“Seemed?”
“I suppose it would depend on who you asked,” Stephen said. “He was as familiar as Moore and I with mythology and history and all of that. None of us had anywhere near Carter’s expertise, although Ward forgot that fact a time or five.” He shrugged. “His parents had died some time before. He’d inherited the factories from them. Otherwise, I didn’t know very much about him. We weren’t close.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you wanted to be,” said Miss Seymour.
“No. He didn’t endear himself to any of the three of us. Moore and I had each known Carter for a while, in our own ways. Ward was the newcomer and perhaps felt it more than we’d intended him to. Still, as I said, he was often arrogant—” Here Miss Seymour’s dark eyes glinted a little, and her full lips twitched. Stephen thought that he could read her mind without any magic at all, and that it contained references to pots and kettles. He went on quickly, “—and he’d a manner with servants that I disliked.”
“Ah,” said Miss Seymour, “and what sort of manner might that be?”
“Temper, mostly. He wasn’t a man to bear well with being thwarted or frustrated in his purposes. Especially not when there was someone he could blame for it, even if they weren’t truly to blame. We’d have gone through five guides before we reached the site if he’d had his way. Still”—Stephen spread his hands—“he was putting up a considerable bit of the funding, and he wasn’t a thief or an overly violent man. At least not that we saw. Now I wonder.
“We reached the site and spent a few days there.” He remembered the smell of the south wind, sharp with snow while the sun warmed his shoulders. He remembered rough stone beneath his hands and the pleasant exhaustion after a long day at good work. He’d accompanied Carter half hoping to find something of his own ancestry, but the trip itself had been well worth his time.
At least, he’d thought so then.
“On the fourth day,” he said, “we found a secret panel in the floor. Once we’d managed to open it, we found an old chest bound and inscribed with a great many holy symbols. Some were Christian. Not all. Moore and I were uncertain about opening it. We wanted to speak to a priest first, at least. Although, in fairness, I’m not sure how much good it might have done if we had. Whatever traditions bound that box had long been lost.”
Miss Seymour frowned. “You and Colonel Moore wanted to wait,” she said, “but Professor Carter?”
“Carter was quite the skeptic in those days,” Stephen said. “He’d had some trouble before that with priests and churches and the like. Perhaps he was in the wrong then, too—but he wanted nobody interfering, and Ward was not a patient or a reverent man. Neither Moore nor I felt very strongly, either. There was a fair chance that the symbols were only superstition, to keep raiders from the village’s treasure.
“So we opened it. We took care, of course, but no more than you would with anything so old. When we worked the binding free…I’m not entirely sure what happened. I felt different: not myself. I managed to keep this shape, but it was difficult,” he said, skipping over the way his bones had ground together and the feeling that bits of broken glass were running through his veins. He skipped, too, the smell of his companions’ blood and the sudden awareness of how fragile they were, how strong he could be.
The woman across from him, intruder that she was, didn’t need to hear such things—and he didn’t need to remember them in any more detail.
Miss Seymour tilted her head. “You were already”—she made a small circle in the air with one hand—“like you are, back then?”
“I’ve been a dragon my entire life,” said Stephen. “Though it’s only since Bavaria that I’ve needed to transform.”
“Hmm,” she said, as if making a note of it. “Every night, I take it. For two hours at dusk.”
Miss Seymour spoke matter-of-factly enough, but she still left Stephen staring at her. “How did you know that?”
“Your servants haven’t taken a vow of silence,” she said, “or if they did, they haven’t been faithful to it. Did you really think they wouldn’t talk?”
“I hadn’t given it much thought,” said Stephen.
“Of course you hadn’t,” said Miss Seymour, and chuckled a little in the back of her throat. It was a pleasant sound—she had a good voice, rather rich—but not a good-humored one. “I beg your pardon, my lord. Why are you a dragon?”
“Why aren’t you?” Stephen shot back. “You have one shape in your blood. I have two.”
“Does your whole family?”
Since she had no idea how big his family was, or who was in it, that was a safe enough question to answer. Stephen nodded. “But this is hardly to the point.”
“I suppose you’re right. What was in the box?”
“A crown,” said Stephen. “Gold, or so it looked, though it must have been impure. Pure gold could never hold the shape so long. There were rubies in it. A great deal of wealth. That was the problem.”
“How do you mean?”
“Our guide was from the village, ye ken,” Stephen said, half-conscious of the way memory broadened his accent. “He said that the crown was theirs by rights, and that we weren’t to do anything until he’d spoken with their mayor. They werena’ a wealthy people.”
“And you disagreed?” Honey-colored eyebrows went up again, and Miss Seymour regarded him with undisguised skepticism.
“No,” Stephen said, more quickly than he might have. Then, irritated by the need to justify himself to this woman—this mortal who had never been his servant or in his charge, who had no claim at all on him—he corrected himself. “I might have, perhaps. We’d done the work of finding it. Carter and Moore werena’ certain. But Ward didna’ take it well, even the suggestion. He began to shout at the guide, and the guide shouted back. I was distracted.”
He had wanted to be distracted. Back then, disputes between mortal men had seemed both inevitable and irrelevant. Men shouted. They stopped in time. When these two stopped, he would step in. Until then, he had better things to think about. Stephen had turned back to the box and its inscriptions, trying to ignore the raised voices. Then he’d heard something else.
“Ward knocked the fellow down. Then he picked up one of the stones we’d pried up, and—well, the guide was dead before even I could reach them. Brutally dead by the time I could pull Ward away.” Stephen had seen messier deaths over his lifetime, but the sheer rage in Ward’s actions had given even him pause. Carter had been sick afterward.
“Ward grew angry with me, then. He hadn’t thought I’d interfere, not for a man we’d hired for a shilling a day. I knocked him down. I thought he’d stay down for a while, so I turned away and told Carter to go get the local constable. That was when Ward grabbed the guide’s knife.”
Stephen touched his stomach, just below his last rib. “It was a fair wound, but we’re harder to kill than most. It did take me by surprise, though, and Ward ran off before I could recover myself, or before the others could step in.”
“What happened to him?” Miss Seymour asked.
“We’d thought he was dead. The police never found him, and his estate passed on—to a nephew, for the most part. There was no body, though.”
Miss Seymour reached for her teacup and held it in both hands for a moment. “Right,” she said. “So this man, Ward, blames you and the others for getting him in trouble—”
“For losing him everything he had. He’d been a wealthy man, as I said, and a man of some position in the world. He became a fugitive. He had the money he’d carried, which was no small amount, but he couldn’t draw on any of the rest. If he did survive, and it seems he did, I can’t imagine what he had to do.”