The Treasure Keeper

Or perhaps they would.

Zut.

She was seated invisible at the edge of a reflecting pool that held the rainfall from last night, rubbing her feet together beneath the chilled water, her skin goose-pimpled, when he spoke.

'What did we learn this morning?'

She took a good look around before answering him, but the soldiers were still acres away.

'I have the name of the man who drove Hayden to Dijon. Later on today .' She paused, thinking about it. 'Later today I'll go back. If he's in town, I'll find him.'

'Back to the stables.' 'Yes.'

'With all those quiet, peaceful horses, which aren't at all horrified by the mere hint of your presence.'

Rhys was a dark ripple across the surface of the pool, a handsome silhouette just visible, gray smoke writhing like tendrils, overlapping where her own image should be.

'The coachmen can't spend all their time in the stables,' she mused. 'If he's here, he'll want to go out at night at least. Men like to gamble. Men like to drink. Cards. Women.'

'Yes,' drawled Rhys. 'We men are funny like that.'

'Well, then. I'll simply go out with them.'

'Splendid.'

'I am female. I'll be where they are, happy to engage with them. What could be more natural?'

'Great God,' said the shadow, faint. 'And then what? An interrogation over whist and port? You'll charm the truth out of him?'

She leaned forward to see him better, and the water sloshed around her ankles. 'You think I'm a child still, don't you? You think I'm weak.'

'I think,' he said carefully, 'that you have a somewhat elevated sense of your own ruthlessness. Zoe, consider it. Until the sanf arrived, you'd never even left the shire. You have spent your entire life cocooned in a place designed strictly to enforce your own sense of security, to remind you of your matchlessness. This'—he lifted a shadow arm, a dark stabbing slash across the shining blue sky—'all this is the human world. It's rough and raw and it stinks and it cheats. And their rules are not like ours.'

'No,' she murmured, watching the soldiers march smartly in place, bayonets flashing in the distance. 'Their rules are more honest.'

She actually felt his anger. It rolled over her like a winter storm, prickling her skin worse. 'Damn it, Zee, why do you have to be so stubborn? What do you honestly think you can do against them?'

'A great many things,' she answered calmly. 'Invisible, remember?'

He seemed to grow thicker upon the water, more opaque. 'Have you even thought this through? What were you planning to do after?'

'After what?'

'After everything.' He waved a hand. 'All this. Your search. Your vengeance. Death to the sanf inimicus, all glory to the drakon. '

She stared at the smear of him upon the pool.

'Don't you ever want to go home?' the shadow asked, more gently. 'Doesn't home matter to you?'

He saw her look away, her jetty gaze searching the horizon, then dropping down to her hands flat upon her thighs. She hadn't even realized yet how he had found her. That she was supposedly unseen, and yet he was here.

'If Hayden is dead ...' she began, and swallowed, and for some unknown reason Rhys's heart clenched. She took a breath and went on. 'If he's dead, then I don't really know what home is left for me anywhere.'

'Zee. The shire is your birthright. Your family's still there. You're young and beautiful. You're Gifted, Gifts like no one else's. There's not a chance in Hades you'd be left .'

Alone,he almost said. Unwed. And then he realized what it meant.

She was Gifted, extraordinarily so. She would belong to the Alpha. But not to Rhys's father— wed—and not to his brother—engaged.

To him. The sole male of his line yet single, yet unattached. To him.

She was still staring down at her hands. He saw the corners of her lips quirk, a cynical little smile that managed to reveal a flash of dimples.

Oh, God. Oh, God, she was pretty.

'Yes,' she murmured, as if she'd read his mind. 'I know. In some ways, we're less enlightened than the Others, no matter how you protest otherwise. By a twist of chance, I can do this.' She lifted straight a lovely long leg that dripped water but cast no shadow, left no reflection upon the pool beyond the diminutive, spreading circles of falling drops. 'And so in the eyes of the tribe I become less than a person. Less than even a female. I become a belonging. Chattel.'

'No,' he whispered. 'You're precious, don't you see? Like a diamond. Like treasure.'

'Or like a well-bred sow.' She came to her feet, stepping delicately from the pool.

Sunlight blazed across her, every naked inch of her. She stood still and held a hand to her eyes to shield them—would that even help?—staring hard at the men now marching in an infinite square around the front of the park to the shouted orders of their leader.

Her breasts. Rosy nipples tight with cold. The enticing curve of her waist. Her legs slightly apart, her hair flowing and stirring against her hips, that sweet patch of curls lower down, brown like her lashes. She was a stern Diana gazing out at her domain, preparing for the hunt.

Holy hell. If only he were still alive.

'I'm going in now,' she said.

He nodded, then cleared his throat. 'Yes. All right.'

She walked away. He watched her, slipping from pool to pool, then to the windows of the palace, until she was past the soldiers, all the way inside.

* * *

The girl was different from all the others.

She wasn't wearing white, for one thing, the standard style of dress for young women inclined to dance. Her frock was instead a sober dark gray shot with some sort of glisteny blue thread; every time she moved the dress changed colors, shifting from gray to sapphire beneath the light of the sconces set high along the walls. And although she sat at a table with a group of other laughing, sweating girls and quite a few beaux, she didn't speak to them. She barely glanced at them.

She did wear the same colorful coronet of paper flowers across her brow that nearly all the girls here did; they were handed out at the door, so that wasn't too surprising. But on her the stiff orange and violet blooms seemed more vivid, more like real flowers than not.

Yet what set her apart most of all from all the other bright-eyed jeunes femmes in the dance hall tonight was simply her looks.

She was the most beautiful woman around, by far. Beneath the flowers, beneath her loosely pinned and powdered hair was a face unmatched by any he'd seen in years. And he'd seen quite a few faces. No sweat, no wine-flushed cheeks. Just pure ... ice.

He was a man from the countryside, not the putrid city. He'd grown up amid fields of wheat and poppies and placid cows. He was still most comfortable there, out there on those endless roads that rambled through the seasons, and to him, this girl had a winter kind of beauty, like snow falling thick and hushed in the woods. Or stars twinkling against an ebony sky.

She'd been asked to dance at least five times since he'd first noticed her, and she'd refused them all with a dazzling smile, gathering men around her as easily as if she'd beckoned them with the crook of her finger.

He took a swig of his beer. The beauty leaned back in her chair and threw him a sidelong look; he caught a glimpse of that smile again, this time aimed straight at him.

One of his fellows gave him an encouraging kick under the table. Alain dropped his eyes and scratched at a sudden itch beneath his hat.

Tres bien.

* _{* *}