by Shana Abe
She’d had years to study her future. Years to seek out the language, the culture of this place. Yet it had happened that finding tutors for what she knew she’d need was not so easy, even in the sophisticated climes of Edinburgh. She’d persuaded the headmistress of Wallence to hire a Bohemian linguist for just three terms. Lia had been his star pupil.
“He says we may rest the night here,” she translated for Zane, who was standing benevolently at her side, a husbandly hand at the small of her back. “He says we are most welcome.”
But interestingly, for all his flowery compliments, the white-bearded man did not seem especially pleased to have them in his home. He lingered back near the open hearth, standing in front of the woman Lia assumed was his wife-nearly blocking her from their sight-as he nodded and spoke and lifted a hand that made the sign of the cross repeatedly as he bowed in their direction.
He had looked only once at Lia, that moment he had answered his door to find them standing on his front steps. After that he kept his gaze pinned to the hardwood floor or else uneasily upon Zane.
Lia tried her most melting smile. “Thank you so much. Your generosity will not be forgotten.”
At that the man glanced at her-a swift, uneasy lift of his eyes before bowing his head again.
“This way,” the man said, and led them to a bedroom. The bedroom, she realized, glancing around at the plain iron bed and pine trunks and unadorned porcelain basin that held water rimmed with ice.
“Sir, we cannot,” she protested, turning to the elder.
“No, no. It is yours for your stay. Please, gentle one”-she thought that was the word he used, although it might have been noblewoman-“you honor us. Accept our humble aid.”
He seemed truly horrified by her protest, his skin blanching, his wife behind him making a small, distressed noise. Lia looked at them both, then back up at Zane, who offered a droll smile.
“How perfectly delightful,” said her false husband, with only the slightest of glances at the cold barren floor.
And it kept like that for days. Every village appeared nearly identical, with clean, whitewashed homes and onion-domed churches, nestled by lakes or frosty streams, and trees climbing mountains to pierce the heavens. At some point they had left Hungary behind for the fertile woodlands of Transylvania, but to Lia the landscape looked the same. The same sheep flocked the hay fields; the same clouds flocked the blue sky. Only the snow changed, vanishing quickly under the relentlessly bright days, leaving the landscape dotted in colors that melted from gold to green to brown.
Every evening they found refuge in one home or another; there was little traffic for inns in these small, nameless places. The thief made his bed at her feet, wrapped in blankets. Lia would stare up at the ceiling as long as she could, fighting sleep, until the dreams would come anyway and drag her down into their depths.
She did not think either one of them was getting much rest.
He was back to riding atop the carriage too.
Lia would wake every morning to find him already up and gone, usually to see about the horses, or the coachman, or the thickness of the mist or the clouds. It was only then, in the privacy of these small, shuttered rooms, that she attempted to Turn to smoke again. It was certainly as much as she dared-smoke might be excused in a house. A full-grown dragon would not.
She was not entirely successful. That first, wonderful time had been so easy. It might have been the passion of the moment, emotions that had swept her along and let it happen. When she tried it now, she found her focus fractured, nothing easy about it. With a great deal of concentration she was able to transform her hair, her right hand and foot. And that was all.
Still, every morning she tried.
Then she would dress. She would greet their hosts alone, accept their bread and good wishes, and carefully attempt to chip away some of the clenched fear that seemed to grip them. However polite she was, however affable, nothing changed.
She left it to Zane to scatter coins upon a table or counter just before they departed. She’d noted how, unless it was absolutely necessary, none of the people here openly touched what she touched.
She was different. She felt different, slower somehow, anxious, as if the mysteries of her body were only waiting behind a locked door and the key dangled just beyond the reach of her fingers. The higher they scaled these mountains, the sharper her blood ran, and all her perceptions with it.
Every day now she felt the flash of the drákon. It was never clear, never stable; she couldn’t seem to pin it to a single place. Sometimes she wondered if the lack of sleep was playing tricks with her mind, but no-it felt real. Usually around twilight, with the sun drained away and the heavens turned translucent, and the first of the stars opening their eyes. It was the time when Draumr sang her strongest, a drag of sweet, melancholy beauty that sank heavy through her bones. If they weren’t already ensconced in some villager’s quarters, she would make a point to have the carriage pull over, to walk the road a moment and breathe in the music along with the thin air until her lungs ached.
That would be when it would happen. The electric warning down her neck, the animal in her waking, searching. If there were clouds she saw nothing else in them; if there was smoke it never openly appeared.
The thief had purchased a hunting knife for her at the last major settlement they had passed, a keenly impressive blade with a slim, leather-wrapped handle that just fit her palm. After much silent debate, she kept it strapped to her garter on her right leg, an ever-chilly discomfort that still made her feel better about what lay ahead.
When Zane inquired, she’d told him what she’d done with it. He’d granted her a sidelong look.
“How do you plan to reach it, if and when the time comes?”
So she’d used the knife’s tip to pick apart the seams of the skirts, until she had a pocket-sized hole for her hand in every dress.
“Good enough,” he’d said when she’d informed him. “A bit drafty, though, I’d suppose.”
She had not answered that. They’d been in bed-well, she was-and his voice, floating up from the floor, had a decidedly sardonic note to it.
She did not retire with it at night. Zane had purchased his own knife along with hers, a much larger one, and she knew that he did keep it close. But perhaps he slept less restlessly than she. Lia would never risk a whetted blade near her face.
On their stops during the day he would show her a few basic moves, the steel in his hand an arc of blinding light, flowing so swift even she couldn’t follow.
Under the watchful gaze of the coachman, Zane would slow his hand and show her again what to do. Otherwise he moved like quicksilver in his demonstrations, thrusting, twisting, whirling, his braid a whip that flew straight out behind him. He seemed born for what he did, a human extension of his weapon; she never knew a mortal man could be so fleet. Her own efforts to copy him were clumsy in comparison. But still, little by little, she was learning.
These were the secret seeds of his life. These were things he had learned as a boy with her mother and honed as a man by himself. There was a good reason he was the terror of London, with a price on his head. There was a good reason her tribe perished, one by one, in the worst of her dreams.
Yet the thief had pointed out to her that a knife would do no good against a cloud of smoke. Lia knew it. As she scanned the skies at twilight she knew it, but still, perversely, the weight of it in her hand reassured her.
Someone was out there, watching her, watching them. Amalia was not as defenseless as she seemed.
Come on, then, she would think, searching the heavens. Come on.
If she had to wait much longer, the dragon inside her would claw her to pieces.
On the evening of their eighth day of highland travel, the fine and decorous leader of the hamlet they had entered slammed the door of his home in their faces.
Amalia stood motionless, blinking at the weathered wood. Zane, standing slightly behind her, pushed a strand of hair from h
is eyes and glanced around the terraced porch.
They were higher than ever in the Carpathian range. The sunset was a blaze of color to the west, gorgeous and unreal, tones so opaque and thick they ran like hot wax down into the horizon. There were pots of wilted herbs drooping along the stairs, and a tabby cat hidden against the turn of the house, staring at them from behind a bush with enormous orange eyes.
Lia lifted her chin. Her hand rose up once more; Zane covered her fist with his fingers before she could connect with the wood, bringing both their arms down together.
“It’s no good,” he said, as kindly as he could. “It’s dusk. We’re outsiders. They won’t let us in.”
She inhaled through her nose, glaring at the closed door.
“Lia,” he said, shifting his touch to her elbow. “My lady wife. Let’s go.”
He drew her with him down the steps, back to the waiting carriage and the gypsy on top eyeing them balefully from over his scarves. The nights were becoming a reflection of true winter, clear and viciously cold; no doubt the man wondered where the hell they would venture next. God knew Zane did.
He’d been expecting something like this for days. He was surprised, in fact, that it hadn’t happened sooner. These were not the bored, leisurely aristocrats that had decorated Hunyadi’s villa, starved for fresh gossip. These were peasants-by the laws here they were actually still serfs. Their lives would be short and harsh and layered with folklore. No one welcomed a stranger’s knock after sunset.
As they walked away, the curtains of a window twitched; a darkened figure pressed against the cloth, watching them go. Zane was about to hand Amalia back up into the coach when a new movement caught his eye.
It was a child. A boy, about seven, hiding behind the rear wheel of the carriage. The boy fidgeted again, his fingers wrapped around the spokes, peering out at them with a pointed, curious face.
With her foot on the step Amalia stilled, then turned. She met the boy’s look.
“Buna seara,” she said, or something that sounded like that. “Numele meu este Lia.”
“Jakab,” replied the child, inching out from behind the wheel. He was dressed in what could at best be called rags, smudged and barefoot, even with the cold. He rattled back a string of sentences to Lia, who smiled and beckoned him closer with the crook of her finger.
Typically, the youth complied. He was thin and pale and looked like nothing so much as the boy Zane himself had once been, hungry and aloof, slightly desperate beneath his outward serenity. Zane regarded him with narrowed eyes.
“He says we should try his parents.” Lia spoke without looking away from the boy. “That they would be glad to see us.”
“No doubt. We’re a pair of ripe pigeons, aren’t we? Foreigners, moneyed.”
“No, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Don’t you?” He sneered at the peasant child, who watched them openly now with an intensely green gaze. “How naive you are.”
“Zane,” said Lia. “I think…I think he might be part…you know. Like me.”
He turned his face to see her.
“It’s a feeling,” she said. “Not very strong, but there. Look at his features.”
“I am. He reminds me of a drowned rat.”
She sighed. “No. Look again.”
“What, then?” he demanded, as the light around them darkened and bled.
“He looks like me,” she said simply. “Don’t you remember? He looks as I did at his age.”
“You’re not like him,” he said at once.
“Don’t pretend. Not for my sake.” She glanced at him askance; her hair was a woven shimmer in the day’s last light, brighter than the heavens. “I remember the past too.”
“Snapdragon-”
“It’s a chance, I know. But I’d rather see it out than drive on tonight in the dark. Wouldn’t you?”
The boy lived in a hut. There could be no other word for it; the roof was straw and the walls were planked wood; the floor was composed of reed mats and swept dirt. There were not actually any farm animals roaming inside, but if the pigs had been gone for less than a month, Zane would have been amazed.
The door was not slammed in their faces here. The door was swung wide, and the people inside pulled them in with plucking, nervous fingers. The hut contained a man and a wife and three more children besides the boy, who darted around them to clutch at his father’s loose shirt.
Lia and the adults exchanged courteous words, the couple bowing and nodding and Amalia smiling in return, her hands a graceful accompaniment to whatever she was saying.
The place smelled of garlic and onions. There was a fire sputtering beside an old inglenook at the end of the chamber; it cast the sole illumination, bright enough to pick out a kitchen hutch, a carved table and chairs, and the wrought-iron cross hanging from a support beam of the wall.
“Look,” murmured Lia in English, in the same gracious voice she’d been using for the peasants. “It’s the mother. Do you see it?”
He didn’t. The woman looked commonplace to him, scratchy blond hair pulled back beneath a kerchief, blue eyes, deep lines around her mouth. She was neither plump nor thin, not tanned nor pale, her gown a wildly colorful mix of embroidered flowers and leaves over felt, a brassy pattern that had appeared on half the frocks of the women they’d encountered in these climes. She was ordinary. He was about to open his mouth to say so when the peasant turned her head, glancing up at her husband-and then he did see. With the light shifting, with her chin lifted…her profile held a shadow of Lia’s own strange and marvelous beauty.
Drákon.
“Yes,” he said, hiding his astonishment.
“It’s not much. But she’s the one.”
“Amalia,” he said, as the couple gestured them forward. He curved his fingers around her arm to prevent her from moving, keeping his face a pleasant mask. “Has it occurred to you that these may be the people who played with fire in our hotel? That we’ve strolled right into their trap?”
“I’m not a ninny.” Her own smile remained fixed. “It’s not them.”
“Because…?”
“Because there’s no power here.” When he wouldn’t release her arm, she deliberately pried his grip from her, following the wife as she urged them toward the table. Zane kept a half pace behind. “The blood is too diluted. It’s like…an echo of a song, rather than the song itself.”
They sat. The wife brought out bowls and spoons; the husband and two of the children left the hut to see to the gypsy. The boy Jakab and a younger sister remained. They huddled together like sleepy kittens on the inglenook, watching Lia with wondering eyes.
The drákon wife served them goulash, piping hot. She sat unsmiling across the table from them both, her hands folded, observing every bite they took.
Lia offered what sounded like a compliment. The woman lifted her brows on a sentence and nodded, then ducked her chin. She said something else almost under her breath; Lia’s spoon paused above her bowl.
“What is it?” Zane said, alert.
“Nothing. I’ve-I’ve just realized I’ve been mistranslating a word.”
“Not here is your poison instead of here is your stew, I hope?”
Her lips lifted in a brief, lovely smile. “No.” She took another bite, chewed and swallowed. “I thought they had been saying noblewoman. To me.”
“And?”
“It’s not noblewoman. It’s noble one.”
He fished a piece of potato from the bottom of his bowl. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not sure.” Her lashes were lowered; she kept her gaze on her food. “But I imagine it means that these people-that all the people we have encountered in these villages so far-know what I am.”
Wonderful.
“This just keeps getting better and better,” he said.
“Yes.” She blew delicately at the goulash in her spoon. “And have you noticed there are no other rooms here, and no beds?”
&nbs
p; They spent the night together on a pallet on the dirt floor, Zane with his arms firmly around her beneath their blankets, his senses humming, exhausting the hours by hovering between the brink of sleep and hard-awake. Despite Lia’s assertion that these were not the people hunting her, he was taking no chances.
The peasant family slumbered around them. Even the Roma had bedded down by the front door.
No one snored. Perhaps no one slept.
He kept her body close for warmth. He inhaled the pleasing scent of roses, her golden head at his shoulder, and let thoughts of sunshine and summer drift through his drowsing mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Little is known of what actually happened between the dragon-princess and the peasant who stole her from the bosom of her kind, all those centuries past. We know he was wily enough to thieve the diamond as well, to ensure he would have Draumr to bind her by his side. We know he was hungry enough for her to risk his own life to keep her, and ruthless enough to destroy her family when they attempted to rescue her from him.
But what did she think, that lovely, lonely girl? Like silent Helen of Troy, we have no records of her thoughts. We know only her actions; we know what mountains men moved for her. The mystery of her soul remains unsolved.
We know she wedded the peasant and bore tainted children by him. We know she remained by his side for many years, raising her family, ensorcelled by the stone.
She had been the prize of her people, cherished and pampered, meant for a royal future. He was naught but a child of the dirt, who did not deserve to even glance into her eyes.
That night she put a blade through his heart, what raced through her mind? When she took the diamond from her husband’s body and vanished into the mountains, did she regret her story? Did she fret for her children, left alone and vulnerable to the mercies of humankind? Was it difficult to step into the void of that abandoned copper tunnel? Did she ever hesitate to take her own life?
Perhaps she was merely relieved to have her nightmare ended. Perhaps she focused only on breaking the spell that had enslaved her.
