The Smoke Thief d-1

by Shana Abe

  “No.” “Yes, ma'am.”

  Rue tipped her head and curtsied a third time, sinking so deep as to touch her knee to the floor.

  “Very pretty,” observed Christoff under his breath, but she did not glance up at him again.

  ______

  He couldn't help but watch her leave the chamber. He tried not to gape at her; he had been trying the entire time not to gape, but the runner, Clarissa Hawthorne, drew his gaze like the only dab of color in a bleakly silvered day, and Nick Beaton found himself drifting back to her every time his attention wandered. Which was too often.

  There was something about her, some ineffable quality beyond the soft glint of her lower lip, or the single chocolate lock of hair that escaped her coiffure to her shoulder, something even in the way she cupped her hands in her lap, her wrists bent, feminine and slight. When she spoke . . . when the light hit her just so, when the wind sighed and she glanced up at him, through him, with those incredible brown eyes . . .

  He'd lost minutes. He'd had to sort through the echoes of words in his mind to scrawl them out on paper.

  Nicholas was a dutiful man. He'd been scribe for the council for these three years, the same assignment his father had held before him, and his father's father, and he had never taken his office lightly. Yet in his distraction his thumb had smudged the final sentence of the official meeting: the scriptede invote had a tail to it now, drawn long and plumy across the page. He frowned at his thumb, rubbing the black smear by his nail until it faded against the whorls of his skin.

  He had ceased scribing after that. By their laws, the Alpha could quash a vote but not call for one, and all the men knew it—even if the girl did not.

  But she was gone now. Nick rose and found his ink pot, salvaging what was left inside of the precious liquid. He took off his spectacles, wiped them clean on the sleeve of his shirt, sharpened and dipped his quill, blotted, and glanced up at the marquess.

  Christoff Langford was standing with his arms crossed, watching the footmen stationed beyond the doors swing them gradually closed. The runner's footsteps down the hallway were soft, nearly silent, dimming quickly into the rhythm of the storm. It was much easier to follow the guards' staccato clip.

  But they would wait, all of them, until they were certain she could not overhear.

  The marquess began to shrug out of his old-fashioned coat, draping it across the chair where Clarissa had sat.

  “Well?” said Grady.

  Langford took the seat, lounging back with informal ease. “A fortnight will motivate her, I imagine.”

  “You actually believe you can control her in London?”

  “She won't run again. She won't think she has reason to.” He lifted a sleeve of the coat crushed behind him, examined the tracery of thread that made the cuff glitter. “Whatever else happens, she'll be working to find Herte . It's what you wanted.”

  “And at the end of your fortnight, my lord? She recovers the diamond—or simply produces it—we capture this fantastical other runner. . . .” Grady shook his head. “Your ‘compromise' may have tempered her for now. But you know we'll never leave her there.”

  Lord Langford sent him a half-lidded look that would have made Nick's blood run cold, but Councilman Grady only stiffened in his chair.

  “At the end of the fortnight, sir, with or without the runneror the diamond, Rue Hawthorne will be returning to Darkfrith, as my bride.” Langford's fingers made a short, hard tattoo against the arm of the chair; he slanted his look to Nick. “Feel free to write that down.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She wanted to go to the orchard cottage. He'd received the request by one of the guards while still trapped in the council's meeting. He thought briefly of refusing her, but she'd left in a fair humor and he didn't want to risk souring what was left of his plans. Kit granted her wish, sent along two extra men and the polite warning that he'd join her very soon.

  Yet soon wasn't enough. The council jabbered on with their notes and ponderous motions as he stared out the windows and watched her stride through the rain across the rear courtyard and then the lawn: no cape, no cap or shawl, just her hair unraveling and his mother's white wedding dress, its train of ruffles flattening the grass behind her. She was flanked by four men. Kit counted nine more at her periphery, drifting along as if she towed them all with long, relentless ropes.

  Just before she vanished from his view, someone new detached from the woods, a woman in a red hooded cloak. He recognized her gait before she reached the first guard, a deliberate saunter that used to fill him with an almost unbearable hotness; Kit had never before realized how practiced it was, Melanie's walk, how coy and certain, just like her glances.

  She'd waited for years. She'd waited and waited, even after he told her not to, even after he had made it clear to her—painfully clear—that they were not going to wed.

  It had enraged his father. Melanie had been indisputably the Alpha female, and the fact of their betrothal was always widely assumed. But he'd never loved her. He'd never really even liked her, beyond the welcome relief her body offered his. Even still, Kit hadn't fully known why he kept refusing her. He only knew that it sent his father into apoplexy and made Melanie's claws doubly sharp.

  She'd surrendered three years ago, well after his father had died, and married the silversmith's son. She must have finally realized that without the old marquess, Kit would never be coerced.

  Now he knew why he'd denied her. Now he knew.

  Rue stopped and turned, apparently waiting for Mel to catch up. They stood facing each other in the last tamed space before the meadows, one fair, one beautiful dark. He leaned forward with a new intensity. He couldn't imagine what they had to say to each other, but he knew Mel well enough. If she went to all the trouble of lying in wait, it wouldn't be for naught. If she tried to hurt Rue, if she harmed her in any way—

  The rain shifted, pelting the glass. He was reaching for the lever to raise the sash when, without warning, Rue's arm slashed up. She had Melanie by the throat, stepping forward and actually lifting the other woman from the grass with one hand. He caught a flash of preternatural gold eyes—another Gift; only a very few of the drákon displayed such an ability—and Melanie had clutched both hands against Rue's, struggling, kicking her feet in a wild froth of cloak and skirts.

  None of the men intervened. Rue dropped Mel to the wet ground and walked away from her, rounding the corner of the green without looking back.

  Kit released the lever. A ritual challenge, an undeniable victory; within hours everyone in the shire would know that Rue Hawthorne was, without question, the new Alpha. All in all, he decided, he couldn't have arranged it better himself.

  There were cobwebs in the eaves. They shouldn't have bothered her as much as they did, but Rue kept glancing up to find more of them, tattered specters draped in the corners of her childhood home, dangling from doorways, floating above curtains, stretched like open fingers between the old geranium pot on the kitchen sill and a small china figurine of a lamb, its tail in the air.

  The tin oval was just where she had last seen it, hanging on the wall by its ribbon, feathered with dust, spotted with age.

  Rue did not mind the dust; according to Quentin, one of her guards, the cottage had been vacant since Antonia died. But the empty cobwebs . . .

  Even the spiders were gone. Only ghosts lingered here.

  She turned away from the tin mirror; she didn't want to see herself in it.

  Someone had taken away the needlepoint chairs, but the walnut floor, the gingham valances, even the quilts on the beds—all that was the same, just the same as the day she had left.

  How well her heart knew this place. It hadn't been all misery and persecution, certainly not here in her mother's house. Within these plain, strong walls she had known love, the scent of vanilla pudding on the stove, games of draughts, vases of wildflowers, larksong, laughter, hugs. . . .

  After her official death, Clarissa Rue had crept back twice for A
ntonia. When the pain and the confusion of that birthday morning had cleared from her mind, when she had found her feet and a single cramped room in a boardinghouse in Wapping, she had returned to Darkfrith to beg her mother to come to London. But Antonia was ever wise; after the joy of their reunion she ultimately refused to go, knowing they could not both safely vanish from the tribe. Rue had spent the night arguing with her about it, lying with her on the bed, their heads together on the pillows, until her voice went hoarse and the sky grew striped with dawn. Antonia never wavered. They both wept their good-byes.

  A half year later, Rue tried again. But by then the consumption had won. All she could find of her mother was a simple marker in the shire's cemetery, farther down the hill than most, the last stone in a row that ended with Antonia, Rue's grandfather, her grandmother. She'd left gentians on the three graves.

  Water was making a slow trickle through a cracked pane in her old bedroom window, slinking down the glass to form a pool on the sill. Rue touched her fingers to the fracture, looking out at the lush, bent grass and rows of storm-drenched trees.

  Quentin and the other three guards remained in the parlor. She'd asked to be alone in here. There was nowhere to go, after all. Even in the orchard she counted six new men looking back at her, hunched against the weather.

  It was a wonder they'd let her out at all. She hoped it was a positive sign.

  The second plank down the hall from her door had a loose joint and a squeak; she heard that, and only that—he was as hushed as the breeze otherwise. She turned her head without looking at him, speaking to the floor.

  “When do we leave for London?”

  The marquess entered the room, bringing with him the darker scent of rain mixed with sandalwood.

  “After supper.”

  She closed her eyes a moment, relief and something more, bittersweet, waking through her.

  “Are you weary?” he asked indifferently. “We could wait a day, if you like.”

  “No.” She wasn't enamored of the thought of climbing back into that carriage for another long ride, but better to get it over with. Better to move on, out of Darkfrith, before any one of them had occasion to change their minds. “After supper is fine,” she said aloud.

  “While the trail is yet hot,” Christoff said, still neutral.

  “Quite.”

  “Was this your room?” He walked forward, his cloak a sinuous flare against the faded quilt and bed hangings.

  “Yes.”

  “It seems pleasant.”

  “It was.”

  He approached the window. The raindrops beading his shoulders began to slink down the ebony folds of the cloak, spattering her skirts.

  But the wedding frock was already ruined. There had never been a road or even a lane to the old cottage, only the broken hint of a dirt path, choked with bindweed and lichen. The storm had rendered the length of it into mud that had sucked at her every step.

  “Rue,” said Christoff, abrupt. “For the herb, or the emotion?”

  “For the flower.”

  “Of course.” His lips turned up. “Late-blooming.” When she didn't respond he touched the cracked pane just as she had, his hand a shadow against the glass. “I wonder if you might satisfy my curiosity on something.”

  “Yes?”

  “What did Melanie say to you, back there on the lawn?”

  She wasn't astonished that he knew; perhaps he'd been watching. Perhaps he only heard of it from the guard. “She inquired if I was still a filthy spy. I, in turn, inquired if she was still a whore. There seemed to be no point in further conversation after that.”

  “So I saw.”

  “Oh.” She lowered her gaze to a pale rose on her skirts, careful threads fashioning a careful pink bloom, a budding of mint-green leaves so pretty and perfect they reminded her of sugar candies.

  “Will you tell me something else?”

  She nodded without lifting her head.

  “Why did you feign your death? Why did you run?”

  Rue turned her eyes to the little pool on the sill, and then to her watchers, stationed amid the trees. The Romans had tilled the soil for apples and chestnuts and pears, but Darkfrith had spent centuries creeping back to herself. Beyond this grove, beyond the men, the formal lines of the orchard tapered into forest, a dense, towering darkness that enclosed the village, alive with streams, rich with mist and bracken and fragrant layers of leaves. For some reason, Rue remembered the forest more clearly than anything else. More clearly even than this house, or the man standing beside her.

  The marquess didn't ask again, only waited with the rain and the sandalwood and quiet all around.

  “Because of you,” she said finally. When he didn't respond she chanced a sidelong glance at him. He was studying her, not shocked, merely quizzical, the planes of his face underlit with storm. She gathered her nerve. “I left because I did not wish to be wed to you.”

  His smile returned. “Good gracious, was I that insufferable?”

  “I . . . fancied myself in love with you.”

  “Ah,” he said, and her gaze slid from his.

  “Asinine, of course. I didn't know you. You didn't know me—you never even noticed me. But I knew what it meant, that I could Turn. And even as a girl, I didn't want you like that.”

  He faced the window again, tracing the zigzag splinter shining in the pane. “Like what?”

  “Forced. Either of us, forced.”

  He let his hand fall, looking out at the trees. Through the veiled light she stole a longer moment of him: the strong profile, the firm lips, his hair very damp, careless strands that clung to his cheekbone with the deeper, honeyed glint of ale.

  “All that effort,” he mused, “merely to avoid me. How gratifying.”

  He did not sound gratified. He sounded sardonic, as though she had told him something so small and unimportant he'd already half-forgotten it. And it hurt, more than she thought it would. “It wasn't only you, Lord Langford. It was this place, these people. This life. I want nothing to do with it.”

  “It's a bit late for that, Rue. Whether you like it or not, we are your blood.”

  “Halfmy blood.”

  “Aye,” agreed the marquess, sober. “Although 'twould seem you've gotten the better half by far. All beauty, none of the beast.”

  She blinked at that, and crossed her arms.

  “How charming! Had you planned that for long?”

  “Only since this morning.” He shrugged, unabashed. “I'll do better in London.”

  “Please, don't bother.”

  “I'm afraid I can't help myself. I'm charming by nature.” And he looked back at her now in utter and wicked innocence, snaring her in a world of sharp, splendid green.

  She lost her breath. She lost the room, and the moment. She thought of telling him more, of how he had been the single star of her girlhood, of how she had watched him steal the hearts of all the other maidens of the shire, giddy geese knocked over like lawn pins with just the flicker of his glance, of how she had waited—and waited—for her own chance to tell himno, meaningyes . . . but that day had never come.

  “I'm sure it's won you all manner of toadeaters,” Rue said instead.

  “It serves a purpose.” Kit jerked his chin at the window. “You seem to have a few toadies of your own.”

  She hesitated. “Those aren't your men?”

  “No, mouse. I believe they're yours.”

  In the trees, in the rain, thedrákon stood motionless, faces she couldn't quite make out, sopped in water, smeared with leaves. There were more of them now, ten—eleven. Only standing. Only staring.

  “Our marriage would protect you,” Christoff said softly.

  Rue drew away from the glass. “I don't believe I care to wait until supper to depart, Lord Langford. I'd rather leave here at once.”

  He made a bow. “Come with me,” was all he said, and in a sweep of black and honey gold left the chamber. She shot another glance out the window, then walked after hi
m.

  He didn't take her to the carriage house. He felt the moment she realized they weren't headed there, the break in her pace that dragged, for a scant second, at his arm under her hand. Yet when he looked at her she held her composure, everything sweet and docile, as if they were enjoying nothing more than a balmy evening stroll around the manor grounds.

  She'd refused his cloak. Rain glistened on her skin, pulled her hair into heavy locks. Her breath formed wisps of frost; she was a goddess washed in cold spring.

  As they walked up the drive, faces began to appear in Chasen's windows, following her, him, the guard. He knew they were watched; they would always be watched here, and he wondered if she had guessed that much as well. Probably.

  London began to seem somewhat more palatable.

  The pair of hounds from the stables loped around the corner of the rose garden. The larger one spotted them, ran panting and grinning across the lawn to leap at Kit with muddy enthusiasm. He shoved it aside, then rubbed its ears; the dog bounced free and danced a circle around them both, smacking them with its tail. With an air of experience, Rue snapped two fingers. The hound responded with another leap, but she caught its front paws with both hands, staggering back a step.

  It gave a joyful yip. In the distance the other dog answered, not coming near.

  “Yours?” she asked as it writhed in her grip, trying to lick her wrists.

  “Somewhat.” He pushed it from her. “Go on! Go home.”

  The hound gave a few more barks, prancing back and forth between them, then hared off again toward its companion, kicking up water and sod.

  “I've never seen dogs at Chasen,” she said, watching them vanish into a hazy coppice of willows.

  “No. There's just the two.”

  They were, in fact, the first. The drákon did not mix well with other animals, in the same way that lions did not mix with lambs. There were wild birds in the trees, and mice tucked away in barns, but that was very nearly all. Darkfrith had no squirrels, no hedgehogs, no foxes or rabbits. No cats or cows or chickens or pigs. An occasional deer braved the woods for the abundant green, flitting through like ghosts before vanishing to safer grounds. The tribe kept horses because they had to, and a single flock of sheep in the hills for appearances—but the sheep had to be herded by the children. They panicked too easily when adults wandered near.