by Shana Abe
Something within him shifted. He felt queer, almost dizzy; the very world seemed to tilt to a slow, molasses stop, everything suspended. Dust motes. Voices. His heartbeat. Only Lia moved. She took a long, deep breath, her chest lifting, her lips parted, and he thought, sinking, Oh, God.
He wanted her. Not somewhat, not in passing. He wanted her deeply, and he wanted her now. Here. He wanted to touch her hair, and taste her skin, and breathe in the scent of smoke and roses he knew would rise from the soft sweet corners of her. He wanted to push his hands under the coat and feel the shape of her waist, and the weight of her breasts, and every creamy inch of her. He wanted to bite her lips and pin her arms and be inside her, and the hot, eager lust that scorched through him all at once was so strong, so overwhelming, that Zane did the only thing he could do to keep himself standing where he was, dripping ale from the tankards.
He closed his eyes and thought of her parents, and of what would happen if they knew.
He had seen what the drákon did to their own kind when they broke the tribal laws. He’d seen the place where they buried their forsaken; Rue had shown him one winter night when he’d been younger and much more reckless: the ominously bumpy field, the blackened earth.
This is where our outlaws lie, she’d told him, her face hollowed by moonlight. This is where their bones are cast after the burning.
The drákon lived by rules coiled within rules. Their society was ancient, feudal, and he had no illusions about his own place within that order.
He was suffered to live because of the marchioness. He was alive today, in this dank foreign tavern, because he was useful, and that was all.
You keep a great secret. You hold fates in your hands. She’d touched his arm then, lightly, deliberately. You know our laws. Do not forget this place.
And he never had.
The barkeep stumped past him carrying a platter of bread and butter and a thick steak of cold ham, all of which he set gently before Amalia. She looked up at the man and smiled.
“Köszönöm.”
“Persze.”
Zane felt his heart squeeze back to life. He joined her at the table.
The keep had brought knives and napkins too. He arranged them with ridiculous precision upon the battered wood, all the while stealing glances at Lia-her tousled hair, the chemise, that dreamy distraction-until he happened to catch Zane’s eye.
Zane watched him blanch and back away.
He lowered his gaze, thinking of the dead and charred bones and the face of Lia’s mother on that long-ago night, the only warning she’d ever offered him.
Do not forget.
“So,” he said briskly, and lifted his tankard. “Who would want to kill us?”
Amalia’s head swiveled around as he took a heavy draft. It was sour and cold and stung all the way down to his stomach.
“Kill us?” she echoed.
“You were there, child.”
She blinked at him, at last awaking.
“I’d say it was grain alcohol poured in the hall, perhaps oil. Something like that, fortified or very pure, that burns hot. Anything diluted like cider or beer would burn too slowly. Saltpeter is swifter but too unreliable. Still, it wouldn’t have taken much to bring down that claptrap of a tinderbox. But you tell me, m’lady. What was it?”
“Alcohol,” she said, after a moment. “Not oil. It smelled distilled, but almost sweet. Definitely alcohol.”
He nodded. The color began to return to her cheeks; it was a little like witnessing marble flush to life. He blew a breath through his teeth and looked away.
The tavern was filling quickly, the men standing outside filtering back in, other guests from the hotel, rumpled and stunned, drifting toward the last of the empty tables. Conversation echoed off the walls; he didn’t need to speak the language to understand it. Everyone was talking about the fire, the sudden and devastating destruction.
Except for Lia, who was frowning down at her ale.
“Have you any enemies?” Zane asked.
He’d meant it more to shock her, to bring her back to this place and moment-he needed her thinking, not lost and beguiling in her daze-but she looked so instantly guilty his senses prickled.
Damn. He knew better than to ignore that sensation. He hadn’t gotten where he was by fighting his instincts.
“What, from boarding school?” She was shaking her head. “No one who would follow me here. Of course not.”
“Excellent,” he said, pretending to focus on his drink. “We may rule out young ladies desiring vengeance over borrowed hair ribbons or such.”
Her cheeks grew more flushed. “Oh, most amusing. It’s far more likely someone is attempting to murder you, my lord thief. I imagine you have enemies aplenty.”
“True. For some reason I do tend to rub certain people the wrong way.”
“People from whom you steal.”
“My, how proper,” he marveled, pausing over his tankard. “You’ve gotten your tuition’s worth in grammar lessons, haven’t you?”
She huffed and looked away from him, taking up the loaf of crusty brown bread, ripping it in two. She dropped both halves without bothering to eat either. He watched her, her fingers toying with the soft innards, her brow puckered. She was scattering crumbs all over her gown.
He took his share before she ruined it, reaching for the butter. It had been a long, long while since he’d allowed himself butter, but under the circumstances, he really thought he’d earned it.
He felt her gaze as he worked. She didn’t speak again until he’d finished the entire half loaf.
“It might have had nothing to do with us. It might have been about someone else entirely. Or-it might have been an accident. Fires happen all the time.”
He didn’t answer. Her fingers destroyed more of the bread.
“Do you truly think it was meant for us? To kill us?”
“Yes,” he said.
“But why fire? Why not-shoot us, or poison us, or run us down on the road?”
“I don’t know.”
“But-”
“Since we have entered this establishment, no one has shadowed us. No one has us under surveillance, save the farmers near the hearth, and I imagine that has more to do with your attire than anything else. The ale came from a common cask; the bread from the back, so I suppose there is a risk there, but as I’ve had my half and still feel rather hungry, we may assume it’s not been tampered with. The barkeep appears to have developed something of a tendresse for you, but that’s only to be expected.” She opened her mouth; he went on more quickly. “Whomever-whoever started that fire, they’re not here now. We have a brick wall with no windows or doors at our backs and the entire room in plain view. The roof is tile, the floor is stone. This place, at least, will not burn easily. So eat your breakfast. No one eludes their enemy on an empty stomach, and it looks like, Lady Amalia, it is going to be a very long-”journey, he almost said, but finished with “day.”
Her gaze had flown to the straw-haired keep behind the bar, his shoulders hunched, wiping the counter with a rag in endless, determined circles. Zane watched her watching him, then leaned across the table and lowered his voice.
“Haven’t you noticed? It’s the good portion of the ham. No bone.” He speared the meat with his knife. “Bon appétit, fair wife.”
But he did not believe they were to be let loose so easily.
He made good use of the barkeeper’s moon-eyed infatuation, convincing the man Lia required the use of the private back room and paying heftily for the privilege.
Zane prowled through the chamber first, learning it-a cracked window, creaking floors, no fireplace, no other exits-then ushered her inside.
“Dress, and try to rest awhile,” he said. “Bolt the door. Don’t open it for anyone but me. Should anyone else attempt to enter, feel free to shoot them.”
“What?”
“The pistol’s in the valise. Do load it first.”
“Where will you be?”
The lower level of the hotel was still swarming with people, most of them weary, robe-clad guests trampling soot through pools of spilled water. The scent of carbon and singed cloth was much stronger here; he held his handkerchief to his nose to hide his face and pushed his way through the people, slowly ascending the first flight of stairs.
The second flight was blocked entirely by a threesome of footmen, sans wigs, who stood with their arms resolutely folded behind a thin, bearded man who was attempting to explain, Zane assumed, why no one could pass. The argument echoed all the way back to the lobby. The dowagers of the pearls were becoming especially riled.
Gentry. Never thinking of the smaller ways to do things.
He skirted the edges of the unhappy mob and slipped down a nearly empty corridor, searching until he found the door he knew would be somewhere nearby: small, plain, and locked. The servants’ stairwell.
He was not followed. No one saw him go in. No one saw him as he shut the door softly behind him, relocked it, and moved noiselessly up the cramped stairs.
Even the best of criminals could leave behind clues. It was a lesson Zane had learned early on in his years. A man too confident, too greedy, or simply too lazy was a man who made mistakes.
Mistakes could lead to Newgate, or a hangman’s noose. Mistakes could lead to a name.
The top level of the hotel was demolished. It was open air and sunlight, and warm blackened beams that crumbled beneath his touch. He didn’t trust the charred floor of what used to be the hallway; the wood was thin and splintered. By balancing his weight he was able to make his way nearly to where his room used to be, where he saw something odd. Something long and round, black and yet gleaming.
It was a bottle, the only thing glaringly out of place.
He crept closer. He hung by his hands from the empty doorways, swinging like a monkey from beam to beam. He managed to get just opposite the bottle, but there was a long, toothsome hole gaping in the floor between them.
Zane stretched. He was tall and purposefully limber; he leaned out as far as he could and with the tip of his finger managed to hook the bottle into a roll, catching it just as it was tumbling to the level below.
He swung back upright. He lifted the bottle to the light.
There had been a label once, but it had burned away. He didn’t need to read it, though. Zane recognized the bottle’s shape, the particular red cinnamon shade of the glass beneath the soot, the tapered neck and stoppered mouth. It had once held a very fine Spanish sherry.
His sherry.
Which had been secure in his trunk, locked in his room.
Zane glanced around him. The trunk was gone, the door and bed and curtains were gone. The only other recognizable thing left from his room was the graceful bow of the window, the sash still set where he had fixed it last night, trying to rid the dust from the air.
Everything else was charcoal.
Anyone sleeping too soundly this morning, he considered, would have been too.
Lia, he thought, and turned to make his way back to her.
He had, of course, saved the valise because it had all the money in it. Lia should not have been surprised by that; she had no reason to feel annoyed or disappointed-but she did feel those things, all of them, even as the thief’s brows arched and he murmured, “Yes, you’re most welcome. Shall we discover a place to purchase some new clothing?”
But there were no dressmakers to be found, not even in the controlled chaos of the city square. By the time he had returned to the tavern, she’d washed the blood from her hands and knees and twisted back her hair into a loose, falling knot. But she was forced to walk the sidewalks of Jászberény with both hands lifting the skirts of her gown; without her hoops, the yards of extra fabric dragged like a wedding train over the ground.
They paused together near the hotel entrance, watching people sleepwalk in and out, as if the fire had hollowed their will as well as the building.
She knew this is where Zane had gone. He’d come back to her with soot on his breeches and hands.
Lia tipped her head to see where their rooms used to be, now simply windows framing sky.
The day was brightening into cerulean. There was no hint of clouds; even the last, thin smoke from the embers vanished swiftly into swirls.
And there was no other drákon. Not the faintest shiver above or below, in any shape or form-nothing at all since that instant in the cold violet dawn. Perhaps she’d imagined it. She was tired, she was frayed. Perhaps it had been simply her nerves…
Except for the glimpse of those eyes. She would not have imagined that.
“Did you dream of this?” Zane asked, surveying the ruins beside her.
“No,” she admitted.
“What was in your trunks?”
“Clothing. Cosmetics. My scarlet silk,” she realized, suddenly mournful.
“Any weapons?”
She turned her head to regard him. He met her look through lashes dark as the soot, then shrugged.
“Well, I’ve lost my best dirk. It will be easier to replace a few frocks than that.”
It wasn’t. The city square held banks and grocers and even a tobacco shop, but to find a seamstress they had to pull their coachman away from a dicing game in the stables. If the ostlers had been part of the turmoil of the morning, they had settled back into prosaic routine now. There was a group of about ten of them squatting in a circle in the dirt, quarreling over a pile of sticks, when Zane approached.
Lia lingered by the eaves of the entrance, as far from the animals as she could manage. She watched as Zane spoke with his hands to the gypsy, who listened and chewed on a hay straw and finally nodded.
“Zot,” said the man, and left to harness the horses.
The dressmaker’s shop fronted one of the smaller, crooked streets that made up the mass of the town, half up a hill that climbed and climbed. Lia followed Zane inside gingerly; the street was shadowed and the shop ill-lit. All she could see of it was rolls of cloth stacked against the window and a single branch of candles burning in the back.
It was unlike any place she’d seen. Not only were there bolts of bright cotton and woolens, there were strands of dried red peppers hanging from the walls, and scrolled looking glasses, and flower-glazed crockery dotting nearly every shelf. Broomsticks tied with bows rested in all four corners, and a single gown lay haphazard upon a counter, its lemon-yellow skirts embroidered with songbirds and ivy, draping down to the floor.
Beside the dress was a bowl of loose stones. She moved toward it through the gloom, following the faint, small music that tingled down her spine. The shop faded, the scent of peppers and smoke and spice faded; she dipped her fingers into their hard sparkling midst, stirring up psalms and canticles with just her touch.
Pleasure-instant, zinging. She closed her eyes. In the shadows of her mind Draumr picked up the melody, turned it sweeter and richer and bolder through her blood, made it a summons she couldn’t much longer refuse…
Distantly she heard Zane speaking, a woman responding…and a slighter sound right before her. Breathing. Lia glanced up. A shopgirl with china-blue eyes was staring at her from behind the counter, a cushion of pins and thread clutched in both hands.
Lia lifted her fingers from the bowl and smiled. The child smiled back, then glanced quickly at the couturière standing with Zane.
“This is your wife?” the woman was saying, in heavily accented French. “But of course-how sad, the hotel. Yes, we have heard. Come, Madame. Please come! Here we will find you something beautiful.”
And so she was draped with the woolens, colors she would never normally choose simply because they did not exist back in pale, pastel-washed England: the fiery reddish-orange of poppies, wild peacock blues, buttercup, emerald. In her too-big gown, Lia held swatches and examined weaves and pretended not to hear the soft, steady chanting of the stones in the bowl.
“No,” said Zane, from where he lounged by the counter. “We w
on’t tarry here. We need something already completed.”
The seamstress protested very loudly, but Zane was firm: they were leaving today. Whatever the woman had on hand would have to do.
“Impossible,” announced the couturière in her tortured French. “What I have, she is commissioned.”
“Of course.” He sighed. “How very regrettable.”
The thief bent his head and examined his left hand. He closed his fingers, opened them, and like magic a row of gold coins appeared, gleaming against his palm. The girl in the corner openly gasped.
Lia ended up with the lemon gown and three others-red, green, blue, as bright and primitive as the sunrise-as well as heavy stockings and stays and silk ribbons that ran like river water through her fingers.
“From Paris,” said the woman, and showed a gap-toothed grin.
Lia left Zane to haggle over the payment, inching once more toward the bowl of jumbled stones.
“Do you like them?” The couturière was beaming with pleasure; no doubt she’d made a handsome profit on her country gowns. “A young lady so lovely, of course you do.” The woman gave her a wink and picked up a pale, glinting shard, placing it carefully in Lia’s hand.
“Diamond! Very rare.” She addressed Zane from over her shoulder. “For your bride, good sir, I’ll make you a fine price.”
The thief pushed off the counter. He filled the shop in the way a lazing lion would fill a formal drawing room: his surcoat and breeches and shirt were drab amid the frolicking colors; he’d lost the leather tie to his hair, so it draped his shoulders in an uncivilized mane. He moved with something darker than poise, something that suggested nighttime, and silence, and feral-eyed vigilance.
His hand lifted. He drew his center finger slowly down the inside of Lia’s wrist to the center of her palm, to the stone she held, a shocking soft touch that sent tremors through her arm.
