"No," said the prince, standing before the table with me. He brushed his palm against the small of my back; I barely felt it through the corset. "This isn't for me, Rez. All this is yours."
I sent him a dubious glance, squinting, because the wall behind him was of actual shaped gold leaves, layered like Spanish roof tiles from floor to ceiling.
"We don't need a wedding," he said, stepping closer, cupping his hands around my eyes so I wouldn't squint. His lips touched the tip of my nose. "You're here, you're one of us, already entrenched in our legend. You are Alpha, you're mine. So they'll pay homage to you. It's in our blood. It's how we are."
Alpha, me . It seemed both impossible and just what I'd always secretly, deliriously expected.
Oh, Rez was fully awake, and she was well pleased.
Our eight days brimmed with wonder. Our nine nights with a dark and magnificent passion. I took the time to find the meadow I'd call Sanctuary and began to hang the first of the crystal lustres from the trees around it, the ones that would lead me to my future. Sandu helped, reaching the taller boughs, sometimes boosting me up to his shoulders so I could get the highest ones of all.
I drank the wine and ate the food and submerged myself in this bright new gladness, this sense of home and love. Of hope for the very best of tomorrows.
Of course, none of that actually came to pass.
Instead, Lia showed up.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It had been a very long while since Amalia had attempted a hunt. And it had been even longer since she'd flown in daylight.
Not that this was much of a hunt. She knew where she was going, just as she had known where to go to find Zane. She'd been to Zaharen Yce before, in her wilder youth, even though over a decade had passed since she'd been anywhere near the bald, snow-scuffed Alps that cradled the last of the original tribe of drakon .
She remembered the mountains. She remembered the taste of the wind, that icy snap of pine and glacier frosting her senses. The flash of the green and blue lakes below, the cold foaming rivers. Forests rippling over hill and dale in velvet colors without end.
The first of the dragons approached while she was still leagues away. He'd been a haze of smoke above a field when she first spotted him, but had swept near with a sudden velocity as soon as he was high enough to Turn to full dragon.
He was burnt red and orange, only a little larger than she. He arrowed close enough to force her to veer, which she didn't, because Lia knew better than to let his first challenge lead to her capitulation.
The new dragon veered off instead; she got a very good look at the crisscross pattern of his scales. No doubt he'd gotten near enough to realize her gender, as well. He didn't try to force her down again, but instead began to fly alongside her, his lips curled back and his eyes strangely scarlet.
Lia herself was dyed more of the heavens, cobalt and violet with pearled wings, golden barbs along her tail. In certain lights she knew she blended with the sky, but it was too late to blend, and she had no intention of slinking into Zaharen Yce anyway.
They flew as a pair. Another mile in and yet another dragon looped up to join them, a green one, all different shades of green, from ivy to peridot to glass.
The next one was bronze and rust, and the next silver and pink and black.
By the time she circled above the turrets of the fortress, she had an escort of no less than eighteen male dragons, and she didn't know where the hell they thought they'd all land, but she herself was going for the inner courtyard, because it was graveled and open, and she'd likely break only one of the fountains in her skid.
She broke two.
They were oversized and placed too close together, but she still might have avoided them if her escort had only realized what she was entirely about. Instead, a dragon with a yellowish back and an actual gray beard attempted to head her off at the last moment, and Lia was forced to duck beneath him, snapping at his flank. It shattered her concentration just enough to sacrifice that second fountain, which had featured a large bird or a dolphin, and was probably ugly anyway.
She left furrows of brown dirt easily nine inches deep, starkly visible against the crumbled white gravel.
With all four legs on the ground again she Turned to smoke, allowing the valise strung around her neck by a rope to fall free. She resumed her shape standing beside it, holding a hand to her eyes as the beasts above her Turned as well, one by one, slithering down in plumes to the courtyard.
The valise contained, among other things, a robe, which she removed and slipped on, ignoring the eyes of all the men materializing nude around her. She belted it, bent down, retrieved the nearly empty valise and let the rope drape over her arm.
"I've come to see my daughter," she announced in Romanian, her words clear and carrying in the thin, fragrant air.
From the dense pocket of shadows that concealed the main doors behind her, her name was spoken.
Lia turned around. Prince Alexandru—God, so grown, how many years had it been?—stood at the brink of the gravel, the light splashed just along the toes of his boots. When he moved forward into the sunlight and his hair went to indigo and his handsome face was thrown into sharp relief, she had a moment of vertigo so intense she had to ease a step back from him to preserve her equilibrium.
This place. The crushing magic of this place. How did any of them stand it?
"I must see her," she said, glad to hear her voice revealed nothing of her momentary weakness.
"Lady Amalia," murmured the prince again, and had the courtesy to offer her a bow, one complete with that unique Zaharen salute of curved fingers to his forehead. "Welcome, Noble One. Please come in. We'll speak inside."
"Yes," said Lia, holding her balance with a lift of her chin. "We will."
He was unsurprised to see she was still beautiful, this female who'd stolen the child Rez from the shire, and who'd summoned a faint tinge of unconscious jealousy in adult Rez's voice. Yet Amalia possessed a different sort of beauty than his beloved, more typically English, he thought, and in that sense, at least to him, more commonplace. She was lovely, yes, but Rez was extraordinary.
He knew they were unrelated by blood, except perhaps through some distant kinship probably all the members of the English tribe shared. But guiding her now into the cool, marbled vestibule of his castle, Alexandru imagined he glimpsed in Lia a distinct resemblance to the woman he'd left sleeping upstairs: the blaze of her eyes, the stiff column of her spine. It was nothing of color or size but entirely of attitude. Lady Amalia seemed prepared for battle, at least mentally.
It set a knot between his shoulders, one he couldn't shake off.
And it wasn't merely that, her straight back and her wary resistance to his smiles. She had music with her—issuing from that valise she carried, which she'd refused to hand over to him or any of the footmen—strange, dulcet music that both soothed and alarmed him on some deep, primal level, because he was very much afraid he knew what it might be.
Poison. A Draumr had ever been to his kind was poison in one form or another, and even though he knew it was broken and its power diminished, there was no question he felt it. Stronger, sweeter, more alluring than any of the other stones.
Aware of the servants stationed about, aware of the nobles trickling down the sweep of the main stairs on their way to breaking their fasts, Radu and Lucia and all the rest, staring, staring, Alexandru kept the cadence of his footfalls unrushed and exact. He led Amalia past the gradually bunching cluster of Zaharen aristocrats at the base of the stairs to the closest parlor, the East Room, and closed the door behind them. He was careful to do that, to keep his hand on the knob, to stand against the wood so she could pass, to listen for the soft tick of the latch to tell him it was all the way shut.