Soul of Fire (34 page)

Besides, he remembered the sound of wings in his dream. What had that dream been all about? What had he heard to inspire it? In his mind, he had an image of this man descending from the sky, naked, flapping his clothes like gigantic wings, and shook his head. About as implausible as all other ideas he’d had.

He indicated that the man should precede him into the room, and carelessly flung a lighting spell toward the magelight on his bedside table. By its pale glow, he was able to see more of the man. He’d thought—hoped, perhaps—that in this light St. Maur would appear less perfect than he did in the half light of the dawning day on the veranda. No such luck. St. Maur remained as perfect as something chiseled out of stone by a master sculptor.

Thou shalt make no graven images
went through William’s head in his father’s stern voice, and he gave his mental confusion relief by turning away from St. Maur to set his sword against the wall next to his bed. He took two deep breaths and turned around, to be overwhelmed once more by a vision of human perfection. “Milord, you were saying?” he said, trying to keep his voice as steady as he could.

“I was saying that I brought you a message from Miss Sofie Warington. Or not a message, but word . . .” The man seemed to be overwhelmed by confusion himself, and opened his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “It is hard to explain, but I . . . You could say I made Miss Sofie Warington’s acquaintance as she was escaping her parents’ house.”

“Her parents have joined her in London?” William asked, knowing he was not thinking straight.

“No. They are, as they always were, in Calcutta. She was escaping their home here.”

“She came to India, then?” William asked. He wondered why St. Maur thought it important to tell him this. And what he was supposed to do with the information. But his mind was too clouded just now by his feelings for him to know exactly what to do. It wasn’t just that he found St. Maur disturbingly handsome, he also could not look at him without the nagging feeling that he had seen him—or at least his eye—elsewhere.

“Yes. Some weeks ago, I understand. Her parents had arranged . . . they had betrothed her to a native prince, the ruler of a state near Jaipur. Only Miss Warington didn’t like the look of the man, and therefore jumped from her window.”

“Jumped from her window?” William asked, wrinkling his brow. “Good God! As impetuous as that?” The Queen had ordered him to marry Sofie and he refused. He didn’t love her, but of the various society women with whom he found himself in company, she was one of his favorites. Not that he was attracted to her physically, nor that he ever felt anything toward her that indicated they should be united in matrimony. No. It was more that she struck him as an impish child would have, a creature quite out of control but always filled with the of best intentions. He liked her company, and had lived half in fear of what she might do next. But . . . jump from a window? He wondered how far up the window was.

St. Maur smiled and shrugged. “Actually, from her veranda. She was, you see, quite desperate. Not only did she intensely dislike her intended, she had heard from the servants that his kingdom was normally referred to as the Kingdom of the Tigers, and that no European had ever entered it and come back out to tell the tale.”

“The Kingdom of the Tigers!” William said. His hands clenched and opened of their own accord. “He told me about the Kingdom of the Tigers. I thought—”

“He?”

“Bhishma. A sepoy. It doesn’t matter. But he did tell me that there was a Kingdom of the Tigers.”

“It is nearby, then?” St. Maur asked, tilting his head.

“So I understand. He said that some of his friends heard their . . . coded roars, and that they were on a quest for some jewel, something that would allow them to overthrow the Queen’s rule in India.”

St. Maur took a deep breath, as though William had struck near the truth. “Then you must hear this. It is urgent. . . .” He leaned close.

William smelled something that couldn’t be quite perfume but was not the body odor of any human, something slightly sweet with a hint of spice like . . . cardamon and cinnamon mixed. It shouldn’t be an alluring smell, but it was, and William found himself taking great deep breaths as the man talked. Fortunately, St. Maur’s story was disturbing enough he probably assumed that William was breathing deep in fear.

In an unhurried, precise voice, with matter-of-fact words, St. Maur told William of rescuing Miss Warington from a fall from her balcony, and of running with her into Calcutta.

“That was very bad of you,” William said sternly, holding on to a thread of sanity. “To entice her away from her parents’ house.”

“I did not entice her. If I hadn’t followed her, she would have continued on her own.”

“But . . . you were stronger than her.”

“Are you truly suggesting I should have laid hands on her?”

Blacklock shook his head. “But—”

“
But
is precisely it. As she threatened to go, and actually started walking away, I realized she did know, fully, the dangers of her position. And yet, she was still determined to see it through, to walk here alone rather than return to her parents.”

“Walk here?” William ran his hand backwards through his hair yet again. “Why would she walk here?”

“It appears she . . . Well . . . She said you would have married her if you could.”

St. Maur said the words as though it hurt him, and while William stared at him in sheer horror, he looked back steadily.

To William, it was as though an abyss had opened where he’d thought to step. What had he told Miss Warington? What could he have said to her that gave her such an idea? The Queen wanted him to marry her, but he’d never even
courted
her. A casual acquaintance, perhaps a light friendship, was the nearest they’d got. He remembered her well—a pretty girl, a good dancer, good on horseback. She had spirit and she stuck out from the group of girls from Lady Lodkin’s Academy that got trotted out at every ball and assembly and social event where young people would gather. She stuck out in part because for all her courage and determination, she looked more than a little lost. Enough to excite William’s pity. She didn’t know how to react to the flatterers crowding around her, and she often would put them off with too bold a dismissal, and end up alone throughout a party.

He ran his hand back over his hair again. What had he said? What had he told her? Had he mentioned marriage? It was possible he had, though if he’d done so, it would have been as something that could never happen. And there, perhaps, she had misinterpreted him and assumed that he meant he could not financially do it, not that he could not . . . Oh, but this was infamous. “She was coming here . . . to marry me?”

St. Maur, looking at William, his forehead wrinkled in a concern that was perhaps not very far from just the slightest hint of amusement, nodded. And William, flabbergasted, looking at St. Maur’s eye, suddenly remembered where he had seen it. “The crystal,” he said before he could stop himself. And then, “The dragon.”

St. Maur froze. His whole body went rigid. The lines of his face hardened, and it appeared to William as though he’d become, in that moment, a creature of stone or ice—something that had no human understanding and no warmth at all. His eye, too, seemed to ice over, to become empty of all sympathy.

Meanwhile, William’s mind worked. He realized he’d seen the same eye in the dragon in the crystal. According to the legends, the eyes often looked the same between person and were-beast. But that meant . . .

He jumped backwards without meaning to, and flattened himself against the wall. Had it been possible, he would have melted into the wall and disappeared. The sound of wings. The sound of wings he’d heard before had been nothing less than the dragon landing. He swallowed again, convulsively.

What happened now? Would St. Maur change into a dragon and devour him? Surely he couldn’t allow William to go, to spread the word that this man, a peer of the realm, was a were-dragon. It would be death for St. Maur, and surely a were-dragon capable of becoming a ferocious beast would not allow himself to be denounced and killed without fight.

St. Maur’s rigidity had passed, and he was patting his pockets desperately. William wondered if this was some sort of preliminary to changing shapes. Was it necessary to touch certain pressure points? Was it something that William should be stopping?

But when St. Maur spoke, it was in a vaguely annoyed tone. “Damn. I appear to have lost my cigarettes when I carried my clothes up. I don’t suppose you have . . . ?”

Acting on some instinctive good manners, William grabbed his cigarette case from his bedside table and flipped it open. Then, at a pointed look from St. Maur, he found his lighter, and—getting a cigarette for himself—lit both. St. Maur took a deep puff and exhaled in a series of neat rings. “Please, Captain,” he said. “Do not imagine I am about to change and incinerate you.”

“But . . . how can you know . . . how can you be sure I won’t give you away? That I won’t . . .” He was the Englishman linked to Soul of Fire. He had to be.

St. Maur shrugged. “Surely you don’t imagine that I can ever go back to England, or claim my seat in Parliament, let alone any of the other prerogatives of my estate?” He shrugged again. “If you give me away, I imagine I’ll go on living as I’ve been living for the last ten years, moving about from land to land, never settling, taking care no one finds out what I am. I probably won’t even use the name.” He took another puff of his cigarette. “I’m more interested in knowing what you meant by
The crystal.
And how, exactly, you found out.”

William realized he’d neither taken a puff of his cigarette nor shaken from it the ash, which was growing very long. He shook the ash into a small bowl he used for the purpose, and which was set at the corner of his desk. “I’m a soothsayer,” he said. “Is St. Maur your real name? Are you a real British lord?”

“Yes. And are you trained as a soothsayer?”

Shaking his head, William said, “The only properly trained soothsayers go to France or Spain to study, and I could do neither. My father is a curate—the second son of the third son of the local lord of the manor. Never much money there, and by the time you get to third sons . . .” He let the rest hang, then asked, “I thought dragons came only from China and Scandinavia. Do you know where the blood comes from? How it got in the family?”

St. Maur shook his head. “Not at all. To my knowledge, there have been no weres anywhere in the family, in any branch, at any time. I suspect the blood got into the family the same way you ended up not being trained as a soothsayer.” And to what William was sure was his perfectly blank gaze, in return St. Maur smiled, just a little. “What I mean is that my family, too, was quite out of money. My grandfather, you see, loved gambling and women. Or men. Or whatever crossed his path when he’d drunk a bit much, which was another of his vices. As a result, he ran through our fortune like water through a sieve. So, my father, being responsible, married the daughter of a moneyed man. It didn’t last—the money, at least. Though my mother didn’t last, either. She died giving birth to what would have been my younger brother, when I was very small.

“But the thing is, though my mother had some minor gentry in her ancestry, the bulk of her ancestors were plebeians and merchants. People of little worth and with very few recordings left of their passage through the world. Who knows? Perhaps one of her maternal ancestors went to China and bought himself a wife or a concubine. Or perhaps, judging by my dragon form, the dragon gene came over with the Normans. I always thought genealogies were kind of a hoax, where you track one line absolutely—two lines at most. You might think all that is your ancestry, but in point of fact, it is impossible for a man to follow all his lines of ancestry in all time. At least for a sane man who wishes to stay so. I suspect at the other end of that type of madness lies the sort of person who shuffles about unswept rooms in his underwear, addressing pointed remarks at the walls.”

William chuckled, despite himself, and realized he was no longer afraid. “You know, you seem quite—”He stopped short, as he realized he was about to use the word
normal,
and that he didn’t know how his guest would take the remark.

St. Maur smiled, a feral grin. “Nice? Normal? Human? Ah, don’t be deceived, Captain, it is but a show . . . as others have found, to their chagrin.” The smile vanished, and a wrinkle, as if of worry, formed on his forehead. “The truth is, sometimes even I am not too sure where the boundaries of the beast lie, nor what it means to do . . . until it does it.”

“Well, you seem . . . That is . . .” William could not feel a menace, and wished he could. Was he deceiving himself that this creature was perfectly harmless?

The worry vanished from St. Maur’s features, replaced with slight embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I’m being a boor, and worrying you. Let me assure you that you are not at all at any risk from me. Not now, not ever, unless you should charge me or wound me or in some way that causes me to feel my life is immediately threatened. As for your soothsaying talent—I take it you used it, with a crystal, and therefore saw my image.”

William nodded. “Yes. Your image and . . . Sofie Warington’s. Now I know why.”

St. Maur took a deep breath. “I take it, then, that you have not the slightest intention of marrying the lovely Sofie Warington?”

William shifted uncomfortably. He looked at the broad forehead, the mobile mouth, and an impulse swept over him that he was far too intelligent to avail himself of. It didn’t matter if part of him wanted to touch St. Maur, to hold him. William was not an idiot. He knew this was likely to bring about the sort of reaction one got from threatening the dragon’s life.