Queen of Dragons - Shana Abe

She made a sound like a laugh, but it was small and turned into a yawn; she smothered it with one hand. Kim found her other, lifting their joined fingers to point at the balcony outside his chambers. "There. Do you see it? The window to the far left of the gargoyle, the one with the beak and the feathered wings—it's open. That's where we'll go."

He went to smoke on nothing but faith that she would follow; after a few seconds, she did. Together they wound through his bedchamber, over to the bed. Room after room was unlit, not even the golden lamp of Moorish glass on the nightstand left to gutter. Every drakon of the shire had a role to play this night, and none of them was of servant.

His sheets were soft, washed with French soap, dried in wind and flowery heat. He flipped them back for her and waited, and the lovely blue haze that was the princess coalesced, became form and corporeal beauty. She regarded him from the other side of the mattress, frowning a little, swaying very slightly.

"I'll be here," he said again.

She climbed into his bed. She pushed down between the covers and closed her eyes, one arm flung across the pillows.

Within seconds, she was asleep.

He meant to stay beside her only a short while. There was so much he needed yet to do, so many urgent things, and, when he'd lain atop the duvet at her side, comfort swept over him like a sweet, sweet narcotic; he'd meant it to last only so long as to ensure she knew he'd kept his word.

She slept. Kimber kept watch, or he thought he did. He was studying her—what he could see of her—in the vague dark of his canopied bed it was more like the notion of her, the curving line of her chin, the smoothing of the night along her upper arm—and when he next looked up, the sky beyond the balcony had brightened into green, the cumulus clouds just visible at the edge of his windows stained orange and deep cool orchid.

It was dawn. He awoke alone in his rumpled bed.

Maricara was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She did not fly east. They would be expecting that, for her to head toward Zaharen Yce. West was Ireland and ocean, and north was the rough drab land of the Scots. So she ducked and circled and finally went south, because that was the direction that made no sense. South would lead her only deeper into England.

She left behind the hills that sheltered and isolated a foggy, leafy shire. She left behind the mansion of windows and dulcet songs, and her gowns and jewels. She left behind the drakon and their leader, the man who had managed, despite all her very best efforts, to discover the map of her heart. Who had pinned her with a cool green gaze and passed his hand over her chest and scorched a hole in her center without even trying.

She'd see him again. She didn't like to think how.

Mari used the same trick to exit the shire that had gotten her in: She soared straight up like a rocket, as high as her wings would carry her and then more, snarling with effort. The air waned so thin she worried they might hear the rasp of her breath, but the majority of the Darkfrith dragons were intent on different prey. The sanf were largely human and could not fly, and Rhys Langford, wherever he was, probably could not either.

The ones who'd been guarding her, however, followed at once—twenty-three, actually, smoke as she was smoke, dragon as she was. But the somber gray minutes before daybreak were always the best time for an escape; she'd known that since she was a child. Eyes were fooled. Senses were smothered. One by one her pursuers fell behind.

Two proved to be extremely persistent, obviously skilled trackers. It took a good ten miles before she was able to lose them above the meandering elbow of a great river, wheeling low again to let the freshwater obscure her scent, and the colors of the woods blurred as she blurred, and within a quarter hour she'd lost them both.

Maricara pulled high once more.

Everything slipped beneath her like that river. Like rain, land and lakes and towns, places passed over so quickly she barely registered them. She flew until the threat of the sun became burgeoning peach and gold, and the anvil of clouds swelling ahead shone beryl in its middle and caramel along the edges. She found the sea, a sudden uprush of brine in her nose—and then stunning, scintillating light, foam breaking ivory around rocks of small islands, and ships that dotted the blue-green waves.

She narrowed her eyes, considering. The water would be wide here, with scant place to rest should she need to, and she didn't like to swim. She'd do better farther south—as far south as Dover, if she dared. But as she glided along the brink of the coast, Mari found herself gazing and gazing at the thin, ambered line that split the salt water from the horizon, envisioning wind-scoured alps instead, glaciers and edelweiss. Timberline. The crisp chill of mountain mornings.

Waking nude atop the tower terrace. White quartzite, and hay that poked at her skin. Suckling pigs devoured in the night. Belfries.

She missed having a home. She actually mourned it; she imagined that in her sleep, in her flying dreams, she was searching for it still, that place where she could be accepted and whole, where she could rest at last. Perhaps the Zaharen would never truly welcome her, but the castle was hers as this isle could never be. She had spilled blood for it and reached adulthood in it, and she had as much right to defend it as anyone else.

Her wings crooked. She began to veer east just as the first sheer notes of music lifted from below her. Eerie notes. Notes that spoke to her of a girl named Honor, and a vanishing.

No. Mari flattened her ears and stretched her body thin, going faster. She wasn't going to listen to it. She wasn't going to turn around. She didn't care how mysterious those notes floated up to her, how powerfully they called. She didn't want to know what made them. She had a mission now. She had a duty.

Oh... but it was beautiful. The smallest of canticles, beckoning, a melody at once so simple and so profound that, when she blinked, teardrops scattered to the wind behind her; she found her wings arcing once again, her body tugged right, back to land.

No, no.

But she was going. She was circling around; the sea flashed; a loose cluster of terns low, low against the ground bunched and then shot inland, vanishing against the buffed cliffs and dunes.

The song was wistful and poignant and still so familiar. It pulled her over the cliffs as sure as if she wore some stretched, invisible leash, over trees and the pointed peaks of a village over a league distant—but the song was not coming from there. It was coming from a clearing, trees chopped raw at their bases and dying leaves still littering the ground.

Someone was burning the trees. Smoke—real smoke—boiled and clawed at the early-morning sky.

At the edge of the clearing was what looked like a ramshackle shepherd's hut, still half-enclosed with woods. The smoke rose from behind it. She went to vapor, blending with the black-burnt sap of the trees, gliding down to a moldy thatched roof, the heavy branches that supported it split and bent with time. A bed of gnarled white geraniums still struggled to bloom between the weeds beneath the only window.

From within the hut the notes sang yes, yes, come in. Mari sank between the thatch.

He was awake. He could not recall coming awake. Hell, he couldn't recall going to sleep. He'd been in the southern woods; he knew that. He'd been walking, pacing off the agitation that burned in him, following the faint press of a deer path and mist that broke around his feet into the heart of ash and wych. He must have fallen asleep. He had no memory of that. But he was awake now, excruciatingly awake, and somehow between that time and this the world had gone blind and reeking.

He wore a hood. He was on his knees in dirt, because the chains were that heavy. He couldn't even rise above that, and he was strong, so whoever had bound him with the chains was clever enough to know his strength. They had been here moments ago. Although time seemed an uncertain thing to him now, Rhys was fairly certain that was true. They were men plus another who was not a man, and they spoke a language he did not understand—not French or German, or anything so logical as that; these words blended into rhythms he could not follow, and his head ached like the very devil when he tried—

Yet they were gone, fled in haste. He knelt alone in a room of some sort. There was an odd music in his head, and his hands and feet felt frozen, even though the air was too warm. Something wet trickled down his neck, saturating the cloth where it was tied against his throat. He thought it was probably blood.

A new sense of warmth gathered above him. It was soft and sly but very there, a presence that pressed into his muffled world, cautious, feminine.

He knew her. He lifted his head, his mind breaking clear of its miasma with a sudden crystalline horror. He felt her Turn before him, dropping down, her hands clutching hard at his.

"Rhys," she said.

His fingers curled. " Turn," he croaked—but just as he'd suspected, the Others were never far off at all.

For thirty-one years, the sum of her life, Audrey Langford Downing had been one-half of a whole. She had not asked for it; the drakon were prone to twins and even triplets, although it was true that in recent years single births had become far more common than not.

She was born second, which might have rankled, but more significantly, she had been born a girl, and that meant she would have been second even had she been born first. But Kimber was eldest, and always had been. It was as if he'd come squalling into the world with the knowledge of his place in their society already embedded beneath his skin. As long as she could remember, he'd been quick to lead, quick to decide, quick to dismiss. Had he been of smaller mind.had his character been a whit less generous, she might have grown up resenting him. After all, he had everything he desired, and always had. He was handsome and charismatic and well-favored with the tribe. He was Alpha heir and then Alpha, and she'd spent years watching him accept the favors of their people with an untailored sort of graciousness that always, deep down, managed to astonish her.

She might have hated him. Sometimes when they were younger—when Kim smiled his comely smile and spoke blithely of London and balls and the royal court, places she'd never go, dances she would never dance—Audrey thought perhaps a wee part of her did. But it was Rue who'd shaken that seed of spite from her daughter's heart. Rue, who would not abide shame or dishonesty from any of her children—although her definition of "dishonesty" was somewhat unorthodox, to say the least.

Her mother was the one who found Audrey early on the morning of her seventeenth birthday. The celebrations had started the evening before, fireworks and raucous dancing in the tavern; blue-and-gold ribbons festooned the village shops and houses, fluttered pretty along the lanes. There was to be a soiree at the manor house later that night for anyone who might care to come. An evening of more genteel cake and music and punch in the ballroom, perhaps even a quadrille.

And it was all for him.