Soul of Fire (8 page)

He reached the end of this devastating recital and stood looking at Sofie, as if challenging her to recognize the flaws in her plan. She saw them all, and starkly enough, and she felt about two feet tall, but she would be cursed if she would admit to this man, this stranger, that she hadn’t thought things through perfectly well.

“It won’t
do,
Miss Warington,” he said at last, very softly. “Your plan is impossible.”

“Oh, you’re wrong,” she said, and stomped her foot, even while she was aware of his being absolutely right. “It will do.” It had to. “William was not just flirting. You don’t understand. He was
quite
head over heels in love with me. All the young men in his regiment were. They brought flowers and sent gifts and were all desperately, madly in love with me.”

“Were they? And yet none offered?”

“Oh, you are vexing. I’ve no doubt they would have offered had I remained in London. Only, Papa wrote demanding that I return home immediately and I—”

“And you returned. Leaving behind an entire regiment in love with you.”

Said like that it sounded like the craziest thing she could have said, but she was not about to admit that, either. She exhaled forcefully. “Still, I know Captain Blacklock was neither flirting nor lying. Wherever he is right now, I warrant you that he’s thinking about me and wishing he could be married to me. I’ll warrant you that he—”

“Perhaps he is,” the man said. “Wherever he is—
wherever
being the operative word here. It is quite likely you’d get to Meerut only to find your love-struck captain has been sent elsewhere. Or perhaps, if you haven’t misremembered and he was sent over due to some unrest, you’d discover that he is in the midst of a devilishly dangerous situation in which the last thing a man wants is a bride hanging on his arm. And then there’s the fact that even if he’s madly in love with you and wishes to marry you, his circumstances might not be such that would permit his taking a wife. In which case, all his love, and all your arduous travel—which, since you’d have to depend on strangers kindly furnishing you with transportation, is likely to take months—will have been in vain. And by then your reputation will be ruined and your parents, doubtless, in great anxiety over your fate. You can’t do this, Miss Warington,” he said, softly.

“But I have to!” she said, finally voicing her despair. “Oh, I know that William might not be able to take me in, that he might not be able to take me as a wife, but I will find some other way to survive, then. Perhaps I can be a maid to one of the officers’ wives. Or a governess to the children.”

“What? When there’s so much local labor offering at very low prices?”

“Then I’ll . . . I’ll join a mission, or something.”

At this he cackled, almost derisively. “I don’t see you as a missionary, Miss Warington.”

“But I must. I’ll do anything but go back home.”

“Come, you’re young, but don’t be foolish. Surely you realize this is just a scary fairy tale you’ve been telling yourself.” He ignored her attempts at speaking and continued, “Your parents would not make you marry this native, or indeed anyone you didn’t wish to marry, any more than they’d sacrifice you to a local god.” He walked toward her, swiftly. “I rescued you from almost certain death, and therefore I am in some measure responsible for you. I do not wish for you to get lost in the wilds of India, with no other choice but to appeal to a mission for your barest sustenance. Come with me,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, confused, putting her hand on the arm he offered.

“Home,” he said. “I’ll walk you back and we’ll say I found you alone after you escaped from the dragon—or, if you require that I be a hero in this, that I chased the dragon away from you. Whichever you prefer. I’ll walk you home and then—”She pulled her hand from his arm and stepped away from him. “Never. I will never ever ever go back.”

She felt a body-long shudder run through her. “I couldn’t. Ever. They’ll make me marry the raj.”

“You’re being quite foolish, you know. Of course they won’t make you marry him. At most they’ll demand and thunder, but you look more than able to withstand such pressure.”

“No. Mama says that we are quite ruined and the prince is offering a bride price and they cannot refuse him.”

He looked exasperated. “Not after you proved you were desperate enough to run away from home to avoid it.”

He should have been right. Sofie wanted him to be right. He should, by all that was holy, have been speaking the truth. No mother—no
parent
—in her right mind would force her daughter to marry someone after she’d almost killed herself escaping from the match.

But against this rational thought, Sofie felt a certainty that rose from within her like a suffocating pressure brooking no dissent. They would make her marry the creature, no matter her protests. She was as sure as she was of standing here and being alive. If she went back home tonight she would never emerge from that house again as Miss Warington. She would only leave it as the creature’s bride.

Feeling as if the air were all quite choked out of her, she said, “Never. I could never . . .” Her breath seemed very loud. Her heart beat like a deafening drum.

The dragon-man stretched his hand to her. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “Come. You’re being fantastical.”

She shook her head. Through her fear and her swirling panic, she said, blindly, “I . . . I will call for help. If you make me go back, I will denounce you. I will scream that you are a dragon and that you kidnapped me.”

IN THE HALLS OF THE MONKEY KING

Lalita ran, hurrying through the streets, her bare feet
slapping now dirt, now cobbles, the jangle of thin silver bracelets around her ankles making a musical sound. She penetrated deep into the native quarter, where everything was bright with life and light, even after sunset.

She ran past women in saris, past houses whose open doors showed dancing and music. She ducked around the advancing bulk of two elephants—carrying the principals in a marriage procession—squeezing herself against the wall, as the elephants took up almost all of the alleyway between makeshift buildings and hovels and tents.

It had been a long time since she’d taken this path.

There had been no reason to take it since she returned from England with Sofie, but there were things one didn’t forget—paths and experiences engraved on the mind and soul that resounded across all the years. She remembered this as she remembered her position and the protocol ingrained in her from a very early age.

She turned unerringly down alleys and paths, never doubting—despite the many new buildings—that she knew the way to where she was going.

She had come this way many times before being sent to England. She’d come with her father. She’d come on important occasions, on hallowed days. It was not something she could forget easily, or indeed at all.

She stopped sharply in front of what would have looked to the uninformed like little more than a miserable shop, merely a tent made of silks of varying age, at the door of which sat a man, his legs crossed, surveying the passersby with a calm and indifferent gaze, as though they had nothing to give him and could take nothing from him, either.

Lalita looked at him and bowed, and he lowered his eyes fractionally and bobbed his head a very slight amount right and then left, then right again. Consent enough. She walked past him, into the tent, where there were bolts of silk everywhere. The last time she’d come here, those had been tables with produce. It did not matter. The nature of the shop might change completely, but what mattered, truly, was the establishment beneath it.

She walked past the colorful silk, paying no attention to the two obese men who guarded it and who did not seem at all interested in selling the fabric. Perhaps she expected a more British attitude. She’d been away too long.

At the place she remembered—the spot where she could feel the power surge beneath her feet—Lalita stopped and made a gesture, which was known as a “wave of revealing” in the magic of her people. To other people it was unknown. It made visible what had been hidden by the magic of her kind. In this case, what had been hidden there at the back of the dingy shop, in the shadows that smelled of silk and the street outside, was a massive door, set in an old, time-weathered stone doorway.

To this door, Lalita bowed three times, and the door opened to reveal a man. He was triple the height of a normal man and wore only loose pantaloons of violently red silk. In each of his hands was a sword, gleaming and polished and lethal-looking.

Lalita wondered if he were truly that big, or if it was only an impression conveyed by some sort of magic. His look—a sword in each hand, his shaved head, a grin on a face that appeared, otherwise, oddly blurred—led her to suspect it was the last, but it didn’t matter. She viewed him as what he truly was, the guardian whose job it was to protect the inner sanctum from profane eyes.

She bowed to him, and pulled up the scarf part of her sari to cover her head and half of her face in its soft folds. Then she ran her hand, palm up, in front of her face, without touching it. In that gesture, she allowed him to see her true aspect. In that gesture, she revealed who she was.

The guard jumped back with a grace that would have looked unnatural to someone not acquainted with the nature of this place. He sheathed his swords with blinding speed, and bowed to her—hands joined at his chest. “Welcome,” he said, stepping out of the way, to allow Lalita to pass through.

Past the guard was another doorway—the massive, hammered gold doors standing wide open. And past the doorway was a hall that seemed to Lalita’s gaze as immense and long as it had looked the first time she had entered it.

It was of golden stone, built deep and narrow. It had side walls and—high up on them—windows, through which came a diffused and filtered light, like the sun seen through several layers of dazzling white cloth. From the walls inward, a profusion of columns—tall, seemingly endless columns—pierced the gloom upward. Covered in faded golden writing in an alphabet that no one had ever seen outside these halls, they held up—high above the heads of even the most towering giant—a ceiling like the inside of a boat keel, arched and peaked and high.

There were paintings on the ceiling, but they were not visible from Lalita’s humble height. But the paintings on the wall were fully visible. They represented—mostly—monkeys frolicking amid ancient palaces. Monkeys wearing rich apparel and jewels.

The same monkeys—or their real life counterparts—ran along the walls, amid richly dressed men and women. Lalita glimpsed them there, in the shadows, rustling and moving—their eyes, seeming too human, staring at her in something like shock.

Lalita fell to her knees and bowed her head. At the other end of the hall, vaguely visible in the filtered-light gloom, stood a tall, shining gold throne, covered in strange carvings. When Lalita entered the room and knelt, it was covered in monkeys, running this way and that.

But now a deep voice rumbled from the throne. “Lalita?”

She lifted her head to look up. On the throne sat a man who didn’t appear old so much as timeless. He looked at her with piercing, dark brown eyes. Even if she couldn’t see his face very clearly from this far away, she could see the eyes, or feel them, like a caress upon her face. And at the same time, a slow and steady examination.

“Sire,” she said, speaking in little more than a whisper, and yet knowing that he would hear her as clearly as if she’d shouted.