The Dream Thief (9 page)

“Alas. No lessons offered on
modesty, I suppose.”

She made a motion with her hand.
“I only meant—that is—” A sigh escaped her; she swiveled in the chair to see
him. “I’m well aware of my face. It’s part of what happens to our kind. You
were quite right.” She swallowed. “We are monsters. But…I could be the monster
who helps you. At least in this.”

His eyes lifted to hers. They
gazed at each other as the light behind him warmed to pearl. After a moment he
set the claret back upon the
secrétaire
with a snap, untouched, and
moved to the four-poster, tugging at his jabot until it fell into folds.

“Where are you staying?” he
asked, his eyes averted again.

She only watched him. He shrugged
out of the waistcoat, tossing it over a chair. The lawn of his shirt stretched
taut over his shoulders as he moved; his braid ended in a silken fan down his
back. He perched upon the edge of the bed and kicked off his fine buckled
shoes, one at a time.

“Actually…”

“Not a chance, my heart.”

Lia rose from the desk with as
much dignity as she could muster. “I am posing as your wife. It would be most
bourgeois
to share the same room with you.” She swept to the bed for her things and then
to the connecting door, oak-framed, modest amid all the glory of the rest of
the chamber. The key was at the very bottom of her reticule.

“Lia,” Zane said softly, a
perfect echo of her dreams. She glanced back. He had stretched out atop the
covers, propped against the pillows, his fingers laced over the flat of his
stomach and his ankles crossed. With his plait and the loosened shirt, he looked
like nothing so much as a corsair, tanned and rough and perilously unknown. She
was granted half a smile.

“How
did
you know which
hotel I’d be in?”

“King’s View is by far the best
in the city. It wasn’t hard to conjecture.”

“And the room?” he asked, softer
still.

“I paid the clerk to put you
here,” she lied. “Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t figure that out.”

His smile never changed. Lia
busied herself with unlocking the door.

“Think twice about refusing my
help,” she said, to cover his silence. “No matter what else you think of me, I
do know how to get to the diamond. Since I’m not returning to Darkfrith without
it, you need to consider the very real possibility that I will reach it before
you do. Do you truly think you’ll get any reward from my people without handing
them
Draumr
yourself?”

She closed the door quickly
behind her, before he could ask her anything else.

Then she locked it again.

She’d
already ensured that he wouldn’t have a key.

“Lia.”

“Yes?”

“Come to me.”

“Yes, Zane.” His arms around her.
His lips upon her cheek. “Tell me of tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow the Duchess of Monfield
will wear a brooch of pink rubies shaped as a rose on her kerchief. She’ll be
alone in her garden picking lavender at ten.”

“Very tempting. But perhaps we
might leave the duchess be for the moment. I want to know, my heart, about your
kin.”

“They’re
in the hills. They’re making plans.”

“What
plans?”

“Plans to kill you. Plans to
steal me. They’ll amass three days hence. It will be raining. No one will
glimpse them in the sky.”

His breath drew into a sigh. She
shifted in his arms; the diamond on the cord around his neck was a dark endless
poem, a song that never ceased. His voice was an echo of it, low and unbearably
sweet. “What to do,” he murmured. “What to do…”

“Use
Draumr,
” Lia said to him.
“They’ll hunt two by two. Set them to fight one another when they come. The
papers will report it as footpads. No one need know the truth.”

“Hmmm.” She felt his lips again,
a caress, slow and silken along her throat. “Clever girl. You’ re full of plans
yourself, aren’t you?”

“I am full of you,” she replied
truthfully, and was rewarded with the pleasure of his kiss upon her mouth.

She came awake in a square of
sunlight, hard and bright against her lids. For a moment Lia only blinked
against it, her arms flung out, her fingers clenched in linen and the puffy
down of the coverlet. The air smelled of feathers and river; she inhaled again and
remembered where she was. And why.

She sat up in the bed, warm and
tired and gritty-eyed, not even noticing the man seated by the door until he
leaned forward in his chair, a slim metal blade twirling expertly between two
fingers.

“Not even a challenge,” Zane
announced, dropping the picklock back into the pocket of his vest. “Still,
don’t do that again.” He stood, looking down at her with a particularly empty
expression. His hair was tied back; the buttons on his cuffs shone pewter in
the morning sun. “I don’t appreciate locked doors. And I won’t wait downstairs
longer than twenty minutes.”

Lia was ready in fifteen.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
ges ago, fairy-tale years ago, it
was said that the Gifts of the
drákon
pulsed through the veins of every
single member of the tribe, male and female alike. As certain as the phases of
the moon, the children of the shire would grow into adults, would Turn into
hunters and warriors and splendid beasts. Back then, all were equally blessed.

But over time, the Gifts began to
fade. It began with the womenfolk first, those who were more naturally
earthbound in any case, caring for the young. Females who could complete the
Turn—human, smoke, dragon—became scarcer and scarcer over generations. They
grew more used to roaming the woods than the skies. With a lack of wings, they
transformed their ferocity and flight into fierce devotion to their children,
into a love of jewels and wedlock and long, wistful glances at the moon.
Darkfrith was rich with women who only ever dreamed of soaring.

Then the Gifts began to thin
through the men as well. The birth of a male child who could not Turn was still
rare enough, but the Turn itself was growing darker, more treacherous. That
initial, violent moment that usually began around a boy’s fourteenth year—that
wild and frightening instant when the self first dissolved into smoke, when
something new had to come in its place or nothing else ever would— became, for
some reason, harder and harder to complete.

Lives were lost. Young men,
promising, bright, vanished into screams and agony. And the women of the tribe
would secretly wonder if they were the better blessed, after all.

Yet
dragon or human, male or female, every member of the
drákon
still had an
animal side. The taste for the chase, the longing for the sky, the power to
hear the stones and metals of the earth singing ballads and chants and arias:
none of these things ever faded. There was a reason no other creatures dwelled
in Darkfrith. It was hard enough to keep sane horses for the stables. Even the
black-faced sheep ran wild.

So Lia was unsurprised when she
walked out of the King’s View—at the august and sophisticated edge of Óbuda;
far, far from the hills of home—and every steed downwind of her immediately
began to stomp and tremble.

At the bottom of the hotel’s
horseshoe steps, a foursome of grays hitched to a polished new carriage bucked
against their restraints. Zane, standing by the carriage door, glanced up at once.
His eyes found hers.

By and large she’d avoided the
typical beasts of burden on her journey here. She’d sailed, in fact, from
Edinburgh to Rotterdam, and that had been lovely. The clipper had been small
and cramped and very swift. Every day she’d stood at the prow to let the wind
tear at her. Her cheeks never burned. Her hair never tangled. But she’d never
felt salt in her tears like that, and she’d never felt her skin smart quite so
beautifully.

When she had closed her eyes and
stood very still, Lia imagined she was flying.

Darkfrith had succored sixteen
generations of her kind. Of the past five, only three females had managed the
Turn: Rue. Audrey. Joan.

Lia had grown used to the veiled,
speculative looks from her people as she’d aged. She’d grown used to the
gossip, the subtle heartbeat of excitement and expectation that throbbed
through the tribe whenever either of her sisters took to the air.

They were silver and gold and red
and green, magnificent. With Rue a white pearl in the sky beside them, they
were the best hope for the future of the
drákon.
Villagers would gather
outside to watch whenever they left the ground; Lia could only gather with
them, her face upturned, and try to pick out the glitter of her family against
the glitter of the stars.

Her birthdays passed: seventeen,
eighteen, nineteen. Whatever other Gifts she possessed, whatever else she took
pains to hide from her parents and her people, this was the Gift she craved
most: to be complete. To lift from the earth, to dance around the moon.

It had never happened. The
heartbeat of expectation around her gradually faded. She was patted gently, and
smiled at sadly, and told of her great good fortune to be the earl’s daughter,
after all. Amalia would always smile back and agree, while her chest ached and
her nails clenched so tightly into her palms that her skin bled.

She supposed if she never had
anything else, at least she had the memory of that clipper ship. The taste of
tar and brine and freedom on the wind.

The carriages she’d hired once
ashore were large and slow, so swollen with passengers that her scent was
buried beneath everything—and everyone—else. Lia kept a veil across her hat to
hide her features. She kept her hands stuffed beneath her mantle and tried not
to move very much. Whenever she exited a coach she angled at once behind it, to
get away from the other animals, and for the most part her tactic had worked.

Except for today.

She stopped where she was on the
hotel stairs, surrounded by footmen and her trunks, the hem of her mantle
whipping sideways with the breeze. The grays were not calming; the one nearest
her began to scream, shrill and angry. Lia sighed and took a step back,
glancing up the curve of marble steps as if searching for assistance. The head
manager was already hurrying down. The wind swept from the east, from the
water. If she moved enough to her left—