Soul of Fire (7 page)

There were many things that Sofie had heard about
weres, and far more that she was prepared to believe. But as she stood on the black marble of the monument to the Black Hole disaster, while the man who had been a dragon dressed himself with expedience clearly born of practice, she thought:
No one told me they could be beautiful.

It had been the beauty of the beast—fire-winged, luminescent-scaled—that had caused her to fall on the dragon’s back and not to fling herself from there once she had dropped on it.

The scales, which should have been cold, had instead been warm and felt strangely soft beneath her body. And the wings . . . the wings rising and flapping on either side of her had been like captive fire. Like . . . a million fireflies captured within a frame of gold. But not even that, for where the fireflies would project white light, these were blue and green and pale gold, shifting and changing and looking now like jewels and now like stars.

When the dragon had set her down, she’d meant to run. She’d heard and read stories—mostly in England, in the papers, and in the novels that all her classmates smuggled into their rooms and hid under their mattresses. Journalists and novel writers alike maintained that those people subjected to turning into weres were the basest of creatures, so crude as to defy belief.

So, despite the beauty of the dragon, Sofie had thought the man whose other form it was would doubtless be an Indian servant, or else one of those drunken young men whose respectable families sent them to India to avoid the embarrassment of having them on hand.

But then the beast coughed hard, mercilessly, twisting and writhing in the pain of it.

And then . . . it changed. And the process of change itself was fascinating to one who had only read about it. The accounts were quite wrong, she now realized. There were not buckets of blood lost, nor did the body become, for a moment, something inexpressibly gross and strange. No, instead of evoking disgust, the process seemed wondrous. The dragon glowed with a blue light, as its lines blurred and changed.

For a moment in the middle, the dragon was neither beast nor man, and did look quite odd—like a man with reptilian wings or a dragon with a bipedal stance. But then the whole resolved itself into a man who, like the beast, was of uncommon physical beauty.

He was tall, very tall. Taller even than Papa, who had always been accounted a very tall man. This gentleman—for there could be no doubt he was one—was straight of back and limb and golden all over, a color just slightly lighter than her own.

His features managed to be beautiful without in any way deviating from the straightness of line to be expected of a gentleman’s physiognomy. A squarish chin was emphasized by an aquiline, high-bridged nose, on the right side of which his single eye—she hadn’t noticed the dragon had only one eye, and now she wondered in what brave act he’d lost the left—was wider than average, and soft and green, the deep green of a tree in winter. And his hair, soft and dark and curly, fell over a forehead beaded with sweat. The blue light faded around him and, as if from very far away, she heard him apologize for his state of undress and then, disbelieving, heard herself muse on the inconvenience—the
inconvenience
—of being a were. He dressed by rote, and quickly, as a man who often found himself naked and in public or semi-public situations would. And all she could do was make inane small talk. At least until he was fully dressed—in a linen suit of impeccable tailoring, which emphasized the lines of his body and his long legs—and insisted she must go home.

But she couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. She’d rather die a thousand deaths than face the raj again. She didn’t know what she expected, but she felt her body shift and tense as he bent the intent gaze of that soft and pondering eye upon her face.

In such circumstances, at least as far as she’d been led to believe, a gentleman of breeding—which this one certainly appeared to be, even if he was also a dragon—would tell her she couldn’t run away from home and would demand that she return to her parents. Or perhaps he would be so shocked by her declaration that he would instantly turn away in disgust from one who had to be lost to all propriety.

But the dragon-man merely raised his eyebrows and looked at her very intently, then nodded once. “I see,” he said. And Sofie had the uncomfortable notion that whatever he saw was not the propriety of her behavior. “Look, Miss . . . ?”

“Warington,” she said. And—training defeating reason—she dropped him a hasty curtsey.

He smiled a little at it, as though he recognized in the gesture the unthinking response of the body. “Miss Warington.” He fished in his coat pocket for a cigarette case, from which he extracted a thin cigarette that he proceeded to light with a nonmagical flint lighter fished from the other pocket. He expelled a neat cloud of smoke, and looked at her. “I assume you were running away from home because you had a disagreement with your family or some such thing. I’ve never had sisters, but I understand from overhearing friends that this is not uncommon with girls your age. I beg you to believe me, the events you’d be exposed to on your own in the world are worse than anything you might have left home to avoid.”

She shook her head, quickly—too eagerly, her mind told her—and said, “I don’t want to marry the maharajah.”

This got her a widened eye, showing she had surprised him. “Your parents wanted you to marry—”

“They accepted his suit while I was away in England,” she said. “And then presented it to me as a done thing. I was to marry the maharajah, and he said I’d be his only wife.”

The eye sparkled with something like amusement. “Yes, I can see how that would drive you to despair. I’m sure it has always been your secret and active ambition to be part of a seraglio.” And then, as though reading the shock in her eyes, he added, with quick sobriety, “I’m sorry. That was ill-spoken.”

“No, I beg pardon,” she said, confused. “I expressed myself poorly. What I meant is that he had discussed marriage with my parents before ever he met me, which seems . . . very odd.”

“Though done often enough in India, which is, in that respect, a more traditional society than ours. Marriage is made for other reasons than sudden and unavoidable love.” He pronounced the last word as if he didn’t quite know what it meant—a foreign word culled from an unknown language.

She shook her head, unable to tell whether he was joking or just persisted in misunderstanding her—and feeling, somehow, deep within, that it was all her fault for failing to explain it more coherently. After all, she’d never before had problems getting words to obey her and she’d always been able to make her meaning quite plain when she chose. Why was she now tongue-tied and unable to explain this matter, when it was of the utmost importance that he understand her? “I know that,” she said, curtly. “My father’s grandmother was Indian and we— I know that.” Then she shook her head. “But you see, there is no reason for him to marry me. My father is not very important. He tried to make a go of a shipping service, but it did not prosper and our ships kept sinking. The whole family is terribly unlucky,” she said bluntly. “Always has been. If we were to make hats, boys would be born without heads. So, he didn’t prosper, and though our house is well enough, or at least I thought it was till today, and . . . and I . . . I suppose I’m well enough, too, though not
beautiful.
” She rushed on, afraid he would dispute this point, and even more afraid he would fail to dispute it, “I am nothing special and neither is my family, so why would a native want to marry me sight unseen? My maid says there are rumors he saw me once in a vision, but that seems unlikely. And he can’t have gone to England, because he’s something special in the way of looks and I’m sure there would have been talk about him if he had visited London.”

“Something special?”

“He’s . . . ugly,” she said, and tried to convey her feeling of disgust and fear in that one word, sure that she was coming short of it. “A face broad and scarred, and little slits of eyes, which are quite yellow.”

“I see,” the dragon-man said again, this time making it obvious that he did not. “And so you don’t want to marry him. But, my dear girl, surely you know that in this day and age no one can force you to marry anyone else? There are laws against that sort of thing.”

“I know. And yet . . .”

“And yet?”

“I feel that if I go back, somehow I will be forced to marry him.”

He should have disputed that, but he didn’t. He just frowned at her for a while. “And what do you plan to do with your hard-earned freedom? Surely you didn’t count on me?”

She shook her head yet again, then said, her voice coming out oddly young and breathless, “Oh, no. You were quite . . . providential.”

“Yes, that’s me. Providence on the wing. But we can’t stay here talking. Sooner or later they’ll look for you, and I don’t care to explain why, exactly, a dragon took you and now they find you with me.”

It crossed her mind suddenly, and with some surprise, that he stood under a penalty of death for the mere fact of having been born a were. And yet he’d gone out of his way to rescue her, which doubtless would attract attention to himself and his condition. The penalty of death had always been justified by saying that weres ate people. Sofie had never doubted it till this moment. And in this slice of irreality in which she was living, she blurted, “Do you eat people?”

He didn’t even look surprised, just said, “Rarely,” with that hint of carelessness that might mean he was joking or else might mean her question had injured his feelings. But before she could apologize, he said, “What are we to do with you now, though? Did you have any other plans than dashing your brains out falling from that balcony?”

“Yes. I intended to go to Meerut.”

“Meerut?” he repeated. “In the Punjab? Good God. That’s a long way away. How were you meaning to get there? Do you have friends here who’ll lend you transport?”

“No,” she said. Her plan—forged in the heat of panic—had seemed perfectly reasonable, but now appeared as if it was not so much a plan as a fever dream. “You see . . . all my friends are in England. I lived there since I was very young. In . . . in an academy for young ladies.”

“But why Meerut? What were you intending to do there?”

She felt color come to her cheeks. She had never really spoken of Captain Blacklock to anyone, and she didn’t wish to confide in this man who was taller than William Blacklock and—though she was loathe to admit it—even better-looking. “I . . . You see . . . When I was in England, there was this captain of the regulars, a . . . He was a very good-looking . . .” She cleared her throat. “What I mean is, we were very good friends, through meeting at balls and parties a good deal, and we went riding together sometimes, and . . . and we formed an attachment.”

“Oh, so you’re engaged,” he said, sounding indefinably relieved.

“In a manner of speaking. I mean, he said that he would marry me in a second if he could. But you see, he was the child of the second child of a mere country squire, and he didn’t have any money and he thought my parents would never accept his suit, which might very well be true. He was ordered to India three months before I left England myself. Something about were unrest?” She looked at him, hoping desperately he would think of that, not of the obvious confusion of her situation with William.

But he dismissed were unrest with a toss of his cigarette onto the ground and a flicker of his eyebrows upward. “Never heard of any were unrest,” he said. “At least, not in Calcutta. Not that I’ve met any other of . . . my kind. Well, properly speaking, I’ve never met my kind anywhere, since I’ve never come across another dragon, but . . .” He shrugged. “So Captain Blacklock is in Meerut and you wish to go to him and throw yourself in his arms?”

She felt the blush in her face become a raging fire. She imagined, having seen herself blush before, that she presented a very pretty picture with the pink coming up in her cheeks and her eyes averted. But she wished three times more that she might have more control of her reactions. “That’s an abominable thing to say,” she said. “He . . . he said that if things were different and he had a chance, he would have very much liked to marry me. So, you see, now things are different, because my parents have forced me into this position, I don’t see why I shouldn’t marry him.”

The dragon-man didn’t speak for a long time. He looked at her in silence till she felt she would burst into flames out of sheer embarrassment. But at last he opened his mouth and said, levelly, “Miss Warington, it won’t do. Even supposing you had some way of making it across the wilds of India to where Captain Blacklock is stationed—are you sure he is stationed there, by the way?”

“He told me he was being sent to Meerut in the Punjab.”

“So supposing he wasn’t lying for some specious reason of his own—and before you look too shocked, madame, let me assure you that men do lie—and that his orders didn’t change, nor that he didn’t catch some horrible disease on ship—which, yes, also does happen—and die and get buried at sea, nor die shortly after debarking, from the shock of the climate or from tainted food—if all these conditions apply, then he is on the other side of this vast subcontinent. And supposing you travel to him by bullock cart, which is the fastest means of transportation you could command—supposing you could command it—to reach such a region as the Punjab . . . you’d take three weeks, perhaps more, to make it to his side. And all on the strength of a comment he made to you during a party, which was that he would be well pleased to marry you, all other things being equal.”