The Treasure Keeper

The Treasure Keeperby Shana Abe

Prologue

 Something Dark is coiled around your heart. Something scaled and glistening, and ferociously beautiful. It has been with you all your days and nights, all your years, in all your thoughts, shaping every single movement: your hands, your lips, your respiration. It lives because you live. It lives because magic is real.

It gives you grace when Others are clumsy. It gives you strength when Others crumble apart. It gives you animal splendor, and cunning, and the means to walk the earth on two legs in open disguise. You are secret smoke and claws, a cocked ear to the music of metal and stone, fangs and luminant eyes, wings for flight. You are the zenith of creatures; you are the hunter and the reaper, and all the Otherswhether they witness your true face or notinstinctively glance away when you pass.

Their skin crawls; they don't know why. Their souls heave a shudder. It is because of you.

Yet you are not above the laws of the universe. As with every facet of life and death and even magic, there is a price for glory, and that price for you is this: the Dark Thing eats through your blood and tendons like acid. Although for the sake of your very existence you must restrain it, it demands constant release. Sometimes the physical need for Change racks you so fiercely you are lost; you cannot taste your food or wine, you cannot suck in the filthy city air, you cannot move or speak or look even the lowest urchin in the eye until you surrender and cut the Dark Thing loose.

Because you're not like the slow and dense Others who trudge through their tiny lives just beside youno, not at all.

You are a dragon.

Drakon.

* * *

Did it hurt, your first time? Of course it did. It hurts us all, even me. This is how it happens: You're minding your day, or drowsing through your night. You're young, you're strong, and the sun threads gold through your hair, and the moon celebrates the luster of your skin. You are standing or seated or incumbent, you are breathing or talking or eating. The only necessary constant in every instance is that your eyes be open, because it won't happen without your sight. So the world spins on the same as every other day, every other night, and between one contraction of your heart and the next, you are devoured.

You're vanished. Jewelry flashing and falling, your garments drifting into a heap on the floor. It's that swift.

Without your will, your human-shaped body has Turned into something else, something diaphanous. Ephemeral.

You are smoke.

And aye, it hurts. It's as if with the Turning of your flesh your very essence is scraped away raw, skin ripped from sinew, sinew torn from bones. You want to scream but you no longer have voice; no one hears. You're alone. Even if you're surrounded in that one lethal instant by those whom you love, you're alone, because their hands only slip through you. There is nothing they can do to help. You must Turn again, you must fight the agony and Turn back to what you were beforeor else you're truly gone.

Too many headstones dot our burial grounds from children who die just like that, bright lives snuffed into wisps of vapor that rise and thin and never return. No coffins to bury, no bodies beneath the sod.

But you lived, didn't you? You knew what to do, and you lived, and after that ... the pain diminished. By your third or fourth Turn, you had control, and all you felt was searing joy.

Are we not magnificent?

_{* * *}

You won't remember our origins. None of us do, except perhaps in the most fevered of clan dreams. But I know our past, a very good deal of it; certainly more than you'll hear from anyone else.

We're not from here. We are not native to this soft and mild green isle. Ages ago we were churned to life from the molten union of earth and sky, from smoking lava and diamonds and a crescent range of faraway mountains that are now called Carpathians.

It was a good place for us. The magic that whipped us into perfection had also perfected our home: thick misty woods, glacier-fed rivers roaring hard and clear, melting into streams. Mounds of pine needles and sweet resin throbbing in the trees and delicious animals that fled too slowly at our approach.

Gold sifted through the streams, swirling into pools with beckoning laughter. Veins of copper and silver fingered up, up through the bedrock, trying to reach us. Diamonds speckled the forest floors, so fat and numerous we could pluck them like summer berries for our pleasure.

Each one welcomed us. Each one begged for our touch.

So we thrived. We hunted and soared and eventually built a castle for our clan, one set upon the highest, bleakest peak, carved from pure quartzite, studded with gems. We named it Zaharen Yce. The Tears of Ice.

Imagine it a moment, sparkling in the sun like distant pillars of salt, the songs of all the stones lifting and calling and weaving lush dreams around you from dawn to dusk and back again.

Close your eyes. You can almost hear it, can't you? So can I.

Humans, as you know, perceive little beyond the most primitive of sounds. But they are spawn of the earth; they crave diamonds and rubies and precious metals nearly as much as we do, although for different reasons.

Zaharen Yce drew them to us like a flare.

Siege after siege befell our people. Arrows. Ambushes. Poison left to steep in the rotting carcasses of our once-abundant prey; drakon too starved and desperate to detect it.

We lasted as long as we could. We had much to defend, after all. Much to lose.

And yet . we did lose.

Now we live here. Now we look like them. We wear corsets and silks, powdered wigs and rapiers. We attend cotillions with rouge on our cheeks; we sip tea and port and ale and try never to breathe very deeply when surrounded by the stench of mankind.

Consummate actors, we drakon. To ensure our survival we've learned to mimick a creme de l 'humanite, and we do it with such skill and guile we deceive nearly everyone, betimes even ourselves.

But we are not humans, and nearly everyone is not everyone. Those are the Others who hunt us still.

Chapter One

Journal of Mlle. Zoe Cyprienne Lane

Presented to Me Upon the Occasion of My Thirteenth Birthday

Myers Cottage, Darkfrith York, England

May 1, 1766

No rain.

Cherry Cake with Breakfast. Spotted Scones and Cider after Supper.

From Mother:The Journal. An Embroidered Tucker.

From Uncle Anton:A Tome of Verse: Songs for Gentle Girls.

From Cerise: An Ink and colored Portrait of my favorite rooster, Maximillian. (From me to Cerise:A Polished Silver Nugget in the Shape of a Heart from the River Fier.)

From Lord Rhys Sean Valentin Langford, second son of the Alpha (!):A bouquet of Pure Whyte Roses (the marchioness's garden?). A Small Carving of Maximillian from Pine (bloodstain on the left wing? dirt?). A Woven Ring of his Hair (!!).

Roses to Mother. Hair Ring to the dust bin. I rather like the carving.

Journal June 13,1766

No rain. Quite hot.

Lessons to-day in the village from the Dreaded Council for All Drakon Children. (I do think that at Thirteen Years of Age One ought not to be called a Child, and ought to be excused from these events, but the Council Begs to Differ.) I don't know why they bother repeating the same shabby old rules year after year. We've heard them enough by now to choke on them: We must not Leave the Shire! We must not Speak of the Gifts! We must not Reveal our Secrets to the Others! We must Think Only of the Tribe!

Rhys arrived late, as ever (no one even chided him. I suppose it must be lovely to be a Lord), and insisted upon squeezing into the seat next to mine. Then he kept pretending to tip his Inkpot upon my skirts when None were Looking. Vexing. I don't care what he said afterward, I don't believe he would have stopped without my kick to his shin. I will Concede, however, that it was unfortunate the Ink spilled upon his breeches instead.

Cerise claims She Saw it All. Grew very red and said that I was a shameless flirt. I told her to find a looking glass before casting names at me. Everyone knows she's a Goose, no matter that she's the elder by three minutes.

I cannot fathom a person less Likely to be my Twin.

Perhaps she is a changeling.

Journal June 19,1766

No rain.

Full moon, couldn't sleep. Mother made me extinguish the lamps early. The smell of smoking oil simply fills my face; I can hardly breathe with it. When I opened my window the stars tried to siphon me up into the sky. Saw Uncle Anton flying, the marquess, Mr. Williams, Mr. Grady, at least five more. We are so very lovely by moonlight. I do hopeI do I DO HOPE I shall fly too someday. I know that females no longer Turn into dragons, not since the marchioness, but I could be the first. I want it so much.

I shall be pink and gold and silver. Those are my favorite colors. I shall have a mane of glorious silk.

Rhys boasted he can already Turn. Liar. Lord Rhys of the manor house surviving his first Turn? I certainly would have heard about that.

June 21, 1766

Cloudy.

With Rhys in the woods. Should not have gone there with him, but he said he would prove he could Turn. And he did.

Thirteen is young. I suppose he's a half year older than that but most in the Tribe Turn after they are sixteen at least. I have time yet before I need worry.

His eyes are very green. I wonder that I never noted it before. June 24, 1766

Still Cloudy. No rain.

Rhys says the most foolish things. My hair is like Ivory. My voice is like Dusk. My eyes are like Pitch.

Pitch. Indeed. I told him that comparing my eyes to the color of tar was uncouth. He changed it to Obsidian and Tried to Kiss me again. I did not Let him.

June 25, 1766

Wind Rising. Clouds Darkening.

He keeps trying to get me to Go Back to the Woods with him. I know it's a Terrible Notion. But I want to. He tracked me to-day to the Lending Library, which very much needs to have its windows wiped. It was murky and we

I do not know why I feel these things around him, my stomach upset and my heart pounding all queer. It's quite unpleasant, actually.

He's Graced me with a Pet name. No one's ever done such a thing before. "ZEE." As if my given name is too difficult to manage, all two syllables of it.

Zee.

His smile is so fetching. He never bothers with a hat or gloves so his skin has tanned with the sun. I did not go with him to the Woods.

Cerise more and more waspish every day. She has at least Five beaux. I can't imagine why she would begrudge my One.

June 26, 1766

Storm to the East. Not here Yet.

I had a Dream Last Night that he came to my window as a dragon, dark glimmer and gold. I dreamt the dragon was tap-tapping on the glass, like raindrops, steady and soft, but when I woke, he was not there. Only those storm clouds, and not a drop of rain.

The air feels so heavy I could tear at my hair.

Addendum

HE LOVES ME. !!!!!!

He wrote it on a slip of paper during Council Lessons. Pressed it into my hand as we were Leaving, along with a rose petal he had hidden in a pocket.

Lord Rhys Langford of Chasen Manor Loves ME, of all the maidens of the shire. Me, the daughter of the seamstress. Me, who once put a clot of mud in his tea when he wouldn't stop teasing me about besting him in Latin and Arithmetic. Me, and I'm not even Pretty. Cerise says my eyes are too strange and my lips are too big and I'll certainly never Develop as she has.

Me.

What a load of piffle. All that just to steal a kiss in the woods. It's really rather pitiful, isn't it? (I shall save the petal here, between these pages.) Addendum Addendum

Cerise found the paper. I had dropped it by accident in the Hallway after Supper, and came upon her just as she was picking it up. I could hardly disguise from Whom it Came. Master Baird says Rhys's penmanship flows like a Sultan's robes in the wind, right off the edges of the page. Most Distinctive.

She was red again, even more red than her hair. She was trembling. I stood there and felt as if a great hammer had smashed upon my head.

Ceriseis in love with Rhys. Enormously shocking!

But she is. She's weeping in her room right now. I can hear her through the wall, though she's trying to be quiet.

August 1, 1766

I've thought on it a great deal. I've thought and thought.

Cerise and I have been at odds nearly our entire Lives. She is Comely while I am not; she is well liked while I am not. She is fashionable, and droll, and buxom, while I am ... not. It's a very great Wonder that we should have shared a womb at all. But I look at the portrait of Maximillian she made for our birthday, now hung above my bed. I look at the lines very carefully drawn, and how steady her hand was with the colors. How she got every stripe in his feathers just right, and the red comb, and the cock of his head. I think about how long it must have taken her to complete it, especially since Maximillian despises Cerise and must have spent a great deal of his portrait time hiding behind the coop.

She is my Twin. When she weeps I feel it to my bones.

August 2, 1766

Cloudy. Warm.

I told Rhys to leave me be. I told him I did not love him. I gave him back his carving of Maximillian, just so he knew I was Sincere.

August 4, 1766 Cloudy. Hot.

He persists.

August 19, 1766