The girl shoved him off the rock.
The surprise of it kept him whole, and when his back hit the water he went all the way under, thrashing like a fish. The river flowed from the glaciers lodged in the basins above and was shocking cold, a frigid slap all along his senses. He actually inhaled a mouthful before managing to Turn back into smoke, wisping free of the torrents.
As a cloud he lifted, found his bearings and the rock and no girl.
He Turned to man atop the stone—dry again, his long black hair snapping in the wind; nothing remained on them from Turn to Turn—raised a hand to his eyes and scanned the waters.
There. A flash of copper, a pair of arms splashing helplessly as the currents tumbled her downstream. The spring runoff was high and she was already halfway to the falls.
Sandu sighed. It didn't look like she could swim at all.
He caught her at a bend, where she was hanging on by the tips of her fingers to another rock jutting above the froth. For an instant he debated about which would be more efficient, plunging in as a beast or a person, but there was really no question: Four clawed feet beat two human feet slipping over mossy stone.
He took his shape midstream, creating an instant barrier that fountained the rush of water into lather, splashing into his eyes. Alexandru lifted his chin and curved his neck to glare at the sodden girl. He couldn't speak or even growl, couldn't make a sound in this shape, and so only gave a jerk of his head to the ebony wing he held outstretched toward her, the river boiling up white between them.
Take it.
She was gasping, tendrils of hair tangling across her face and arms, her lips bloodless. She looked from him to the wing. Without warning, she let go of the rock.
He didn't know if she meant to slide under him or catch hold, and didn't give her the opportunity to choose. The open spread of his wing dipped down and caught her. She was scooped into a clumsy weight that mashed against his ribs.
She began to struggle. He closed his wing to hold her tighter. With the girl pressed to his side, he lumbered up the steep stone-and-mud bank, talons digging deep into the earth.
At the first stretch of level ground, he released her. She collapsed, still gasping, and curled into a ball on her side. Her body trembled, all that pale skin now tinged blue, very striking against the hair.
Sandu Turned again.
"One of us," he said, standing over her with his arms crossed, "appears to be rather stupid. Can you guess who I think it is?"
She rolled over, found her feet, scrubbing the muck off her palms and thighs. She backed up a few paces, glancing around them, stumbled over something and came to a halt. Her gaze met his, dropped down to his unclad body, and twitched up again to his face. Panic sketched across her features.
"Oh, yes," he drawled, unmoving. "Excellent notion. After all that fuss, I'm quite in the mood for a bit of fun. Besides, you must be all of twelve years? Thirteen? Kindly don't insult me. I have plenty of women," he gave the word a delicate emphasis, "who like me well enough not to drown me, anyway."
"Get back," squeaked the girl in a high, wavering voice—in English. "Get back! I'll hit you, I know how, I swear!"
Sandu blinked. He understood English, understood it very well, in fact, but it was hardly his native tongue. He'd been addressing her in the patois of the mountains, a lilting combination of Romanian and Latin, a touch of Hungarian thrown in, the language everyone from the gentry to the masses used.
As far as he knew, none of the commoners spoke English. Not more than a few words, and definitely not in that unmistakable, patrician accent. And she wasn't a royal of the Carpathians. He could count all the noblewomen on two hands.
"Who are you?" Alexandru asked flatly, also in English.
"Who the bloody hell are you?" she countered, still squeaky, and skipped back another step when he uncrossed his arms.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, impatient. "Look here, child. I'm turning my back on you, yes? I can't see you, you can't see me. We're both properly modest now. Just don't—"
"—run," he finished, as he heard her scrambling away.
He rolled his eyes to the sky, went to smoke, and funneled down in front of her at the brink of the forest, catching her by the shoulders with both hands.
She hadn't been lying. She did know how to hit, a flurry of punches aimed wildly at his face and chest. And for all her skinniness, she was still a drakon. He'd have bruises tomorrow if she kept this up.
"Stop it. Stop. Girl, you need to—damn it!" He freed her with a small push, wiping the blood from his lip. "That one hurt. Don't run." He examined the slick of red across his fingers, then glowered down at her. "If I'd wanted to harm you, don't you think I would have by now?"
She only stood there, panting.
"I could have just left you to the river," he added. "And ruddy good riddance." "Where am I?" the girl demanded, all hint of the squeak gone.
He lowered his hand. She was yanking her hair across her shoulders and down her body now, trying to cover herself, but it was still dripping water, and not long enough. He made certain to look straight at her face.
"There are exactly two tribes of drakon in the whole of the world," Sandu said, slightly sharper than he should have, but his lip stung like the devil. "Where do you think you are? And don't bother to deny your heritage. I feel you. I know you feel me."
Her mouth dropped open. "This is ... these are ... the Carpathians?" "Very credible. Did they choose you because you can act so well?" "Choose ... what?"
"The English," he said, and ran his tongue over his upper lip. "Your Alpha, Langford. Your Council. It seems a bit desperate, even for them, to send a little girl to spy upon me in the midst of hostilities, but then your ways have always struck me as odd."
"Spy? Hostilities?"
"This is going to get tedious. You needn't repeat everything I say."
"Why, you—you—ruffian!" The words seemed to burst out of her. She drew herself fiercely upright. "I'm not little!"
"Oh," Prince Alexandru said, smiling a cool, unpleasant smile, one that had been known to drain the blood from the cheeks of grown men. "But you are a spy."
A frown crinkled the pallid forehead; she clenched both hands above her heart. The wind returned and stirred the drying strands of her hair. She was a wet skinny twig of a child with a halo of coppery rose and flesh covered in goose pimples, as unlikely a scout as he'd ever seen.
But she was here, and she was drakon , and she was English. What else could it mean?
He held her eyes, now welling with tears. He was struck, once more, by the intensity of their blue.
"I'm l-lost," the child said. Her lips pressed into a quivering line; her voice came small and broken. "Please, sir. I'm lost. Can you help me get home?"
Before he could open his mouth to reply, she vanished.
She was there and then she wasn't. No smoke or dragon. Just the empty air, the silent woods. The roaring river. Sandu was left astonished, standing alone. If it weren't for the little-girl footprints pressed in the mud beside his, he would have sworn he'd dreamt the whole episode.
But they were there. They were.
That had been the first time.
A fortnight later he'd been asleep in his bed in the castle. The official royal chambers had once been the solar of the ancient fortress, modified and restructured over the centuries so often and by so many hands that by the time Sandu was to claim his place there, the space was a cluttered confusion of gilt and diamonds, crammed with artwork and imported furniture, everything to the touch slippery fabric or cold stone or dark-grained, heavy woods.