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saying such a thing to him, anyone, he would have jeered and walked away, because there were few things more
perilous than dealing with madmen.
    “Done,” the thief said, and
pushed to his feet to shake Rue’s hand.

    “Did he suspect anything?” Kit
Langford asked his wife, watching from their bedroom window as the carriage
containing their human guest rolled away down Chasen’s drive.
    Rue was standing behind him; he
heard the shrug in her voice. “He’s Zane. He always suspects something.”
    “But he’ll go.”
    “Yes.” She walked up and brushed
her fingers to his, a soft, fleet intimacy that warmed him, just as her touch
always did. He turned to her, taking up both her hands. She was beautiful. Cool
and dark, the night to the stars, she was always so beautiful. A smile hovered
at the corners of her mouth.
    “I
dislike this scheme. Intensely,” he added when her smile only deepened.
    “I
failed to hear you devise a better one.”
    “Actually,
I did.”
    “We cannot both go,” argued his
wife, reasonable. “We cannot both vanish without word for months on end, no
matter how urgent the cause. The entire tribe would be in an uproar. The
council would have our heads.”
    “That is why—”
    “And if it were to be only one of
us, you know it should be me. I’m the one with the most experience at stealing
away.”
    “If you think for a moment I
would let you travel alone—”
    “No,” said Rue. “I didn’t think
that.”
    It was a delicate subject, one he
didn’t feel like exploring at the moment. But her eyes had grown stormy; to
distract her, he bent down and pressed his lips to her temple.
    “Imagine how lonely I’d be
without you,” he murmured. “Tottering around, a doddering old man weeping into
his shirtsleeves…”
    It earned him a laugh, low and
musical. “You’re far too vain for that. You’d use a handkerchief.”
    He folded her into his arms. They
were silent a long while, her head against his chest, rocking slowly together
as the clouds outside lapped vanilla cream against the horizon. Finally Rue
sighed.
    “It can’t be either of us. It
can’t be any of us. We can’t risk it. The lure of the song is fearsome
enough at this distance. Even the elders agreed it could be irresistible up
close. Whoever has that diamond now might understand its power. Might realize
what we are and use it against us. That’s why it must be Zane. He won’t be
susceptible to the song, and he won’t think twice about handing it over to us
once he has it. Especially since he doesn’t know what it can do.”
    “Unless
someone sees fit to tell him. What then, little mouse?”
    She
stilled a moment, then tipped back her head to see him.
    “He’s still our best hope.”
    “Aye,” agreed Kit reluctantly. “I
know it.”
    Their gazes locked. The heat
began to build, that deep, burning craving for her, for her body and her voice
and her heart.
    Rue’s lashes lowered, very
demure. He felt her fingers tighten over his arms.
    “Will you come to bed, my lord
Langford?”
    It was barely past teatime.
Neither of them cared.

    Paris was wet, a cold, gray city
with even grayer people, the scent of decaying vegetables and clay and cattle
everywhere. The sky remained leaden all the way from Avon to Strasbourg, but it
didn’t truly start to snow until he reached Stuttgart, when the raw winds tore
through the clouds to embed a layer of ice crystals upon his rented coach, and
the road, and his coat and the gloves on his hands: every inch of the world
glistening with a sly, glassy enchantment beneath the weakened sun.
    The horses struggled with the
frozen muck. Zane had been riding atop the diligence until then, squeezed into
the driver’s perch alongside the German coachman until the cold seared his
eyeballs and bit his skin to frost. He had never cared for the cramped
interiors of carriages, no matter how stylishly done up. He needed the open
sky, and open views.
    But the horses suffered. So they
traveled