Soul of Fire (18 page)

“My father saw me change. I don’t know how he talked the others into holding their fire, or if he did. I doubt their powersticks were charmed for weres, and if they weren’t, the shots would have felt like little more than painful slaps. Mind you, I don’t remember feeling them, but I don’t remember much of that night. I
do
remember waking up in the morning, in my room. And my father telling me I would have to clear out and stay out.”

“Oh, no,” she said. She couldn’t help it. He looked so young and so lost as he talked, she longed to do foolish things—to hold him in her arms, to console him. To do who knew what nonsense.

Her exclamation startled him and he looked up quickly, seeming suddenly older again. “He had to,” he said. “My father had to send me away. If you think about it, it was quite the only thing he could do for me. The were laws might be winked at here, but they are quite implacable in England, you know. If I had been found and in such a dangerous form, they’d have killed me. No second thought about it, and no mercy such as might be evinced toward a fox or a wolf—or smaller, less dangerous weres.” He ate a piece of fruit quickly, almost choking on it. Or at least that was an explanation for the tears in his eyes. “It was probably for the best for everyone,” he said afterward. “I doubt I’m cut out to be a country squire, and our fortune doesn’t run to being a light of society. But you asked how much of me there was in the dragon, and how much of the dragon in me. I don’t know. I left home and I traveled the world, at times living in ways I don’t care to explain to a lady. For a while I believed in anarchy, and that if I could but eliminate all European noblemen . . . Ah, but that doesn’t matter. About what you asked . . . I think that I’m me in both forms, but the form itself dictates some of the impulses and the feelings that I experience.”

A small flash of an almost genuine smile. “My human self has never looked upon a live buffalo and experienced the slightest bit of appetite. My dragon self, on the other hand, seems to regard it much as I’d regard a ripe apple. But I think, if I should own the truth, that both forms are me and that referring to them as separate is just something I do to keep myself from sensing the full strangeness of the situation. Like playing chess with yourself and pretending not to know your own thoughts when working the other side of the board. I know when necessary I can control myself about as well in both forms.”

One last bite of fruit and he got up briskly, without looking at her. “I will now change, shall I?”

By the time she finished eating and looked up, he had undressed, put away his clothes and changed. In the middle of the clearing stood the dragon, green and gold and magnificent. Yet in the dragon’s eye she read the soft vulnerability she had, for a moment, glimpsed in St. Maur’s. And as she climbed atop his back and held firmly on to the neck ruffle, she thought,
He has three forms. A dragon, a man, and a lost boy.
And she wondered why the thought made her wish to cry.

THE PRINCESS, THE MONKEY AND THE RUBY

Lalita woke and rubbed her eyes. She had fallen
asleep in one of those safe havens available to her kind when they traveled across the country. Like the hidden palace in Calcutta, this place had a magic-guarded entrance that would go unnoticed by any but monkey-weres. Lalita had sensed the place just before nightfall, and realized that Hanuman had been steering them this way all along.

She hadn’t asked. She had no intention of increasing Hanuman’s good opinion of himself. His smile was infuriating enough already. Now, as she woke, she looked around the chamber—so old that the stone appeared to have a golden cast and the floor mosaics were worn in depressions.

It was a single chamber, the back wall ornamented by a magnificent relief of the monkey god Hanuman. The columns—ornamental, not functional—in each corner were covered in carvings of monkeys climbing up. Though there were signs of burning incense and perhaps candles in the distant past, now the place was abandoned, empty and resounding in its echoing loneliness.

Lalita had set a magelight burning on high in the middle of the recessed ceiling, to which bits of gold patina clung together with a curiously vivid red paint. Now she rubbed her eyes and sat up in dismay as she realized Hanuman was nowhere in sight. Where had he gone?

He had made such a point—their both being naked after changing shapes—of sleeping in the far corner from hers, to preserve her modesty. But now she was the only one here, as she looked around, breathing in a sudden hiss of impatience. The fool. Where could he be? Their whole time together had been like this. He resisted admitting her superiority, or her right to rule over him. Her uncle must hear of the impertinence his favorite courtier so clearly displayed when away from his eyes. But right now her alarm was clearer and more immediate.

Hanuman had the ruby. Though no longer masked—that spell took too much energy to maintain—the gem was safely hidden in a pouch they’d taken from a poor family’s hut—and marked the place, too, to remember to send the family compensation for their theft. Had Hanuman headed back to town without telling her? She didn’t think he’d dare appear before her uncle, telling him he’d left the king’s niece behind to fend for herself.

So, where could Hanuman have gone? She assumed that he couldn’t be trusted. Also, she knew that he had intents different from her own, and despite his denials she suspected him of still intending to return to the city and give his king the ruby he’d recovered. The only reason he was looking for Sofie was to find out why she excited the interest of the dragons and the tigers—why the tigers thought they needed to have her as well as they ruby. But she couldn’t believe he’d leave her alone.

She heard a muttering from the doorway, and then it sprang open, letting a thin trickle of daylight into the old buried temple. A man stood in the entrance, and thinking this must be a were-monkey she didn’t know, Lalita jumped up, standing against the wall with the monkey god on it, ready to explain who she was and to command help and obedience from someone who had, by necessity, to be less wellborn than herself.

But the person at the entrance, fully dressed in turban, tunic, pants, bowed deeply to her before any introduction was made, then walked into the temple, uttering—softly—the word that closed the door behind him. Closer to her, he bowed again. Then lifted his face, to reveal Hanuman’s irreverent, self-satisfied smile. “Good morning, Princess,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

Lalita glared at him. “Where did you go? What are you doing? With whom are you in league?”

He bowed slightly at her. It was strange how his features, well sculpted and beautiful in human form, somehow gave the impression of being as mobile and impish as his simian face. “I am in league with you, Princess. Per His Majesty’s instructions.”

She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it for a moment. He was too impertinent, too self-sufficient, too hardheaded. She frowned at his smile. “Where did you go?”

“It occurred to me,” he said, and for just a moment his features acquired a pensive cast, as though he could be a thinking, responsible human, “that it is very foolish of us to try to chase down a dragon on foot. Or even”—he smiled—“on hands.”

They had spent a good part of the day before swinging from branch to branch and making very good progress—certainly much better than they could have made on foot as either humans or monkeys. But she would agree that a dragon—as it was—could move much faster than they ever could.

“Is she still . . . with the dragon, do you think?” she asked, somewhat taken off balance. She still remembered, all too well, the image of Sofie sitting astride the dragon as it climbed high in the sky. She remembered it, but she couldn’t understand it, much less accept it.

She’d been to England with Sofie. She knew the girl better than probably anyone else, her parents included. She had been Sofie’s closest thing to a friend and confidante. Their different stations in life, such as they were—and such as Sofie thought they were, which was something else again—had created some distance between them, but not nearly as much as it would have, had Sofie been different. The English girl’s naturally affectionate and sociable ways had met with the impenetrable barrier of English manners and English prejudices, and had made Sofie turn to Lalita for all her confidences and talk.

And Sofie had shared with Lalita the novels she read. Weres were a recurrent theme of the English novels. Usually as villains. At first, Lalita had thought that the stories about these weres—strange, savage creatures that attacked and tore people apart without knowing why or what drove them; who could kill their loved ones and not remember; who changed without control and without hope of stopping it—were written by people who had never heard of weres, much less met one.

But then she was not so sure. She had read legends and true stories of weres, and she knew a little more about Britain and the British. She knew, for instance, that there were no kingdoms of weres within the proper British society. As far as she could tell, in fact, British weres were so rare and so kept in terror of the laws against shape-shifters that they rarely met others of their kind, much less learned from them. Isolated, ashamed of themselves and in fear for their lives, they went through life in a very strange state, indeed. It was quite possible, Lalita thought, that they denied who and what they were even when they knew otherwise. And that as a result they ended up a little mad and unable to control either form properly.

This would explain the legends. What it didn’t explain was why someone with Sofie’s view of weres, acquired through these stories, would allow one of them to kidnap her. Or as her position on the dragon’s back indicated, would willingly go with one.

What could have possessed her? Was it some threat it was holding over her head? What threat could control the brave, impetuous Sofie Warington?

“Are we sure, then?” Lalita asked. “That she’s with him?”

He nodded to her. “It was part of the reason I went out. Since you wish to find your friend and I’m honor bound—ordered by my king—to do what you want me to, I went out and bought clothes, and have—”

“Bought clothes?” Lalita asked.

“There is a bazaar an hour’s walk away, and I got up very early.”

“But . . . with what money?”

He smiled that annoying, knowing smile of his, as though he were an adult and she a little child with no knowledge of the world. “Princess, in the walls of this temple, this refuge of our kind, there are always . . . What would you call them? Safe money repositories, for those of us who are traveling and who’ve lost our clothes and possessions to sudden changes.” He touched the wall, said a word, and at the bottom of the wall a compartment opened, where gold glimmered. “See, Princess? There is a fortune in any of these shrines. The locals will leave money, often, in jars at the entrance, or give it to one of our kind who’s staying here.”

“But . . . it’s not ours,” she said. She hated his calling her Princess, but she would be cursed if she allowed him to call her Lalita. And she hated his superior smile and self-assured manner. On the other hand, she felt as though she would long ago have died or worse without his guidance and attention. The sad thing is that she knew nothing about India; having been sent to England so young, she’d never learned the manners of her own people or how to be an adult among them. She was a princess, yes, but counted for little more than a waif who had no idea what her new life entailed. So she contented herself with shaking her head at him. “It must be a gift to the god Hanuman.”

“Sure it is. It is left here for wayfarers of our kind. To whom else would the god himself wish the money to go, but to his mortal children?” He grinned at her, and she wished she had his easy assurance. But before she could muster the words to refute him, he said, “At any rate, I took the money and got clothes, and I looked for those of our brothers who live hereabouts.”