The Dream Thief (28 page)

“My world is a tinderbox,
snapdragon,” he said, distant. “It’s dangerous and unpredictable, and you are
the cinder that could kindle it all to ash.”

“Would that be so dreadful?”

He closed his eyes. “Yes. It’s
all I know.”

“Not quite.” She waited until he
turned to her. “You know me.”

His face hardened again, his gaze
bright and wary, thoughts she could not read turning behind his look. Lia only
gazed back at him. She curled her fingers in the pockets of her cloak and felt
the roll of coins he had given her, unyielding against her palm. Then his lips
began to curve.

“Isn’t this the part where you
weep prettily and beg me to change, to give up my evil ways and become a decent
man?”

“Who’s been reading penny novels?
I think you’re a decent man already.”

He shook his head. “Then you
don’t know me at all.”

She said nothing. She stood in
the mud and let the air cloud in front of her, hearing the soft, small rush of
the streaming water, the snow melting into raindrops that slipped from the
trees, the diamond whispering and yearning below.

Zane picked up a pebble and
plunked it into the wash. “Play it out, my heart. What would happen to us? We’d
retire to Darkfrith on Papa’s reward, and I’ll become a dull country bloke,
growing old and bored and fat by the fire—when I’m not busy ducking your
family, who will
not,
I assure you, find any of this amusing. No doubt
they have some eager-eyed, sharp-clawed mate all picked out for you, so I’d be
ducking him too. You’d despise me within a year.”

“No.”

“Then I would despise myself.
Lia, all that I am is what I do. I’m not meant for a tame sort of life, to
dwell in bucolic splendor. I’m a city rat. I ache for it. I was made for it.
And I wouldn’t expect you to live as I do. I wouldn’t want that for you. But
it’s all I have to offer.”

“Then—I accept.”

He brought a hand to his forehead
and began to laugh. “It’s like being snared in a sugartrap. You won ’t listen.”

“I
heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the
heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those
things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and
wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.”

“I do
not love you.”

“You
are
a good liar.”

“I
want
you.” He turned
and stepped closer to her, suddenly imposing, all humor vanished. His cravat
was tied; his hair was braided back; he might have been any English gentleman
on any given day confronting her in a wild forest, but he was not. When he
moved, he blocked the sun from her eyes. The day flared into a nimbus around
him. “I want you all the time, and that’s the honest truth. I want to touch you
again, I want to be inside you. I want to make you scream, and the hell of it
is, I know you want that too. But don’t be witless. This isn’t love.”

She stood her ground. She felt
shamed and light-headed and didn’t know if it was the sun or him or the lack of
nourishment, or if it even mattered.

You will not change the future,
the dragon whispered.
You
cannot make him care.

From somewhere far, far away, an
eagle let out a single piercing cry, and another one answered it, their calls
dying off against the hills.

Zane bent his head. His mouth
touched hers, cool and impersonal, the kiss of a courtier, and Lia felt her
heart give a painful skip.

“Is this your love?” he asked,
his hands rising to her shoulders. His lips traced her cheekbone. “Is this the
steady kindness you spoke of?”

Her hands raised too, clutching
at the fabric of his coat. She lifted her face and closed her eyes, tilting
back into the sunlight, and the world went to red behind her lids.

The coat was one from Jászberény,
itchy and coarse, nothing of the smoothness beneath it: the damask vest, his
hot skin. But the fact that she knew what waited beneath was enough to excite
her. She’ d tasted him now. She’d known him, in the depths of the night. His
skin was pale without his tan; his nipples were brown; there was an old scar
that slashed thin along his left ribs. His arms were muscular and his chest was
sculpted. He was a man who used his body as a weapon, and with his every
breath, it showed. He tasted like candy, like wine and spice and sugar, no
matter what he’d been eating. He moved inside her like a demon, opening gates
within her she had not known were there.

She touched a hand to his cravat.
She found the knot that held the linen in place and began to loosen it, working
a finger down into the folds.

“Don’t bother,” Zane said. He
tore off the sheepskin and blanket, and then the greatcoat and his gloves,
letting it all fall to the mud. He yanked at the buttons of his breeches and
pushed her hard back from the stream, over moss and ferns and rocks until
something hard pushed back: a tree trunk, digging into her spine.

His hat fell off. His hands
parted her cloak and dragged up her skirts. His mouth didn’t leave hers; she
felt his words against her lips as his fingernails scratched up her thick
stockings.

“Is that truly what you desire?
Love and matrimony, innocence and froth? Or is it this—” He stroked her beneath
the chemise. He thrust two fingers deep inside her, and despite herself, Lia
moaned. Pressed against her, stomach to stomach, chest to chest, his hand
sliding in and out—and in—Zane gave his wicked smile.

“That’s
what I thought.” His free hand took hers and held it to his shaft. He felt both
foreign and familiar, throbbing hot and stiff with his breeches falling open to
his hips. She dragged her fingertips against him, exploring his shape, his
heat, eager to understand this part of him, eager to know how he tortured her
dreams and sent her body into night-sweat agony.

She found his smooth tip and
rubbed it, following his ridges, the curves and veins and satin softness, all
the way down to the curls at his base. She drew her nails lightly back up,
turning her hand, rubbing her palm along his center, very gently, because it
made him freeze on a breath.

Zane knocked her hand away. He
grabbed her by the waist and rammed into her, and the beech tree sifted snow
down around them in utter silence.

He was rough. He was uncouth. He
gave her no quarter when she turned her head for a cold, quick breath, but
pressed his fingers into her cheek and held her prisoner for his kisses. His
beard rasped against her face.

“Scream,” he bit out, turning his
lips against her throat, his teeth closing on her just hard enough to hurt. He
pushed deeper into her, fire and pain, delicious heat and lust that rose
through her veins. His words were a hiss against her skin. “Go ahead and
scream, Lia. I know you want to.”

She buried her face in his
shoulder. She felt her toes lift from the earth.

“Lia.”

She bit down on his waistcoat.
She closed her eyes and opened her throat on a sound that hit the sky more
urgent than the eagle’s, her body shattering around him.

He caught her to him with both
hands, thrusting hard. He was as silent as she was not, a force without words
or timbre beyond his ragged breath, the slap of his skin against hers, the
sifting of the snow with every fierce push of his body. She felt his release. She
felt him spilling inside her, his entire being shuddering, her legs spread wide
and every inch of her raw to his touch.

For a long time afterward he kept
his cheek to hers, winded, their eyes averted. He kept his hands at her
shoulders as he swallowed and slowed his breath.

“That—was stunning. But it wasn’t
love.”

Lia had no answer. Not now. She
felt sore and bruised and horribly relaxed, a doll with loosened joints. Her
head drooped against his neck; his hands reached up and dragged through her
hair, tugging at the coronet she’d plaited tight this morning, his fingers
pulling as his palms slid down to her cheeks. She smelled him and burnt pine
and fresh water, more intoxicating than any wine.

With his thumbs at her jaw he
tipped back her head, another kiss as his body withdrew. Then he dropped his
hands and stepped away. Her dress slithered back down over her legs.

A new noise rattled the forest,
not very distant. Horses. The steady squeak of wooden wheels.

Zane shoved his shirt back into
his breeches as Lia stepped around the beech to glimpse the road. A coach and
four—not their own—was heading down the mountaintop, gigantic brown horses
picking their way down the slope, the driver’s whip primed high and loose in
the wind.

Zane
expelled a breath, bending to retrieve his tricorne. “Apparently, my lady, we
are expected.” He turned around to jerk up her bodice, speaking grimly all the
while. “Don’t look so calf-eyed. If he hasn’t already spied what we were up to,
he’ll guess it in an instant by the expression upon your face.” She pushed him
away, enough to make him stagger. But he only came right back, brushing her
loose hair back from her cheeks, dusting snow from her sleeves and shoulders.
She reached up and yanked his hat over his ears.

Zane raised it up again
carefully, examining her with a critical eye. “It’s not entirely your fault, I
suppose. No doubt you can’t help being so damned ravishing.”

She could not think of a single
rude response before the coach and four was upon them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he strongest magic, as you must
know, is born from the shiny sharp brink of sky and earth. Earth has her roots
and geometric crystals; these things are useful for grounding spells, for
tempting living beings and bending their fates like a cherry-hot blade to the
hammer and forge.

Sky has his planets and orbits
and infinite constellations. Sky’s magic is transparent, ungrounded, useful for
slipping into thoughts, for whispering a name in an unguarded ear, for
suggesting alliances and enemies or revealing venom in a cup by the aqua light
of a harvest moon.

But only in that bounded,
unspoken space where these two realms scrape edges is the purest magic
revealed: violent, churning, sparks and comets and whirlwinds, invisible to the
human eye. From that place, eons ago, from diamonds and lava and ruby spinning
stars, the
drákon
were first thrust into light, which is why we are the
apex of all things.

We bleed with the mountains. We
ponder with the stars.

Our Gifts are plentiful. We speak
to stones. We Turn to smoke. We bend metal with our hands and end lives with
our talons. We’re clever and subtle like the sky, and feral and potent like the
earth.

But dreams are not our natural
province. When the Gift of clairvoyance is stirred into the soul of one of our
kind, terrible beauties result. Of those few in our history who have grasped
this Gift, nearly all sank with it into madness over time. It cannot be an easy
thing to know your own future, or that of your kin. It cannot be pleasant to
witness the story of the life and death of your tribe before it unfolds.

Under the spell of the mighty
Carpathians, with the breath of her creation blowing over her heart, Amalia’s
Gift splintered. She was given two futures: one dark, one bright, the same
mortal lover pulling her two-handed into each.

Every step she took lured her
closer to the dark.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN