The Dream Thief (21 page)

He had looked only once at Lia,
that moment he had answered his door to find them standing on his front steps.
After that he kept his gaze pinned to the hardwood floor or else uneasily upon
Zane.

Lia tried her most melting smile.
“Thank you so much. Your generosity will not be forgotten.”

At that the man glanced at her—a
swift, uneasy lift of his eyes before bowing his head again.

“This way,” the man said, and led
them to a bedroom.
The
bedroom, she realized, glancing around at the
plain iron bed and pine trunks and unadorned porcelain basin that held water
rimmed with ice.

“Sir, we cannot,” she protested,
turning to the elder.

“No, no. It is yours for your
stay. Please, gentle one”—she thought that was the word he used, although it
might have been
noblewoman
—“you honor us. Accept our humble aid.”

He seemed truly horrified by her
protest, his skin blanching, his wife behind him making a small, distressed
noise. Lia looked at them both, then back up at Zane, who offered a droll
smile.

“How perfectly delightful,” said
her false husband, with only the slightest of glances at the cold barren floor.

And it kept like that for days.
Every village appeared nearly identical, with clean, whitewashed homes and
onion-domed churches, nestled by lakes or frosty streams, and trees climbing
mountains to pierce the heavens. At some point they had left Hungary behind for
the fertile woodlands of Transylvania, but to Lia the landscape looked the
same. The same sheep flocked the hay fields; the same clouds flocked the blue
sky. Only the snow changed, vanishing quickly under the relentlessly bright
days, leaving the landscape dotted in colors that melted from gold to green to
brown.

Every evening they found refuge
in one home or another; there was little traffic for inns in these small,
nameless places. The thief made his bed at her feet, wrapped in blankets. Lia
would stare up at the ceiling as long as she could, fighting sleep, until the
dreams would come anyway and drag her down into their depths.

She did not think either one of
them was getting much rest.

He was back to riding atop the
carriage too.

Lia would wake every morning to
find him already up and gone, usually to see about the horses, or the coachman,
or the thickness of the mist or the clouds. It was only then, in the privacy of
these small, shuttered rooms, that she attempted to Turn to smoke again. It was
certainly as much as she dared— smoke might be excused in a house. A full-grown
dragon would not.

She was
not entirely successful. That first, wonderful time had been so easy. It might
have been the passion of the moment, emotions that had swept her along and let
it happen. When she tried it now, she found her focus fractured, nothing easy
about it. With a great deal of concentration she was able to transform her
hair, her right hand and foot. And that was all. Still, every morning she
tried.

Then she would dress. She would
greet their hosts alone, accept their bread and good wishes, and carefully
attempt to chip away some of the clenched fear that seemed to grip them.
However polite she was, however affable, nothing changed.

She left it to Zane to scatter
coins upon a table or counter just before they departed. She’d noted how,
unless it was absolutely necessary, none of the people here openly touched what
she touched.

She was different. She
felt
different, slower somehow, anxious, as if the mysteries of her body were only
waiting behind a locked door and the key dangled just beyond the reach of her
fingers. The higher they scaled these mountains, the sharper her blood ran, and
all her perceptions with it.

Every day now she felt the flash
of the
drákon
. It was never clear, never stable; she couldn’t seem to
pin it to a single place. Sometimes she wondered if the lack of sleep was
playing tricks with her mind, but no—it felt real. Usually around twilight,
with the sun drained away and the heavens turned translucent, and the first of
the stars opening their eyes. It was the time when
Draumr
sang her
strongest, a drag of sweet, melancholy beauty that sank heavy through her
bones. If they weren’t already ensconced in some villager’s quarters, she would
make a point to have the carriage pull over, to walk the road a moment and
breathe in the music along with the thin air until her lungs ached.

That would be when it would
happen. The electric warning down her neck, the animal in her waking,
searching. If there were clouds she saw nothing else in them; if there was
smoke it never openly appeared.

The thief had purchased a hunting
knife for her at the last major settlement they had passed, a keenly impressive
blade with a slim, leather-wrapped handle that just fit her palm. After much
silent debate, she kept it strapped to her garter on her right leg, an
ever-chilly discomfort that still made her feel better about what lay ahead.

When Zane inquired, she’d told
him what she’d done with it. He’d granted her a sidelong look.

“How do you plan to reach it, if
and when the time comes?”

So she’d used the knife’s tip to
pick apart the seams of the skirts, until she had a pocket-sized hole for her
hand in every dress.

“Good enough,” he’d said when
she’d informed him. “A bit drafty, though, I’d suppose.”

She had not answered that. They’d
been in bed—well, she was—and his voice, floating up from the floor, had a
decidedly sardonic note to it.

She did not retire with it at
night. Zane had purchased his own knife along with hers, a much larger one, and
she knew that he did keep it close. But perhaps he slept less restlessly than
she. Lia would never risk a whetted blade near her face.

On their stops during the day he
would show her a few basic moves, the steel in his hand an arc of blinding
light, flowing so swift even she couldn’t follow.

Under
the watchful gaze of the coachman, Zane would slow his hand and show her again
what to do. Otherwise he moved like quicksilver in his demonstrations,
thrusting, twisting, whirling, his braid a whip that flew straight out behind
him. He seemed born for what he did, a human extension of his weapon; she never
knew a mortal man could be so fleet. Her own efforts to copy him were clumsy in
comparison. But still, little by little, she was learning.

These
were the secret seeds of his life. These were things he had learned as a boy
with her mother and honed as a man by himself. There was a good reason he was
the terror of London, with a price on his head. There was a good reason her
tribe perished, one by one, in the worst of her dreams.

Yet the thief had pointed out to
her that a knife would do no good against a cloud of smoke. Lia knew it. As she
scanned the skies at twilight she knew it, but still, perversely, the weight of
it in her hand reassured her.

Someone was out there, watching
her, watching them. Amalia was not as defenseless as she seemed.

Come on, then,
she would think, searching the
heavens.
Come on.

If she had to wait much longer,
the dragon inside her would claw her to pieces.

On the evening of their eighth
day of highland travel, the fine and decorous leader of the hamlet they had
entered slammed the door of his home in their faces.

Amalia stood motionless, blinking
at the weathered wood. Zane, standing slightly behind her, pushed a strand of
hair from his eyes and glanced around the terraced porch.

They were higher than ever in the
Carpathian range. The sunset was a blaze of color to the west, gorgeous and
unreal, tones so opaque and thick they ran like hot wax down into the horizon.
There were pots of wilted herbs drooping along the stairs, and a tabby cat
hidden against the turn of the house, staring at them from behind a bush with
enormous orange eyes.

Lia lifted her chin. Her hand
rose up once more; Zane covered her fist with his fingers before she could
connect with the wood, bringing both their arms down together.

“It’s no good,” he said, as
kindly as he could. “It’s dusk. We’re outsiders. They won’t let us in.”

She inhaled through her nose,
glaring at the closed door.

“Lia,” he said, shifting his
touch to her elbow. “My lady wife. Let’s go.”

He drew her with him down the
steps, back to the waiting carriage and the gypsy on top eyeing them balefully
from over his scarves. The nights were becoming a reflection of true winter,
clear and viciously cold; no doubt the man wondered where the hell they would
venture next. God knew Zane did.

He’d been expecting something
like this for days. He was surprised, in fact, that it hadn’t happened sooner.
These were not the bored, leisurely aristocrats that had decorated Hunyadi’s
villa, starved for fresh gossip. These were peasants—by the laws here they were
actually still serfs. Their lives would be short and harsh and layered with
folklore. No one welcomed a stranger’s knock after sunset.

As they walked away, the curtains
of a window twitched; a darkened figure pressed against the cloth, watching
them go. Zane was about to hand Amalia back up into the coach when a new
movement caught his eye.

It was a child. A boy, about
seven, hiding behind the rear wheel of the carriage. The boy fidgeted again,
his fingers wrapped around the spokes, peering out at them with a pointed,
curious face.

With her foot on the step Amalia
stilled, then turned. She met the boy’s look.

“Buna seara,”
she said, or something that
sounded like that.
“Numele meu este Lia.”

“Jakab,” replied the child,
inching out from behind the wheel. He was dressed in what could at best be
called rags, smudged and barefoot, even with the cold. He rattled back a string
of sentences to Lia, who smiled and beckoned him closer with the crook of her
finger. Typically, the youth complied. He was thin and pale and looked like
nothing so much as the boy Zane himself had once been, hungry and aloof,
slightly desperate beneath his outward serenity. Zane regarded him with
narrowed eyes.

“He says we should try his
parents.” Lia spoke without looking away from the boy. “That they would be glad
to see us.”

“No
doubt. We’re a pair of ripe pigeons, aren’t we? Foreigners, moneyed.”

“No, I
don’t think that’s it.”

“Don’t you?” He sneered at the
peasant child, who watched them openly now with an intensely green gaze. “How
naive you are.”

“Zane,”
said Lia. “I think…I think he might be part…you know. Like me.”

He
turned his face to see her.

“It’s a
feeling,” she said. “Not very strong, but there. Look at his features.”

“I am.
He reminds me of a drowned rat.”

She
sighed. “No. Look again.”

“What,
then?” he demanded, as the light around them darkened and bled.

“He
looks like me,” she said simply. “Don’t you remember? He looks as I did at his
age.”

“You’re
not like him,” he said at once.

“Don’t pretend. Not for my sake.”
She glanced at him askance; her hair was a woven shimmer in the day’s last
light, brighter than the heavens. “I remember the past too.”