The Princess hurried toward her escape. The glass doors were already ajar, because the fat elder dragon-man had already pushed through them—roughly, mind you; he had broken a fine brass latch to do so—and so they stood cracked, with a nick of cleaner air from the garden beyond pushing wet into the odors of the pump room.
The Princess was swift. Her slippers barely touched the floor. She moved like a dancer in ethereal gray past the slow and startled Others; the surest way to follow her was by the jet beads fringing her gown. They shone in black winking tears, and clinked and rustled and sang out with her every step.
That was how the other female dragon found her, and was able to take her by the hand. With that one single touch their minds fell into harmony. Together they flitted past the glass doors and became seamless with the night.
This other dragon was no princess. But she was yellow-haired and fair and born in a mansion of clouds and light; let us call her a Lady.
The Lady also winked with stones, mostly amethysts that moaned a curious song about lakes and caverns, and geodes breaking apart into sparkles. About the Lady's neck was tied a velvet ribbon, and from it hung a pendant shaped as a heart. Embedded in the pendant were three shards of diamond, each one of them shining pale, evil blue.
The Princess looked at the Lady, and the Lady looked at the Princess. The rain fell upon them in hard silver pins, biting at their skin.
The diamonds lifted and joined to weave a chorus of blinding noise; it was all the Princess could hear, and all she could fathom, until the Lady said:
"Go, Maricara, and forget me."
And the Princess did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She had traveled across a continent without accompaniment. She had crossed the skies, and bathed in secluded tubs, and supped on cold meats and cheesecakes and slices of gingered pineapple, delicacies all purloined from the finest of houses. She had been alone, and not lonely.
But Mari had accompaniment now. Oh, they were not so bold as to follow her openly, not even the footmen who had dashed ahead to open the main doors before she reached them, or the gardener and his assistant who glanced up from their bed of mulch to watch her stride past, sweat-dripping faces beneath the brims of straw hats.
Not the three young kitchen maids, also in the garden, clipping herbs and whispering behind their hands. The gathering of boys behind them, holding baskets.
There were drakon everywhere in this shire. They trickled through the woods still, clouded the cobalt sky. They watched her without approach. They waited, she knew, for the order from their Alpha. That was all that held them back.
The air felt opaque. It felt so heavy and wet she could hardly force it into her lungs.
Mari angled toward the staggered break of trees that marked the forest closest to the manor. She crossed a bed of violets and pinks, crushing perfume beneath her heels. The shade of a chestnut dappled her shoulders and dazzled her vision, and the chestnut touched branches with an elm, and the elm took her into the real woods, and then she was inside them, and the air was cool on her face, and she could draw breath again.
She set her back against a rowan. A copper-winged butterfly zigzagged through the holly and bracken; she closed her eyes against the matted green leaves and summoned the cold.
Snowstorms. Winter.
Mountains and boars and white fields. Frost rimming windows; icicles frozen from eaves.
Zaharen Yce.
It had been raised in crystalline towers and wide, high terraces, a true sanctuary for dragons. Only later did it grow walls and an armory, transforming with deadly grace into a plain sound fortress. It could withstand cannons and cascades of flaming arrows. The portcullis was of iron. The oaken doors still held the indentations of a battering ram wielded four centuries past—the doors had not yielded. Time had proven again and again that humans could not breach the castle.
Dragons, however.. .oh, dragons could.
She brought her fists up to her eyes. She felt her lips pull back in a grimace of a smile and did not know if she should scream or weep.
An occupation. They planned to occupy her home—to invade it. They had planned it all along, perhaps for years. Perhaps from the very first. And the Zaharen—proud and cloistered and unwary—the Zaharen would fall because these dragons were stronger than her kin. By Gifts and wiles and smiling false diplomacy, they were stronger.
Damn them to hell.
And Kimber.Kimber.
The shaking that had taken her in the council's chamber stole up through her limbs once again, bleak and icy, colder even than that snow she remembered.
In her darkest musings she had imagined something like this. It explained their repeated requests for her location, to come to her or have her come to them. But she'd also thought that these English drakon would be more like her own folk, remnants of a once-mighty race, with pockets of power and a majority of thin-blooded people. Before coming here, Lia had been the only one of them Mari had ever known, and certainly Lia had been formidable, but no more formidable than Maricara herself.
Even if her worst fears proved real, she'd thought the Zaharen would prevail. They had the castle and at least a hundred good strong men who could Turn, and so would prevail.
But she had been wrong.
Darkfrith, a haven, was far larger than she'd imagined. There had to be close to a thousand here who could Turn.
A thousand.
It would be a massacre.
She would leave, then. She would fly home. She belonged to the Zaharen, by birth and by marriage, and this time she would not abandon them. Let the earl and his English kin come; her people would still fight. Let them see what might there was left in the Carpathians.
She shoved from the rowan in a surge of determination. Another butterfly shivered up and away, but Mari barely heeded it. She took two steps into the dark humid forest, her power cresting—a mere second from the Turn—
But then she heard music. Stone music—not the notes from the spa—she had no idea why the squire would invent such nonsense; it was surely just another part of their plot—but this was something broken and queer and hauntingly familiar. Mari knew this song. She knew that melody.
Through the sultry heat a chill crept over her skin. She paused, rubbing her arms, glancing around at tree trunks and wildflowers bent double to rest their heads upon the ground. A breeze stirred the rowan and quieted the song; she waited until the air settled again, listening. And then she began to walk.
It was such a slight, unsettling thing, so faint beneath the other sounds of rocks and metals and running water that she lost it three more times. And there were twigs and bugs and she should not be walking, but she knew if she Turned now, she'd have the immediate attention of all those not-clouds dangling above her. Mari had faith enough she could escape them when the time came. But first she just wanted to see.
She walked a good while. The sleeves of Kimber's shirt caught against the brushwood, and once she splashed into a flat little stream throttled with muddy debris. After a half hour her feet were filthy and perspiration had the linen clinging like translucent skin to her torso and arms, but the notes were getting clearer.
The forest opened up into a meadow. It was sprinkled with scarlet campion and bluebells, a good many of them flattened to the earth. Dirt had been kicked up. The smell of man and steel sopped the air. And blood.
Sanf inimicus.
She moved cautiously into the grasses. She glanced up and around and stepped sideways like a crab, unwilling to keep her back fixed to any one spot, even though the scent of the sanf was hours old.