The Treasure Keeper

and stone, to a sire and dam of unspeakable beauty and ferocious power, held tight behind their polished human masks. He was not born first or even second; Rhys was the third of five children, firmly in the middle, all of them different yet all the same. Blessed to be a lord, blessed to be drakon, he had celebrated his good fortune at full tilt for as long as he could recall. There had been no real reason not to. Unlike his father, he would never assume the honor of becoming Alpha to the tribe. Rhys had an older brother to take care of that. Let the two of them put their golden heads together to wrestle the ancient drakon rules and traditions into the modern day. Let his mother and three sisters fuss over their human facade, planning balls and soirees and high teas like the fiercest of war generals.

Rhys's world was slightly ... more feral than all that.

He was comely, because all the tribe were. He was aware of that, even as a boy. He'd been granted his father's ice-green eyes but his mother's deep chestnut hair, a decided advantage with the females in a clan of creatures that tended to be redheaded or blond. It didn't hurt also that he possessed a certain piratical nature—his eldest sister had called him that once when he was eleven and she thirteen, /?iraftca/, to his enormous and open delight—that seemed to soften even the hardest of feminine hearts.

Most of them, anyway.

Despite his face and title, he'd found it rather easy to slip away from the undue notice of his parents and nannies and tutors. In fact, it became one of his more valuable skills, the ability to fade into backgrounds, to listen without speaking, to see what he wouldn't otherwise if he didn't stick to the shadows. He supposed it might have been a natural talent; his mother, after all, had once been one of the most notorious thieves London had ever known. Rue Langford alone would find him lurking around corners and merely smile.

So he grew to be a child of extreme stealth and cunning, known for his rakish grin and wild tousled looks and not at all for stealing out alone at night to go swimming in the lake, or to prowl the woods, or snatch an extra pastry from the kitchen pantries, just because he could.

And then came the Turn.

God, yes. What a catastrophe.

As he was the son of the two strongest members of the tribe, no one had any doubts about his ability to survive this particular rite of passage. Even he had assumed it would happen just as it should, perhaps when he was fourteen or fifteen, as it had with Kimber, his brother.

But the Gift hadn't come to him at fourteen. It had come to him two days after his twelfth birthday, by thin gray starlight, when he was by himself in the most ghastly place of all the shire.

The rough earth of outlaws, the Field of Bones.

He'd had no business going there. Had he been caught, his parents and the Council would have reacted far more strongly than the usual confinement to rooms with bread and water. There would have been a lashing. There would have been blood, at the least.

The Field—bound from the waterfall past Blackstone Fell, to the half circle of oak and rowan woods to the west, to the bog marsh that fed small muddy streams into the River Fier—all of it was labeled profanus. Profane. To cross those boundaries without permission was considered one of the most grave offenses possible. And the Council of Darkfrith enjoyed a very long list of possible offenses.

Certainly there are few swifter ways to capture the interest of a pubescent boy than to tell him something is forbidden to him. For years Rhys had cherished the notion of the Field with the same awestruck, morbid wonder as all the rest of his friends. The elders would whisper tales of the drakon outcasts buried there, their bones scorched and scattered, no markers, no memories of them beyond what passed from lips to lips over generations. The dead strewn there no longer even had names; the remains of their lives and passions and crimes were now little more than terrible, uneven lumps beneath wild grasses. Only a very few of the living had ever even seen those lumps, and then only for the most dire of reasons.

A tribe member went there to execute, or he went there to be executed. A handful of witnesses were allowed for the burning. That was all.

Rhys had slipped past that particular law just once, and never again. Once was enough.

He'd gone on a moonless night, of course, because there would be legions of dragons overhead, no matter the light or the weather. At nightfall, the tribe's true nature reigned. His kind always flew if they could.

So it had been dark. And it had been easy. His heart had kept up a hard, sick hammer in his chest, but he had managed to breathe through it, finding his way out of the manor house, following all the secret paths he knew, easing from cover to cover. He had a story prepared in the event he was discovered: He was out because Thomas Hawkins from the village had told him there was a pair of red foxes that ventured into the Fell deep at night, and Rhys had never before seen a live fox. It had the virtue of being true, and he thought he'd be able to say it with credible sincerity—but he hadn't been discovered. So he'd saved the foxes for another time.

The Field appeared just as he had imagined it, a murky darkness between the trees, the path that led to it faint with sparse use. It seemed more a large open hollow than a field; the path peaked upon a hill above it and then curved downward, so that when he reached the end of the woods the shadowy depression gave the illusion of rising inexorably to meet him.

He saw no lumps. Not at first. He stood beneath the boughs of an oak and stared for a while as he chewed at his thumbnail, abruptly reluctant to take the step that would free him from the forest and lead him down into the long grasses.

Overhead were clouds and stars and his kin very distant, stealthy as reapers, gaunt streamers with wings that hissed and cut into the night. He glanced up once but no one was in sight; Rhys listened to them instead, far more preoccupied with detecting any sort of worrisome stirring below.

Yet the hollow awaited him without motion. Even the mists that had begun to lift and clump with the damp were at rest down there, dull, slaty strips of fog unrolled between the weeds.

Like skeleton fingers. Like cloudy poison.

Rhys spat out a sliver of nail, dropping his hand. He had come all this way. There was no reason not to finish the job. He'd be the only one he knew who'd ever done it. It would gain him the unmitigated envy of his brother and no doubt a buss or two from one of the more daring village girls, and there was no reason at all not to move his feet and go forward, except that he realized he'd begun to respire rather too quickly, and he was feeling light-headed, yes, definitely lightheaded, and the sound of his lungs laboring for air had become much, much too loud in the leering, eager, poisonous silence—

He was no longer beneath the oak. He was on his knees on the path falling downward to the Field, scrabbling to stop himself, his hands clawing at the dirt, mist in his eyes—

The dirt broke his hands apart. He shattered, his hands and arms and chest and body—shattered into smoke, so quickly, so horrifically, he didn't even have time to squeak with shock.

He was aware of his clothing falling away. Shirt, breeches, the tie in his hair. He was aware that he no longer felt the path, or gravity, or his heart in his chest.

All he felt was pain.

As a toddler he'd once stuck his fist into a scalding pot of tea when no one could quite stop him in time, and it had been like this: an instant of nothing but surprise, then searing, shrieking agony that bubbled his skin and the world went red and raw and weeping, and there was nothing he could do about it—he was still breaking apart, thinner and thinner—

The stars were spinning above him, below him. The Field of Bones was a yawning dark mouth, ready to eat him, ready to swallow. A fearsome cold lightness was beginning to transmute the red-fire pain but somehow it actually felt worse, because Rhys knew it was the last of himself, dissolving.

He was the same color as the mist. He was as chill and wan as the mist . less substantial. Gossamer. The indigo sky reached down and drew him into threads.

No,he thought, from some deep, invisible place that was no longer inside him but around him, through him, lancing and connecting the very stars.

No.

He would not die like this. He would not be remembered for this, death in a field, profane, unforgiven.

He focused on the ground. He made himself pull with all his might, with every atom of will he could muster,pull, pull, until the cold began to recede into a heavier weight, and he felt the smoke that used to be hands and feet and legs and head gain density, change shape—and with one final mighty heaving effort he found himself nearly back to earth.