The Dream Thief (30 page)

They were diamonds, every one.
Lia traced her fingertips along their bumpy surfaces. If Zane hadn’t kept such
a firm grip on her elbow, she might have floated from the floor.

God, this place. She could get
lost here. She could remain lost and be happy about it, as long as she could
touch these walls and hear these stones.

“My lady,” said Zane, and she
realized he and the prince had paused in their conversation; everyone drew into
a knot around them. The thief slanted her a penetrating look. “What would you
prefer?”

She lowered her hand. She tried
to drag her thoughts back to what they’d been discussing.

“Tea, I think,” announced the
prince, decisive. “The English love tea, I do know that. Tea at once, and then
you may rest. Tonight you will tell me all your tales.”

Lia curtsied once more. Zane
smiled and inclined his head, but she saw how his eyes rested cold and pale
upon her.

They took tea alone in the suite
of rooms the prince had provided them, seated silently together before the fire
in a pair of silver-striped wing chairs. Their trunks were carried in by the
human footmen; the tea was served by human maids. There were diamonds trapped
behind these walls as well, hidden, and Lia sat with her gaze on her clasped
hands, letting their notes wash over her, smelling hot sugar and baked cloves
and curling her toes in her shoes.

Zane handed her a cup. From
somewhere inside the castle, a harp was being played. Its melody blended with
the stones—with her yellow sapphire—swelling and falling, mournful and
delicate.

And behind the wall to her left,
sly as mice, were the prince and four Others. She’d needed no special Gifts to
know they were there. It was a child’s game to pick out their scents, their
heartbeats past the wainscoting and quartzite, and she couldn’t imagine why a
drákon
man wouldn’t realize that. Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was a test of some sort,
to see what they would do.

Lia accepted her cup. She locked
eyes with Zane and lifted her chin to the wall; he answered her with a bare
nod. He was the one who had found the listening holes drilled through the
flowers of the wallpaper in the first quick, stolen moment they’d been left
alone.

“Out from the frying pan,” he
said in English, and tried his tea.

It was excellent, she knew.
Everything was excellent, the tea, the vanilla crepes and syrupy little cakes
flecked with shaved almonds. She ate as if she hadn’t taken food in weeks, not
days. When the platter was empty, the servants arrived with another, this one
heaped with fried pastries and sour cream, and apples dusted with flakes of
real gold.

She drank her tea and listened to
the harp and the diamonds and the small shifting noises of the dragon-prince.
She turned her head and gazed out at the sky beyond their windows, hazing
slowly into a turquoise sunset.

Zane had already searched his
trunk for his weapons and found them all intact.

She’d never dreamed of any of
this. She did not know what would come next.

The great room was enormous. At
last the ancient roots of the castle became apparent, because the chamber was
long and narrow with arrow-slit openings high above, letting the dusk slant
through in thin blue pieces, braziers and candelabras illuminating the medieval
shields with painted crests fixed upon the walls.

Dragons writhed on the shields.
Crescent moons. Six-pointed stars.

The main table was fashionably
new, mahogany. The service was china with gilt, and miniature peacocks and
columbines painted over and over in exact sameness. The table was set for four,
although besides the prince and themselves, there were only serfs in the room.

The prince’s name was Imre, his
family the Zaharen. He’d laughed as he introduced himself, by all appearances
abashed that he had not thought to do so before.

He shook Zane’s hand—in the
course of the introductions, Zane had elevated them from lord and lady to earl
and countess—and bowed over Lia’s. He gave no indication he’d spent half the
afternoon spying on them.

Behind a lacquered screen in
their bedchamber, Lia had changed into her lemon-yellow gown. She wanted to be
visible, brash, a distraction enough to allow Zane in his plain gray coat to
melt into the night if need be.

The fireplace at the end of the
hall was large enough to roast oxen. Prince Imre’s chair backed against it, so
when he sat, the high, carved wood kept a corona of flames. His pair of white
dogs sprawled nearby. They were panting from the heat, their eyes following Lia
with jetty interest.

“We don’t receive many visitors,
especially this time of year,” Imre said. His gaze flicked to the manservant
nearby, who stepped forward with a decanter of wine. “But of course,
you
are the Englishman on the Grand Tour, and a very intriguing one, if I may say so.
I find your face far more credible than the gypsy’s! That reminds me”—he
watched the servant tip the wine into his goblet, the decanter mouth held high,
a narrow golden-green stream splashing neatly against the crystal—“what shall
we do about your thief? Shall we hang him?”

In spite of herself, Lia started.
Imre fixed her with a laughing look. “I’m joking, of course. We are not so
uncivilized, my lady, even here. But in these mountains, in the passes and
steppes, our laws are sacrosanct. He’s a Roma and so born a savage. If I let
him loose, he’ll only steal again.”

“Some thieves may be redeemed,”
she said, as the servant drifted toward her glass.

“Do you think so? You have a
tender heart, well paired with your beauty. I fear you’re much too kind. But I
shall leave him to your mercies. He’s your thief; I will do with him whatever
you say.”

She did
not for an instant glance at Zane. “Let him go.”

“Alone?
In the winter woods?”

“Give him a nag. Give him
blankets. My lord will compensate you.”

Imre tapped a riff against the
table, his mouth quirked. “Anything else?”

She thought quickly. “Matches.
Candles, and a cloak. Enough food for a week.” A rimmed bowl was placed before
her. She did not look down to see what it was; it smelled like cold
strawberries. She held Prince Imre’s blue gaze and would not blink, not even
when the fire behind him began to hurt.

“A
noble heart as well,” he said eventually, very soft. “It’s fortunate for me
you’re not
my
wife, Countess.
Zaharen Yce
would be overrun with
the dregs of mankind within a month.”

“Indeed.”
Zane sounded bored. “You should see our little estate in the country, Your
Grace. She’s already commissioned a parish school and a workhouse, for all
we’ve been wed just under a year.”

Lia picked up her spoon. The bowl
held a soup, although it still smelled like fruit.

“A noble heart,” repeated the
prince, nodding. “Most becoming in a lady.” His voice raised slightly. “Don’t
you agree, my love?”

From the doorway at the far other
end of the hall, a new figure approached. It was a woman, garbed in gold and
emerald, similar to the colors of the robe the prince had worn this afternoon.
But this was a gown, a
robe à la française,
shifting and flowing,
elaborate and modish in a way that Lia’s simple lemon frock could never be.

Candlelight
glimmered over her face. She wore a topaz choker about her neck and a matching
butterfly in her powdered hair.

It was Mari.

The dogs began a deep-throated
whine.

Imre
stood; Zane followed suit. Lia remained in her chair, staring, as the girl—not
a woman—glided forward and lifted her hand to the prince. Both dogs climbed
heavily to their feet.

“May I
introduce our guests? Lord Lalonde, Lady Lalonde, I present my wife, the
Princess Maricara.”

The
girl acknowledged them each with a curtsy. Her face was powdered too, her
cheeks rouged. She lifted kohled eyes to Lia and spoke in a solemn voice.

“I’m late. I apologize.”

“Not at all,” said the prince, as
one of the footman pulled back her chair. He flashed a beaming smile around the
table. “We’ve only just begun.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
t was the most delicious and
unpleasant meal he’d ever endured. Zane had dined with all manner of evil
before, thieves and murderers, rapists and cutthroats, and he’d felt more
comfortable in their company than he did seated in this luxurious prison of a
chamber, reminded with every glance that he was the sole person at the table
who didn’t have another life involving scales and smoke and wings. That— hell,
that he was the sole person at the table. This princess could only be the
dragon-girl Lia had told him about. Zane was practiced at hiding his true face,
but Amalia was not. Days and nights he had spent with her, waking and sleeping;
he was attuned to her now, to her every breath and movement, the tilt of her
head, the fall of her hair. When Imre ’s wife was still four chairs away the
light had crossed her face and Lia had shivered—slight, swift, a fractional
disturbance in the air that passed from her to him, and he knew what it meant.

The girl was a dragon. He would have
figured it even without Lia’s reaction. The complexion, her face, her
bottomless eyes. She did appear older than the child Lia had described, but
Zane had spent too many years learning Darkfrith not to recognize the
drákon
in their human disguise. It was how he knew that, despite the dogs, Prince Imre
of the Zaharen was one of them as well.

He’d not yet had a chance to
discuss any of it with Lia. He regretted that, but they’d not been
significantly alone since the woods. A man who spied on strangers behind walls
was a man wallowing in something far beyond ordinary suspicion. Zane had no
desire to provoke him into defense.

He had most of his weapons back.
He had his training, and his nerves. But now he had something more precious to
consider than just his life.

From the corner of his eye she
was amber and yellow with winsome flushed cheeks. She’d threaded ribbons
through her hair that shone with the firelight. She sat a little forward in her
chair for the meal, alert, mostly silent. Her plates were being taken away
still nearly full; she’d hardly eaten. But she was listening, he saw that. She
was following his story. Good.

He’d stuck with their fiction
about the Tour, since the prince seemed inclined to accept it. He’d woven in
riches for good measure and a family seat in York. He droned on about tenants
and wheat and the varying qualities of English wool, and all the while the
prince nodded and ate and asked vague questions, and no one said a bloody word
about
Draumr,
or the
drákon.