Soul of Fire (35 page)

“If she thinks I made her a promise,” he said, miserably, “then I will have to marry her. The truth is, I hadn’t planned to marry yet. I can hardly support anyone from my pay, and besides . . . At the risk of sounding mercenary, I thought when I did marry, it would be to someone who could help me establish myself back in England, or perhaps find my fortune in India. Not that—”

“Then you know Sofie Warington has no money? How?”

William could not exactly say that the ministry of magic had informed him of the fact. Instead, he shrugged. “It was open rumor.”

“I see,” St. Maur said, and unfortunately it looked very much like he did. “You’ve heard of Heart of Light and Soul of Fire, Blacklock?”

“Oh!” William said, feeling a blush climb to his cheeks, and in that moment feeling as though he’d been wholly unmasked. He tried to recover, saying, “I mean . . . I’ve heard of the legend. Like every . . . like every English schoolboy.”

But St. Maur was not deceived. He said, drily, “Just so.” And then he proceeded to pour on William’s ears a tale William wasn’t sure he could believe, not in its entirety. How the queen had sent an English nobleman, the younger of the Oldhalls—of whose disappearance William vaguely remembered reading in the paper—to Africa, to find Heart of Light. How his mission had been impaired by local tribesmen and bedeviled by a movement started by none other than the older Oldhall, whom everyone believed to be dead. How Peter Farewell, then not yet St. Maur, had joined the expedition under false pretenses, wishing to take the ruby and destroy it.

And then, softly, he described how they’d come to the oldest temple of mankind and mankind’s oldest avatar, whose eyes the rubies were supposed to be. In this part, William could not, indeed, doubt him. St. Maur’s face became grave with reverence and intensely focused, the way William had seen the faces of feverish people looked when they were fixed intently on a faraway mirage. No, St. Maur had truly visited that temple, and in it understood that the rubies had to be returned, so the splintering of the worlds could end. He had truly been there and truly lived it . . . or else he was the greatest madman alive.

The other details rushed out in a torrent. It appeared that Nigel Oldhall and Peter Farewell had separated six months ago, so that when St. Maur found the second ruby, the two stones wouldn’t be together. Because if they were together and fell into the wrong hands, the result would be the death of the entire universe—a painful though mercifully quick end. But Peter Farewell had failed to find the ruby in his six months in India.

Now the pieces of his story fell into place. He’d rescued Sofie Warington while in dragon form. And of course he could not drag her back to her parents, not while she had the power to retaliate by denouncing him.

And then he said, “I was a fool. I never thought . . . I never realized the reason the tigers were interested in Miss Warington . . . as I found out last night under circumstances that . . .” He shrugged. “The reason they wanted her and the ruby, both, is that she is the last of the line in which the ruby of Charlemagne has passed. He presumably gave it to his son. Even spent, as it was, it would have some value, some magical power as one of the oldest jewels of mankind. I don’t know through what crooked channels of inheritance it ended up in Miss Warington’s family, but there it is. And therefore the tiger wants to secure both Miss Warington and the ruby, so that by sacrificing Miss Warington, he can . . .” He shook his head, his eye reflecting a pain that William wished with a fatal, heart-deep longing, he could ease.

“I see,” he said, mechanically.

“But you see, the reason she matters to them, the reason she can be used to this end is that she is . . . er . . . a virgin. I cannot marry her. I can even less . . . despoil her. I wouldn’t thus mar a woman I hated, much less—” He halted. “If she marries, then the jewel can’t be healed until she has a daughter who is nubile, but I thought . . . twenty years . . . The jewel can wait for twenty years. And . . . and someone else can take it to my friend Nigel, who . . . who’ll have to travel around the world until then.” Suddenly, he cackled, sounding like a man on the edge of madness. “And I thought, if she married you . . . I suppose it is not in the cards, then?”

William shrugged. He felt as if he were being pulled inexorably toward an abyss. And it occurred to him that beautiful Miss Warington deserved better than a husband who felt this way about it. He heard a moan escape his lips. “I wish . . . What am I to do if she comes to me, having already compromised her reputation irreparably? What can I do but marry her? But I—”

“No, by God. Don’t marry her if you feel that way. It would be shackles for her and she—” St. Maur stopped. In that one word, he had managed to convey all the enchantment and passion in the world. That
she
was a blazing summer breeze; it was the breaking of the wave upon a golden shore; it was the sun coming out after a long night, when all the Earth had looked dead. That
she
echoed with a longing that William had never felt and never . . .

“I was thinking,” William said, “that she is too good, too kind to be shackled to that sort of marriage, where I would be marrying for obligation only. But what am I to do, then, about her reputation?”

“All might not be lost there,” St. Maur said. “She . . . Her maid has found her. It could be said she is traveling under native escort, as so many other English misses do in India, and no one will know anything at all was amiss, unless talk spreads. I’m more worried, truly, about the other thing. While she remains a virgin, she will remain at risk. But . . . Don’t worry about it, I will simply have to find another way to neutralize the tigers.”

“They have the ruby, then?” William asked. “The tigers have Soul of Fire?”

The oddest looked passed over St. Maur’s features. “You know . . . I did not ask. The tiger spoke as though we had it, yet I think . . . Oh, let Sofie not have been hiding it all along.”

William did not say anything. He registered that St. Maur had referred to Miss Warington as Sofie, and wondered if this was how he referred to her in the secret of his heart. And then wondered why this pained him so, like red hot irons to the soul. “I’m sorry,” he said, without even having any idea why.

“No, don’t worry about it. I half suspected her claim was the imagination of a girl who had but little experience in the ways of the world and the ways of man.” He stubbed out his cigarette and got up. “If you don’t mind, I will fly from your balcony.”

“I don’t mind,” William said. He remained rooted to the spot as St. Maur walked through the gauzy curtain to the veranda, to where the sun was coming up over the horizon, making it far brighter than the mage-lit room. William watched the silhouette as it undressed, revealing that perfect body he’d half seen before.

He examined his tumultuous thoughts and feelings in the dispassionate light of day, and frowned slightly.
It doesn’t mean anything. It is in all the stories. In every legend. Dragons are fatally attractive to females.
He stubbed out his own cigarette.
But I am not a female. Therefore, I must be . . .

In that moment, it was as if he’d always known it. He should have always known it. All the clues were there in his thoughts, in his feelings, in what he’d done and in what he’d failed to do. But until this moment, he’d never seen it. And now, having seen it, he wished he could undo it.

AN EYE FOR SEEING; THE OBLIGATIONS OF A RESCUER; THE MANY USES OF A BROKEN HEART

Miss Warington was right about me, Peter thought, as
the dragon took wing over Meerut, against the fast-brightening sky.
I’ve been giving the beast too much sway. Far too much.

For a moment, when the word
dragon
had formed on Blacklock’s lips, Peter had wanted to reach over and break the aristocratically high neck that held Captain Blacklock’s aristocratic head.
And perhaps I should have,
he thought, tilting to take advantage of the air currents. Below him, looking like a child’s model, were forests and villages and English troop encampments and citadels. All of it dun with drought and shimmering under a veil of heat. And he wondered where the enemy hid—the people who wished to kill Sofie.

No. Not Sofie. I have no right to call her that. She will be someone’s wife soon. If not that fool Blacklock’s, then someone else’s. She’s too lovely to remain unmarried long. And I can’t think of another man’s wife that way. Miss Warington. I must teach myself to call her that.

A sound startled him, before he realized it was a half-painful and half-wishful sigh escaping the dragon’s mouth. He climbed higher, which was folly. In the full light of the dawning day, everyone could see him, and the troops in this area would have rugs and anti-were powersticks. But it did not matter. Very little mattered anymore.

Not for the first time in his long exile from house and father and ancestry, he wished he had the strength to kill himself. What was it Hamlet ranted on about? A dagger. With a dagger one could purchase liberty. Only Peter couldn’t. First of all, killing a were was almost impossible, unless one got hold of a were-charmed powerstick and discharged it, at close quarters, against the head. And even then, it was unlikely to kill. More likely it would maim you, and leave you an idiot—half-witted and shambling and open to speculation as to how you could have survived such a thing at all.

The only way—the only truly good way—to kill a were was to remove its head, or put a charmed blade through its heart, or burn it. Peter thought that to commit suicide in that way would entail some truly careful engineering. And again, it left too much chance of simply crippling oneself in the attempt.

But no, there was an easier way open to him—to allow himself to be caught by the Gold Coats, the Were-Hunters with their magical weapons, in service of the queen. The powersticks wouldn’t kill him, but they would weaken him long enough that he could be bound over to inspection by the Royal Witch-Finders. And eventually, on an overcast morning—in his mind it was always an overcast morning—brought out by the public executioner for his final walk. He’d imagined the scene many times. When he was young—newly thrust out of his father’s house and the family’s circle of acquaintances—he used to dream of it and wake up sweating. In more recent years, it had become a conscious fantasy, almost a daydream.

Because he was a nobleman, he would merit the attention—the public exposure—given to other dangerous weres who had been caught and condemned over the last two centuries. Peter had read about them, almost obsessively, so he knew how the ceremony would go. They would bring him to St. Paul’s Cathedral and make him kneel on a step leading up to the entrance, laying his head on another. The rest for his neck would have been constructed already, so the ax didn’t mar the stone. Above, the sovereign would sit—Queen Victoria with her inert features, looking saddened and somewhat out of sorts, lending her stolid bourgeois presence to this most barbaric of spectacles. After all, Her Majesty had ordered much bloodshed, but rarely watched it. And then there would be the minister of magic, on the steps above, yelling out to the assembled crowd that England would now rid itself of this corruption in its body politic.

And then the masked man holding the ax would lift it with solemn poise, and let it fall—hopefully swiftly. Peter had read all he could about death by beheading, including the descriptions of the deaths of members of the French aristocracy under Monsieur de Guillotine’s merciful invention. That it was indeed merciful in relation to the British ax, he knew. Often enough the ax would botch it, merely breaking the neck or wounding the prisoner, leaving him suffering but not dead. Anne Boleyn, after her denunciation as a were-hare—hardly a dangerous animal, but the fact that she had concealed this crucial defect from the king constituted treason in a royal spouse—had demanded and obtained a French executioner brought forth, to behead her with a sharp sword. Peter doubted that impoverished Lord St. Maur—though descended from the family that had once upon a time supplanted the Boleyns; and just as fast, through treason and bungling, lost all their power—would have the political pull to ask for a similar boon. And then there was the whole question of how fast one died by beheading. There were indications that the noblemen so swiftly dispatched by the waves of revolutionary favor had lived for some minutes after the head was severed. The lips moved; the eyes looked at this or that person; the mouth emitted a peculiar sound, still trying to breathe. Coughing in the basket, they called it.