He was wearing an outfit she didn't know, formal court clothing, a skirted coat and buckled breeches, truly splendid. One of his many disguises, she assumed; certainly they never ventured anywhere together that required such finery.
In the harsh light of the day he sparkled so radiant with silver and pale yellow she had to narrow her eyes to take him in.
"I had to," he said to her, glancing back at her, very calm. "Do you understand?"
Lia wanted to answer him but found she could not. She had no voice.
"I had to," he repeated, as if she argued. "She forced me."
He took his hand from the sign and left behind a bloody red handprint, a stain of a shape that actually did resemble a capital A, and he held out that dripping red palm to her.
"It was them or you, snapdragon. That's not a choice. She didn't leave me a choice."
Who? she tried to cry, but still made no sound. Terror had begun to climb acidic into her throat.
"She's not Honor any longer, you know. She hasn't been for years. Her name is Rez, and we should have let them have her as a girl, but we didn't, and they're all dead now."
He was a courtier who came toward her with that bloody hand, blinding silver and light, that calm, reasonable tone.
"For you, beloved," said her husband, his red fingers reaching for hers. "I killed them all for you." Then she screamed.
Chapter Twenty
I thought I should return to the apartments to say farewell to Lia. It wasn't as if I never meant to see her again, ever, but there was no question that I would be leaving, and I honestly wasn't certain how she would react to that. For two females whose Gifts shoved us both willy-nilly ahead in time—as differing as those Gifts might have been—we seldom discussed my future. I'd been living with her and Zane for over seven years as their daughter. It was a convenient fiction for us, I suppose, but our story was beginning to show its age.
My age.
Most young women of twenty-one, human or drakon, would have wed by now and even borne children. At the very least, they would have been courted. There would have been balls or assembly hall dances to attend, teas and posies and flattering comments about the color of their eyes. Back in Darkfrith it seemed there had been a wedding capping every week between spring and autumn. More often than not, the grand ballroom at Chasen Manor hosted the receptions deep into the night. I'd been to some as a girl, and those I did not attend I could still hear, the music and laughter and champagne toasts wafting over the treetops of Blackstone Woods, right in through my bedroom window.
Those things were never going to happen for me. I had known that the instant I'd finished reading my very first letter to myself.
But I was going to have something. A December wedding, I guessed, which sounded passable. Better than a wedding, I would have a companion. A prince. And even though I'd told myself about it years earlier, my Weaves and my Natural Time had at long last caught up with each other, so now it had the weight of reality. The prince of the Zaharen had found me, had courted me, and if our courting had involved no tea or posies, my heart was stolen just the same ... whether I liked it or not.
My suitor was a drakon who perceived me without flattery, who'd called me stupid and stubborn—perhaps not entirely without cause—and who liked me anyway. An Alpha who would ask me to marry him every single day for over a year. A dragon who'd fished me from a river and from the sky, and kissed me like he was starved for me, like I'd never tire him or bore him or aggravate him enough for him to step back and say, No, wait, I was wrong. Who was ready to claim me despite the consequences, because at last he realized that I belonged to him, even though I had known it since I was a child.
After all these years, I was no longer going to be alone.
So yes, I was leaving Barcelona and Lia. And Zane too, wherever he was. It wouldn't be without a measure of sorrow, but I was going.
I would be riding a dragon home.
Sandu had desired to come with me to the apartments, but I'd convinced him I was better off going alone. He had to go steal back his own belongings anyway, which he'd left in the belfry at the king's residence. We could meet up again at my Casa de Cors Secrets, whose secret hearts were about to lack one from their sum.
"Anyway, you said you were eager to get back," I reminded him, drawing a finger lightly down the intriguing bumps of his rib cage. "That every hour away from the castle mattered."
We were both in my bed, both disrobed this time, with the sheets drawn up over our heads. I smiled at him beneath them, a fellow conspirator tangled up in his limbs.
He trapped my hand, held it to his chest. "Yes. But suppose something happens? It's better if we stay together."
"What might happen? I'll get struck by a carriage while walking there? Horses run the other way from me. It's only Lia. She's gentle as a sparrow, I promise."
"Yes," he said again, and nothing more.
"Oh, no," I groaned, and buried my head against his shoulder. "Not you as well." "Pardon?"
"I should charge a shilling every time I have to see that expression," I grumbled. "That dreamy, happy, ridiculous look men get woolgathering over her. I'll call it 'Lady Lia's Lovers' Lost Look.' You know her, don't you?"
"No," he said, turning his face away from me, gazing up at the sheet. "Not really. I met her briefly, back when I was first brought up to the castle. She and her husband were there. It's how we first discovered each other, the different tribes. Amalia and Zane found us in the mountains."
"She's very beautiful," I said.
"She was."
"Hmm."
His lips pressed into a smile. "Honor. I wasseven ." He rolled over to face me again, twisting the covers, yanking them down so that both our heads were exposed. "Perhaps she was beautiful, but you ." he leaned down, placed a feathery kiss upon the corner of my mouth, "... as it happens, are mine."
"That makes me the most beautiful," I insisted against his lips, unmoved.
"Of course."
It was a while yet before we left the bed.
In the end, Sandu had agreed to let me go back to the palace apartments alone. I think he sensed that there was more to my refusal than I was admitting, and was chivalrous enough to let things be. We parted ways at the door of the cathedral. After he bowed to me and walked off I lingered against the wall, my back to the limestone, watching him merge with the Others on the sidewalk and down the street, sending a flock of pigeons drowsing on a roof across the way into an explosion of flight. I watched for a good long while, until he turned a corner and I couldn't see him any longer.
The truth was, I didn't want him with me because I didn't know what Lia might say to him. If she might manage to convince him not to take me. She'd always been so determined to keep us here in Spain. She was beautiful, and damned clever; I dreaded the thought she'd be able to cite some ominous Future Dream and change Alexandru's mind.
But it turned out that Amalia wasn't at home. Nemesio answered the door for me—in my jittering state of excitement and dread, I'd forgotten my key—and grunted the news that the lady had left a half hour past after checking the morning mail, and had yet to return. No, he didn't know where. Yes, there was breakfast, but only if I hurried, because it'd been set out some time ago and the girl was about to take it back to the kitchen. If I'd wanted it warm, I should have been here for it when it was warm.
As his hulk of a figure clumped away from me down the corridor I realized there were some things about this life I would not miss.
And yet .
I'd spent so long here. I'd grown up here, in these rooms. And it had been nice. Mostly nice.