Queen of Dragons

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At the wise and seasoned age of thirteen, Rhys had fallen in love for the first time.

Her name was Zoe. She was the daughter of the village seam-stress. She had exotic black eyes and hair of the smoothest, purest ivory, and even though he'd known her since they were infants—since they'd been wet-nursed and day-schooled together—he realized one spring day that he was truly, utterly in love.

She wanted nothing to do with him.

Rhys fancied himself not ill-favored. Even then, he was beginning to show signs of the man he would grow into, and finding maidens of the shire to adore him had never proved a challenge before, except, perhaps, when he was compared to his brother. But Zoe Lane was resistant to his every wile. If he brought her roses, she said she preferred wildflowers. If he brought her wildflowers, she said she preferred them left to grow in the downs.

If he brought her sugar, she wanted salt. If he offered to read her poetry—poetry!—she claimed she'd rather go swimming in the lake.

With the other boys.

He'd fretted and stewed all summer, boiling in a sweat of unfulfilled adolescent desires. He'd tried everything he could think of, being kind, being mean, leaving her be, following her about, and one late night he was seated outside her bedroom window, eating blackberries and sucking the juice from his fingers while he tried to figure his next move, when her face appeared by the curtains, a pale oval framed with even paler hair.

They stared at each other; she was still the most beautiful girl he'd ever known. His stomach got upset just looking at her.

"You're really not going to quit, are you?" She kept her voice low, because, he knew, her mother slept quite near.

"No," Rhys said.

She nodded, vanished, then came back. She beckoned to him and he'd trotted up to the sill just like an eager puppy.

"Stick this needle through your earlobe," she said coolly, holding it up between her thumb and forefinger. "All the way through. Then I'll believe you love me."

The consequences had been instant, and rather immense. He was already supposed to be confined to quarters from eight at night till eight in the morning; Zoe's mother had complained more than once about his behavior around her daughter, and he'd been forbidden by the marquess even to speak with her for a full month. But there was no hiding all that blood. It had flooded his clothing and risen up around him in waves, spreading its scent like the worst sort of alarm, and Rhys never knew if it had been luck or planning that his elder brother reached him in the grand hall of Chasen Manor just before his father did.

He remembered Kimber's face, how his eyes widened as he stepped around the stairway and caught sight of Rhys trying to slip in unnoticed. How he stopped at once, and then turned as Rhys did to see Christoff emerge from his study.

A line of little red dots followed him like a trail along the floor. Rhys stood in the study with one hand pinched to his ear, trying to catch the rest of it so the carpet wouldn't stain.

His father had studied him a long while without speaking, tall and nearly frightening in his severity, candlelight dancing hellish bright behind him. It had seemed long, anyway, damned long, and it was all Rhys could do not to fidget while his fingers dripped and his mind raced through excuses.

"There was this needle—" he began.

Christoff interrupted in a deadly soft voice. "I thought I made it incontestably clear you were to stay away from that girl."

And then Kimber took a breath.

"Please, sir," said his brother, standing behind him. "It was my fault." The marquess's gaze flicked to Kim.

"I dared him to pierce his ear," Kim lied, the golden child, the Alpha heir. "I didn't think he'd really do it."

Rhys snapped his mouth closed. He tried to look innocent. "May I inquire why?"

"I was bored," said Kim. "And I wanted to see how much it would hurt."

It hurt, as it turned out, a very great deal. But somehow not as much as seeing Kimber punished in Rhys's place, confined to his own quarters, meals of bread and water for three full days and a formal, written apology to his brother for his part in the wretched matter.

When Rhys had tried to sneak meat up to him, Kim had refused it.

"They'll smell it, you dolt," he said through the door.

When he'd asked, softly, why he had done what he did, Kim had answered only, "Because."

Because he was Kimber. Leader, protector at all costs. Because whenever Rhys had fallen—in love, to his knees, into the worst of plots and plans, even at school—Kim was there to help him back up.

Kimber was always there. Rhys tried to admire him for that.

From his vantage now atop the carriage rolling back toward home, he watched the princess flow as smoke across the sky. Her grace, her thrilling beauty, all that defined the best of their kind.and Kimber there, always there, just beside her.

He felt that familiar, unhappy clench in his stomach.

Despite the fact that the sun shone very bright, he found he could not look away.

Kim had sent a man ahead to alert the shire they were returning, to carry the news that there were enemies lurking nearby—only that. He hadn't informed his guard of the thin-blooded drakon, the sanf inimicus. He hadn't wanted a full-scale panic at Chasen before he was there to contain it.

Tensions had been festering all summer. Before that. Before Maricara had arrived, before Rue and Christoff had left. The tribe's perfect mask had developed its first fatal crack back with that letter from Lia, describing a castle and pebbles and dragons that lived free under the stars.

She, too, is fully one of our kind.

Nothing had been the same since. Nothing had been as safe, or as good. The heat and oppression of this summer had only intensified everyone's tempers. Spats flared more easily and were ended more often with fists. The village tavern was filled to over-flowing every night. Creatures designed for glorious flight and battle turned to gin and petty squabbling instead. The number of feuds Kim had had to settle in the past few years had been steadily escalating, most over field boundaries or imagined insults. A few over more serious crimes, like theft. Vandalism. Runners.

With every new disagreement, with every new drakon attempting to flee the shire, the old men of the council grew more entrenched behind their beards, hunkered deep into their soft, carved chairs. These were their ways, and that was that. They would not be modified, the tribe would fall into line, and there would be no debate about it. This is how it had always been done. This would be their gift to the future as well. The traditional laws had more than sufficed all these generations. They were the only solution. Loyalty to the tribe above all.

There had been nights Kim had fallen asleep with his hands actually pressed to his head as if it was trapped in a vise, cursing his parents, cursing his position, the seasons, Lia, the Zaharen. And then he'd wake up the next morning and get dressed and go tackle it all over again. Someone had to.

In fact, the only fine thing to emerge from this disaster, the only filament of luminous clarity, Kim considered, was Maricara herself.

She was all they had for information at this point, his lovely, night-flying princess. Unfortunately, she would also be the only person the tribe would connect with these part-dragon sanf; she was of the foreign tribe; the hunters were of the foreign tribe; unspeakable catastrophes were about to unfold, and who had caused it all to come about? Kim could all too easily imagine the council's reaction:

You've brought an ancient enemy to Darkfrith. You've caused the loss of at least three good men, you've flown in daylight as a dragon, you've defiled our rules and traditions and imperiled our very survival and oh, yes, welcome to your new home. We look forward to the wedding. Would you mind very much just stepping into our prison?

Or, even worse:

What's that you say? Lord Chasen described it as a fine place to sleep? Certainly it is. We'll even provide you both a bed.

Better to face that moment, too, in person.

So when they reached the manor house at last, Kim was hardly surprised that there were no singers awaiting them, no banners aloft, nothing remotely festive beyond the desperate flowers and shrubs progressively scorching to a crisp in the gardens. There was, instead, a line of ten unsmiling men standing in the drive beyond the main doors, ignoring the pair of carriages rolling up the wide, roundabout path, staring up instead at the sky.

They wore wigs, every one of them. Even in this weather, the formalities held.

If Kim could have sighed, he would have. As it was, he glided against the velvety edge that was Maricara one last time, then twisted down into man against the hard heat of the earth.

Evening fell. She observed it from a bench nestled beneath the coppice of willows she had once run through to reach Kimber's home, what seemed like ages ago. The mansion was towering walls and windows this close up, mellow stone that sang mellow songs, half-obscured by leaves that never moved, because there was no wind.

She sat alone. Kimber was nearby, Rhys was nearby, the sisters scattered, a thousand heartbeats, a million breaths, all the English drakon pulsing life through the Darkfrith twilight in heady, invisible waves.

Some of them were more visible. There were faces to be glimpsed past her little enclosure of willows, people walking in the woods, people staring from behind the beveled windows. There were bright, serpentine dragons floating through a sky of darker green and blue and purple above her. They cut in silence across the pinprick stars, sending them winking.

She was not tired. Not tired enough. She'd eaten as much as she could, she'd taken no wine. She'd asked to be alone to watch the moonrise.

Crickets began to wake. Maricara heard them in the far distance, pockets of chirping buried within the forest. The moon began as a halo of white light against the black rolling horizon.

Around and around the dragons looped overhead.

The place where Kimber wanted her to sleep was called the Dead Room. She'd overheard a pair of footmen whispering the name between them, their voices surprised and hushed. The earl had said only that it was a chamber within the manor designed to contain dragons—full-fledged dragons—to defeat smoke and keep whoever was inside it safely contained.

The Dead Room. No subtlety there, no mystery, for all their mock-human ways. She could damned well figure out what the place was actually for.

Mari gazed at the ascending moon. It shone like a drop of sweet cream, round and fat with the edges nearly misted, so much softer than at home. Everything in England was softer, the air, the savor of wildflowers and wood, the deep indigo night. Even she had become softer, Maricara realized. If she had an ounce of sense or self-preservation, she would Turn and leave this coppice, fly up and out and away, far from any room meant to imprison her kind. Kimber had claimed she was skilled at flight; she didn't know how true that was. She'd been flying since she was a child, going nearly where she wished, when she wished. Surely she could outrun all these cautious, curious drakon above her. After all, she'd done what she could here, what she'd come to Darkfrith for. They knew they were hunted now, and they knew by whom. She had no real reason to stay.

She could go anywhere. She could actually wander the globe, with no obligations to anyone or anyplace ever again. She was finally, truly free.

But for him.

But for that kiss, and the butterflies, and the stroke of his fingers along her bare arm.

Maricara closed her eyes. She exhaled a long, steady breath and began her sliding descent into dragon-perception.

Time slowed. The air pressed against her dampened skin. The fading colors of the sunset flared once again but now as vibrations, humming echoes of light that spread through her senses, burgundy, saffron, lapis blue. The crickets roared into lions, deafening; buried minerals beneath her feet chanted and moaned and pleaded for her touch. The paths of the drakon soaring above shone like concentric rings behind her lids, every one of them a brilliant link to a chain, repeated over and over again.

Kimber was inside the manor house, alone. In the music room, where they had first met.

She focused on that, Kimber, music room, letting all the other noises and rhythms and whispering songs sink away to unimportance, the moonlight gone, the stars swallowed, until there was only him, his quiet breathing, the rustle of his clothing and the press of his shoes into the woolen rug as he shifted forward into a step.

She heard a single note from the lyre. It came again, muted, as if he did not wish to pluck the string but his finger had found the sound anyway.

Another note. Another. It was D, lonely and strange, the same steady tone repeated.

Mari opened her eyes. She rose from the bench and, with one last glance at the cream-drop moon, retraced her path back into the manor house.

The princess stood at the iron door in a robe a l'anglaise of French blue and wide lacy ribbons, unmoving. She looked both delicate and chary, her jaw set, her hands folded over her waist. Kim remained at her side, one palm still braced against the cool metal, waiting for her to go in.

He knew how it appeared: Spartan, cavelike, a chamber clearly at odds with the fine bed that had been hastily assembled for it, the Chippendale chair and satinwood desk and tapestries of unicorns and maidens that hung from the walls. Her valise had been placed in here, even her safe. The candelabra from the blue parlor had been set atop it; seven candles in their sterling cups were lit, flames casting shadows that bent and slithered along it all.

It had been named a room but was truly a cell of enormous stone blocks, seven deep in any direction except the ceiling, which had been reinforced with plates of steel. No windows, no vents, no vulnerabilities. The door was solid and barred from the outside; when closed, it met the stone so perfectly a human hair would not slide between them. Without its new furnishings the space was brutally plain—stark, actually. Before this morning it had held a cot and a lantern and nothing else. It had not been designed for comfort. It had been designed to contain outlaw drakon in their final hours before being put to death.

And so, beneath the honey of melting wax Kim imagined he smelled sweat and desolation. Behind the thick woven tapestries were last words carved into the walls, good-byes, recriminations, faint tracings he had long ago memorized as a child with cold shivers crawling across his skin. He didn't think there had ever been blood spilled on this floor, at least not in his lifetime. But with a little effort, Kim could smell that too.

Fixed at its brink, Maricara let her gaze travel the chamber. Whatever her thoughts, she kept them to herself.

He felt the will of his people pressing against him. The council members, banished to the outer halls with the servants, waiting, everyone waiting for the last female who could Turn to take that little step.

"Lord Chasen," she said, without looking away from the cell.

"Yes, Princess."

"I'm going to require more than just a promise now. I'm going to require your oath."

"Yes?"

"Swear to me you'll let me out again in the morning." "I swear," Kim said.

"On the lives of your people," she continued quietly, gazing at the bed. "On the future of your tribe. Your children. Their fates."

"Yes," he said again. "You have my word on it."

The hallway here was plain stone as well. He heard the reverberations of his voice diminish down into nothing. She tilted her head a fraction and glanced up at him. In this light her eyes held no color; he gazed down into bottomless depths.

"Someone once told me I'd be a fool to trust you."

"Who was that?"

"A man who knew you."

Kim dropped his hand from the door. "'Once' is a very tricky word, Your Grace. It implies things shouldn't change, but they always do. I will let you out again."

"Shall I believe you?" she murmured. "Shall I trust you that far?"

"I'll stay with you, then. I'll sleep in the chair."

Her lips curved, just a fraction. Her lashes lowered. "It looks very uncomfortable." "I admit, the bed would be nicer."

"I don't require quite that much sacrifice. Find your own bed. Come open this door again in the morning."

"As you wish," he said.

But now that he had her here, exactly here where he needed her to be, Kim found himself perversely reluctant to let her go. He meant to release her in the morning. He did mean to. But the thought that she would be trapped down here, in that bed, alone, when he had already held her at night and warmed her body with his and kissed her shoulder in her sleep.

"Good night," Maricara said, and passed the threshold into the cell.

He didn't move. The train of her gown made a wide, blue circle upon the stone. She paused at the foot of the bed, her face angled back toward him, her head slightly bowed. She did not speak again, but only lifted a hand to unlace the stomacher to her bodice, using her finger and thumb to slowly draw the ribbon free.

Kim closed the door. He heaved the iron bar into its braces across it, then turned the iron key in its single-sided lock.

"Good night," he said.

It was foolish of them to put all these pretty things in here with her. It was foolish to try to make a prison into anything but what it was.

She sat at the end of the bed and eyed the ornate woodwork of the chair.

It would snap into splinters.

The candelabra—mashed flat. Wax smeared upon the walls. The tapestries shredded. The desk torn apart.

Only the safe looked like it belonged. It was ugly, the largest, most sturdy block of metal she'd been able to find. It might survive the night.

Her back ached. Her feet hurt. The candlelight burned her eyes.

She crossed to the flames and blew out all but one. Then she Turned to shed the gown, too weary to bother with the corset and tapes, and left it all in a heap where it fell. The valise contained her nightgown. It sifted like a white cloud down her body.

Barefoot, unthinking, she pinched out the final candle and realized at once that the English had not been so foolish after all. Without the candles, the Dead Room plunged into flawless black.

She might walk in her sleep, she might rage. But she would not be able to Turn.

Mari began to laugh. It was small and painful, a bubble in her chest that somehow turned into a smothered sob. She held it in by pressing her hands over her face.

In time, with her arms stretched out before her, she fumbled her way to the bed. It was not as soft as it first appeared; the sheets were cotton instead of satin, and the pillows gave off an aroma of long-deceased fowl.

None of it mattered. She closed her eyes and let the blessed darkness sink into her skin.

She slept without moving. He could feel her stillness, the solemn night wrapped around her, her absolute quiescence. The Dead Room was three floors below his own and half a wing over, sequestered from any other useful part of Chasen. It had been constructed near the heart of the house but sunk into the earth; the closest public space was the wine cellar. The hallway that led to it also led to the back gate of the manor, to a certain path that wound through the woods. Following that path for nigh an hour would lead to a field of bones at the end of it, bones charred and buried, the final remnants of the drakon outcasts strewn far from the tribe.

The princess took her rest in a cell brimming with ghosts, gone to her dreams with a peace that eluded him. He imagined her there on the bed he'd helped set up, between the sheets he'd smoothed flat with his own hands.

Rhys shifted beneath his covers, too hot, too aware. The down mattress felt suffocating. Her endless silence drove him mad.

He stared up at the ceiling of his room and wished for the same oblivion that had taken Maricara, or the outcasts.

His body would stop burning either way.