once called Lia by anything but her given name. But she had penned that note.
The nightsong from the distant fiddle paused, started again. A clot of men on the street below had staggered to a halt beneath her to sing off-key, their torches casting a diabolic glow straight up to where she stood.
The silence of the apartments behind Amalia beckoned. She released the railing, turned back to her room and to her empty bed.
When I was twenty-one, what I knew of the sanf inimicus would fill barely a thimble. Our ancestral folklore was rife with stories of humans hunting us; even human history boasted tales of brave men slaughtering dragons, or of dim-witted women being stolen by them. We knew we were unwelcome in the world of the Others, of course we knew. It was the reason we pretended to be them. It was the reason we spent our lives, generation after generation, incognito.
But I don’t think we English drákon had a specific name for the hunters. I don’t think any one of our stories ever called them by that name.
Still, they did exist.
They had been conceived in the Carpathians ages ago, just as we had been. Confirmation of them had only just surfaced in the shire right before Zane had taken me away, and that was the last I’d even thought of them until Alexandru’s first accusation to me, there in the library of Zaharen Yce.
Yet my initial introduction to the sanf inimicus actually came by way of Joséphine and Gervase.
My father was a trusted advisor to our Alpha, probably because, like the Alpha, he was obsessed with ensuring the tribe’s silver fortunes. There was a lot of it to ensure.
Whenever he was home, Gervase reeked of silver. I don’t believe he spent much time deep within the mines themselves, but he worked surrounded with all forms of the ore. As a girl I used to imagine that the crude metal had permeated the crevices of his body and hardened around all his inner organs. He would bawl, spit, and sweat silver.
Like the rest of us, he knew his place in the tribal hierarchy. He was both smart and obedient; he would never challenge for a higher status. Why bother? He already had Plum House and the Alpha’s ear, and a position all but the council members would envy.
Whilst I, the runt of the litter, had evolved into a very skilled eavesdropper.
So when the whispers about the human dragon hunters began, I opened my ears. I learned that the Darkfrith Council had secretly sent out ambassadors to the Zaharen drákon, sent three strong young drákon men to the wild crescent of the Carpathians to seek out our hidden cousins—one, two, three.
The sanf inimicus had tracked and killed two of them nearly at once.
Not merely killed.
“They took their hearts,” my father told my mother, his voice so strained with rage I barely heard it through the keyhole of their bedroom door. “Their hearts, Jo. Ripped them beating right out of their chests, like godforsaken wolves.”
My mother made a stifled sound.
“Aye, their hearts and all their papers, their wallets and horses—the bastards took everything. Left only their tribal signets, so we’d know. So we’d know they knew about us.”
Joséphine’s response sounded far more composed. “Will they come here?”
I don’t know why my father lied to my mother; I wouldn’t have. She was very good at detecting lies, at least with me. Perhaps the smell of so much silver dulled her senses.
“No,” he said. “No, pet. We’re far too protected for that.”
It occurred to me later, much later, that he’d been disingenuous about the wolves as well. Tearing out the hearts of their prey sounded much more like something a dragon would do.
I lay in my bed in my cathedral that night, thinking about what Prince Alexandru had said. About how my old tribe believed I was sanf somehow. That I would betray them in the most despicable manner possible.
I had not been happy in my life in Darkfrith, but joining the sanf inimicus would mean striking out at everything I was, not just my kin but my heritage. It was unthinkable.
Free from the restrictions of the shire, I’d learned to embrace what dragon traits I had. I liked the slow, budding ferocity that had trickled—and then gradually rushed—through my blood as I had grown older. I liked hearing stones and metals, and being fleet, and being strong. I liked the looks men sent me now. That my complexion had finally gone to alabaster. That my hair no longer resembled reddish straw. I’d never possess Lia’s cream-and-honey beauty, but I had my own kind of al
lure, something a bit more untamed. Or so I hoped.
I liked Weaving. I liked being able to escape the confines of ordinary time and place, even if only temporarily. The only thing I actively disliked still were the aftereffects from it, the shooting pains that would inevitably wrack me from my head to the tips of my fingers. The bloody noses that would leave me dizzy.
None of that was the fault of the shire, though. Was it?
Besides, I couldn’t imagine why a group of humans who desired to hunt and kill dragons would accept a dragon in their ranks. It made no sense to me.
However …
Against my will, my thoughts returned to the letter I’d written to myself so far ahead, that fifth Letter Over Time. Its tone of understated discontent, which vexed me more than I liked to admit. Twenty-three years from now I seemed morose, confused, yet determined to change something I’d done. I’d spent a long time now trying to guess what that might be. Surely if it were joining the sanf inimicus—I’d never, never do that, but if I did—I would have told me. Something like that, something so spectacularly important, no matter how confused I was, I would have mentioned it.
Dear Honor, please do not become evil and hunt down your own kind.
Ridiculous.
I sighed and adjusted my nightrail so that my shins were uncovered. Even though it was September, the darkness felt too warm and I had already pushed off my covers. After dinner I’d taken the trouble of washing the powder out of my hair, which cooled me slightly, but it was very long and took forever to dry. I’d spread it out around me like a sunburst along the pillows, away from my body.
The old cathedral was long and skinny and yawning open in the middle, but lined with smaller, private chapels both abovestairs and below. I’d claimed an upstairs one that must have once been devoted to some high church official; it was more spacious than the others, more elaborate, with carved, figured stone and rounded windows I’d already torn the boards from. I kept them cracked whenever I could, to allow the outside scents in. It was open and interesting and another aspect of my life that I liked, that I had this clandestine place, essentially all my own.
