The Dream Thief (32 page)

“Then
you should kill him,” said Mari, calm. “It’s why you came here, yes? You can’t
let him have it.”

“I
know.”

The
girl’s fingers skimmed a heavenly scale. “Shall I do it?”

“No.”

“You
love him.”

Lia
tried to laugh; it caught in her throat.

“You
do,” said the princess. “It is unfortunate.”

Lia stood up with the cushion in
her clenched hands. “You will not harm him. Do you understand me? You will not
touch him.”

Maricara
bowed her head. “We’ll see.”

“I
swear to you, if you—”

“What’s it like, to be in love?”
Mari’s chin lifted; she stared once more directly at Lia, painted and pretty,
not a cloud behind her gaze. “The servants speak of it when they think I can’t
hear. I only wonder.”

Lia turned around and tossed the
cushion back to the chaise longue. She found that she didn’t have an answer to
Mari’s question. She couldn’t say what she’d heard her sisters always say,
It’s
thrilling,
or
It’ s bliss,
or
He makes me so happy.
She
raised her head and swallowed the strangeness in her throat, walking to the
fireplace, to the pianoforte, pressing a finger against the honey-buffed wood.

“It is,” she said at last, “the
most terrible feeling in the entire world.”

And she meant it.

“Yes,” the girl agreed, examining
her face. “I think it must be.”

“If anyone is to kill him, it
will be me.”

“As you
wish.”

The song concluded. Maricara’s
hands lifted from the strings for only a brief moment before she closed her
eyes and began the same piece again.

“Perhaps
none of it will come to pass. They’re only dreams.”

“Not mine. They come true. They
always come true. And no matter how I dream it—he’s always the one who ends up
with
Draumr.
He’s always the last one to hold it in his hand.”

“If you
kill him,” said the child, practical, “he won’t hold it at all.”

“Then
it would just be someone else, wouldn’t it?”

“Mayhap.
It’s been lost all these centuries. It could stay lost.”

“No.” Lia went back to the fire.
“It won’t stay lost, because I’m going to get it. And then I’m going to destroy
it.”

“You
think you can change the future?”

“I
don’t know.” She shook her head. “I have to. I have to try.”

“Countless lives have been
sacrificed seeking that stone. My uncles and grandfathers. My older brother.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Lia
held her hands to the flames and spread her fingers, watching the heat pink her
skin. “But it doesn’t alter anything. My people know it exists now. Zane knows
it exists. They’ll never stop searching for it. But I’m the one meant to find
it.
Draumr
wants me to find it.”

“How do you know?”

“It told me. It’s always been
telling me.”

Zane was not a man susceptible to
flights of florid imagination. He was cunning; he recognized that about
himself. He was intelligent. He was intuitive. He had the gift of invisibility
when necessary and a quicksilver tongue that had gotten him out of more
disasters than one. He was not soft, not romantic, and not gullible. One of his
very first memories was of being taught by a black-haired prostitute with
pocked skin and no teeth—her name had been Dee—how to rub dirt in his eyes hard
enough to make himself cry. He had been five, the cloying hook in a wiry gang
of street children; as soon as he’d managed the trick, he helped lift his first
purse from a drunk skinner. At the age of seven he was doing it alone. At ten
he was the leader of his own ragged gang; they’d squatted in a tottery ruined
warehouse by the docks, sharing quarterns of gin and roasting rats for supper
when the days had gone lean. Most of the windows had been broken out by stones
or birds. He’d spent those first years of his life smelling the Thames, day and
night, silt and manure and rotting fish. He’d never dreamed. He’d worked. He
hated the warehouse, so he schemed for a better place. He hated the taste of rat,
so he’d found Clem, who fed him meat pies and puddings in exchange for copper
coins and snuffboxes. He hated the effects of the gin—the loss of dominion over
his own body—and so stopped drinking it.

Prince Imre’s diamond tale was so
tragic and far-fetched it was better suited for a nursery than a starry night
among French champagne and adult company. The street urchin inside him wanted
to laugh at the mere notion of it. But Zane was more than that child. He was
grown, and he’d seen and touched wonders that would have sent an ordinary man
into spasms of denial.

He never dreamed; he did not
dare. But he watched Lia Langford walking away from him across the terrace of
the cold, glinting castle, heard the click of her pumps against the hard stone,
her skirts trailing wide, her head bowed, the nape of her neck revealed, and he
was gripped by a desire so strong he nearly couldn’t breathe.

If he had that stone…if he held
the diamond…then there would be no stopping his dreams. Not any of them.

And the boy who had chewed upon
rats to survive thought:

She could be mine.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

S
he waited for him in their
sitting room. She waited a very long while. The longcase clock down the hall
struck half past two, and still he did not come.

There was no one now behind the
walls. She made certain of that; she opened her ears and her nose and took in
the silence behind the wallpaper flowers. There were no Others keeping watch.
The prince was somewhere else, far else. She felt only dimly his presence
within the castle. Far stronger was Mari, secluded in another wing, alone and
unmoving. And Zane…

She cast out her awareness and
encountered nothing of him. He would not have left, not without her. But she
was used to his presence now, to the warm energy of him, his quiet strength.
Perhaps it was the chorus of diamonds surrounding her—among all the Others, she
couldn’t find him.

And he did not come.

She was too restless even to sit
down. Lia paced the connected chambers, passing the canopied bed and the
rosewood nightstands and the washbasins painted with vines and blue larkspur.
She crossed to the windows and looked out at the harsh lucent night and
realized Maricara was right. She should wait.

As
smoke she couldn’t carry anything with her into or out of the mines; she would
be truly alone. Assuming she could even find the right entrance to the right
tunnel, she’d have no light, no clothing, no guide but
Draumr
’s
beckoning. She’d likely freeze before finding it. Everything she’d accomplished
so far would have been for naught. The diamond would still exist. The threat to
her people would still exist. Only she would be gone. She lifted a hand to the
pane in front of her, pressing her palm to the glass. It was bitterly cold,
drawing the heat from her body into a mist around her open fingers. She held it
there as long as she could stand, thinking,
This is what it’s going to be
like inside the earth.

When
she turned around again, Zane was standing beside the bed, watching her with a
half-lidded gaze.

This is what love was to Amalia
Langford:

It was to carry a secret in your
soul for all your days and nights, a secret so heavy and terrible it changed
you, made you smaller and more frightened than anyone you knew, a secret so
harrowing you couldn’t share it with anyone, not your family, not your private
journal or closest friends.

It was to know that the man who
had captured your heart would also capture your future, relentless, absolute.
To always wonder if he was truly friend or foe. To realize that if you spoke
your secret aloud to anyone of power—to your father, to your mother, or the
council leaders of your kind—the best and worst you could hope for was that
they might actually believe you.

And then the man you loved would
be put to death.

No trial, no judge or jury.
Just…killed. And he would never even know why.

All because of you.

“Tired?” he asked, in that gentle
tone that revealed nothing.

“No.” She tucked her hands into
her skirts. “Where have you been?”

“Exploring.”

“This
late?”

“Darkness,” Zane said, “is
surprisingly helpful when entering locked places. It’s what I do, Amalia.”

His
lashes lowered at her expression. “It’s why I’m still standing here tonight,
having this conversation with you. If there are rooms I cannot see, I always
prowl. Every night.”

“You didn’t at the villa.”

“I did,
but you slept through that one. Why did you think
Madame
Hunyadi was so
eager to be rid of us the next morning?”

She said, shocked, “Did you steal
something from her?”

“No, I refused something from
her.” He gave her a look, then crossed to the bedpost, propping a shoulder
against it. “It was quite a night for my sense of worth. She found me in her
husband’s extremely dull library, a book of German poetry, I believe it was, in
hand. I’ve a feeling she was pacing outside the door, waiting for any handy
fellow to wander by. Yet it so happened that my affections…were otherwise
engaged.”

“But—you never told me. You never
woke me.”

He lifted his gaze straight to
hers. “I don’t trust anyone, Lia. I never trust anyone. It’s how I’ve survived
all my years.” He gave a lazy smile. “Another something we have in common, I
suppose.”

Her lips bowed. Everything she
wanted to say to him, everything she wanted to confess, remained trapped in her
throat. She couldn’t open her mouth to utter a word.

“I’m glad you’re awake.” Zane
pushed off the post and strolled toward her, scented of night and torchsmoke, more
beautiful than she’d seen yet, coiled grace and tawny hair, his face clean
planes and lines that glowed with firelight. His shoes made no sound across the
floor. “I’m not much in the mood for sleeping either.” He lifted a hand and
brushed his knuckles against her cheek; his eyes followed his movement, a
sliding touch that skimmed from her lips to her jaw to her throat, his fingers
spread along her collarbone. With his hand warming her skin, his gaze angled to
hers through his lashes, pale yellow masked dark.

“You weren’t going to tell me
about
Draumr,
were you?” His other hand came up. He wrapped a tendril of
gold around his finger. “Devious little dragon. We’re definitely better paired
than I thought.”

She felt the beginnings of
despair sink runners through her heart. “Promise me that you won’t use the
diamond against me.”

“Against you?” the thief
murmured, and touched his lips to her forehead, feathery, fleeting, cool as the
air.

“Against my family,” she said.
“Against my kind.”

He said lightly, “It’s only
against
if one resists. What if I use the diamond for something you’d like?”

“You don’t need
Draumr
for
that.” She caught his wrist in her hand, pulling away to see his face. “Promise
me, Zane. Please.”