Shana Abe - Queen of Dragons

• Название: Queen of Dragons
• Автор: Shana Abe
• Жанр: Любовно-фантастические романы
• Год: 2008
• ISBN: 978-0-553-90447-5

Hidden among the remote hills of eighteenth-century England lives a powerful clan of shape-shifters who've become the stuff of myths and legends. They are the drákon—supersensual creatures with the ability to Turn from human to smoke to dragon. Now a treacherous new enemy threatens to destroy their world of magic and glittering power.

For centuries, they thought themselves alone at Darkfrith, but the arrival of a stunning letter from the Princess Maricara sent from the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania suggests the existence of a lost tribe of drákon. It is a possibility that the Alpha lord, Kimber Langford, Earl of Chasen, cannot ignore. For whoever this unknown princess may be, she's dangerous enough to know about the drákon's existence—and where to find them. That, as Kimber can't help but concede, gives her a decidedly deadly advantage. And, indeed, it wouldn't be long before Maricara breached the defenses of Darkfrith and the walls around Kimber's heart. But the mystery of the princess's real identity and the warning she has come to deliver, of a brutal serial killer targeting the drákon themselves, seem all but impossible to believe. Until the shadowed threat that stalks her arrives at Darkfrith, and Kimber and Maricara must stand together against the greatest enemy the drákon have ever faced—an enemy who may or may not be one of their own. They have no choice but to yield to their passionate attraction for each other. But for two such very different drákon leaders, will an alliance of body and soul mean their salvation, their extinction… or both?

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"If they figure out exactly who you are—"

"Maricara. Right now I'm trying to persuade you that the safest course of travel back to Chasen Manor is by coach, tucked nicely inside with my guard and my kin. That's all. Since I plainly haven't the slightest chance in hell of convincing you of that, I am simultaneously calculating the safest flight path home. A path that will lead us far from where we last sensed the hunters. I've no desire to greet them today. Certainly not with your neck on the line as well."

"Better to leave them behind here," she said, unconvinced. "Better to let them wonder and sweat."

"Yes." He moved away from her with a sudden, menacing grace, going to the window, tapping two fingers hard against the glass. He spoke in an undertone, the taps accentuating his words. "By all means, let them sweat."

"Return for them later, when you're better prepared. They won't give up so easily. They'll remain here at least a few more days. In fact, I'll come with you," she offered, when he did not speak. "We'll hunt them together."

"Two kings," he murmured—but didn't turn away from the window. His eyes reflected color off the glass, green against the bright blue sky.

"Yes."

"Smart kings let the peasants do the fighting for them," Kimber noted dryly.

"That rather works out, as I'm secretly a peasant."

"And I'm bloody George III. You've made your point, Your Grace."

She turned her cheek to the cool damask of the cushion. "Then we agree. Today we'll both go as smoke above the coaches. Two guards in the air, rather than one. Tomorrow.. .we'll be royal again."

The earl inclined his head, capitulation tempered by the sardonic curl of his lips. "Splendid. I cannot wait to hear my sisters' reaction to this."

"And your council's."

"Naturally, yes, the council. They'll welcome us home with banners and ballad singers." He glanced back at her; some of the dragon glow began to fade from his eyes. "You're deuced mulish, you know."

Mari crossed her left leg over her right, keeping the robe modestly draped across her lap. "I don't know what that word means. But I do know I'm doing exactly what you would, in my position."

"Pigheaded," he said.

"Precisely."

So they flew. Side by side, two gossamer-gray clouds that drifted high against the wind, and joined edges so often they began to seem melded into one.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At the wise and seasoned age of thirteen, Rhys had fallen in love for the first time.

Her name was Zoe. She was the daughter of the village seam-stress. She had exotic black eyes and hair of the smoothest, purest ivory, and even though he'd known her since they were infants—since they'd been wet-nursed and day-schooled together—he realized one spring day that he was truly, utterly in love.

She wanted nothing to do with him.

Rhys fancied himself not ill-favored. Even then, he was beginning to show signs of the man he would grow into, and finding maidens of the shire to adore him had never proved a challenge before, except, perhaps, when he was compared to his brother. But Zoe Lane was resistant to his every wile. If he brought her roses, she said she preferred wildflowers. If he brought her wildflowers, she said she preferred them left to grow in the downs.

If he brought her sugar, she wanted salt. If he offered to read her poetry—poetry!—she claimed she'd rather go swimming in the lake.

With the other boys.

He'd fretted and stewed all summer, boiling in a sweat of unfulfilled adolescent desires. He'd tried everything he could think of, being kind, being mean, leaving her be, following her about, and one late night he was seated outside her bedroom window, eating blackberries and sucking the juice from his fingers while he tried to figure his next move, when her face appeared by the curtains, a pale oval framed with even paler hair.

They stared at each other; she was still the most beautiful girl he'd ever known. His stomach got upset just looking at her.

"You're really not going to quit, are you?" She kept her voice low, because, he knew, her mother slept quite near.

"No," Rhys said.

She nodded, vanished, then came back. She beckoned to him and he'd trotted up to the sill just like an eager puppy.

"Stick this needle through your earlobe," she said coolly, holding it up between her thumb and forefinger. "All the way through. Then I'll believe you love me."

The consequences had been instant, and rather immense. He was already supposed to be confined to quarters from eight at night till eight in the morning; Zoe's mother had complained more than once about his behavior around her daughter, and he'd been forbidden by the marquess even to speak with her for a full month. But there was no hiding all that blood. It had flooded his clothing and risen up around him in waves, spreading its scent like the worst sort of alarm, and Rhys never knew if it had been luck or planning that his elder brother reached him in the grand hall of Chasen Manor just before his father did.

He remembered Kimber's face, how his eyes widened as he stepped around the stairway and caught sight of Rhys trying to slip in unnoticed. How he stopped at once, and then turned as Rhys did to see Christoff emerge from his study.

A line of little red dots followed him like a trail along the floor. Rhys stood in the study with one hand pinched to his ear, trying to catch the rest of it so the carpet wouldn't stain.

His father had studied him a long while without speaking, tall and nearly frightening in his severity, candlelight dancing hellish bright behind him. It had seemed long, anyway, damned long, and it was all Rhys could do not to fidget while his fingers dripped and his mind raced through excuses.

"There was this needle—" he began.

Christoff interrupted in a deadly soft voice. "I thought I made it incontestably clear you were to stay away from that girl."

And then Kimber took a breath.

"Please, sir," said his brother, standing behind him. "It was my fault." The marquess's gaze flicked to Kim.

"I dared him to pierce his ear," Kim lied, the golden child, the Alpha heir. "I didn't think he'd really do it."

Rhys snapped his mouth closed. He tried to look innocent. "May I inquire why?"

"I was bored," said Kim. "And I wanted to see how much it would hurt."

It hurt, as it turned out, a very great deal. But somehow not as much as seeing Kimber punished in Rhys's place, confined to his own quarters, meals of bread and water for three full days and a formal, written apology to his brother for his part in the wretched matter.

When Rhys had tried to sneak meat up to him, Kim had refused it.

"They'll smell it, you dolt," he said through the door.

When he'd asked, softly, why he had done what he did, Kim had answered only, "Because."

Because he was Kimber. Leader, protector at all costs. Because whenever Rhys had fallen—in love, to his knees, into the worst of plots and plans, even at school—Kim was there to help him back up.

Kimber was always there. Rhys tried to admire him for that.

From his vantage now atop the carriage rolling back toward home, he watched the princess flow as smoke across the sky. Her grace, her thrilling beauty, all that defined the best of their kind.and Kimber there, always there, just beside her.

He felt that familiar, unhappy clench in his stomach.

Despite the fact that the sun shone very bright, he found he could not look away.

Kim had sent a man ahead to alert the shire they were returning, to carry the news that there were enemies lurking nearby—only that. He hadn't informed his guard of the thin-blooded drakon, the sanf inimicus. He hadn't wanted a full-scale panic at Chasen before he was there to contain it.

Tensions had been festering all summer. Before that. Before Maricara had arrived, before Rue and Christoff had left. The tribe's perfect mask had developed its first fatal crack back with that letter from Lia, describing a castle and pebbles and dragons that lived free under the stars.

She, too, is fully one of our kind.

Nothing had been the same since. Nothing had been as safe, or as good. The heat and oppression of this summer had only intensified everyone's tempers. Spats flared more easily and were ended more often with fists. The village tavern was filled to over-flowing every night. Creatures designed for glorious flight and battle turned to gin and petty squabbling instead. The number of feuds Kim had had to settle in the past few years had been steadily escalating, most over field boundaries or imagined insults. A few over more serious crimes, like theft. Vandalism. Runners.

With every new disagreement, with every new drakon attempting to flee the shire, the old men of the council grew more entrenched behind their beards, hunkered deep into their soft, carved chairs. These were their ways, and that was that. They would not be modified, the tribe would fall into line, and there would be no debate about it. This is how it had always been done. This would be their gift to the future as well. The traditional laws had more than sufficed all these generations. They were the only solution. Loyalty to the tribe above all.

There had been nights Kim had fallen asleep with his hands actually pressed to his head as if it was trapped in a vise, cursing his parents, cursing his position, the seasons, Lia, the Zaharen. And then he'd wake up the next morning and get dressed and go tackle it all over again. Someone had to.

In fact, the only fine thing to emerge from this disaster, the only filament of luminous clarity, Kim considered, was Maricara herself.

She was all they had for information at this point, his lovely, night-flying princess. Unfortunately, she would also be the only person the tribe would connect with these part-dragon sanf; she was of the foreign tribe; the hunters were of the foreign tribe; unspeakable catastrophes were about to unfold, and who had caused it all to come about? Kim could all too easily imagine the council's reaction:

You've brought an ancient enemy to Darkfrith. You've caused the loss of at least three good men, you've flown in daylight as a dragon, you've defiled our rules and traditions and imperiled our very survival and oh, yes, welcome to your new home. We look forward to the wedding. Would you mind very much just stepping into our prison?

Or, even worse:

What's that you say? Lord Chasen described it as a fine place to sleep? Certainly it is. We'll even provide you both a bed.

Better to face that moment, too, in person.

So when they reached the manor house at last, Kim was hardly surprised that there were no singers awaiting them, no banners aloft, nothing remotely festive beyond the desperate flowers and shrubs progressively scorching to a crisp in the gardens. There was, instead, a line of ten unsmiling men standing in the drive beyond the main doors, ignoring the pair of carriages rolling up the wide, roundabout path, staring up instead at the sky.

They wore wigs, every one of them. Even in this weather, the formalities held.

If Kim could have sighed, he would have. As it was, he glided against the velvety edge that was Maricara one last time, then twisted down into man against the hard heat of the earth.

Evening fell. She observed it from a bench nestled beneath the coppice of willows she had once run through to reach Kimber's home, what seemed like ages ago. The mansion was towering walls and windows this close up, mellow stone that sang mellow songs, half-obscured by leaves that never moved, because there was no wind.

She sat alone. Kimber was nearby, Rhys was nearby, the sisters scattered, a thousand heartbeats, a million breaths, all the English drakon pulsing life through the Darkfrith twilight in heady, invisible waves.

Some of them were more visible. There were faces to be glimpsed past her little enclosure of willows, people walking in the woods, people staring from behind the beveled windows. There were bright, serpentine dragons floating through a sky of darker green and blue and purple above her. They cut in silence across the pinprick stars, sending them winking.

She was not tired. Not tired enough. She'd eaten as much as she could, she'd taken no wine. She'd asked to be alone to watch the moonrise.

Crickets began to wake. Maricara heard them in the far distance, pockets of chirping buried within the forest. The moon began as a halo of white light against the black rolling horizon.

Around and around the dragons looped overhead.

The place where Kimber wanted her to sleep was called the Dead Room. She'd overheard a pair of footmen whispering the name between them, their voices surprised and hushed. The earl had said only that it was a chamber within the manor designed to contain dragons—full-fledged dragons—to defeat smoke and keep whoever was inside it safely contained.

The Dead Room. No subtlety there, no mystery, for all their mock-human ways. She could damned well figure out what the place was actually for.

Mari gazed at the ascending moon. It shone like a drop of sweet cream, round and fat with the edges nearly misted, so much softer than at home. Everything in England was softer, the air, the savor of wildflowers and wood, the deep indigo night. Even she had become softer, Maricara realized. If she had an ounce of sense or self-preservation, she would Turn and leave this coppice, fly up and out and away, far from any room meant to imprison her kind. Kimber had claimed she was skilled at flight; she didn't know how true that was. She'd been flying since she was a child, going nearly where she wished, when she wished. Surely she could outrun all these cautious, curious drakon above her. After all, she'd done what she could here, what she'd come to Darkfrith for. They knew they were hunted now, and they knew by whom. She had no real reason to stay.

She could go anywhere. She could actually wander the globe, with no obligations to anyone or anyplace ever again. She was finally, truly free.

But for him.

But for that kiss, and the butterflies, and the stroke of his fingers along her bare arm.

Maricara closed her eyes. She exhaled a long, steady breath and began her sliding descent into dragon-perception.

Time slowed. The air pressed against her dampened skin. The fading colors of the sunset flared once again but now as vibrations, humming echoes of light that spread through her senses, burgundy, saffron, lapis blue. The crickets roared into lions, deafening; buried minerals beneath her feet chanted and moaned and pleaded for her touch. The paths of the drakon soaring above shone like concentric rings behind her lids, every one of them a brilliant link to a chain, repeated over and over again.

Kimber was inside the manor house, alone. In the music room, where they had first met.

She focused on that, Kimber, music room, letting all the other noises and rhythms and whispering songs sink away to unimportance, the moonlight gone, the stars swallowed, until there was only him, his quiet breathing, the rustle of his clothing and the press of his shoes into the woolen rug as he shifted forward into a step.