Lord of Snow and Shadows (51 page)

The plain back walls of the palace stared back at her, with blank, empty windows. She was utterly alone now. Not even Astasia could save her.

Numb with shock, she could not believe this was happening. And happening so fast.

“I demand to see a lawyer!” she cried. “I have rights. I am a citizen of Smarna!”

But instead, a column of soldiers was being marched smartly in, carbine rifles on shoulders. At a gruffly barked order from an officer, they halted and faced her.

A firing squad.

Astasia ran through the palace in a last, desperate search for anyone with any authority who might help, rapping furiously on shut doors. She was met with surprise and polite indifference from the palace staff. They seemed not to understand her requests. There was, she was informed by the prince’s personal secretary, no one who could help her at Swanholm. Chancellor Maltheus was the only man who could revoke the execution order—and he was far away in a parliament session in the city of Tielborg.

And then the sky suddenly darkened.

Marta, Karila’s nurse, burst into the secretary’s office.

“She’s gone! The princess is missing!”

The officer came up to Elysia, a blindfold in his hands. He fumbled as he tried to tie it around her eyes, catching a strand of hair, mumbling an apology for his clumsiness. She caught a little of the telltale odor, sweat and soap mingled, that told her he was young, maybe as young as Gavril, and flustered, plunged into matters of state way over his head.

This isn’t the end of it all,
she kept telling herself.
It can’t be.

“Firing squad,” barked the officer, “present arms!”

She heard the unmistakable click of the carbine rifles.

“Take aim!”

“Gavril?” she whispered. “Gavril, where are you?”

A great building lay far below, a graceful curve of pale stone and gray slates powdered in snow.

Eugene’s palace?

He circled lower, in slow, wide circles, letting the Drakhaoul control his descent.

He was dropping faster now. He could see landscaped groves of trees looming up to his right, a formal lake straight ahead. The lake was a smooth sheen of green ice, covered with a crystalline frosting of frozen snow. Now he could see terraces, columns, carved balustrades.

Swanholm.

He detected movement in one of the many courtyards behind the fine sculpted facade of the palace. A barracks lay behind the stable blocks, orangeries, and kitchens.

And what was this?

A row of soldiers lined up in the farthest courtyard, carbines leveled at one solitary figure, a woman who stood tied to a post, a blindfold over her eyes.

“Mother!”

Astasia and Marta came flying down the stairs, only to encounter a tide of servants and soldiers fleeing in the opposite direction. They were shouting, screaming one word. It seemed to be
dragon
.

Astasia glanced at Marta. Dragon? That was what Karila had kept repeating in the sleigh. Had the princess known what was about to happen, had she “seen” some terrible natural disaster?

“Don’t go that way!” a lackey yelled at her. “For God’s sake, get clear!”

Astasia pushed on through the crowd, even more determined to find the little girl. In this stampede, she could easily be knocked to the ground and trampled. She grabbed a musket from a guardsman and marched across the inner courtyard toward the barracks, Marta staunchly following behind.

Gavril’s shadow darkened the sky as he swooped down, blotting out the daylight.

And felt the shock as he encountered an unseen barrier, soft yet stronger than silk. Some invisible and powerful force had been placed here to keep him out. His bruised body tingled with the shock and his mind went blank.

Mage-mischief.

Dark anger flared in his heart.

They were going to kill his mother. And they dared to try to keep him out!

He flung himself back at it, diving headfirst, and felt the silken barrier pulsate, then rip asunder.

He was in.

“Wait!” Elysia heard a man’s voice ring out, brusque on the bitter air. Someone was hastening across the yard; she could hear the clatter of elegant court shoes over the cobbles, crisp and formal. “Hold your fire!”

“Feodor,” she whispered, overwhelmed. “You came back.”

And at that moment she sensed the darkness, even through the blindfold, as the beat of great wings gusted a hot, dry wind across the yard.

The men gasped in disbelief.

“Fire!” yelled the officer in a panic.

She steeled herself.
Fire.
Even Velemir’s last-minute intervention would not save her. Any second now the bullets would hit her and nothing would matter anymore.

But the shots—when they came—were not aimed at her. A creature cried out, a hoarse bellow of fury, neither animal nor human yet with an unmistakably familiar timbre to it.

“Gavril?” she cried. “Gavril, is it you?”

The Drakhaon’s wingtips grazed the soldiers’ heads as he descended, dark as a whirling stormcloud.

They swung around, firing up at him. Lead bullets grazed his skin. With a flick of wings and tail, he knocked them flying, heard their shots go wide, peppering the surrounding buildings, shattering window glass.

He saw only the blindfolded woman, hands tied behind her back, waiting bemusedly for death. He recognized the faded auburn of her autumn-bright hair, and felt a storm of rage, grief, and recognition overwhelm his heart. They had done this to her—to punish him.

“Mother!”

He alighted in the courtyard, placing himself between Elysia and the terrified soldiers. The darkness of his anger throbbed about him like a thunderstorm.

Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a twitch of movement. Someone had dared to move—

A man. Coming toward his mother.

Had they not understood? If anyone so much as tried to harm one hair of her head, they would die.

Feodor Velemir gazed up at the Drakhaon. And felt his whole body go chill.

He realized—to his surprise—that he was afraid. Mortally afraid. And all his adult life he had been afraid of nothing.

This creature had swooped down out of his childhood nightmares, a winged dragon-daemon with the blue-burning eyes of a man cursed, mad with grief. A shimmer of dark heat radiated from its body.

The secret of Azhkendir’s invulnerability and power stood before him.

“Magnificent,”
he murmured in spite of himself.

The Drakhaon heard him and swiveled its head toward him. Its nostrils flared. For a moment he felt the crazed brilliance of its flame-blue gaze pierce him, a clean, bright pain that lit up the yard.

From somewhere far away he heard a woman scream, “No, Gavril. No!”

And then he began to burn.

Karila crept into the open doorway that led to the barracks yard and stared. No one noticed her in the confusion, a child cowering in the shadows.

There it was: the flame-eyed dragon of darkness who had haunted her dreams. Marta had told her her nightmares were only bad dreams, they would never come true. But Marta was wrong!
Marta was wrong!

The yard suddenly filled with the brightness of a terrible conflagration. A man was on fire. She heard his scream of terror. She watched, speechless, as the flames obliterated him: a blinding dazzle of white-blue fire, and at the heart, a blackened skeletal thing dropped to the ground and crumbled away to charred ash.

Then there was silence. Karila could hear her own heart beating, thudding against her ribs as the courtyard filled with a foul-smelling, choking smoke.

And then through the smoke she heard the soldiers calling out to one another.

“Fetch the cannon!”

Did they
still
not understand? The dragon had not come to destroy them. It was wounded beyond reason, mad with grief and confusion, as twisted in mind as she was in body. She could sense its terrible rage, blue-black like a thundercloud. If they fired on it, they would only enrage it more.

“Dragon,” she said to it aloud. And knew it heard her, was suddenly aware of her.

“Drakhaoul,”
a voice, dark as smoke, corrected her.

“I am coming, Drakhaoul,” she said, setting out into the courtyard. “Coming to help you.”

The brightness of Velemir’s burning scored itself against Elysia’s lids, even through the thickness of the blindfold. But she scarcely felt the scorching pain of the flame dazzle; she felt only numbing shock.

This creature that was—and was not—her son had killed a man, had seared him to an agonizing death by fire. Now she relived with vivid intensity all the horrors Volkh had tried to shield her from, that she had forced herself to forget all these years.

My son has become a monster.

And then she felt the Drakhaon’s breath on her face, her neck, but now it no longer seared; it was warm as a caress. And a voice of darkness spoke with Gavril’s well-loved inflections—but whether within her mind or aloud, she could not be sure.

“Mother—we must get out of here. Climb on my back, quick.”

“I—I can’t,” she stammered, “my hands are tied.”

The shadow loomed over her and she felt something—a Drakhaon’s claw?—grate gently against the ropes that bound her wrists until they fell away.

“Hurry. They are coming.”

She rubbed at her rope-chafed wrists, then grimly raised one hand to tug away the blindfold, to see what she must—but dreaded to—see.

The Drakhaon stood over her protectively, wings outstretched, a great shadow-dragon, cloaked in a shimmer of darkness that issued like smoke from its nostrils. But beyond it she saw the soldiers leveling cannons at them. She saw the little flames of their fuse matches.

“Gavril,” she said, hoping it understood her, “they’re going to fire—”

“Aim,” yelled an officer, “on my mark—”

And then she saw a small figure coming hesitantly toward them across the smoke-filled yard.

A little girl in a white frock.

“The princess!” she heard the officer shout. “Hold your fire!”

The Drakhaoul sensed the child before it saw her, smelled the sweet, clean fragrance of her young body.

The Drakhaon body it had fashioned for the man it possessed was weakening, its resources depleted by the night’s long flight and that last, furious burst of fire. Hunger would soon drive it to seek out fresh, untainted human blood.

Yet this child was different. Her body might be warped, deformed, but her mind burned with a white radiance, bright as a starflame. She knew its crazed pain, its utter loneliness.

“Drakhaoul,” she said aloud in her child’s voice, grave and clear.

Astasia came dashing down the stone stairs that led out to the barracks yard, Marta following, and almost fell over a great cannon.

“Stay back, altessa.” Guards barred her way. They were busy loading the cannon with shot and powder.

Gauzy wisps of smoke drifted from the courtyard. Glittering smoke. The vile smell of burning flesh tainted the air. She could sense heat: a dark, dry, intense heat.

“What’s happening?” She pushed forward. “Let me through. Let me see for myself—”

And then she spotted Karila. A child, vulnerable and alone, gazing up at the daemon of darkness, which gazed back at her with all the madness of its flame-blue eyes.

“Karila!” she cried, starting out toward her.

“Altessa, no!” The officer tried to hold her back but, long used to chase games with Andrei, she ducked nimbly under his outstretched arms and emerged in the yard.

Slowly the creature swiveled its head, wisps of smoke, blue as indigo, issuing from its wild-flared nostrils.

It saw her.

Astasia.

How often he had sketched her beloved face from memory, trying to recall accurately every last detail. And now those liquid, dark eyes which had haunted his dreams stared at him in shock and disbelief.

He saw her pale lips open, framing a word, a name.

“Gavril,” she said in the stillness.

She knew him. Even though he was clothed in this monstrous form, she had recognized him.

The part of the Drakhaon that was still Gavril remembered who he was and felt a shudder of remorse shake his great daemon-body.

That she should see him like this . . .

A burning pain seared through his heart. The dreams of their love, dreams that had sustained him through the long desperate winter in Azhkendir, all fizzled to dust and smoke in that one brief moment of recognition. He saw stretching ahead a loveless, lonely future. . . .

“Gavril.” He heard his mother’s voice, low and urgent, close to his ear. “They’re aiming cannons at us.”

The smell of immediate danger brought him back to himself. Tired, injured as he was, he must get Elysia safely away from Tielen. A myriad little flames glinted under the arches. Cannon fuses.

And then the girl-child turned to the soldiers cowering beneath the arches behind their great guns.

“You must let them go,” she said in her small, clear voice. “You must hold your fire.” She came closer to him with her twisted, limping gait and stared imploringly into his eyes.

“Stay back, Kari,” called Astasia, her voice trembling.

“Take me with you, Drakhaoul,” the child said. “I want to fly like you. I want to be free.”

Elysia reached out one shaking hand, placing it on the burning scales of the creature that was and yet was not her son, hoping her touch, her voice would reach him, steady him. Her own safety forgotten, she only wanted to ensure he did not harm little Kari.

“Gavril,” she murmured, “don’t touch the child. Don’t even let her near. You’re not in your right mind, you don’t want to do anything you might regret. . . .”

The Drakhaon Gavril did not answer her. She could sense how troubled he was, how unpredictable; the least distraction might spark him into another violent reaction.

Beyond Kari and Astasia, the fuses gleamed brighter in the shadows, the waiting soldiers hovering nervously, waiting for the command to fire. To blast them both to eternity.