It took more willpower than he liked to simply lift his hand then and offer her a chair.
He wanted to snatch the bag from her.
He wanted to rip it open, and close his fist on the source of that sweet song. He wanted to gobble it up.
Instead, Prince Alexandru waited for the Lady Amalia to take her seat, and then calmly, cordially, took his own in the leather armchair opposite.
The parlor was referenced by its wide bank of windows, which faced the courtyard and the rising sun; the walls and floors were streaked with light.
"You hear it," Lia said in English, not a question. She sat very prim at the edge of the cushion, her ankles crossed, her bare toes pressed into the rug.
He nodded.
"Good. I wanted you to. Where is Honor?"
"In our room. It's still early, you know. She likes to sleep."
"When will she be down?"
"I don't know." He managed another peaceful smile. "When she is."
Lady Amalia regarded him silently for a moment, a steely look entirely at odds with her charming, mussed appearance. Through the panes beyond her he could see a trio of groomsmen and a scullery maid encircling the remains of one of the broken fountains.
He felt as if the light was congealing around him, thickening solid as jelly. It was growing so thick he could hardly move it from his nose into his lungs. A sense of weight settled atop him, atop the restriction in his chest.
It was cold, pure dread.
"I have a letter for you," she said. "Two of them, actually."
He said nothing. She held him in that hard gaze for a moment more, then opened the valise. The sweet poison song of Draumr swelled.
He was leaning forward in his chair before he realized it. He was rising to his feet. "Do not approach me, Your Grace," said Amalia, without looking up.
He stopped, again without meaning to. With a very great effort, he dug his fingernails into the meat of his palms, and that woke him some.
He sank back to the chair.
Amalia stood, crossed to him. The sheet of paper in her hand fell open in folds.
"I mean you no harm," she said. "I hope you believe that. But what I'm about to do is ... unprecedented. You are to read these two letters, Alexandra You're to start with this one."
He took it from her, shook it out and lifted it to the sun.
It was from the English tribe. It was written in the form of a formal proclamation, dated over eight months past. The language was stilted, the script embellished with tails and curls so dramatic they seemed to swallow up the actual words.
But the message itself was stark enough.
Proposal for the Unification of the Drkkon Tribes, he read.
One Alpha, two lands. Rule by proxy. Reasonable rights and privileges of the prince retained, all primary laws of Darkfrith to be upheld. Shared expenses. One rule.
One Alpha. Not two.
"Where did you get this?" he asked slowly, still reading. "I never received this."
"No, you wouldn't have. Apparently, they decided not to send it to you. Perhaps they realized the wording wasn't quite genial enough for what they really intended."
"Subjugation." He labored through a breath of the thick jelly light. "They mean to rule Zaharen Yce."
"Not just the castle." She sounded nearly sympathetic. "Everyone. Everything. Every last drop of blood in this land. Especially yours."
He was not surprised. He told himself there could be no surprise in this news, that in fact, the only actual astonishing part of it was that they had taken so long to reach this step in the deliberate, long-distance chess game they'd been playing with him since he was a boy. Stratagems and strategies, all the devious skills he'd learned in his short few years of rule, all for naught. He'd danced and sidestepped and tried to ever remain at least a move ahead of them but now, in the end, their patience was done. It was all going to come down to simple brute force.
Check, Sandu thought, detached, and opened his fingers. The proposal fell, a flat feather drifting, settling upon the rug between his feet.
It had landed upright. The true words of it glared up at him, bold slashes:Give Us a Fight, Then, Boy. Let Us Destroy You.
"Where did you get it?" he asked once more.
"From Rez."
His lashes lifted.
"Not the one you know. An older Rez. A different woman. I'd like to wait to show you the other letter, though. Until Honor is here."
The arched connecting door to the next chamber swung open, the flat china painted panels a sudden glare in a shaft of sun. "Honor's not coming."
They both turned their heads. Rez glided forward into the jelly-sun room, her eyes swift to his, then focused back on Lia. She seemed to have no trouble walking, not as he did, and the jelly was beginning to affect his vision as well; impressions of her came to him in quick, brilliant relief: December curls pinned up, a scintillating frock of robin's-egg blue. Pale cheeks, pale neck, pale chest. The puckered gauze that ended her sleeves matched the open petticoat of her skirts.
Her gaze, holding their deep rivers of emotion.
Apprehension, he thought now, so attuned to her. She was worried to see Amalia, even though her face was as smooth as a mask.
"I'm sorry to hear it," Lady Amalia was saying.
"Don't be. Rez is a far happier person than Honor was." She paused. "I'm happier, Lia."
"For now."
"Is that Draumr ? There in that valise?" "Yes."
"I thought you said you'd lost it."
Lia shrugged, watching Rez circle warily around her. "I lied."
Rez reached him, took his hand. Perhaps the dread had sunken into her as well; her skin felt like ice, chilling his bones.
"You won't separate us," she said. "If you came here to try, it's fruitless. Despite the diamond, there's nothing you can say or do. I swear to you, I won't go back."
Lady Lia smiled, a poignant smile, and with it Alexandru abruptly remembered the first moment he'd laid eyes on her, here in this very room, back when he'd been just a child and she a young stranger to his land, come to save the life of the human man she'd loved. How he'd been introduced to her but was too bashful to lift his gaze, until she'd knelt before him and took his hand, pressed a kiss to the back of it, something no one,no one , had ever done before. How the boy Sandu had looked up, astonished, and been struck dumb by just the smiling shape of her lips and the perfect lie of shadows on her face.
"No filla," Amalia said gently, older, but perfect and shadowed still. "That's not what I want. There was never any going back."
She had the prince show Honor the letter from her people, signed by Lia's brother and all the members of the Darkfrith Council, those gnarled, frightened old men. It shamed her that they would resort to this, shamed but did not amaze her. Lia'd always known the rulers of her tribe would place their own survival above all. A measure of bloodshed had never stopped them before.
It was her fault, some of it or maybe even all of it, and so she had to do what she could to mend these two families. Had she never come here with Zane so long ago, had she never fled the shire as a girl, had she never stumbled upon Zaharen Yce and written that very first letter to her parents, breaking the news of this unanticipated and undomesticated clan of dragons....