The Time Weaver d-5

by Shana Abe

  Adiran and the Lady stood in the shadow of one of those palms. He watched the contrast of paler gray and darker gray swaying back and forth along the path and up her dress, slipping like a shroud over her shoulders and face.

  "Thank you," she said, and he knew this was the end of their encounter. She held out a hand to him. He opened his and accepted the coins she gave him without glancing at them, without counting them or testing them, which was such a violation of all he'd been taught that it was a good thing none of his family was there to see. He'd be cuffed for certain.

  But she looked at him with those black-star eyes. And he didn't wish to insult her by counting. She smiled at him. "Go eat, Adiran. We'll meet another time."

  He swept her a bow he'd copied from this cavalier he'd followed once for a whole day, just to see where the fellow went. Then he took off running, glad to be free again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For every Gift, a sacrifice.

  It was a concept the drakon understood well, both those born of green fields and those born of the mountains. To embrace greatness required an understanding of it first; no true understanding could come without tribulation.

  So these creatures who were ever encased in songs from metals and stars and stones no matter where they journeyed, heaven or earth, had themselves no voice.

  These children of the beasts who survived the grotesque, involuntary agony of their very first Turn had peers, friends, brothers who did not.

  And these animals who speared the skies in broken rainbows of color, whose radiance was the roots of legend, whose splendor defied all mortal comprehension, were forced to walk the dirt with human faces, in human bodies, because their true selves were too awful and beautiful for humans not to fear.

  What sacrifice, then, for she who could baffle Time itself?

  Only one had this Gift.

  The physical pain was just the preface of her story. The temporary loss of her blood, of her senses, were merely the beginning of what she would forfeit.

  The soul of a dragon is a wild and untouchable thing. It shines gossamer, wholly pure no matter how sullied the body attached to it.

  But for hers.

  Hers became touched. Nipped. Small pieces and corners torn away, a little more, a little deeper, with each new Weave.

  Such a soul would shine at first regardless. Especially hers: shy and wondering, marveling at every miraculous speck composing her miraculous life. Who might even notice a few minor fissures?

  But Time itself could be a dragon, the most Fearsome Dragon of all, and it would have its way. Even one who might Weave around it must make offerings. Time would use its teeth to see to that.

  So as this one creature, with her one Gift, aged and Wove, she had no notion that she was slowly allowing herself to be devoured. All the good in her, all the shy purity, digested and gone. Fragments of her caught up in its gums, and Time licked its lips and thought, Yes, delicious.

  What soul she had left, those tattered pieces, grew sullied indeed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the early morning somberness of September 26, 1788, mere hours after Amalia Langford dreamed about empty Darkfrith and a drawling girl, hours after she met her Gypsy boy spy to learn that fate had wiggled around her determined plans and sent the prince of the Zaharen to her daughter anyway, Lia experienced one last dream.

  She'd returned home because she was weary, and she needed to mull the facts she knew. She did not go back to her bed but instead to the chaise longue in the Blue Parlor, the one with the rug that reminded her of sandy feet and fragrant sex and panting pleasure.

  She missed her husband with a severity that felt like an actual knife to her heart. It closed her hands into fists so tight she'd later discover blood from her nails cutting into her palms.

  As the predawn gray began to creep into the parlor, Lia abandoned the chaise longue, which was of stuffed satin and shockingly uncomfortable, and stretched out on that span of woven turquoise instead.

  She didn't even think she'd closed her eyes.

  The dream started high above her, floating, then plunged without warning through her like a solitary leaf caught in a waterfall. It took her down with it, took her in water and light, and Lia realized that this dream wasn't like any of her others. In this dream, she could see.

  She stood beside a lane of hard-packed dirt, with milkwort and grass trying to grow along its edges, but it washot, so hot, and the grass had all wilted and crisped brown at its ends, and the sky was a bleached bone above her.

  The sun beat down on the top of her head; she cast no shadow. The air and the grit and the dirt: Everything shimmered with heat.

  A wasp buzzed past her. She turned around and there was the fence overgrown with dog rose, and dusty hedges poking through, and there was the gate, and there was the sign on the gate that read in very big, bold letters: DANGER, INFLUENZA. Only the A in DANGER was obscured, because there was a man's hand pressed flat over it, and that hand belonged to Zane.

  He was wearing an outfit she didn't know, formal court clothing, a skirted coat and buckled breeches, truly splendid. One of his many disguises, she assumed; certainly they never ventured anywhere together that required such finery.

  In the harsh light of the day he sparkled so radiant with silver and pale yellow she had to narrow her eyes to take him in.

  "I had to," he said to her, glancing back at her, very calm. "Do you understand?"

  Lia wanted to answer him but found she could not. She had no voice.

  "I had to," he repeated, as if she argued. "She forced me."

  He took his hand from the sign and left behind a bloody red handprint, a stain of a shape that actually did resemble a capital A, and he held out that dripping red palm to her.

  "It was them or you, snapdragon. That's not a choice. She didn't leave me a choice."

  Who? she tried to cry, but still made no sound. Terror had begun to climb acidic into her throat.

  "She's not Honor any longer, you know. She hasn't been for years. Her name is Rez, and we should have let them have her as a girl, but we didn't, and they're all dead now."

  He was a courtier who came toward her with that bloody hand, blinding silver and light, that calm, reasonable tone.

  "For you, beloved," said her husband, his red fingers reaching for hers. "I killed them all for you." Then she screamed.

  Chapter Twenty

  I thought I should return to the apartments to say farewell to Lia. It wasn't as if I never meant to see her again, ever, but there was no question that I would be leaving, and I honestly wasn't certain how she would react to that. For two females whose Gifts shoved us both willy-nilly ahead in time—as differing as those Gifts might have been—we seldom discussed my future. I'd been living with her and Zane for over seven years as their daughter. It was a convenient fiction for us, I suppose, but our story was beginning to show its age.

  My age.

  Most young women of twenty-one, human or drakon, would have wed by now and even borne children. At the very least, they would have been courted. There would have been balls or assembly hall dances to attend, teas and posies and flattering comments about the color of their eyes. Back in Darkfrith it seemed there had been a wedding capping every week between spring and autumn. More often than not, the grand ballroom at Chasen Manor hosted the receptions deep into the night. I'd been to some as a girl, and those I did not attend I could still hear, the music and laughter and champagne toasts wafting over the treetops of Blackstone Woods, right in through my bedroom window.

  Those things were never going to happen for me. I had known that the instant I'd finished reading my very first letter to myself.

  But I was going to have something. A December wedding, I guessed, which sounded passable. Better than a wedding, I would have a companion. A prince. And even though I'd told myself about it years earlier, my Weaves and my Natural Time had at long last caught up with each other, so now it had the weight of reality. The prince of the Zahar
en had found me, had courted me, and if our courting had involved no tea or posies, my heart was stolen just the same ... whether I liked it or not.

  My suitor was a drakon who perceived me without flattery, who'd called me stupid and stubborn—perhaps not entirely without cause—and who liked me anyway. An Alpha who would ask me to marry him every single day for over a year. A dragon who'd fished me from a river and from the sky, and kissed me like he was starved for me, like I'd never tire him or bore him or aggravate him enough for him to step back and say, No, wait, I was wrong. Who was ready to claim me despite the consequences, because at last he realized that I belonged to him, even though I had known it since I was a child.

  After all these years, I was no longer going to be alone.

  So yes, I was leaving Barcelona and Lia. And Zane too, wherever he was. It wouldn't be without a measure of sorrow, but I was going.

  I would be riding a dragon home.

  Sandu had desired to come with me to the apartments, but I'd convinced him I was better off going alone. He had to go steal back his own belongings anyway, which he'd left in the belfry at the king's residence. We could meet up again at my Casa de Cors Secrets, whose secret hearts were about to lack one from their sum.

  "Anyway, you said you were eager to get back," I reminded him, drawing a finger lightly down the intriguing bumps of his rib cage. "That every hour away from the castle mattered."

  We were both in my bed, both disrobed this time, with the sheets drawn up over our heads. I smiled at him beneath them, a fellow conspirator tangled up in his limbs.

  He trapped my hand, held it to his chest. "Yes. But suppose something happens? It's better if we stay together."

  "What might happen? I'll get struck by a carriage while walking there? Horses run the other way from me. It's only Lia. She's gentle as a sparrow, I promise."

  "Yes," he said again, and nothing more.

  "Oh, no," I groaned, and buried my head against his shoulder. "Not you as well." "Pardon?"

  "I should charge a shilling every time I have to see that expression," I grumbled. "That dreamy, happy, ridiculous look men get woolgathering over her. I'll call it 'Lady Lia's Lovers' Lost Look.' You know her, don't you?"

  "No," he said, turning his face away from me, gazing up at the sheet. "Not really. I met her briefly, back when I was first brought up to the castle. She and her husband were there. It's how we first discovered each other, the different tribes. Amalia and Zane found us in the mountains."

  "She's very beautiful," I said.

  "She was."

  "Hmm."

  His lips pressed into a smile. "Honor. I wasseven ." He rolled over to face me again, twisting the covers, yanking them down so that both our heads were exposed. "Perhaps she was beautiful, but you ." he leaned down, placed a feathery kiss upon the corner of my mouth, "... as it happens, are mine."

  "That makes me the most beautiful," I insisted against his lips, unmoved.

  "Of course."

  It was a while yet before we left the bed.

  In the end, Sandu had agreed to let me go back to the palace apartments alone. I think he sensed that there was more to my refusal than I was admitting, and was chivalrous enough to let things be. We parted ways at the door of the cathedral. After he bowed to me and walked off I lingered against the wall, my back to the limestone, watching him merge with the Others on the sidewalk and down the street, sending a flock of pigeons drowsing on a roof across the way into an explosion of flight. I watched for a good long while, until he turned a corner and I couldn't see him any longer.

  The truth was, I didn't want him with me because I didn't know what Lia might say to him. If she might manage to convince him not to take me. She'd always been so determined to keep us here in Spain. She was beautiful, and damned clever; I dreaded the thought she'd be able to cite some ominous Future Dream and change Alexandru's mind.

  But it turned out that Amalia wasn't at home. Nemesio answered the door for me—in my jittering state of excitement and dread, I'd forgotten my key—and grunted the news that the lady had left a half hour past after checking the morning mail, and had yet to return. No, he didn't know where. Yes, there was breakfast, but only if I hurried, because it'd been set out some time ago and the girl was about to take it back to the kitchen. If I'd wanted it warm, I should have been here for it when it was warm.

  As his hulk of a figure clumped away from me down the corridor I realized there were some things about this life I would not miss.

  And yet .

  I'd spent so long here. I'd grown up here, in these rooms. And it had been nice. Mostly nice.

  My bedroom was a chamber fixed in time, arranged and decorated according to the tastes of a fourteen-year-old maiden. I liked it still, it was true. The colors were restful, the gilt sang to me as prettily as it ever had.

  But I was older than lavender walls and flowered curtains. I was old enough now to appreciate a plain square room with beveled windows, and precious gemstones glinting around a fireplace. A canopied bed with fur coverings, large enough for two.

  I stood motionless for a moment at my doorway and simply took it all in.

  I'll never have to sleep here again. I'll never have to stay trapped in here, afraid of my Weaves, ever again.

  I found my valise and packed swiftly. It wasn't very large, and I could fit only three gowns into it, but I knew I'd have to hug it to me the entire time I was atop Sandu's back, plus his own satchel. Possibly he could carry them both in his talons or teeth, but I imagined that would be cumbersome. He'd already have a person sitting astride him for days. I'd hold the luggage if I could.

  When I'd crammed everything in that I could and still get it closed, I went to my writing desk, pulled back my chair. I had a stack of paper and a penwork box I kept in a drawer, and to my great surprise the ink inside it was still wet.

  I dipped the quill, brushed the tip of the feather under my chin, thinking, and then began to write.

  Dearest Lia,

  Thank you for my life. I know if Kindness and Grace dwell within me at all, they sprang from you. You have been a truly Excellent Mother. I pray you'll be pleased to know that it is through you I've found I can Love.

  His name is Alexandru, and he is the Alpha of the Zaharen. You know him, and you know the castle. I hope you come to visit us there. I hope you find a mate who

  I hope you can be happy.

  Your daughter,

  —H.

  It seemed acceptable. I wondered suddenly what Sandu would Read in it were he here, and was doubly glad he wasn't.

  In our years ahead I was going to have to be very careful about my writing, I supposed. It was an unnerving thought, to realize that someone might know more of me thanI did, just from a few scribbled words, even if that someone was my mate.

  I sanded the note, folded it, and stood up to slip it under her door, or perhaps her pillow. But as I stood my hand brushed the stack of virgin paper before me; the sheets skidded sideways across the surface of the desk and ruffled down to the floor.

  "Blast."

  I bent to scoop them back up, careless. But as I bent down, I noticed one of the sheets wasn't virgin. It had writing on it. My handwriting.

  I pulled it free of the rest and stared at it. A beam of sunlight falling across my hands made the letters appear bluish purple.

  R.,

  You are with child. Don't wait for Lia. Just go.

  —R.

  All the pages fell free of my numbed fingers, a soft papery rustle that blanketed the rug and the hem of my skirts, and in that brilliant splash of light, they shone like fresh fallen snow.

  I decided not to tell him.

  Perchance it wasn't true. Perchance it was true when I wrote it then , in the future, but it wasn't now; I was in a different ripple of time now. It seemed too enormous to comprehend. I felt no different than I had yesterday, or the day before, except for that nervous, thrilling energy that zinged through my limbs, and the more sensual awareness that I
had been with a man, and so I actually wasn't the same.

  Perchance it wasn't true.

  But the dragon in my heart knew that it was.

  Things had changed for us. That's what Future Sandu had told me. Things had changed, and Future Honor—Rez—thought our English parents would have cause to celebrate it, enough so that she would risk her life returning to the shire.

  Gervase and Josephine might celebrate a grandchild.

  A flutter of panic began to bloom within me. It was too soon, I told myself. Too soon for this.

  I hadn't wanted a mate, but I had one. I hadn't dreamed of drowning in love, but it appeared I was going to anyway.

  But this. A baby, on top of everything else ...

  A strange laugh forced its way past my lips. I wasn't even certain whose child it would be, the prince who'd deflowered me or the one I was about to run away with. Did it even matter?

  I crumpled the paper in my fist. I looked around, found a lamp that had been left burning, removed the glass and held the edge of the note over the flame until it caught.

  The last smoking bits singed my fingers; I shook them clear. The ash fell pale and feathery, dusting the table beneath in flakes.

  A voice called from beyond my closed door; it was the maid. "Senyoreta?" "Yes."

  "Did you wish for a breakfast tray?"

  I looked up. "Are there crumpets?"

  A pause. "I'm sorry—are there what?"

  "Never mind," I said, without turning around. "No breakfast today. I'm going out."

  "Yes, senyoreta."

  Before I left the room, I swiped my hand through the air above the ashes, and scattered the flakes to the floor.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Along the white-cliffed coast of southern France, not too distant from the city of Marseilles, was a series of caves that had once sheltered dragons, and then humans, and then eventually no one at all, because as the aeons had passed their entrances became submerged beneath the enameled blue Mediterranean. Accessing these caves now required the ability to swim to great depths, and to discern which sort of darkness between the limestone stalactite teeth might eventually lead to a space with a bubble of ancient air trapped inside it, and which might just lead to more water.