They were joined now, Alexandru and Sky, perfect reflections of each other. Up here, alone, he could at last be himself. He could be free.
His people, human or dragon alike, would gather in the hamlets and all along the crenulated edges of his castle when Sandu chose to soar. Those who could would sometimes follow him; day or night, every drakon of the mountains burned to fly.
But on that particular morning, he had been unaccompanied. He'd slipped out before dawn without any fanfare, restless and eager to escape the formality of the day he knew would come. Stretching his wings was a necessary solace.
When the mists caught between the highest eastern tors had lifted from pink into pearl, he knew it was time to return home. Duties awaited him. Papers, plans. All the winds of the world would not spare him from that.
Then came that flag of color beneath him that had snared his attention. It was bright, much brighter than the dark rock around it, or the raging green-and-foam river that had carved its path through the granite of the canyon. The flag glinted in shades of copper, dancing above the rapids.
He passed it, circled back, staring. A woman's hair.
He'd made another full loop before his mind accepted what his eyes were showing him. Yes, there was a woman in the river, hunched low upon a drenched rock with her arms around her knees, her face upturned to him. She seemed without clothes.
The wind shifted and her hair blew across her eyes. She lifted one armwhite skin, a quick and nervous push of her hand along her forehead to clear her visionand stared back at him.
Sandu Turned to smoke. Instant buoyancy, all resistance to the wind gone, all the mechanics of flight and angles and gravity rendered moot. There were times when being smoke was even better than being dragon.
Smoke could maneuver down to the river in a way a dragon could not. Smoke could twine as thin as a whip against the channel of air that rushed atop the water, regroup without effort into the thickness that resembled his human shape. Smoke gave him weight upon the rock in front of her, feet that found a reasonable footing against the slick stone, a body and head and a face, inches from hers, because, honestly, it wasn't much of a rock and there was hardly any room.
The woman had stood too, staggering a bit to find her balance as he Turned to man in front of her. She gazed at him with wide blue eyes. Very blue eyes, dark as a bruise. She was pale and thin and much younger than he'd first realizednot a woman at all. A girl still. A maiden.
And drakon .
It was the second-most obvious thing about her, after that streamer of hair. It washed over him now in pretty little sugary waves, that sense of one of his own, a pulse that throbbed and matched his heartbeat, his blood. Electrical. Unique.
Even with her youth, she felt strong, stronger than most. The people of the mountains had mingled for centuries with the Others, and so their talents waxed and waned according to the whims of their ancestry. But this girl's power thrummed over his skin.
She didn't look like anyone he knew. The drakon ran the gamut of colors in their human shapes, but he'd never seen anyone in the castle or any of the villages with splendid hair like that, copper and rose and gold.
Still, she'd know him . She had to. All the peasants knew their prince.
Sandu smiled down at her, benevolently, because her eyes were still so wide. He offered her the traditional greeting her blood entitled her to. "Gentle One. What are you"
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 stonedry again, his long black hair snapping in the wind; nothing remained on them from Turn to Turnraised 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 voicein 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 todamn 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, youyouruffian!" 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.
He'd spent exactly one week in the solar. After that, Sandu had discovered the tower room at the western end of the keep, and it had been his sanctuary since.
It wasn't precisely unadorned. But it was simple. Large, square, and echoing, it held a canopy bed, a mahogany secretaire , a Renaissance table of mother-of-pearl inlay and padded chairs. The fireplace had been rimmed in precious stones, and there were Turkish rugs strewn about for warmth. As Alpha, he'd made only a single major, modern improvement to the tower. He'd added a water closet, and liked it so much he'd commissioned ten more for the rest of the castle.
But the very best part of his private chamber was the view.
Eight glazed windows had been set in the walls, each one reaching nearly from floor to ceiling. Their beveled lozenge panes flared with sunlit prisms or the milky moon. From this lone, high tower, he could gaze in almost every direction, see nearly every corner of his realm. By day the rugged crests of the mountains greeted him, snow-kissed, clouds sweeping down their flanks to caress the green valleys and walled villages below.
By night he slept amid the stars, suspended in their brilliance; it was almost as perfect as flight through the purple-velvet heavens.
So, he'd been asleep. He thought he'd been asleep, because he was burrowed beneath his covers, and the fire in his hearth had dwindled to occasional sparks and embers. He frowned at them from his pillow, wondering what it was about them tonight that seemed different. The fire was lit every evening, even in the summer months. Zaharen Yce, the Tears of Ice, was a castle actually composed of quartzite and music and very chilled air, and no change of seasons would alter that.
But the embers seemed different. After a whilehe wasn't certain how longa new spark flowered and broke apart, and that's when Alexandru realized that their difference was not in color, or heat, or even their small lazy rustlings.
Their difference was that there was a naked woman standing to the right of the hearth. Beyond the post of his canopy, he could just see the outline of her leg, her calf and thigh and the curve of her hip. The bare russet glow of her skin.
He sat up. He stared at her from the soft trap of his bed.
Surely it wasn't the same maiden as two weeks ago. She didn't look quite the same. She was older, for one thing. Her hair was longer. She stood taller. Yet she might have been that child's sister: same coppery mane, even more glimmering by the light of the dying embers. Same long-lashed blue eyes glancing back at him.
And she was drakon , and she was nude. Just like that girl had been.
"I know this place," she said slowly. She spoke in English, solemn words, trailing a hand along the rubies and emeralds and topazes embedded in the mortar around the marble mantelpiece. Her face turned back to the embers; her profile was orange and dark. "I know these gems. I know their music. I've heard all this before."
Sandu made certain not to move; he only cleared his throat. "Have you?" "And I know you." She shot him a look. "Don't I?" "No," he said.