Queen of Dragons

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She did not fly east. They would be expecting that, for her to head toward Zaharen Yce. West was Ireland and ocean, and north was the rough drab land of the Scots. So she ducked and circled and finally went south, because that was the direction that made no sense. South would lead her only deeper into England.

She left behind the hills that sheltered and isolated a foggy, leafy shire. She left behind the mansion of windows and dulcet songs, and her gowns and jewels. She left behind the drakon and their leader, the man who had managed, despite all her very best efforts, to discover the map of her heart. Who had pinned her with a cool green gaze and passed his hand over her chest and scorched a hole in her center without even trying.

She'd see him again. She didn't like to think how.

Mari used the same trick to exit the shire that had gotten her in: She soared straight up like a rocket, as high as her wings would carry her and then more, snarling with effort. The air waned so thin she worried they might hear the rasp of her breath, but the majority of the Darkfrith dragons were intent on different prey. The sanf were largely human and could not fly, and Rhys Langford, wherever he was, probably could not either.

The ones who'd been guarding her, however, followed at once—twenty-three, actually, smoke as she was smoke, dragon as she was. But the somber gray minutes before daybreak were always the best time for an escape; she'd known that since she was a child. Eyes were fooled. Senses were smothered. One by one her pursuers fell behind.

Two proved to be extremely persistent, obviously skilled trackers. It took a good ten miles before she was able to lose them above the meandering elbow of a great river, wheeling low again to let the freshwater obscure her scent, and the colors of the woods blurred as she blurred, and within a quarter hour she'd lost them both.

Maricara pulled high once more.

Everything slipped beneath her like that river. Like rain, land and lakes and towns, places passed over so quickly she barely registered them. She flew until the threat of the sun became burgeoning peach and gold, and the anvil of clouds swelling ahead shone beryl in its middle and caramel along the edges. She found the sea, a sudden uprush of brine in her nose—and then stunning, scintillating light, foam breaking ivory around rocks of small islands, and ships that dotted the blue-green waves.

She narrowed her eyes, considering. The water would be wide here, with scant place to rest should she need to, and she didn't like to swim. She'd do better farther south—as far south as Dover, if she dared. But as she glided along the brink of the coast, Mari found herself gazing and gazing at the thin, ambered line that split the salt water from the horizon, envisioning wind-scoured alps instead, glaciers and edelweiss. Timberline. The crisp chill of mountain mornings.

Waking nude atop the tower terrace. White quartzite, and hay that poked at her skin. Suckling pigs devoured in the night. Belfries.

She missed having a home. She actually mourned it; she imagined that in her sleep, in her flying dreams, she was searching for it still, that place where she could be accepted and whole, where she could rest at last. Perhaps the Zaharen would never truly welcome her, but the castle was hers as this isle could never be. She had spilled blood for it and reached adulthood in it, and she had as much right to defend it as anyone else.

Her wings crooked. She began to veer east just as the first sheer notes of music lifted from below her. Eerie notes. Notes that spoke to her of a girl named Honor, and a vanishing.

No. Mari flattened her ears and stretched her body thin, going faster. She wasn't going to listen to it. She wasn't going to turn around. She didn't care how mysterious those notes floated up to her, how powerfully they called. She didn't want to know what made them. She had a mission now. She had a duty.

Oh... but it was beautiful. The smallest of canticles, beckoning, a melody at once so simple and so profound that, when she blinked, teardrops scattered to the wind behind her; she found her wings arcing once again, her body tugged right, back to land.

No, no.

But she was going. She was circling around; the sea flashed; a loose cluster of terns low, low against the ground bunched and then shot inland, vanishing against the buffed cliffs and dunes.

The song was wistful and poignant and still so familiar. It pulled her over the cliffs as sure as if she wore some stretched, invisible leash, over trees and the pointed peaks of a village over a league distant—but the song was not coming from there. It was coming from a clearing, trees chopped raw at their bases and dying leaves still littering the ground.

Someone was burning the trees. Smoke—real smoke—boiled and clawed at the early-morning sky.

At the edge of the clearing was what looked like a ramshackle shepherd's hut, still half-enclosed with woods. The smoke rose from behind it. She went to vapor, blending with the black-burnt sap of the trees, gliding down to a moldy thatched roof, the heavy branches that supported it split and bent with time. A bed of gnarled white geraniums still struggled to bloom between the weeds beneath the only window.

From within the hut the notes sang yes, yes, come in. Mari sank between the thatch.

He was awake. He could not recall coming awake. Hell, he couldn't recall going to sleep. He'd been in the southern woods; he knew that. He'd been walking, pacing off the agitation that burned in him, following the faint press of a deer path and mist that broke around his feet into the heart of ash and wych. He must have fallen asleep. He had no memory of that. But he was awake now, excruciatingly awake, and somehow between that time and this the world had gone blind and reeking.

He wore a hood. He was on his knees in dirt, because the chains were that heavy. He couldn't even rise above that, and he was strong, so whoever had bound him with the chains was clever enough to know his strength. They had been here moments ago. Although time seemed an uncertain thing to him now, Rhys was fairly certain that was true. They were men plus another who was not a man, and they spoke a language he did not understand—not French or German, or anything so logical as that; these words blended into rhythms he could not follow, and his head ached like the very devil when he tried—

Yet they were gone, fled in haste. He knelt alone in a room of some sort. There was an odd music in his head, and his hands and feet felt frozen, even though the air was too warm. Something wet trickled down his neck, saturating the cloth where it was tied against his throat. He thought it was probably blood.

A new sense of warmth gathered above him. It was soft and sly but very there, a presence that pressed into his muffled world, cautious, feminine.

He knew her. He lifted his head, his mind breaking clear of its miasma with a sudden crystalline horror. He felt her Turn before him, dropping down, her hands clutching hard at his.

"Rhys," she said.

His fingers curled. " Turn," he croaked—but just as he'd suspected, the Others were never far off at all.

For thirty-one years, the sum of her life, Audrey Langford Downing had been one-half of a whole. She had not asked for it; the drakon were prone to twins and even triplets, although it was true that in recent years single births had become far more common than not.

She was born second, which might have rankled, but more significantly, she had been born a girl, and that meant she would have been second even had she been born first. But Kimber was eldest, and always had been. It was as if he'd come squalling into the world with the knowledge of his place in their society already embedded beneath his skin. As long as she could remember, he'd been quick to lead, quick to decide, quick to dismiss. Had he been of smaller mind.had his character been a whit less generous, she might have grown up resenting him. After all, he had everything he desired, and always had. He was handsome and charismatic and well-favored with the tribe. He was Alpha heir and then Alpha, and she'd spent years watching him accept the favors of their people with an untailored sort of graciousness that always, deep down, managed to astonish her.

She might have hated him. Sometimes when they were younger—when Kim smiled his comely smile and spoke blithely of London and balls and the royal court, places she'd never go, dances she would never dance—Audrey thought perhaps a wee part of her did. But it was Rue who'd shaken that seed of spite from her daughter's heart. Rue, who would not abide shame or dishonesty from any of her children—although her definition of "dishonesty" was somewhat unorthodox, to say the least.

Her mother was the one who found Audrey early on the morning of her seventeenth birthday. The celebrations had started the evening before, fireworks and raucous dancing in the tavern; blue-and-gold ribbons festooned the village shops and houses, fluttered pretty along the lanes. There was to be a soiree at the manor house later that night for anyone who might care to come. An evening of more genteel cake and music and punch in the ballroom, perhaps even a quadrille.

And it was all for him.

Yes, Audrey happened to be born on the exact same day, of the exact same parents. But it was for Kimber, ever Kimber, that the tribe met to celebrate.

She'd not yet been able to Turn; that Gift hadn't come for another quarter year. So when she'd slunk from Chasen Manor she'd done it the human way, by foot, wearing black. She'd made it as far as the circulating library in the village before Rue smoked down to catch her.

The circulating library, at four in the morning. She'd been leaning with her back against the bowfront window, staring down sullenly at her feet. Nearly everyone was asleep at that hour. There were people still in the tavern, but they were drunk and it was at the opposite end of the village, and, as usual, no one noticed her.

One of the ribbons was torn free of its mooring; it made a very fine snake against the paving stones. She stood there, watching it flip back and forth with the breeze near the hem of her skirts. She was thirsty already, and she'd forgotten to bring anything to drink.

"It's late," announced her mother's voice, tranquil and just beside her.

And because she was thirsty, and because her little moment of rebellion had been quashed just that quickly, Audrey had sneered, "So?"

"So, nothing, actually." Rue kept back in the shelter of the awning above the library door. "I've always enjoyed the night myself. Quite useful for stealing about. What an interesting gown. It looks very much like one of the maids' uniforms. What did you do with the apron?"

"Nothing," she muttered. After a moment: "I'll sew it back on."

"Better you than I," said Rue, cheerful, because everyone knew how she hated to sew.

Audrey lifted her chin. "Well? Aren't you going to punish me?"

"I?" replied her mother. "Good heavens. What have you done?"

"This." She made a curt gesture to the village, the shuttered windows. "Running away."

"Ah. Do you consider this running away?"

And there was something there, some careful compassion in her voice that made Audrey's temper snap. "Yes, I do. Certainly it's nothing compared with you, the glorious Smoke Thief, but I daresay this isn't allowed—I pulled that banner down, yes, and I fully plan to pull down all the others, as many as I can—and I guarantee you that if I had an ounce of your Gifts I would have left this place in the dust."

Rue said nothing. Audrey was breathing hard through her nose, humiliatingly close to tears. The darkened street before her wavered and the music from the tavern became heavy with French horn.

Audrey had already extinguished the candle lantern in front of the library by the simple expedient of one well-aimed rock. When Rue stepped forward, it was into shadows.

"Do you imagine it will be easy for him?" she asked softly, placing a hand on her daughter's arm.

Audrey twitched free. "I don't care to discuss it."

"It won't be, you know. He's strong, and that's a very good thing, because being the leader of our kind is a burden that devastates the weak."

"Oh, yes indeed. Poor Kimber!"

"No. Poor Audrey, to have to watch and realize that she's as smart and as strong as her brother, but she'll never be allowed to live his life. She will grow into a beautiful young woman. She will fall in love and wed. She'll learn to fly—yes, my dear, you will; we're very alike, and I've given you that much, I don't doubt. But you will always be female." Rue lifted her hand to the night, examining the tips of her fingers, the turn of her wrist. "And perhaps—someday—Audrey will become more than the rest of us.

Perhaps she will convince her clan that the womenfolk deserve a firmer place than they have now. Perhaps she will succeed where her mother has not." Her arm dropped. "Kim's world is both less and more than yours. He'll never struggle as you do. He'll never learn as you. When your father was his age he'd already been forced to publicly kill two of our kind because they were threats to the tribe. To our survival. Is that the role you want?"

It was true; Audrey knew it was true. She glared down at the ribbon twisting over and over itself and shook her head.

"Your brother doesn't want it either," said Rue simply. "But he will do it. Violence, assassination. Lying, cheating, death. Whatever he must. Much like his twin, he was born with a tender heart, and the path ahead of him will do naught but darken it. I don't think you should envy him that. I don't."

All these years later, her mother's words echoed in her ears, Rue's matter-of-fact tone, her fleeting touch. Audrey looked at her twin standing now in the grand black-and-cream ballroom of Chasen Manor, bright with the fretwork of amber inlay and leafed gold and the faces of their kin, as many as could cram into the chamber, and that was a great many.

One-half a whole. He stood atop the musician's dais—the very dais where a quadrille had once been played, fourteen years before—and spoke words to the tribe, words that Audrey did not really hear because she was concentrating on the man himself instead.

This man wasn't Kimber. He didn't look like Kimber, and from this distance, he didn't feel like him. He was ice and marble and someone new, someone she'd glimpsed once or twice before in the most fell of extremities, but that was all.

A darkened heart.

His lips moved. He wore clothing she'd seen countless times: a starched shirt missing its waistcoat, buckskin breeches and tall brown boots. The sun angled in from the west and lit his plain country attire to gilt and fire. His hair was undone. In the natural light it shone every rich shade of blond. It was the only aspect of him that still appeared—human. Every atom in the chamber seemed drawn to him, charged and bright and dangerous, and only a dragon could do that.

His face was drawn in planes, harsh and bleak; his figure fixed as if he grew upright from the dais, from the manor house itself, and the wild sky and the trees and the blood of the earth. His gaze raked the crowd with an intensity that had more than a few of the younger maidens enthralled with wide-eyed dread.

Rue was gone, no longer beside her second-born child; Joan was with her now instead, and together the sisters clasped hands and watched as what was left of their eldest flaked away, an imaginary skin that frosted and cracked until only the Alpha stood before them, an animal that never raised his voice, never shifted his stance. He held the tribe rapt with just a few soft-spoken sentences.

"Our time is come. Assume any strangers in the shire are sanf, no matter what they say. Slay them if you must or save them for me."

A pair of starlings winged across the vista behind him, blackened and swift, falling from sight against the backdrop of verdant woods.

The Alpha said, "Do not hold back."