The Treasure Keeper

down beside her and took a new shape: a man, a dragon-man, with a curved back and bent legs, and talons that scratched the dirt.

'Here?' he asked, frowning at the scratches.

Zoe nodded. She knew they both heard it, the subdued song of limestone made hollow by the open space behind it, about as big as a trapdoor. Everything else around was solid stone beneath packed mud.

She stood, kicked her heel against the earth. The song wavered, then resumed.

'Allow me,' said Rhys.

She stepped back, and he curled his hands into fists and pounded them both against the ground.

The song broke. Rhys hit the earth again, and again, and when the stones crumbled apart they both heard that as well, and then they saw it: a hole opening up, snowflakes and feathers tumbling down into the sudden darkness, disappearing.

'You know what I miss?' sighed Rhys, peering down into the opening. 'What?'

'The smell of peaches. Ripe peaches. There's nothing that evokes warm days and starry nights, leisure and happy times more than the aroma of freshly picked summer peaches. And plums. Plums are good too.'

She glanced up at him.

'This'—he aimed a talon at the gaping hole—'is about as far from that smell as I can imagine.'

'Agreed,' she said. She stood to dust the snow off her lap. 'Shall we go?'

'In a moment. One last thing.' He faced her, flakes gathering on his bare skin, speckling his hair, white fluff across his eyelashes. It was coming down harder now, much harder, and she had to blink a few times to clear her own vision. 'I know I've told you how much I don't want you to do this.'

'Rhys—'

'And I know you're dead set on it anyway,' he continued, speaking over her. 'It's one of the things I love about you, Zee. Normally. That you think for yourself. That you don't adhere to any sort of conventional behavior for a female, even a female dragon. So now I'm going to tell you for what may be the last time the one thing I hope you'll remember of me: I would give up all the summers of eternity for you. I love you. Forever and my summer days, I'll love you.'

She cupped her cold fingers to his cheek. 'This won't be the last time.'

'Well.' His lashes lowered and his mouth curved; he turned his face to kiss her fingertips. 'Just the same.'

Her hand dropped. 'I didn't love him.'

His eyes flashed back to hers, and she swallowed.

'You said that I did. But I ... I want you to know that's not true. I wanted to love him. I tried and tried. He was a good man. He was kind.'

'Yes,' Rhys said, and nothing more.

'But no matter how hard I tried, it just ... didn't happen. Maybe, had we been given more time ...' She wiped the snow from her eyes. 'So no, I didn't love him. But he was still mine. That's why I'm here. That's what this'— she pointed at the hole—'means to me. He was good, and valiant, and he was mine.'

Snow fell in dots between them, a curtain of endless dots. 'Then that makes him mine as well,' said Lord Rhys, and shook the flakes from his hair. 'Let's go.'

Had any of the sanf inimicus inhabiting the quarry tunnels come upon them, no doubt they would have been startled to see a single candle in a lantern bobbing along by itself in the air, an excess of smoke drifting behind it to crease along the bumps and knots of the ceiling.

But they encountered no one. Not the first mile. Nor the next.

She followed the cloak, swishing and flicking ahead of her, a living thing now, deep blue and yellow stars, voices murmuring in chorus, whispering to her,hurry; no, don't; yes, hurry, it's time.

The limestone had been chiseled in great sheets from its base, but the floors of the tunnels were littered with splinters and flakes, and she was afraid she was beginning to leave a trail of blood behind her, for all her invisibility. She looked back and saw nothing but water puddles and sharp changing shadows. If she rinsed her feet, she'd leave prints for certain. So she tried to step lightly and went on.

Her strategy had evolved from simple vengeance into more complicated duplicity. She had instructed the cloak to take her to the leader of the sanf inimicus. Zoe would identify him, wait for him to be alone—and he would be alone at some small moment, she was certain of it—and then she and Rhys would abduct him. Smuggle him out together, out of the quarries, out of Paris, all the way back to Darkfrith.

Let the council have him. Let the Alpha work his tender mercies upon the human who had caused them all so much grief. She wouldn't shed a tear.

And if perchance the man proved to be . disagreeable, or impossible to transport, Zoe would kill him. She would picture in her mind the face of the dragon who had pledged twice to wed her. She would remember Cerise, and the shire, and she would snap his neck.

That seemed an excellent plan too.

Up ahead, the cloak loosened its arrow shape, widened and thinned until it blocked the entire passage as a diaphanous veil. Through the spirits she caught a glimpse of a different sort of light, less mobile. It was a rush light, fixed to the wall.

She paused and glanced at the smoke beside her. Rhys Turned to man, winked at her, and went back to smoke.

She blew out the flame of her lantern and set it against a wall. She crept onward, up to the veil, straight through it, and for the slightest second—as the world plunged deep blue and she tripped forward into infinity—she heard the voices again, clearer than ever before:yes/go/ Then she was through it, back upon solid stone. She stopped to lift her hands to the rush light to get warm, then wrung them down her hair to ensure no stray droplets of water would betray her.

A line of torches ahead, each one a bright cherry of light, until the tunnel ended, and she walked into a vast cavern of stone, minute, refractive glimmers from veins of quartz sparkling through the shadows. The ceiling was domed and uneven, and reached so high along the far side she could not see the top.

It was a living chamber. It had been furnished with fixtures and rugs, an agate-topped card table with matching chairs, a teak dining table with carved phoenixes winging up along the legs. Three satin settees. A painted golden screen in the Chinese style, brushwork depicting birds upon branches, a river rushing below them. A gilded candelabra burning with a dozen white candles. There was even a harpsichord, amber-colored wood and ivory keys, flowers painted in a pretty plait upon the sides.

A bed loomed by the Chinese screen, a big one, with four mahogany posts and ocean-blue covers, furs strewn haphazardly along its base.

But for a single, elderly woman seated upon a bench at the foot of that bed—and all the gossamer songs of the quartz bespangling the limestone—the cavern appeared to be deserted. There was no scent of Others anywhere nearby.

Zoe was invisible. Rhys was close to it, hugging the area around the final torch. Yet the woman turned her face toward them anyway, a sheen of gray-white hair bound into a coronet, shoulders straight, her hands frail and elegant. She lifted a small golden watch fixed to a chain about her neck, checked the time, and let it drop. In her other hand was a teacup; she raised that and drank from it, and Zoe realized right then, from all the way across the cavern, that this woman was a dragon.

Not faint-blooded. A full drakon.

'Will you take tea?' she called, her voice wavering across the silence. Zoe froze.

'Yes, I can feel you,' the woman said, nodding. 'Don't make me get up. These old bones, you know.'

Before Zoe could move again, before she could think, a spiral of smoke bloomed around her, brief warning, then shot past, transformed into naked Rhys before the elderly female. He walked casually to the bed, picked up one of the furs, and wrapped it around his waist.

'Tea would be delightful,' she heard him say. 'How kind.'

The woman made a motion toward the stand by the bed, where a service was arranged. Rhys took a cup, poured from the pot, glanced around him as if to discover a place to sit, then remained standing. He lifted the tea to his nose, appeared to inhale.

'It's not poisoned,' said the woman, sounding amused. 'If I'd sought to poison you, Lord Rhys, I would have