The Dream Thief (34 page)

She awoke alone. Again. Only this
time she was in a bed that swallowed her in feathers and ticking, and she was
actually warm and quite comfortable. The morning light was crisp and sharp, a
blinding flare through the beveled panes that sliced into the room, picking out
colors and shadows and the tapestry cushions on the chairs, the hues of the
cloisonné pitcher atop the nightstand: enamel blue and glass green and pearl,
flower petals shaped from wires of gold.

Zane.
She closed her eyes and searched for him, her arms spreading to either side
beneath the empty sheets. She smelled sunlight and sweet biscuits, and hot
chocolate. She sensed diamonds and dogs and Others, and—

Lia opened her eyes and sat up.
She wasn’t alone after all.

“He’s gone,” announced Maricara,
seated in a corner by an oak coffer. The chocolate scent was coming from the
service set beside her, a silver pot, napkins, two saucers and cups. The
biscuits were iced pale pink. “Imre took him to the mine hours past. You truly
do sleep deep.”

“Imre…?”

“I told you he was toying with
you. He knows your husband can touch
Draumr
without consequences. And he
knows exactly which tunnel leads down to it. I showed him last year.”

Lia stared at her, trying to
wake. “Zane
left
?”

“Your
husband,
” replied
the girl, biting, “claimed this morning to believe in dragons and legends. He
said he was sent by the English
drákon
to fetch the diamond, because he
is the only one who will be able to return
Draumr
to daylight. They have
an augur who foresaw it—I assumed he meant you.” The princess was dressed in
orange brocade, silhouetted in light, her face smooth and grim beneath her
powder. “Imre desires the stone; we all do. But he’s never gone all the way
down to it. The song is too maddening, so I can’t show him where it rests. He’s
sent Others after it, but they always get lost. Some never come back. So over
breakfast they made a pact, the two of them. The prince will deliver him to the
nearest tunnel to where the diamond lies, and the Earl of Lalonde will find it
and bring it up.”

“Why—” Lia’s voice, tremulous and
too high, cracked. She cleared her throat. “Why would he do that?”

“The earl said that in exchange
for Imre’s help, he would sell the diamond straight back to him—for hardly more
than what your own people would pay. I did wonder what the English had decided
it was worth, but I was listening behind the walls at the time. They moved off,
and I was not in a position to ask.”

Lia flipped back the sheets.
“You’ve got to show me where they went.”

“It’s probably too late,” said
Mari. “If the earl has found the diamond by now, Imre will have already killed
him.”

“Oh, my God.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed; she
sent Amalia a speculative look. “You’ll be a widow then.”

Nude, uncaring, Lia ran forward
and towed Mari out of her chair. “Take me to them right now!”

A frown creased the girl’s
forehead. She turned her face away. “I’m sorry. I’ve been forbidden.”

Lia gritted her teeth.
“What?”

“Do you think I’m here because I
love the prince?” Maricara tore free, her voice throbbing. “Do you think I
enjoy his company? He holds my family in his fist. He is the master of this
land, Giftless or not, and he has an army of Others behind him. Most in my
village can’t transform at all, not to dragon or smoke. He paid money for me
and my parents profited, but the real reason I stay is because I have a younger
brother. I still have a father and a mother. And Imre controls all of us. He
told me I couldn’t show you the copper mine. The last time I disobeyed him
directly he had my mother flogged. I won’t do it again.”

She stood in a beam of light that
slashed ocher across her gown, breathing hard. The powder was already fading
from her hair. Despite her paint, she looked her age then, small and thin, her
lips trembling.

She wore a necklace of ornately
worked gold that seemed too heavy for her chest.

She’s just a child,
Lia realized. Skinny, afraid.
Just as Lia had once been.

“I was supposed to serve you this
when you woke.” Maricara indicated the pot of chocolate. “It’s drugged. You’re
supposed to sleep until they return.” She sent Lia a beseeching look. “Perhaps
you didn ’t want cocoa this morning, but I cannot leave this castle. It’s all I
can do. Do you understand?”

“I understand.” Lia went to the
girl and pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Stay here. I can manage alone.”

Mari grasped her arm. “Don’t let
him kill you.”

“I won’t.”

The window was ancient but the
latch was not. She turned the lock and pushed against the hinges, bathed in
sunlight, inhaling the mountain air.

“Go east,” said the princess
behind her.

“Yes,” replied Lia. “I know.”

She Turned to smoke. She twisted
out the window and into the open sky.

CHAPTER TWENTY

F
or the first time in her life,
Draumr
whispered to her,
I’m ready.

And with that message came the
music, always the music, thick and heady, drawing her in a straight line to a
pair of lonely mountaintops and then down, down a tapered chasm that widened
into a gorge below, a river of green ice moving with winter sluggishness around
boulders and decaying logs.

The mountains were hollow. She
felt it, the bitter channels that burrowed through them, connecting in warrens
of wasted water and ore, splitting off again.

Draumr
called,
Yes! Here!

But she didn’t need the stone’s
guidance by then. Very few paths cut through the firs and austere pastures; a
parcel of men gathered along one of them, standing outside a square, gaping
hole in the mountainside.

Lia shot toward them, very fast.
A few looked up and pointed, but she was too high, too swift. She passed them
in a gray arrow, soaring straight into the tunnel.

There were lanterns set about on
the ground, picking out the lines of an old iron track. They showed her the
narrow confines of the mine, the flaked rock and inky depths. There was a rope
snaking alongside them, descending into the unknown. Lia followed it.

The air about her grew close and
humid, cold enough to freeze crystals into the wooden beams and along the
chipped walls, arabesques of light in glittering crevices. As smoke the cold
meant nearly nothing to her; she could still slice through it, she could still
maneuver and duck and turn. But she began to wonder what it was going to be
like when she had to Turn back.

Don’t think about it. Just get
that stone.

The rope kept on, occasionally
lit by those lanterns. She was moving quickly, so quickly that when she passed
Imre he barely had time to glance up at her—but he did. The tunnel was tight
and she could not avoid him: he lifted his hand to her, the cuff of his coat
falling back, his fingers opening a wake through her center as she flew past.

Damn it. She floundered,
swirling, struggling in her velocity to pinch herself back together. He
vanished as she fell down another level of the mines, and the diamond’s song
shuddered through her, the notes pitched sharp and painful. She clouded against
an empty shaft, hanging there until the ache began to weaken.

The rope dropped straight
downward. The glow of another lantern rose up like hellfire from the bottom of
the earth.

She slithered down.
Draumr
echoed in widening waves, bouncing back off the vertical tunnel, doubling,
tripling, louder and louder, and Lia understood what Mari had been trying to
tell her: to go farther would be madness.

But she did.

Zane was with the light, in a
small landing littered with rocks and the rusted remains of a toppled cart. He
was staring up at the shaft she was descending, the rope wrapped in coils
around his arm. He was breathing frost, his hair pulled back, his eyes
narrowed. He wore heavy boots and gloves and a fur coat and hat she had not
seen before—all courtesy of Imre, no doubt.

“Amalia.”

She did not stop. She hardly
slowed.
Draumr
sucked her down past him and she let it, almost floating.
She was ahead of him now. She was going to win. She was going to reach the
diamond before anyone, take control of her destiny, and save her people and the
man she loved, and if
anyone
tried to stop her—

But she had forgotten something
important. Something she’d known, and had forgotten.

It was a peculiar limitation of
the
drákon
that actual sight was necessary for the Turn. The sages said
that for every Gift there was a balance, and for Turning it was this: all
surroundings must be visible. Without sight, this Gift was gone. The surest way
to constrain her kind was with a blindfold or a hood. It was used as one of the
harshest punishments in Darkfrith, on runners or the particularly wicked. A
very few offenders were offered the choice between permanent blindness or
death. Most chose death.

As a
drákon
who could not
Turn, Lia had never deeply considered it. Her world had been smaller, and far
more human. When her brothers and sisters put their heads together over tea or
backgammon and compared their limitations, Lia had only sat apart, watching
them, thinking,
So, so lucky…

It happened that a pitch-dark
cavern eliminated her sight. As the last of Zane’s light faded behind her, Lia
found herself gathering, a raincloud set to descend. Before she could control
it, she Turned back into woman, staggering against the uneven floor.

She
fell to her knees. She scraped her palms. She caught herself against a wall—she
thought it was a wall—and knelt there, panting, the utter darkness wrapping
around her.
Draumr
showed no mercy. The song was a hammer inside her
head, thunderous and unremitting; her skin went to gooseflesh and her body
began to clench. She staggered to her feet, using the wall to guide her
upright. She took a step forward and sank calf-deep into glacial water, the
cold so fierce that for a full second she didn’t even feel it. And then—

She began to stumble ahead, one
hand still tracing the wall. Nine hitched breaths—long enough to numb her to
her knees—and she was out of it, climbing atop a pile of chipped stone, hugging
her arms to herself, bowing her head.

I’m here, here, here, Here, HERE,
HERE—

The diamond wasn’t far; the song
was screeching through her in something close to agony. Surely it was nearby,
not even in another shaft. She took a blind step forward, and then another. On
her fifth step, she splashed down into a lake.

Perhaps it wasn’t a lake. It felt
like one. There was no bottom, no sides. Only water. And she could not swim.

HERE, HERE, HERE—

Draumr
rested at its bed, she was
certain of it. Lia flailed and struggled, finding her head above water for a
few precious seconds—enough to gulp a lungful of air—and sank again. She lost
the feeling in her legs and fingers. She lost all direction. She held her
breath and let gravity steal her weight, controlling her panic. Pressure at her
ankles, solid stone: she had reached the lake bottom.

She bent down. She stretched out
her arms. With her lungs burning, she crept and crawled like a crab, searching,
following the song—she was so near—

But it had taken too long. She
ran out of air.

Stupid, stupid—and too late. She
tried to push up against the bottom, but it wasn’t enough to break the surface.
She was being pressed thin in the icy water, suspended, and no matter how she
fought, there was no longer any up or down. There was only black liquid, and
Draumr
retreating into silence inside her head, the opposite of her booming heart.

…here…

With the last pulse of the
diamond, Amalia succumbed. The air left her body in a rush of gently rising
bubbles.

Something grabbed her by the
neck. She was jerked upward—tugs and pulls. Then she could breathe again, and
the something turned out to be an arm clenched around her, and a solid man at
her back.