Soul of Fire (54 page)

And despite her having told him she would like nothing better than to be married out of hand, somewhere, after eloping he’d insisted on doing the proper thing. “So many things are wrong with this union,” he said, “I want to make everything else as right that I can.”

She had no idea what he meant about things being wrong. He’d gone to her parents and asked their consent. She didn’t know what he’d told them, but the consent had been immediately granted. Perhaps because Peter had parted with one of the diamonds in that pouch that Lalita had given them, through Aimee McCleod.

So that was well, though Sofie had absolutely no intention of keeping up too close a connection with her parents. It was hard to forget they’d almost sold her for blood sacrifice. She could forgive, but not forget.

They were going to live on St. . . . no, Peter’s estate—she must remember to call him Peter; he’d asked her most fervently, telling her St. Maur always made him feel she was talking to his father—for which he had very grand plans. “It is just a large rambling house,” he said. “And some half a dozen farms, including the home farm. And a whole lot of flocks. But with the money we have, we can make the estate as lovely as it was in my great-grandfather’s day. Or at least as wealthy. We’ll repair the house, but we won’t really
change
it. It and the gardens around it have a wild beauty all their own. Just like you.”

She thought he was very silly, but she was looking forward to the house anyway. It was his house, and it was clear that he loved it. As she loved him. And as he loved her.

On one thing only had her new husband stuck, and could not be moved. “I will not take a carpetship,” he’d said. “No matter how much I can control myself, I will not be confined that long, in such a small space with so many strangers. Something would go very wrong.”

She didn’t care. She leaned forward over his neck, while beneath her Europe stretched, as dark and mysterious as any of the unexplored continents. Lights shone here and there, the mirrors of the constellations in the sky. Soon, they would fly across the ocean, and then, at long last, into England. Peter had told her that he knew a place to land where no one would see them. And how from there they could rent horses or another conveyance to the nearest town, and eventually make their way to his beloved Summercourt. “Where I will make my land manager happy,” he had said, “by assuming all my responsibilities, and then some.”

A thought of the rubies, to which they owed all their happiness, intruded. Peter said his friend Nigel would be taking them back to their temple in Africa, even now.

She said a little prayer for the rubies’—and Nigel’s—safety, then leaned forward, resting her head on the warm, soft neck of the dragon, and whispered in the general direction of his ears, “I love you, Peter Farewell, Lord St. Maur.”

He flapped his wings, once, twice, gaining altitude. Below them, Europe was a small thing, of little importance. And around her, his wings sparkled like captive fire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal more years ago than she’s comfortable admitting. She currently lives in Colorado with her husband, teen sons and a clowder of various-size cats. She hasn’t been to Africa in twenty-some years, but she would like to visit again. Around four dozen—at last count—of her short stories have been published in magazines such as
Weird Tales, Analog, Asimov’s
and
Amazing,
as well as various anthologies.
Ill Met by Moonlight,
the first book of her Shakespearean fantasy trilogy, was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. Sarah is also working on a contemporary fantasy series starting with
Draw One in the Dark,
and—as Sarah D’Almeida—is in the midst of a Musketeers’ Mystery series starting with
Death of a Musketeer.
Her website is
http://sarahahoyt.com/
.

Also by Sarah A. Hoyt

Heart of Light

If you loved
Heart of Light
and
Soul of Fire,
be sure not to miss the riveting conclusion to this series, as Nigel’s tale is finally told in:

HEART
and
SOUL
by
Sarah A. Hoyt

On sale November 2008
Here’s a special preview:

On sale November 2008

Red Jade held her breath as her brother prepared to set fire to the paper boats and the hordes of carefully detailed paper dragons. She wanted to close her eyes and shut out the scene, but her will alone kept them open. Through the screen of her eyelashes, she saw Wen approach the altar upon which the funerary gifts of their father had been set. Above that, another altar held the tablets of their ancestors.

Red Jade had supervised and arranged it all. She had made her father’s women cut and glue and color and gild for days, so that on the lower jade table there stood a palace in paper—the palace her family hadn’t possessed in millennia. To the right of it stood row upon row of paper boats, minutely detailed, like the barges upon which Red Jade had spent her whole life. In the middle stood representations of the court—men and women meant to be her father’s servants in the afterlife: a coterie of pretty paper dolls for a harem, and a group of broad-shouldered male dolls for the hard tasks her father’s spirit might want done, and to protect him from whatever evil he might encounter. On the left, in massed confusion, were perfect, miniature paper dragons. Herself, in dark red. Red Jade. And Wen in Blue. For some reason, seeing them there, before the palace that would never be theirs, made the tears she refused to let fall join in obscuring her sight.

Her brother, whom she must now think of as the True Emperor of All Under Heaven—though her family had been in exile for many centuries and she doubted the present usurpers even knew of their existence—held the burning joss stick in his hand and dropped slowly to his knees.

Let him not fall,
Red Jade prayed, and she wasn’t sure to whom, though it might have been to her father’s spirit. Only she didn’t know if her father cared, and she wished there was someone else she could appeal to.
Let Wen not fall,
she told herself, sternly, and felt a little more confident. It was insane to think she could keep Wen upright and within bounds of proper behavior through the sheer power of her mind, but then . . . she always had, hadn’t she? And she had hidden his addiction from her father, as well.

When had she ever had anyone else to ask for help? So when she saw Wen’s head start to bob forward, like the head of one overcome with sleep, she willed him to stay up, on his knees, facing forward.

Wen straightened. The joss stick swept left and right, setting all the pretty paper images aflame. And Red Jade fought against the sob climbing into her throat even as the sound of her father’s concubines erupting into ritualistic screams deafened her mind. She would miss her father. She was afraid for Wen and her own future. But, in this moment, all had been done well, and Wen was behaving as he should.

She finally allowed her eyes to shut as Wen’s voice mechanically recited the prayers that should set their father’s soul free and make it secure in the ever after.

Their father was dead. He’d been the Dragon King, the True Emperor of All Under Heaven, the descendant of the ancient kings of China. Wen, his only son, must inherit the throne. Because only Wen could protect his half-sister, the daughter of the long-dead, foreign-devil concubine.

She followed him to his room after the ceremony. It was her father’s old room, in the main barge of their flotilla. Servants and courtiers prostrated themselves as Wen passed by, knocking their foreheads against the dusty floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. Wen was tired and anxious. His eyes kept darting here and there, as though he had trouble focusing both sight and mind.

The men surrounding him—his father’s advisers—probably knew as well as she did that he longed for his fix of opium, but they gave no indication of it. It was all “Excellency” this and “Milord” that as each competed with the other, asking boons on this, his first day in power. Repairs to this barge and additions to that one, and a promotion in the precedence of yet another.

All of them Wen ignored, walking just ahead, his eyes blindly seeking. But as the entourage prepared to follow him into his quarters, he spun around and clapped his dismissal. At the back of the group of followers, Red Jade stood waiting, not quite daring enter her newly powerful brother’s room without his permission. For years she’d protected him and helped him, but now he was Emperor and her ascendance over him was gone.

But seeing her at the back, he smiled and motioned for her to approach, which she did, closing the door behind her.

“We’re done now, Red Jade,” he told her, his man’s tones distorted into a child’s whine. It was a voice that had only developed after he started smoking opium. “I’ve done what you wanted, and now I’m tired.”

Part of Red Jade felt sorry for him. They were of an age, she and Wen, though Wen was the son of the First Lady, her father’s official wife. Red Jade was only the daughter of a concubine with red hair and blue eyes who had been stolen off a foreign carpetship.

And though Red Jade looked Chinese, with her long, smooth dark hair and black eyes, she knew her eyes had a blue sheen, and there was something to her features that wasn’t quite right. She was also too tall.

Her father had teased her about it, telling her they’d never get her a husband. No man would want to look up at his lady.

The recollection that Zhan would be out there, prowling and planning to make her his, sent a shiver of fear up her spine, and made her catch her breath. “Not yet, Older Brother,” she said. “We must be able to lift and move the dragon boats. I—”

He gave her one of the startlingly cunning looks that he could give—a sudden expression of knowledge that belied the normal dreamlike tone of his days. “You mean
you
must lift them.”

His look was so like her father’s that she bowed deeply and whispered, “I do not mean to take over your . . .”

“No,” Wen said, and shook his head. “No, of course, not. But let’s not play games, Younger Sister. Not with each other. We both know that the opium interferes with flying the boats. I would not risk my people.” He turned abruptly towards a table that was set at the foot of his bed. Bed and table both were gilded, and inlaid heavily with semi-precious stones. They were very old and had come—centuries ago—from their ancestors’ palace. Now they stood in uneasy contrast with the rest of the furniture, which ranged from heavy, foreign, mahogany furniture scavenged from carpetships to improvised pieces put together from flotsam and tatters.

The boxes, like the table, were made of fragrant woods and covered in gold leaf and jewels. Jade had seen them open before, when her father had been searching for something. So she knew what they contained—papers and jewels, most of them magical and bequeathed to them by long-lost generations. Wen rummaged through the boxes as if he knew what he was looking for, and Jade held her tongue while he did so.

“Ah,” he said at last. He held aloft a heavy signet ring, with a bright red stone, upon which were chiseled the characters for Power and Following. Jade, who’d never seen that ring, blinked at Wen.

“Father showed me all these boxes before he died,” Wen said. “And he told me what each jewel and paper did—magically, as well as symbolically. This ring was worn by our father when his own father was incapable of ruling the Dragon Boats, in his final years of life. So our father wore the ring, and with it could command the Dragon Boats with the magic of the Emperor. He could also command all of the Imperial power.”

“But . . .” Red Jade said, stricken. “I am only a woman. And my mother—”

“Was a foreign devil, yes,” Wen said, with unaccustomed dryness. “But Jade, you’ve been doing half of Father’s work for years—everything that didn’t require Imperial magic. And, now . . .” He shrugged. “I can be the Emperor, or I can dream.” He gestured towards his hookah on the small, rickety pine table near the gilded bed. “I’d prefer to dream.”

Their eyes met for a moment. Jade had never truly discussed his addiction with him, because Wen would get defensive and change the subject. So he’d never before admitted the power his dreams held over him, and never so bluntly confessed that he cared for nothing else.