The Treasure Keeper Page 12

  “I don’t think the situation calls for levity.”

  “I am in all seriousness, I assure you. My good confidence rides upon your answer.”

  “Your confidence has never needed any help from me,” she snapped. “Don’t you realize what this means?” She spread the papers across her skirts. “What this is?”

  “It’s a death list,” he replied, very calm. “Of course I realize. And it’s a ruddy good one too, I regret to say.” He stroked his hand over hers, very brief contact; it felt like arctic fire, like needles of ice brushing her skin. “Zee. Have you taken a close look at that ring?”

  She had not. But he had dropped any trace of humor; he spoke gently now, and he did not move or reach for her again. And so by his very stillness she realized what it was, the ring. Even as she picked it up carefully and turned the face to reflect the sullen night beyond the windows, she knew what she was going to see.

  A dragon. It was there, frozen in the mangled gold with wings outstretched, the letter D stamped deep into the metal behind it. It was the official seal of the Shire of Darkfrith, and the unofficial insignia of the tribe itself. Every male drákon received one upon the completion of his first Turn. Even ghost Rhys had a ghost signet upon the smallest finger of his right hand.

  All three emissaries had worn one when they’d left the shire. The Princess Maricara, along with her news of two drákon slain, had brought their rings back with her.

  Here, then, was the third.

  She turned it over, lifted it higher, but if there were initials engraved upon the inside, they had been obscured when the ring was damaged. But three Darkfrith signets missing from their owners still meant the same thing: All three owners were likely perished.

  “I’m going to sleep now.” Her voice sounded tiny, insignificant against the cavernous stretch of the open ballroom. She gathered the contents of the wallet and climbed to her feet.

  “We don’t know for certain—”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t say it. Don’t say anything. And don’t follow me. I’m going to my room, and I’m—I’m going to sleep.”

  She realized she could hear her footsteps as she crossed the floor and modified her gait, so that by the time she reached the threshold to the antechamber beyond, she made no noise at all. It was only then that she turned, found the shadow standing with his hands at his sides in the middle of the chamber.

  “I was lying before,” she said quietly. “I did want the coachman dead. He betrayed Hayden, just for a handful of money. And in that instant, as soon I realized it, I wanted him dead.”

  Then she left.

  * * *

  He was back at his bleak little road. He found himself too fatigued to stand and so sat upon the curb with a fist propped to his cheek, contemplating the deserted sidewalk, the drooping yellow shrub across the street from him. The pile of leaves beneath it.

  The constant music that haunted him had shifted into a slower, drowsier tune. Rhys realized it was a lullaby, one his mother used to sing, especially when his younger sisters were fussing. He could almost hear her humming the notes, that soft dusky contralto that had soothed him to sleep so many nights as a child.

  No. It’s not real. Rue is not here. None of this is real.

  It was nighttime in this place as well, with no moon to lighten the shadows. That might be a good sign. It could mean he was still in Paris, like Zoe. Or it could just mean that because her world was night, so was his.

  He’d tried to stay with her, despite her insistence that he not. She had no authority over him, after all, and a great deal of reckless abandon when it came to her own safety. So he’d tried. But it seemed his efforts with the dying coachman had sapped more of his strength than he’d imagined. As soon as Zee had left the ballroom, he’d watched the walls and gilded doors fade into this gray place.

  At least there were no Others about to ignore him. Even the rat was missing.

  That coachman. His mortal body, his mortal pain. Leaping into him had been the strangest sensation, like drowning, an instant iron weight submerging every particle of his being, a sliding descent without end and oh—that agony. The knife wound. The slit lung. He’d felt that a thousand times over.

  Poor bastard. It was a hell of a way to die. Rhys knew that now for certain.

  But for all the pain, it had been worth it. He’d managed to lift the man’s arm and even to throw the knife—it had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but he’d managed to throw. Now that he had time to mull it over, Rhys realized it was sheer blessed luck that it’d worked, any of it. Luck, and a desperation that had sent drákon strength through a human arm and granted drákon aim through fading vision.

  As soon as it was done he’d found himself unable to attempt anything else; the iron weight sank him like a ship failing at sea. He’d crumpled as the man had crumpled, and perhaps the only thing that kept him bound to the body for the moments after that was the unexpected joy of seeing Zoe again with living eyes, flawed and human as they were.

  Feeling her hands upon his chest.

  From someplace to his left—west? north?—bells began to toll, shattering the night. He’d never noticed them before, cathedral bells by the sound of them, pure and piercing. Rhys counted the peals to three, which made sense … well, at least as much sense as anything else did.

  Three in the morning: too late for honest folk to gad about, too early for the libertines to trickle back home. It was the perfect hour of the dead.

  The black humor of it struck him, nearly made him laugh, but instead he lay on his back to stare up at the sky.

  He drew a breath, closed his eyes, and summoned Zoe once more.

  For an instant he was with her. She was in bed, in that great ugly bed in her chamber, curled on her side into a ball beneath her blankets. Her hair was a spill of pale shimmer over her pillow. She’d pulled the blankets up to her nose; her brow looked peaceful enough in her slumber. One hand poked out from the covers by her face. Rings of gold shone from every finger. A cabochon ruby gleamed like a ripe strawberry on her thumb.

  He stood beside her. He turned a slow circle about the room, examining the walls, the windows, the curtains. The giant cracked mirror. The floating faces within it, gazing back at him.

  They were masks atop vapor, every one of them the same, sallow and ghoulish with shadowed eyes and moving lips. He couldn’t hear them; the lullaby was growing stronger and stronger and if they had speech that might have reached him, he could not hear them now. If one of them was Hayden James, Rhys could not tell.

  One of the beings lifted an arm and pointed mutely at Zoe in the bed. He glanced back at her and had the dizzy confusion of seeing two images at once: one the Zoe he knew, with her ivory hair and brown crescent lashes and that single lax hand aglimmer against the sheets.

  But the other was a dragon, the most delicate and exquisite dragon he’d ever seen, silver and gold and edged in pink, also sleeping peacefully beneath the covers.

  A terrible weakness took his legs. He staggered and was back on the gray sidewalk of the gray street, flat against the ground. When he tried to stand he couldn’t; the best he could do was crawl along to a smoother stretch of stone and collapse again, utterly spent.

  His mother’s voice sang the words to the lullaby, verses that seemed to sift down around him and settle like Stardust, straight from the heavens.

  Sleep and dream, true heart, and cease to weep,

  Sleep and dream, true heart, all sweet relief …

  Chapter Twelve

  For the first time in all her long and twisting flight to Paris, Zoe was uncertain of what to do next, or even where to go.

  Hayden was actually dead. Her quest, her hope—all the meaning behind her risks, all the rewards worth the possible punishment awaiting her back in the shire—all to ash.

  She didn’t want to return to the Palais Royal to continue her hunt. She didn’t want to stay in the cold, marbled mausoleum that was Tuileries. And she would never willin
gly visit a dance hall ever again.

  Because the city now seemed a drab and dismal place, she wandered to the flower market banking the edge of the Seine. She found a seat on a bench between a stall of nodding tulips and one of orange blossoms on cut twigs and simply watched the passersby, shoppers and vendors, giggly girls in lace caps and crinoline picking out posies, sharp-eyed women with dirt on their aprons and wide-brimmed hats that flapped with the wind, the scent of soil and pollen and bulbs nearly overpowering the stink of sewage wafting from the river below.

  Rhys had apparently taken her at her word last night and left her alone. She’d seen nothing of him so far today, not even a shimmer in window glass.

  Fine. It was better this way. She wanted to mourn alone.

  Between Zoe’s fingers was the key she’d found in the wallet of the sanf. It seemed too small to be a house key. Too large to be the key to a diary, or even a jewelry box. When she rubbed it hard enough, the tarnish smudged her fingers, showing brass beneath.

  There was a crude letter R scratched across the surface. She traced it with her nail, over and over, without even caring what it meant.

  An elderly man eased down to the other end of the bench. He sat with his legs spread, holding a box of cut tulips and piles of small sackcloth bags, one atop another, his walking stick propped aslant against the arm of the bench. His skin was parchment pale and so thin she could see the fine spidering of veins across his cheeks, the thicker blue ropes along the backs of his hands.

  He withdrew a handkerchief from his greatcoat and began to mop his face; beneath his bicorne and iron-gray toupee, he was sweating profusely. Someone called a question from behind another stall and the man flapped his handkerchief in response, not bothering to shout back.

  Zoe returned to her contemplation of the key.

  “A young lady so fetching should not be so sad.”

  She lifted her head to view the man. He wasn’t looking at her.

  “To be young,” he said. “To be alive. Flowers and the cerulean sky. These things don’t last forever. Best to …” He seemed to fumble for his words a moment. “Best to appreciate them while you can.”

  She sat up. The man still stared straight ahead, clutching his box.

  “You have life,” said the man. “You still have that.”

  She blinked a little, glanced around. No one else paid them any mind. A liveried footman and a rose dealer were bickering over the price of his garlands; the candied perfume from the orange blossoms swirled around her like nectar in the air.

  And because the day was clouded and not clear, because Hayden was dead and the sanf were miserably, enragingly real, Zoe cast the blue cloak at the old man.

  Nothing.

  She tried again, frowning at him, seeing the indigo depths of it, feeling it fall about him, envelop him, his unadorned black coat and felt hat and buckled shoes …

  But there was nothing there. The man was a field of blue upon blue, a blank spot in the eternity of its depths.

  He turned his face and looked at her, empty hazel eyes that sent a chill skittering along her skin.

  “Excuse me,” she managed, and stood, clutching the key in her fist.

  “Will you take a flower?” asked the man, and raised a tulip to her, the petals streaked pink and red. But he held it too hard; the stem bent in his hand, and the flower fell sideways to tap his vest. “A small token to your beauty.”

  She walked off. She moved stiffly, her heartbeat in her ears, her feet crunching across the pea-stone gravel, and had gotten at least six feet away before she heard the man calling after her.

  “Zee. Zee!”

  She stopped, swiveled slowly about. He was still sitting on the bench, holding out the tulip.

  She scanned the surroundings very quickly, saw no ghost nearby, no shadow or smoke beyond the white drifting spire of a nut roaster down the lane, searing chestnuts over charred wood.

  “Here,” said the old man. His arm gradually lowered. “I’m here, Zoe Lane.”

  Sweet heavens. She crossed back to him warily, clutching at her elbows beneath her shawl. The sanf key pressed unbending against her palm.

  “I wanted to see if I could do it,” said the elderly man quickly, tonelessly. “Do it again, I mean.” He switched to English. “And I can. It’s not as difficult as last night. This fellow’s not in the best of health, but he’s mobile, and he can breathe. I can breathe, Zoe. God, I can breathe and smell flowers. I can see you.”

  “Get out of him,” she said, flat.

  “Not yet. I still feel strong enough to—”

  “Get out of him. Leave him be.”

  “But—”

  “Have some respect for the living, Rhys Langford.” Her voice was throbbing; a knot of hot fury had lodged beneath her breastbone and she didn’t even know why. “He has friends here. I saw them. You don’t know who he is, if he’s married, who loves him. You don’t know what you’re doing to him. Get out.”

  The man fell quiet. He released the bent tulip; it flopped to the bench by his leg, then to the dirt. He took a shuddering breath and brought a hand to his face.

  Zoe moved before him, sending out the cloak again. “Sir. Are you well? You seem quite pale.”

  … for geneviève’s garden, she’ll like them best, these are her favorites, yes, and then the moorish yellows to maurice, he’ll be fine with those, good bulbs, good roots, exactly as i’d hoped …

  “Yes,” said the man, and groped until he located his handkerchief again. He dabbed at his forehead. “Thank you, mademoiselle, I’m quite well. I fear the sun off the water gave me something of a turn, but I’m better now.” He peered up at her, and his eyes were watery and bright. “An old man, you know. We move in fits and starts, but we get where we’re going. All in good time, yes?”

  She smiled and nodded and moved on.

  “There.” The shadow was beside her, gliding in his graceful, smoky way. “No harm done.”

  She spoke without moving her lips. “You didn’t know.”

  “I did, though. I did, in a way. I could feel his heart. I could control his respiration. I felt everything just as he did. The bench. The sun. He’s hungry. He was slightly out of breath. There’s a problem with his left leg, I think it’s gout. But he wasn’t frail.” Rhys took a few longer steps and moved in front of her, his expression serious: straight dark brows, intent green eyes. “I would not have hurt him on purpose. You should know that. He was innocent, and I would not have hurt him.”

  She had to stop in the middle of the path so as not to walk through him. A trio of young boys knotting twine around bundles of dried lavender watched her curiously from their booth, tiny purple buds clinging to their arms and shirts, all three knives paused in midair.

  Rhys inclined his head and offered her a bow, edging out of her way. She resumed walking. He kept pace.

  “It is a wonder to me,” he said, low. “Life. Just for those few minutes. Just that short slice of time, to feel alive again, even in pain. I—I would give anything.”

  She cut her eyes to him. His head was bowed; his profile was sharp and clean and as handsome as ever, and she could see right through him, past flower stalls and masted boats, all the way across the Seine. When he shook his head, the smoke that defined him bloomed up and away.

  “Anything to have my life back.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, because she couldn’t think of any other response.

  “Are you indeed?” He smiled grimly to the ground. “So am I.”

  * * *

  “It is the key to a door,” announced the locksmith. He turned the key over and around between his blackened fingers, squinting at the shape.

  Zoe set her reticule upon the counter before her. The locksmith shop was small and crammed with bits of jagged metal and machinery, shavings of brass and pewter and lead fallen into little drifts upon the floor. An apprentice with shaggy red hair worked in a corner by a window, meticulously folding crimps into a strip of copper fixed betw
een two vises. He was seventeen or eighteen, and kept darting looks at her through his hair with every few turns of his wrist.

  The locksmith, however, was easily in his eighties and had barely managed a civil greeting from over his magnified spectacles. He slapped the key from the sanf upon his counter with an emphatic clink.

  “What manner of door?” Zoe asked.

  The smith’s face wrinkled into a grimace. “One with a lock that will fit this key.”

  “Dee-lightful,” said Rhys, lounging with his arms crossed against the store’s doorway. He had not ventured more than two steps inside. Zoe wondered if he heard what she did, all the strange and clashing songs of the metals here, groaning and sighing and frenetic singing, a near cacophony in her head.

  She tried to smile past her growing headache. “Your indulgence, sir. Is it possible to be more specific?”

  “It is ordinary,” said the man, impatient, jabbing a finger at the key. “Do you see this shank? This rounded bow for the hand? Ordinary. It’s not even a passkey. This might fit a dozen different warded locks, mademoiselle. One to a salon. To a linen closet. A butler’s pantry. Do you see? There are likely ten thousand such keys in St. Germain alone.”

  She pressed a hand to her temple. “Yes. Thank you. I see.”

  “Six sous,” grunted the smith.

  From his place by the door, Rhys gave a snort. “Thief.”

  She was inclined to agree. The smith pocketed the money and turned away without another word, hobbling to a workbench crowded with tools, squatting down to his seat with an audible popping from his knees. When his fingers found and curled about a solitary pick, it shrilled a sound like a flute: a series of high, reedy notes overpowering all the rest.

  The apprentice watched her leave. She felt his eyes, at least, on her back as she closed the door carefully behind her.

  “What’s amiss?” asked the shadow, ever alert.

  She swallowed and looked around the little street, taking in the rows of tall scarlet-leafed trees with their roots growing over the curbs and the sky flashing patches of blue between the clouds. The air, not so thick now with the aroma of metal that it felt like a coating down her throat.