Shana Abe - The Treasure Keeper

We were clever to have settled in a place that offers us so much earthly wealth. The silver mines of Darkfrith are vast and deep, and keep us all well adorned. And really, who deserves those metals more than we? Who appreciates the cut of a sapphire, the clarity of an emerald, better than the dragon for whom they sing?

Now imagine being without your lovely gems. Imagine having to endure the loss of warm gold and cooling silver, of fiery copper too. Imagine all you have is darkness, and iron around your wrists.

And the shards of a once-mighty diamond that sing and sing and sing in your head, pushing out all your better thoughts, keeping you dull and alive and only very distantly wishing you were dead.

The diamond was once named Draumr. And the dragon trapped in its ruined world was named Rhys Langford.

* * *

I wish I could tell you only joyful stories of our history. I wish I could assure you that the many Gifts Nature has blessed upon you will be your salvation against all comers. Yes, we are More than the beings surrounding us. We are Better, and what graces we exhibit today we have earned, I promise you. Our sinuous beauty. Our native intelligence. Our ability to steal the shadows for a hunt.

But we are not invincible. And to prove it, Nature took the very same stars and lava and sky that melded and made us, and from them forged the most exquisite and sinister stone ever to come to be:Draumr.

Nature is the veriest Bitch sometimes.

Once Draumr belonged to a dragon-princess of the Carpathians, many centuries past. To be clear, it belonged to her Zaharen family, and then was stolen, and then, at the cost of her life, she stole it back. Draumr sparkled like a drop of arctic blue sky, frigid cold and absolutely flawless, nearly too wonderful to behold. Its name means dreaming diamond, and here's what more you do not know about it. It was the sole stone carved from this Earth that had the power to enslave us. Yes, enslave us. Anyone who held it could command us. Any low, simple human scum.

You may well imagine what disasters befell us then.

Why was it never destroyed while the Zaharen drakon still possessed it, before it was ripped from our castle by human hands? There's no certain answer for us today. Perhaps our ancestors were more trusting than we, thinking no Other would dare to even attempt to take it. Perhaps they were overly confident, or overly foolish. I don't know. But it was taken, more than once, found again by us, and finally shattered into evil little pieces.

You'd think that would break its power, would you not?

You'd be wrong.

Even those tiny pieces, scattered and floating like thin blue needles through the warp and woof of the universe, have the power to harm us still.

Poor pretty Rhys. He found that out too well.

The body of the creature was kept in the cellar. She was unhappy about that, because the cellar had been in full use before the thing had been brought here, and like any good cook, she regretted its loss. Unlike many other cellars, this one was pleasantly large and well designed, and tiled all the way around in limestone. A wine rack had been built along one wall, and on the opposite, convenient shelving for all the many cheeses and jellies and kitchen herbs she enjoyed. True, the darkest corner was constantly damp and had a patch of blackish mold, but she'd devoted two barrels of mushrooms growing in sand to it and they'd been doing very well, in fact. Everything had to be removed to the upper level once the creature came, and now the mushrooms had shriveled, and cheeses were cracking, and the herbs were beginning to taste more like grease than rosemary and fennel and dill.

But at least she didn't have to go down there any longer. She'd seen the body once, and that was enough.

It was kept in manacles that were oddly glinting, as if they'd been sprinkled with tiny blue stars. There was a blanket tossed over most of it, hiding the face, but just one glimpse of those gold-clawed, twisted hands frozen in the air had given her a nervous stomach for a week.

She let the others manage it. She had other matters to attend to.

***

He had been born into a world of glorious secrets: in a bedchamber of ivory and gilt, in a mansion of glass and stone, to a sire and dam of unspeakable beauty and ferocious power, held tight behind their polished human masks. He was not born first or even second; Rhys was the third of five children, firmly in the middle, all of them different yet all the same. Blessed to be a lord, blessed to be drakon, he had celebrated his good fortune at full tilt for as long as he could recall. There had been no real reason not to. Unlike his father, he would never assume the honor of becoming Alpha to the tribe. Rhys had an older brother to take care of that. Let the two of them put their golden heads together to wrestle the ancient drakon rules and traditions into the modern day. Let his mother and three sisters fuss over their human facade, planning balls and soirees and high teas like the fiercest of war generals.

Rhys's world was slightly ... more feral than all that.

He was comely, because all the tribe were. He was aware of that, even as a boy. He'd been granted his father's ice-green eyes but his mother's deep chestnut hair, a decided advantage with the females in a clan of creatures that tended to be redheaded or blond. It didn't hurt also that he possessed a certain piratical nature—his eldest sister had called him that once when he was eleven and she thirteen, /?iraftca/, to his enormous and open delight—that seemed to soften even the hardest of feminine hearts.

Most of them, anyway.

Despite his face and title, he'd found it rather easy to slip away from the undue notice of his parents and nannies and tutors. In fact, it became one of his more valuable skills, the ability to fade into backgrounds, to listen without speaking, to see what he wouldn't otherwise if he didn't stick to the shadows. He supposed it might have been a natural talent; his mother, after all, had once been one of the most notorious thieves London had ever known. Rue Langford alone would find him lurking around corners and merely smile.

So he grew to be a child of extreme stealth and cunning, known for his rakish grin and wild tousled looks and not at all for stealing out alone at night to go swimming in the lake, or to prowl the woods, or snatch an extra pastry from the kitchen pantries, just because he could.

And then came the Turn.

God, yes. What a catastrophe.

As he was the son of the two strongest members of the tribe, no one had any doubts about his ability to survive this particular rite of passage. Even he had assumed it would happen just as it should, perhaps when he was fourteen or fifteen, as it had with Kimber, his brother.

But the Gift hadn't come to him at fourteen. It had come to him two days after his twelfth birthday, by thin gray starlight, when he was by himself in the most ghastly place of all the shire.

The rough earth of outlaws, the Field of Bones.

He'd had no business going there. Had he been caught, his parents and the Council would have reacted far more strongly than the usual confinement to rooms with bread and water. There would have been a lashing. There would have been blood, at the least.

The Field—bound from the waterfall past Blackstone Fell, to the half circle of oak and rowan woods to the west, to the bog marsh that fed small muddy streams into the River Fier—all of it was labeled profanus. Profane. To cross those boundaries without permission was considered one of the most grave offenses possible. And the Council of Darkfrith enjoyed a very long list of possible offenses.

Certainly there are few swifter ways to capture the interest of a pubescent boy than to tell him something is forbidden to him. For years Rhys had cherished the notion of the Field with the same awestruck, morbid wonder as all the rest of his friends. The elders would whisper tales of the drakon outcasts buried there, their bones scorched and scattered, no markers, no memories of them beyond what passed from lips to lips over generations. The dead strewn there no longer even had names; the remains of their lives and passions and crimes were now little more than terrible, uneven lumps beneath wild grasses. Only a very few of the living had ever even seen those lumps, and then only for the most dire of reasons.