The Dream Thief (36 page)

Amalia. Come down.

No,
she thought.

Come down.

And even though she didn’t want
to—even though she was free and untamed up here, commanding the sky—she tucked
her wings close to her body and began a spiraling descent, marking a white
stone castle as her center, tightening her circles until the walls and towers
winked at her in ripples of quartzite, until the man and the girl standing in
the inner courtyard followed her with upraised faces, waiting. From somewhere
else on the castle grounds, dogs began to groan and then to wail.

She landed in a skid, her talons
raking through the gravel, knocking over a fountain at the end of it with a
contemptuous flick of her tail. The alabaster basin hit the ground and cracked
apart.

“Change back,” commanded the man,
unmoving.

She inhaled. She closed her eyes
and reined in her magnificence. She Turned into woman, standing cold and alone.

Faces watched from behind the
castle windows. No one stirred.

The man glanced at the girl, who
walked forward and draped a mantle over Lia’s shoulders, closing it at her
chest. The girl’s eyes were bright and very clear. “Beautiful ladies,” said
Prince Imre, observing them with his hands in his coat pockets. “My ladies.
We’ll go inside now.”

The
mournful baying of the dogs followed them all the way in.

The worst aspect of a shoulder
wound, Zane considered, was not the blood soaking his shirt and sleeve to
clammy coldness, or even the pain that stabbed hot pokers through his veins. It
was that, even with a tourniquet, it made his arm useless, and climbing
extremely damned difficult.

Still,
at least Imre hadn’t hit him in the leg. Climbing up mine shafts with a leg
wound would have been impossible.

So Zane climbed. It took him
hours to escape the mountain. Hours to find another way out of the tunnels
besides the way Imre—and, he hoped, Imre’s henchmen—took.

After being shot he had, quite
sensibly, rolled back into the lake. At least it had seemed sensible at the
time; Imre still had his gun and surely the means to reload it. But the nearest
bright light was a tunnel away, and unless the prince could see in the
dark—Zane sincerely hoped he couldn’t—reloading would be tricky.

Let Imre think he was dead, or
close to it. He had no problems sinking below the slick surface of the water,
floating without noise. The cold had numbed his wound. He’d hardly felt
anything at all.

Imre had rummaged around for a
few minutes and then left. Zane floated a few minutes longer, listening hard,
but there were no further sounds disturbing the cavern beyond his own breathing
and the subtle lapping of water against stone.

It had taken far more effort to
escape the lake again than it had to roll into it.

He
thought of sea monsters lurking beneath waves. He thought of Lia, of metallic
coils and open wings, and dragged himself out.

His coat was where he’d left it,
the fox-lined hat too. He fished the candle and phosphorus matches one-handed
from a pocket—thank God Imre hadn’t discovered the coat—and let the slight,
wispy bend of the flame show him which way the air drew.

It also
showed him that the diamond was gone. He found the smashed lantern, and that
was all.
Bloody good aim,
he’d thought hazily, and began to climb.

Hours. He imagined her wounded.
He imagined her bleeding, as he was. He imagined her supine with Imre above
her, his hands on her white skin, and he staggered along a little more quickly.
Occasionally he worked without the candle to make it last; he had ten matches.
Nine chances to get it relit. He tried to use them only at forks in the
tunnels.

He didn’t know when he began to
realize that the small glow of his flame wasn’t the only light source before
him. The walls began to gain texture and shape. The air lost its deadened
scent.

He heard a bird warbling. His
tunnel ended in a chink of daylight, a pile of fallen rocks that showed an
opening hardly larger than his face. He put his eye to the hole and looked out
at a sun-dappled forest, at a tiny bright songbird, butter-yellow, perched on a
pine bough dead ahead. The bird looked back at him, falling quiet. It hopped
sideways a little on its branch, fluffing its feathers, then began singing
again.

In a small, quiet corner of her
heart, Lia observed what was happening to her. She felt the hands of the Others
as they helped her dress. She heard their whispering voices, Romanian words she
could not quite understand, but it hardly mattered because they were talking
about her, not to her.

She felt the daylight on her
shoulders as they bound her into her corset. She smelled the outside on their
clothing, chemical roses from the rouge on their cheeks, coffee and dairy on
their breath.

She lifted her arms as they
fitted her with the deep-green bodice, the lace scratchy against her breasts.
She gazed out the windows of the bedchamber and thought,
Turn.

But she did not. She didn’t
really even try. Prince Imre had handed her cordially to the human maidservants
and commanded, “Let them attend you,” and that’s all she wanted to do.

The dreams had not offered her
sight, but she had it now, and with
Draumr
a low, agreeable swirling in
her head, everything about her appeared softer, mistier; a sheen of water
separated her from the room and the women and everything harsh. She stood alone
behind it, admiring the play of light, distracted and happy and at peace. She
was back beneath the lake; she had never left the lake. She did not need to
swim, because drowning turned out to be so sweet.

Except for that one little
corner.

The canopied bed had been made up
since this morning. There was no indication anyone had ever slept there; even
the pillows were smoothed. And but for the lingering caress of his scent, there
was nothing left in this chamber of Zane. Only her belongings remained, her
trunk and gowns and two pairs of buckled shoes.

The women placed rings on her
fingers that were not her own. They touched perfume to her throat that she did
not know. She admired the view and let them comb out her hair, and curl it, and
sift French powder down to her scalp.

That unknown corner of her began
to bleed, but her body remained passive. Despite her secret heart, she was
content to sit until Imre called for her again.

Like the palace in Óbuda, there
would be no stealing into
Zaharen Yce.
It was a fortress before anything
else, with a single entrance that he knew of, and that a guarded gate and
portcullis, as formidable as any Norman stronghold dotting the hills of the
English countryside.

He approached it openly, keeping
a hand pressed to his shoulder under the gray fur coat. He greeted the men who
poured out to intercept him—bewigged footmen and a few fellows more serious
than that, reminding him greatly of Hunyadi’s guard. Before they could touch
him, he informed them he had news for their master,
drákon
news,
managing to imply through his tone and the lifting of his bloodied palm that
should any one of them feel the need to prevent him, it would be on their
heads. Zane was escorted inside.

The courtyard looked as if it had
seen a tussle. There were deep furrows scoring the driveway, and at least one
fountain and an urn toppled and broken.

He’d seen marks like that before.
Five claws, four feet. A dragon had skidded to rest here since he’d ridden out
this morning, and he had a damned clear idea of who it would be.

He knew from his prowling that
Zaharen
Yce
had a ballroom. He hadn’t lingered there last night; empty ballrooms
echoed uncomfortably and usually held little of interest. Yet today, for some
reason, it was where the prince had decided to take his supper.

It was a tower chamber, huge and
round, chilled from the slab marble walls that alternated from cream to smoky
blue and the Roman pillars that touched a frescoed ceiling at least three
stories high. The fresco was of planets and stars and silver-painted beasts.
Gauzy curtains shot with gold draped the windows, framing treetops and
mountains and that endless deep sky all around. The late-afternoon light
slanted in, cool and drifting; the white sparkling floor was devoid of any
rugs. Dancing here would be akin to dancing atop the clouds.

There was no hearth, no furniture
at all save the table at the end, where the prince sat in a throne chair,
platters of food and drink before him, a crystal vase of jasmine adding
fragrance to the air. Flanking Imre on either side were the princess and Lia.

It wasn’t a ballroom. Zane
realized that now. The floor, the stars, the vaulted ceiling: this was a place
designed for the convergence of dragons.

One of the footmen hurried ahead,
his heels striking hard at the stone. He approached the prince and bowed and
muttered, but from the instant Zane had entered the chamber, Imre had not taken
his eyes from his.

Zane offered a smile, insolent.
He’d intended insult and hoped for surprise. He thought from the prince ’s
rigid expression he’d managed both.

The footman bowed again, and Imre
dismissed him with a nod. Zane had not stopped walking, outstripping his
reluctant escort. When he was near enough to make out the embroidery on Imre’s
oyster-gray lapels, he halted.

“You are dripping blood upon my
floor,” observed the prince.

“My apologies. It is the
unfortunate consequence of being shot.”

“Indeed.” The prince’s black
brows lifted. “You might have done me the favor of expiring before reaching my
halls.”

“No,” said Zane, and with an
effort that cost him dots in his vision and a cold sweat down his back, he
completed a sweeping, perfect bow. “I fear I’m never so couth as that.”

“So I see.”

As he
raised from the bow, Zane risked a look directly at Lia: her pallid face, her
slumberous eyes, her lips dabbed red and her hair ivory-white. She gazed back
at him impassively, her hands folded in her lap.

“I’m
going to make the diamond a pendant, I think,” said Imre conversationally, tapping
light fingers against his vest pocket. “It’s too large for a stickpin and too
heavy for a ring. Don’t you agree?”

“That’s how I plan to wear it,
Your Grace. I must applaud your taste.”