The Dream Thief (38 page)

Draumr
rolled free from Imre’s fingers.
It didn’t roll far; it wasn’t round, only rounded, and the force of the man’s
hand striking the floor sent it off with a small, chinking rattle that was the
only sound Zane heard beyond the prince’s breathing and Lia in his arms,
panting tears upon the floor. It came to rest at the feet of the princess.

She
seemed not to notice the diamond, or anything else. She stood cool and blank
above her husband —but with a sudden sob, her face crumpled into tragedy. She
dropped into a squat, as inelegant as any street waif, and buried her head in
her hands. A choked, high-pitched moan pushed past her palms. The prince lifted
his arm. He touched the hem of her skirts.

She kicked free of him,
scrambling back, and the diamond went rolling again. It bumped into the
overturned table and caught against a cluster of white flowers.

Lia turned her head.

In the space between one
heartbeat and the next, Zane realized what was about to happen. She still lay
beside him, her body cold and nude and unbroken. She did not shift, she did not
tremble, but he felt her intent as surely as if it had been his own. As his
heart reached its next beat, she Turned to smoke.

He was a thief, a rat, an urchin.
He did not think. He did not pause for judgment. He lurched to his feet and
pitched after her.

She should have reached it first.
She was a misted rush that zoomed toward the table, a silky gray cloud that
began to draw into fingers, into a figure, inches from
Draumr,
and he
was none of those things.

Zane gave up his uneven dash. He
lunged chest-first to the floor, skidding with the slippery fur coat into a
banner of light, his good arm outstretched. Black pain roiled up through his
brain, but beneath it, behind it, the icy heft of
Draumr
smacked into
his palm. Lia’s fingers covered his a bare instant too late. They slammed
together against the table, and the pain inside him lit to blind agony.

“No,”
she cried, anguished, and tried
to pry open his hand. She was very strong.

Zane managed a winded gasp.
“Stop. Lia, stop!”

And she did.

When the black suns faded from
his vision, she was seated like a statue over him, one leg tucked under her,
her head lowered and her face hidden. Her hands still covered his.

Something wet struck his wrist.
He crawled up to an elbow, dragging the length of his coat and his useless leg,
and then to his hip. He used the table behind him to support his back.

The double doors to the chamber
opened. Voices rose; a swarm of men began to clip forward. The gauze curtains
beside them twirled gold in their wake.

“Princess,” Zane rasped. The
dragon-girl lifted reddened eyes to his, her cheeks streaked with kohl. “Get
rid of them. Verbally,” he added hastily, as Maricara found her feet.

She gave a command in her foreign
tongue. A few of the men pressed on and she sharpened her tone, lifting an arm
to point at the door.

The body of the prince was half
obscured by the table. If any of the servants could see it, they did not linger
to ask questions. The men bowed and backed away. Maricara raised her voice to
add something else, and the doors closed quietly behind them.

Then the girl only stood quiescent,
a puppet awaiting the next pull of her strings. Lia had not yet moved; her head
was still bent and her arms wrapped around her shin. Her skin peeked cream
beneath the burnished curtain of her hair.

Zane
groaned. He tried to slow his skipping heart, waiting until he could breathe
normally again before opening his hand to examine the blue diamond. He
was
a peasant, unskilled with mystical things, but God’s truth—he felt the power he
cradled, felt its buzz and shine and the promise of all things bright and dark.

He could have anything. Sixty
thousand pounds, ultimate power—whatever he wanted, whatever the
drákon
of Darkfrith could give him. Or steal for him. He could be the greatest thief
of all time; he could be richer than the king—

Softly, almost imperceptively,
Lia gave the smallest of sighs.

Zane glanced at her, then lifted
the diamond closer.
Draumr
dazzled his eyes like a cold full moon, like
a secret drop of unholy sky.

The moisture on his wrist had
been a tear. He rubbed it away absently on his thigh, and as if the scratch of
the fabric had reminded him of it, the pain from his broken leg washed up into
a great greasy knot inside his throat.

“Shit,” he muttered, squeezing
his eyes closed again. “Shit. Lia. Maricara. Find anything flammable and put it
in a pile at my feet.”

He heard them moving, Amalia’s
soft treading and the swifter steps of the princess, and when he could see
again there was a colorful mound of skirts and table linens and damp jasmine
beyond his boots.

“Not the dress,” he said, and Lia
lifted it out, shedding flowers.

He dragged himself straighter.
“Is there any wine left in the bottle?”

“Yes.” Maricara brought it to
him. He took a generous swig, and then another, and then handed it back to her.
“Pour the rest on that pile.”

It was a Bordeaux, a damned good
one. It stained the white holland and stone in a wave of deep maroon.

“Snapdragon.” She was standing at
his side. All he could see was her leg and hip and the glinting fall of her
hair, curving gently above the pretty arch of her buttocks. He shifted on his
good hand, dragging his body sideways to get out of the way. “Set it afire.”

She walked to the pile. She
lifted her hand to her mouth as if to blow a kiss, but instead, a small,
perfect flame hit the air, falling sideways to catch at the edge of a napkin.
The fire began to crawl along the cloth.

“Right.” Zane gritted his teeth
and dragged himself forward again, trailing blood. He waited until the flames
were taller, until the flower stems curled and the smoke lifted black up to the
high, painted ceiling, and then he tossed
Draumr
in.

For an infinity, she did nothing.
Lia really couldn’t quite comprehend it:
Draumr
was in the fire. Zane
had pitched the diamond—his fortune and her future—into the fire.

It landed amid the folds of the
tablecloth, glowing like a blue heart to all the dancing orange and gold. Its
song lifted dulcet and pure, still beckoning. The smell of scorched linen
singed her nose.

She sank to her knees. From a
music-filled distance, she saw her hand reach out.

“Don’t.” Zane shoved back her
arm. “What’s the matter with you? I thought this is what you’d want.”

“You
can’t burn it away,” said the princess from behind them, her voice muffled.
“It’s a diamond, not a piece of coal.”

“I’m
well aware of that.”

The linen began to crumble apart.
The diamond kept its blue glow.

“Lia.” He waited until she
glanced back at him, her face pale, distracted. “I need you to remove my boot.
The right one. Don’t touch the left.”

She came to life. She knelt
before him and ran her hands down his left leg, finding the break in his femur,
his swelling skin. Her fingers were light as butterflies, and misery throbbed
with her every stroke.

“I did this. I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” he snarled, his head
banging sharp against the table. “But, the
boot.
”

“Use this.” Maricara handed him
an elaborately decorated pump, the buckle made of lapis and heavy gold. “It’s
new. There’s a steel rod down the center of the heel.”

He’d hurled
Draumr
against
a glass lantern, and it hadn’t suffered so much as a nick. But even diamonds
had fractures. All it took, he knew, was the proper application of stress and
force. He’d watched stolen gems the size of hailstones cut into tiny pears and
rounds by the best hands in the business. He’d seen grown men weep from an
unlucky fracture in a priceless ruby or sapphire; even the most skilled of
jewelers couldn’t predict a perfect facet.

Clearly, smashing something to
bits only took a bit of willpower. Zane used a spoon to roll the diamond from
the ashes. He lifted up the pump and brought the heel down hard on the heated
stone. The impact jarred him all the way up his spine. The wound in his other
shoulder broke open.

Nothing else happened. Lia made a
low moan.

He hit it again. Three times.

On his fourth strike, the heel
broke off the pump, and
Draumr
skittled back into the flames.

He swore under his breath. He
reached out, reckless, and snatched up the hot diamond, throwing it as hard as
he could against the wall.

It burst into splinters, a shower
of pale blue shards and light falling back to the floor. Both women cried out.

Zane looked at Lia, his fingers
singed. She stared back at him with her hands over her mouth.

He said, “I’d make a ring of them
for you, if I thought you’d have me.”

And then, most unfortunately, he
passed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A
full day spun by.

Lia
kept watch over Zane in a wing chair beside the bed, listening to the unnatural
calm that had taken hold of the castle with the dawn, keeping her senses bright
for any hint of coming trouble. She ate little, and slept even less. But so
far, they had been left alone.

She sat in the slow-shifting
light and passed the time by deliberately considering which had been worse:
watching the prince’s physician dig out the lump of lead from Zane’s shoulder
yesterday, or having to help the man set the broken bone.

Zane had been awake for the
bullet, his eyes fixed on hers, his skin very gray, paler than the sheets of
the bed. But his lips kept a grim, narrow smile. He did not look away from her
face. She’d held his hand and tried not to speak, because she wasn’t sure what
might come out. Apologies, babbling love talk and nonsense. She didn’t want to
break down and weep in front of the physician.

Sunlight crawled along the woven
colors in the rug. She decided that setting the leg had been worse. Lia
wouldn’t trust the footmen to handle him—she didn’t trust the physician either,
but couldn’t see a way around that—and so she had held his ankle and Maricara
his shoulders, and the physician placed his hands on Zane’s thigh and told them
how to pull.

Zane’s eyes had rolled back in
his head; his body fell slack. She’d been biting her lip with the effort not to
cry out and was glad he couldn’t see it.

And that day had finally passed.

The death of the prince had
rocked the castle society to its foundations. There had been true panic at
first, the serfs converging and a rumble of ugly unrest rising through the
halls. Lia had felt it, Zane had felt it. Last night, Others with rush-lights
and torches had assembled outside her windows in the courtyard below, and Lia
had only stood at the glass in her blood-spattered skirts, watching the people,
wondering if a dragon breathing fire in their midst would force them to
retreat.

But then had come the princess.
Maricara, young, glassy-eyed, who had done nothing less than save Lia and Zane
and perhaps all the tribe of Darkfrith as well. Maricara strode out alone into
the night, into the thick of those torches, and raised her treble voice and
commanded obedience.