"The Dream Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abé Shana)

CHAPTER NINE

For the next three days, the weather held. Zane was glad of it-far more than glad. The sky burned blue and the wind blew mild, so he was able to remain outside the carriage. Away from Lia.

If the Roma thought it odd that his English passenger did not wish to travel in secluded luxury beside his wife, he kept his own counsel. For three days Zane sat with the coachman, letting the sun sink into his bones, watching sunflower fields and meadows and darksome forests clip by.

And for three nights, they’d found refuge in inns, happily off-season inns. Every one of them had two rooms to spare.

The meadows slowly folded up into hills. Every evening he would sit with Lia and discuss the next day’s route; he could hardly ask her much else, not in the cramped, public rooms they found. She was usually quiet, which he supposed was natural to her. Of all Rue’s children, he remembered that Amalia was the still one, always lingering alone behind her siblings when he saw her…laughing with them when roused, teasing with them when prodded, but somehow distant. Apart.

Brown-eyed, golden-haired; a skinny little daisy amid all the pretty gardens of dragon-children. Aye, he remembered her reticence.

But it left him to fill in the conversation, something Zane had never learned to enjoy. Before Rue had stepped into his life and steeled his manners into something approaching civilized, he’d used conversation the same way he’d used his picks-for skill, for information, and that was it. Social chatter was for nobs who didn’t have to work. And Zane, one way or another, was always working.

So suppers in the countryside became the two of them dining in silence, with peasants in homespun offering stews and fried pork and steaming boiled cabbage, and Zane covertly following the play of firelight over Lia’s face. Or the way her lips moved. Or how her coiffure never seemed completely tamed, but somehow always perfect, with wayward strands that curled against her neck and shoulders just like from a portrait painting, no matter how tightly she pinned the rest.

Country inns were drafty places. Someone would open a door, someone would unhinge a window, and the strands would lift and he’d find himself adrift in her scent, in cool winter roses, a fragrance subtle enough to raise the hairs on the back of his arms and sweet enough to drown out the stink of the cabbage.

She no longer wore hair powder. She hadn’t even bought any back in Jászberény with the rest of her toiletries; he almost wished he didn’t know why.

But he did.

In a way the past three days had been a comfortable dream, because even though the sun shone warm and the pastures were picturesque, and no one followed them-another reason to ride above-deep in his gut Zane knew it couldn’t last. Dame Fortune was never so accommodating as that.

He was a mongrel masquerading as a gentleman. Lia was a myth masquerading as a lady. Impossible as it seemed, he’d bet his arse someone knew where-or what-one or both of them truly were. And what they were doing here.

As they set out that fourth morning, winding deeper and deeper into the rising green hills that led into Transylvania, with the clouds behind them spreading thin and sparkling, Zane couldn’t shake the feeling that this day-this cold, crystalline day-was going to be the end of their fair streak of luck.

Damned if he wasn’t right.

She was sick of riding inside the carriage. She was sick of the carriage itself. She was sick of the constant swaying, and of the horses curling their lips in fear when they saw her, and of the coachman smirking at her, and of Zane avoiding her eyes all the time, and of the bloody, bloody diamond singing to her across the heavens in a symphony that was not getting any softer the nearer they got.

Lia pressed her fingers to her temples and sighed. She wasn’t sleeping again. Like the call of Draumr, the dreams were getting stronger. Sounds. Scents. His lips, his hands, stroking her body every night, kisses and whispers and she’d wake in a panic, thinking it was real. That it was already real.

But she still slept alone. How much longer, she couldn’t say. The future was looming, and she had yet to figure a way to avoid it.

She was going to be his lover. It might as well have been scrawled across the stars. In all the dreams, in all their outcomes, that part was always the same. And once that happened, Amalia knew the final threads of her safe, guarded existence would forever unravel.

The drákon mated for life. She could not sleep with him and then just slip away; she could not use her own body so lightly. Perhaps it was that there were so few of them left, but mating-marriage-was taken with great gravity back in the shire. The young children played games mocking love; as they grew older the games turned more sensual, and more serious. By the time marriage vows were exchanged in Darkfrith’s lone and white-marbled chapel, all games were done. Husband and wife were sacred to her kind. No one divided them. No one even tried. To do so would be to risk the punishment of the tribe: imprisonment. Even death.

She was born to a world of harsh, shining rules. When she gave her body to Zane, she would be giving him her heart. And so her life.

He would never wed her. She knew from her dreams that wasn’t what he desired; his hopes and ambitions ran far darker than that.

He craved power and luxury. He craved possession, not love. In the blind future she would bring him riches and pleasures he’d not yet imagined. She would steal and lie and twist fates for him. And for a mortal man who could not truly open his heart, it would be enough.

For a creature who had long ago lost hers to him, it would be an abomination.

She was trapped. She was stuck between worlds, too much a beast to become fully his, too much his to become fully drákon.

In Darkfrith she’d avoided the places she knew her peers went for stolen moments. She’d removed herself as far as possible from the hidden pockets of woods, and the old granary, the swimming stream, and the secret cave by Blackstone Fell that wasn’t secret at all-not to young couples. Even her brothers and sisters thought her painfully chaste.

She wasn’t. God knew she wasn’t.

Lia sighed again and leaned forward to drop her head in her hands. Nineteen years old, a virgin who’d never even known an actual kiss-yet she knew all about making love. She knew a human man’s taste, and his body heavy over hers, and the wild pleasure of him inside her, every night. She did whatever he asked of her, everything he asked. She did things she’d never known a man and woman could do together.

Touch me here. Like this.

Take me in your mouth.

Lie back.

Put your arms above your head.

Do you feel this, Lia? Tell me. Tell me how I make you feel.

Tell me what you want me to do to you.

No wonder she couldn’t sleep.

And she was so tired, and so cold…

She was cold. She sat up to push back the curtains of the window and saw that the clouds of this morning had caught up with a vengeance; the sky had bruised into heavy purple, swallowing the sun. They were winding through what appeared to be rows and rows of gaunt, woody grapevines, starkly beautiful, almost endless. At the blur of the horizon were blue-veined mountains with their peaks veiled in storm.

She drew the sheepskin around her knees a little higher. It was going to snow.

Even as she thought it, the first of the flakes tapped the window, holding its shape just a heartbeat before sliding away. The next three did the same, and the fourth stuck. In less than a minute the window was edged with white.

She kept her hands tucked under the folds of her new worsted cloak and watched the grapevines gradually vanish under powder. In all the distance there was nothing that indicated a town or a village, not even a farmhouse for all those grapes. The light was dwindling and the carriage bumped on.

The sound of hooves against packed dirt was a steady, even staccato…it was a rhythm she knew now down to her bones, in her sleep, thump-thump, thump-thump, like a lullaby…when she closed her eyes she could see it too, gray hooves, brown dirt…the outline of horseshoes and mud printing through the clean new snow…

And the grapevines were sleeping through the cold, and the wild geese had their heads bent under their wings, and the mice in the great house were silent against the baseboards, listening to the wind, eyes open, whiskers twitching…

She knew that house. She knew, suddenly, where they were.

Lia came awake just as the driver’s slot above her snapped open, sending a wash of cold air over her face. Zane’s fingers entwined with the metal grille.

“Amalia. There’s what looks like an empty mill up ahead. We’re going to have to take shelter there.”

“No.” She climbed over the seat to kneel just below him. “Keep on this road. There’s a villa farther along. They’ll take us in.”

His fingers vanished; he bent down to see her face.

“A villa?”

“Yes. It’s not far.”

His tricorne tilted low over his eyes. Snow dusted his collar and shoulders.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me. Might I inquire how you are certain?”

“I-” she began…but it wasn’t a dream, not really; it felt more like a spell. Like what happened in the dreams, when she saw things that should be impossible to see.

“It’s ruddy cold up here, my lady. I don’t fancy us being mired in a blizzard.”

“Zane,” she said, leaning up to him. “It will be there. Just another minute.”

He observed her a moment longer from under the brim of his hat. She heard the coachman make an inquiring noise. The horses began to slow.

“No,” he said, turning back to the driver. “We’re going on.”

She kept the curtains open, so that when they rounded the next curving turn she could see the lights shining through the snowfall and just make out the fuzzy, leaden shape of buildings, low-slung against the grapevine hills.

“The Grand Tour! Most romantic! My dear.” István Hunyadi turned to his wife at his side. “Do you remember our journey to Vienna, all those years past? The boulevards! The food!”

“The dancing,” said that lady, with a tip of her silver-wigged head.

“Yes, yes. You were graceful as a dove.”

Hunyadi was a humble winemaker, or so he claimed. Zane doubted very much that was all the man did. Lia had been correct: this lonesome, twinkling place in the hills was nothing less than a villa.

They had been greeted at the gate by heavyset men bundled in scarves. The men spoke no French at all, so the gypsy had been the one to explain their situation, his voice rising when the gatekeepers had not seemed inclined to grant passage. The snow was falling thick and fast by then, and Zane was already calculating how long it would take them to slog back to that derelict mill, when one of the men held up a hand and barked an order to let them through.

The man had been looking at the carriage door, at the window. Zane had no doubt that Amalia was there looking back at him.

If his fingers hadn’t been numb and his nose a block of ice, Zane would have had them turn about anyway. But the gypsy clucked at the horses, and they eased inside.

At the entrance to the main house, more men rushed to greet them-footmen, Zane had supposed-but once he’d gotten a better look at them, he realized they weren’t. They wore no livery, done up instead in furs and plain wools in earthen colors, their hair shaggy and unkempt down their backs. He’d taken Lia’s arm and kept her close as they ducked through the snow into the atrium, a wide, stone-lined mouth that seemed to swallow them whole with the closing of the doors.

The villa was made up mostly of limestone. The rugs beneath their feet were Persian. The paintings on the walls were oils. There was a series of pressed-glass lamps swaying gently from the ceiling; they were colored violet and burgundy and gave off a pirate’s glow.

Zane put his lips to Lia’s ear. “Do you know who lives here?”

She shook her head. But by then it was more than apparent who lived there, for he was coming down the hallway toward them, a short, wide man wreathed in smiles.

“God’s grace, to be out with your lady in such a storm! Come in, come in! You are welcome here!”

Hunyadi was dressed in velvet, and he spoke fluent French. He bowed like a courtier and laughed like a bawd. Zane was inclined to like him, if for no other reason than the man wore an immense gold chain around his neck studded with rubies the size of quails’ eggs.

That, and he didn’t serve cabbage at his table.

They had interrupted a pastoral partie de plaisir, it seemed. There were a dozen other guests present, every one of them done up in wigs and jewels, and painted faces with lips that curved politely at Lia and Zane’s damp, bedraggled state. But as their host had welcomed them, the guests could do no less. Two extra places were set at the table, soup served, wine poured. Zane sat back in the soft candlelight and began his careful ravel of lies and truth of how they had come to the kind Monsieur Hunyadi’s door.

Lia seemed to hear none of it. She sat clutching her wineglass, gazing off into the shadows. She wore the best gown the couturière had to offer, a rich, deep green affair with black lace and ribbons that paled her skin to alabaster. Even with her cheeks scrubbed and her hair pulled back, she outshone every other woman in the room. They knew it too, these blue-blooded Hungarians. Under thinly arched brows the women exchanged whispers and glances and lifted their noses as they eyed her up and down.

For a moment-just a moment, a brief tick of time while the soup bowls were cleared-Zane allowed his gaze to linger on a necklace of cobwebbed gold and colored gemstones. He imagined how easy it would be to be a ghost in the hall. To wait until the wine was done, and the banter finished, and everyone was conveniently asleep in their silent, scattered rooms. There had to be enough trinkets in this villa to keep him in satin and Spanish oranges for years. No wonder István Hunyadi kept so many guards.

The necklace would be magnificent on Lia.

When he glanced at her again, she was watching him, her glass paused halfway to her lips. She looked slightly alarmed.

He tipped his head and smiled back at her, mocking.

“Do you enjoy the wine?” Hunyadi asked Lia, oblivious. “Please, I beg to know. There are few things more agreeable than the opinion of a beautiful lady.”

“It is lovely,” Lia said.

“Yes? Not too dry for your taste?”

“Not at all.”

Hunyadi rubbed his hands together, his eyes gleaming. “We use a different process here than the Germans, you know. The fermentation alone-”

“Tell me, Lord Lalonde,” said Hunyadi’s wife, “what brings you to our land? You have said you are on the Tour, but I confess we do not see many English so deep into the countryside.”

“No,” said Zane, giving her an attentive look. “And you might not have seen us, by heavens, had we not had the good fortune to stumble across your generosity. My beloved bride, you see,” he smiled once more at Lia, “has a very great fondness for wine and winemaking. Her family maintains a substantial vineyard outside Arcis-sur-Aubé. Good, hearty country stock, God bless her, but their Blanc de Blancs is entirely exquisite. She insisted we venture deeper into your land than first we planned. She’s heard splendid things about your Riesling.”

“Truly?” Hunyadi shifted in his chair, the rubies on his chain gathering the light. “We’ve had a very nice season, my lady. You will be interested to know the harvest was late and the juices concentrated-”

“But you, Lord Lalonde,” purred the wife, taking a deep breath, “what is it you enjoy?”

“Ah,” replied Zane, still smiling. “I enjoy diamonds.”

Everyone turned to see him.

“All precious stones, really, but especially diamonds,” he continued, gazing straight into the wife’s avid eyes. “It’s something of a passion with me, shall we say.”

“Do you collect them?” asked a man down the table.

“Whenever possible.”

“Fascinating,” said the wife, showing a row of even, yellowed teeth.

“You have done well to come here, then,” announced someone new, an elderly gent with white curls down to his shoulders. “The Carpathians are known for the quality of their mines. You’ll find no better stones than ours.”

“Yes.” Zane lifted his glass. “So I’ve been given to understand.”

Another course was served, pheasant and trout, the red wine whisked away and replaced with white. The servants here were dressed to match the dark, no paint, no wigs, just simple frocks and chapped hands. They moved in utter silence; their eyes never lifted from their work.

The wife stabbed her fork into the broiled pheasant set before her. Her fingers glimmered with rings. “A happy business for you indeed, Lord Lalonde. But where do you go from here? The best jewelers are back in Buda, I fear.”

“We’re down to chasing legends, Madame,” answered Zane. “Fool’s dreams, but amusing enough. I’ve pulled us all this way to find a stone named Draumr.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Amalia stiffen.

“Perchance you’ve heard of it?” he asked mildly.

“Draumr,” muttered Hunyadi, tugging at his lower lip. “Draumr, Draumr. It does sound familiar, I vow. A strange name though, isn’t it? Not of our tongue.”

“It is a diamond?” inquired the wife.

“Yes.”

“A very…large one?”

Zane’s smile deepened. “Assuredly so.”

“What is the legend that accompanies it, my lord?” asked another woman, tilting forward into the candlelight so her emeralds sparkled with every breath. “Pray, do tell us.”

“Alas, dear lady, I don’t yet have all the details. But…it is a sky-blue diamond of uncommon beauty,” he improvised. “So uncommon it haunts the dreams of any who’ve seen it. In fact, it’s said to be so fantastically unique that, if one listens closely enough, the sound of its singing fills the ears, more dulcet than the music of the heavenly spheres. It is…ethereal. An opus so haunting it captures souls, grants infants their first tears, gives wings to lovers, and,” he finished, inspired, “bankrupts the hearts of honest men.”

“Singing,” sighed the emerald woman, with another rapturous lift of her bosom.

“A treasure indeed,” drawled one of the gentlemen guests.

“I’ve a mind to set it in a necklace for my bride.” Zane leaned back and favored the wife with a look from under his lashes. “’Twould suit her well, I think. Since I’ve mentioned the notion, she simply won’t let it rest.”

“Singing,” exclaimed Hunyadi, with an air of triumph. “I do remember something now! Certainly I do! Wasn’t there such a stone in those wild Magyar tales from the Carpathians? Serfs will believe anything, you know. I am nearly positive they have a saga about something of the sort, a singing diamond.”

“Yes,” said the elderly man abruptly, straightening with a creak of his corset. “Yes, I recall it too. I heard the story as a boy. I can’t quite recall the details…but it had something to do with the dragon-people of the far mountains. It had to do with the drákon.”

Lia dropped her wineglass. It shattered like a bomb upon the stone floor.

“You knew,” he said, standing with his back to her, gazing out the tall, glazed window of the bedroom chamber they’d been assigned.

“No,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“If I had known,” she said, very composed, “why wouldn’t I have told you? Why would I have kept it hidden? It serves no purpose.”

Zane did not answer. His shoulders were stiff beneath his new indigo waistcoat; she could not tell how angry he was. If he was.

He had seemed more surprised than anything else. He’d masked it well, had finished the meal with the suave, clever polish of a master of deception. A part of her had even admired his pretense, how he’d continued to flirt with the unbearable wife of their host. How he’d tried every dish, and complimented every drink, and meticulously fished out the last of the details of the drákon that he could from these sotted, smug aristocrats.

Diamonds, warfare, lost souls. The rough fable of her people, presented like a medieval parable with no bearing on actual fact. She could hardly comprehend it herself.

The dragon-people, yes. It’s a very old myth. I recollect they’re known for a few things, gemstones primarily. And like most wicked creatures, they wreak havoc among the peasants-stealing away the fairest virgins, poaching deer, switching babes in their cradles for mischief, that sort of thing. They hunt by night but look just like you and me during the day-just like your fetching young bride, my lord!-but they’re said to have eyes that phosphoresce and smiles to freeze your very blood…

It had frozen her blood. It had kept her a lump in her needlepoint seat beside the laughing Hunyadi, unable to speak, unable to eat…because with every word she remembered the frisson of the dragon that morning in Jászberény, and the smell of alcohol that had ruptured into flame.

Zane turned his head and fixed her with a pale yellow look; the glass behind him reflected the fire in the hearth and her own shape perched upon the bed, her face and gown smeared into shadows. The bed itself was wide and plush, covered in mink. She’d retreated to it because it was the farthest distance she could put between them, and still she felt his heat. Still she felt the pleasure of his voice.

It was a small room, extravagantly furnished with burled wood and pillows and more of those dangling, colored lamps. They cast blue and turquoise along the length of his body, as if he stood at the brink of a dark, deep sea.

“How long have you known?”

“Precisely as long as you have,” she retorted. “Approximately two and one-half hours. So sorry, it seems my timepiece was recently incinerated. I suppose it might be a tad longer.”

“Amalia.”

“I didn’t know! I had no idea. You know my people as well as I. You know what they say in Darkfrith-we are the last. We are the only. I assure you that if anyone there had any idea there were others like us alive in the world, someone would have done something about it.”

“Yes,” he agreed, with a faint lift of his mouth. “I do believe that. But what, my lady, are you not telling me?”

“Why-nothing.”

“Did you realize,” he said conversationally, “that when you lie, the most charming spots of pink appear high on your cheekbones? It’s really quite convenient. Oh…not for you, I suppose.”

“I did not know of this. I swear to you, I did not.”

“Very well.” He crossed to her through the strange shifting light, took a seat close beside her on the bed before she could protest. The mattress tilted her toward him; she leaned hard away to keep her balance. “Why don’t you tell me what you did know? What, snapdragon, you do know. I prefer not be led around like bear bait. It’s really most undignified.”

She dropped her eyes. The shadows changed; she felt his fingertips graze her cheek and suddenly couldn’t breathe.

“Lia.”

“You said you didn’t want all my secrets.”

“You’ll discover that lying is just one of my many nefarious skills. We have that much in common. Lia,” he said again, amusement threading his tone, “good heavens, must I torture you for an answer? It’s a simple question, my lady: what do you know?”

“Every night,” she said finally, very slow, “I dream. In my dreams…things happen. Random things. Things that come true.”

His head tilted. “Is that a common Gift among the drákon?”

“No.” Her lips pursed. “Apparently none of my Gifts are very common.”

“Naturally not. What do you dream of this diamond?”

“That you will find it-that we find it.”

“And?”

“That’s all. We find it. You give it to my mother. You’re rich.”

His finger tapped her cheek. “That’s the end of it?”

She pulled away from him, unable to bear his casual touch. “That morning in Jászberény, standing on the street after the fire…I thought I felt the presence of another drákon. Watching us. Watching me. I didn’t tell you because I thought it wasn’t real, that I was merely fatigued. I thought I was imagining it.”

He sat back. “But you weren’t.”

“No.”

“Dear me.”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a long while. Firelight licked up his stockings in whispers and crackles and threw hot gold off the silver buckles of his shoes. In time, he heaved a sigh.

“This rather changes things, my heart. The stakes have been raised. If it is your delightful kinfolk who wish you harm, you’ve become quite a liability.”

“Why would they wish me harm?”

“I’ve really no idea. All I know is it’s bloody hard to fight smoke. Believe me, I’ve tried. Sixty thousand pounds won’t do me a damned bit of good from the cold, dark beyond.”

“I don’t want you to fight them!”

“But then who will protect you,” he asked smoothly, “the next time around? Who else knows their secrets as I do? Who else here knows that they must be able to see to Turn? Who else here knows the usefulness of hoods and blindfolds and a solid bullet to the gut? Who else knows how to steal through shadows, and capture singing diamonds, and share riddles with all the other animals? Who else is a mere human, a mortal man, with knives and pistols and blood on his hands, and the knowledge of how to defeat a mighty dragon in flight?”

She stared back at him, mute.

“Perhaps they wish to kill you,” she said.

“Perhaps,” he agreed, nonchalant. “But I really rather doubt it. You make a nice, shining target-a pretty maid, a dragon-maid, encroaching on their land and their traditions. Oh, yes, I also know how your kind admire their traditions. I’d wager you’re shattering all sorts of worthy rules right now. It’s not even England, it’s middle Europe. We haven’t seen a real water closet in days. I can’t imagine the laws of the drákon out here are much more enlightened than your own.”

“Do you want me to go?” she asked, very still.

“Not especially. But if you mean to stay, I’m afraid there would be a price. I don’t work for free, love. Everyone knows that.”

He smiled at her, a dangerous smile, a thief’s smile, warmed by firelight and the dark timbre of his voice.

Her own voice came very thin. “What is the price?”

“Only this,” he said, and leaned across the bed to cover her mouth with his.