The Time Weaver

by Shana Abe

  He thought she might be smiling. Everything was shadowed, like a veil across his eyes, a sheen of desire and animal lust. She fisted a hand in his hair and pulled him down to her. Her kiss was a bite, and Sandu knew then that the smile had been more a baring of her teeth, a distinctly feminine dare.

  For an instant her eyes flashed cobalt in the dark, her own dragon rising.

  He didn’t wait to disrobe. He yanked at the waist of the foreign breeches they’d given him, freed himself of the wool. She took his weight again with her legs spread and he came upon her in his borrowed shirt and shoes and that unclothed part of him, rigid and searching, a rapid thrust deep into her center, and Honor accepted his dominion with a hiss in her throat.

  He pushed his tongue past her lips the way he pushed into her below. He felt the buildup like a Turn scarcely restrained, bone-deep and clawing into him. He thought he should stop or slow but the dragon had control, and the dragon wanted more of her, pressed harder into her, exalted in her silken wet heat—and yes, she was hot at last, hotter than he, in that place of their joining, and it felt so—good—she was life and good and burned him up—

  Sandu moaned, his mouth to hers, her breasts crushed against his shirt, her nipples hard as pebbles. She dug her nails into his back and lifted her legs to cross her ankles at his waist. He went even deeper then, lost all sense of air with it, but incredibly he managed to do it again, and again, shoving into her with such force the bed shook.

  “Amant,” she whispered, and arched her back again with a breathless cry. Her climax wrung through him; he dragged his lips from hers and let it consume every inch of him, and while she still shuddered and trembled beneath him he came too, an explosion of pleasure so powerful he had to turn his face away, to gasp for air or perish in this terrible, rolling dark bliss.

  Honor closed her teeth on his bared throat. Her nails never unclenched from his back.

  We sat together outside on a blanket on the roof. The rain was done and the tiles were already releasing their tiny curls of steam as they dried. The storm had cleansed everything, all the sand and dust and dirt of the town washed away, leaving only what shone fresh and new.

  I was a part of that. I was fresh and new.

  Above us burned that black well of stars I’d first ever seen with Lia. They tinseled Sandu’s hair, cast the shadows of the rooftops and spires surrounding us in edged relief.

  “I’ve been thinking …” said the prince, easing back to rest on his elbows beside me.

  “Yes?”

  “If you return with me to Zaharen Yce, we might disguise you a bit. If that’s all right with you.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Nothing elaborate. We’d have to maintain whatever it was for your entire time there, so simple is always better. I thought, perhaps, merely a different name.”

  I looked at him. Smiled.

  He sent me a sideways smile back. “How about … Réz? It’s a good girl’s name. Elegant. Strong.”

  “I like it,” I said, and leaned over to kiss him again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I’ve met someone. A man. A drákon, I mean.

  Oh?

  A prince, actually. I … he’s … he’s really quite wonderful. In fact, I love him. So much.

  Another cup, my dear?

  What? No. No, thank you. Did you hear me, Papa? I’ve found my mate. It’s Alexandru of the Zaharen. We’re engaged.

  Ah.

  I live in his castle … we have a little …

  Yes.

  … you’ll be so … pleased … she’s—

  —Lia would toss in her sleep, frowning—

  Tell us the truth, Honor. Tell me. Are you involved somehow with the sanf inimicus?

  … mmm …

  Honor! Tell me!

  —Her heart rate would increase. Behind her closed lids, her pupils would begin to dilate—

  I’m sorry. It will be swift. But it’s best if you go now.

  —Her blood would be changing, chemical changes. The magic in her, the animal, would be heating every cell. Her fingers would clench her sheets—

  No, no, I don’t want this. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t agree to this! Let go of me—he’s here! My lord! My lord, I beg you! What happened? Tell me what happened! Tell me what you did to my—

  Nothing happened, Joséphine. Before I could touch her, she Wove away. Even in her sleep, she Wove away.

  God help us.

  No, Gervase. We won’t wait for God.

  —Lia would open her eyes, gasping, and lose control—

  Her dreams had begun to twist out of shape.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so troublesome had she not been sleeping alone for so long. Zane had been gone for three months, eighteen days, eleven hours. None of the clocks in the apartments were ever wound precisely and so none would ever chime in unison; she didn’t know how many minutes to add to her tally.

  Zane had been gone too long. But it always felt like that.

  It seemed to her that she managed to muddle through her days well enough. She had a household to run, however unusual it might be. She had servants and shopping and even lent her hand in the kitchen from time to time, although this tended to silently enrage Mateo, the cook. When she’d had enough fuming, sidelong glances and burned soup with supper, she retreated back to her own domain.

  Plaster and gilt. Gemstones and silk. A missing husband, and a daughter whose growing absences were no less worrisome.

  In her darker, grimmer moments Lia would ponder the notion that she wasn’t entirely sure what she was about, what any of them were about. She’d set her little family on this path because the dreams told her she would. She’d had Zane steal Honor because the dreams revealed Honor was stolen by Zane. She’d moved them all to Barcelona because in the dreams they were in Barcelona. She’d even put her husband at risk because the dreams had him with the sanf, and those were the worst dreams of all. Thank God they were short; she’d never once had to suffer through more than a few minutes of Zane immersed in his own very dark moments, surrounded by those who plotted to eliminate her kind. Becoming one of them.

  And he was good at it. Naturally he was, the infamous Shadow of Mayfair, a man still with a bounty of over four hundred pounds on his head back in London—she checked the foreign periodicals at the circulating library, which were refreshed every other month—a man like that was going to be very, very convincingly wicked.

  A few spoken exchanges. No sight, of course, in the dreams. The words were enough.

  —like this, see? You hold the knife the other way, they’re going to have time to Turn.

  Yes, I see.

  It’s the small ones you need to worry most about. The females. Remove the head, or remove the heart. It’s a lot of blood if you—

  Whenever Lia awoke from one of these dreams, these particularly nasty glimpses into that Other World she’d sent him to, she would have to leave her bed, and sometimes her room. And sometimes the apartments entirely.

  More than once she’d discovered she’d Turned to smoke the second her eyes had opened. She’d be halfway to the moon, a wisp of almost nothing material, before she felt safe enough to Turn again.

  Up there in the sky, she was protected. Nothing was going to harm her there. The city below was a smeary fretwork of light, and no man or bullet or arrow could fly as high as she. Even the dreams couldn’t chase her if she ventured high enough; they died without the thick miasma of the earth to support them.

  At least, that’s what she wanted to believe.

  On especially bad nights she’d fly far, far over the sea. She’d imagine what it would be like if she kept going. If she just didn’t turn back. If she managed to hug the curve of the globe she might one day end up back in the Antilles, and if she landed there, he might be there too, waiting for her. He might be standing on the white sand crescent beach that had backed against their home, with coconut trees shading the roof, and the enormous turtles that swam, und
isturbed, in the warm shallows close to shore.

  Every year, sea turtles were born on the beach. They would hatch and crawl toward the water as quickly as they could, and there would be Zane, that dread wicked Shadow, guarding them from the stray dogs that wanted to come, or the gulls, his island trousers rolled up and sand sprinkling his calves and his hands out as he coaxed them forward, as if by his voice he could herd them more quickly to the safety of the waves. And then Lia would walk out in her bare feet past the deck, and all the little baby turtles would scramble faster.

  If she just kept flying, she might see that again.

  But that was not where her future lay. Not yet.

  Zane was in France. She knew that because he’d taken great pains to keep her informed of where he might be next, and what he might accomplish. They were both excited about the fact that he’d finally broken through to the upper echelon of the sanf inimicus, that he’d finally been invited to hover in the orbit of their leader.

  Their excitement had, naturally, taken different courses. Zane had delivered the news over tea, his voice an unaffected murmur, his eyes a feral gleam in the cool civility of the Blue Parlor of their palace suites, which had been done up in aquamarine and azure, and had the turquoise rug from Morocco spread at an angle across the civilized floor.

  They’d made love on that rug, back in the beach house. Too many times to count, she’d been on her back on that rug, or he on his, perspiration and kisses and slippery limbs and laughter. She’d stared at it as he told her, found the swirl in the corner that always reminded her of a rose, though it wasn’t, and kept her gaze there as he talked.

  Because when his eyes shone like that, yellow and fierce, it shook her to the core. It reminded her of all that he was and was not: human, not drákon. The entire sum of her soul, and just a man. Who, despite the force of her ferocious, monstrous love for him, was never going to have an armor of scales or the elusive trick of smoke.

  Who was in mortal danger because of her.

  Stupid, selfish Lia.

  She’d sent him straight into the mouth of the beast. And he had only sipped his tea and smiled at her when she lifted her stricken eyes to his. He’d leaned over the tea table and kissed her quickly, before she could voice any of the useless protests that were ready to come.

  She had begged him to join the sanf inimicus. And now she was begging him to get out. She’d never wanted him so close to their center.

  He wouldn’t do it. All this time invested, all this hatred, and he would no sooner leave now than he would leave Lia forever, because her cause had become his, just as everything in their married lives had done.

  He could find the leader, he told her. He could get close. And then … he could do what he’d been known to do back in the days before they’d wed. Mad King George’s hair-raising bounty wasn’t entirely without cause.

  But he’d been gone now for three months, eighteen days … twelve hours. And she didn’t like to sleep without him.

  Her dreams were twisting. New endings, shorter interludes, more often snippets than entire scenes. They were losing their cohesion as well. Or at least her understanding of their cohesion.

  Yet Darkfrith was a corpse, over and over.

  Different causes. Fire. Desertion. Ambush. Poisoned wells. They all amounted to the same deathly conclusion, including the new one she’d had tonight. The one that wrapped around her in slow creeping horror. The one that had felt so, so real.

  An old man talking, his accent thick and coarse. A girl, better bred. The smell of grass overwhelming again, of rocks and dirt. The buzzing drone of a horsefly or a wasp.

  Lia’d actually felt the heat of the sun beating down on her head as they spoke.

  Watch it, luv. You don’t never want to go in there.

  I wasn’t.

  The girl was quick, defensive. She sounded young enough to feel guilty at her trespass, old enough to be sly.

  Yeah? ’Cause it looked to me like you was just about to scale that fence. Can’t you read th’sign, girlie?

  What sign?

  That one there. The one wot says ‘Danger, Influenza’ in them big red letters. You blind?

  A silence. Then the girl spoke more slowly. Is that what happened to them? Influenza?

  Aye. Every single one of ’em, dead as a doornail. Whole village wiped out. Manor house too, buggering marquesses and earls. The man spat, very clearly. Cursed place.

  But … that was long ago. Wasn’t it? Years past.

  Aye. Years and years. Funny thing about curses. About ’ow people don’t forget.

  Surely … after all this time …

  Nah. You listen to me, now. Darkfrith’s a dead man’s land. Never a reason in the world to climb that fence, you ’ear? Not unless you got a taste for an early grave. Go on, then. Get ’ome to your mum.

  Her voice turned surly. I haven’t got a mum.

  The man spat again. Bugger you, then—just buggering go.

  Amalia gazed up into the darkness of her bedroom. She did not Turn to smoke. She stared very hard at where she knew the decorative cornice lining the upper length of the wall at the foot of her bed would be, although it was nearly impossible to see, just a suggestion of molded acorns and vines and birds highlighted by the streetlamps shining beyond the balcony doors.

  She didn’t know the old man in this dream. But the girl … the girl had sounded almost exactly as Honor had once. Fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Honor, or perhaps a little younger, although Lia had never heard a younger Honor’s voice. Only the cadence was different, the vowels a tad more drawn. It lent the girl a refined, brooding tone, one Lia remembered well from her brief stint in finishing school: The very most blue-blooded girls spoke in such a way, those gimlet-eyed, drawling girls born of coroneted dukes and princes and earls. Had Lia spent more time in human society, she herself might have spoken the same way.

  This female was not Honor. But who the devil else could it have been?

  Amalia sat up. She slipped from the bed, found her wrap and walked silently to her daughter’s chamber.

  When they’d first arrived, the rooms that were to become Honor’s had been decorated in a theme that Lia had privately named Bloody Awful Red. The walls were red, the rugs were red. The chairs and divan and bed covers, all red. The only relief came from glimpses of the waxed linden floor, and the muddy yellow accents that might have once been more goldenrod, but now resembled dried mustard.

  She’d allowed Honor to choose the new décor. She’d guided her new adolescent daughter away from the more lurid bright purple she’d seemed initially to favor, and Honor—so biddable then!—had instead decided upon walls of pale, cool lavender, with accents of apple green and seafoam and pearl, and real gilt applied along all the edging, because they could afford it. And because petite, timid Honor had held Lia’s hand and confided softly that it sang her to sleep like a harp.

  Not tonight though, apparently. Lia stood at the threshold of the doorway and knew that adult Honor wasn’t sleeping in her bed now, harp-gilt or no.

  It was the second night in a row she’d been missing. It was senseless to fret over a Time Weaver’s unexpected absences; she’d long ago learned that. Honor was here and then she wasn’t, and that was simply the nature of who she was. Who she’d turned out to be. She’d be back here again when she was here again.

  When she was sixteen, she’d vanished for an entire ten and a half months. Months. Lia had fretted then; she’d wept and worried, and even Zane had developed a habit of pacing through her bedroom twice a day, checking.

  When she’d Woven home again, she claimed she had no memory of where she’d been, or when. She seemed sincerely astonished that it was winter now instead of spring, and what had happened to summer? And why did her gowns no longer fit? Or her stockings or slippers?

  She’d never vanished for so long again, and she’d never gotten those memories of her sixteenth year back. Or so she’d said.

  Lia’d never had real cause to doubt her daug
hter’s word … but perhaps there was a sliver of the Shadow in her, after all. They’d been married long enough to grow saturated in each other’s ways, even the secret ones. She loved him for his light and his dark.

  And the dark Shadow inside Lia whispered, She’s not away right now. She’s in hiding.

  Hiding from what?

  As if it were a just-right cue in a play, a faint, thin scratching came from the direction of the front door, the sound of a single fingernail being drawn slowly down the wood, so very small and furtive Lia knew none of the servants would hear it.

  None of them were meant to. It was a sound designed specifically for Lia, for her dragon hearing.

  She worked the series of locks without needing to see them, her fingers knowing the proper twists and turns. They were oiled every month; she made sure of that. They produced only the barest of clicks.

  She cracked open the door, acknowledged the figure standing there in the unlit hall with a nod of her head, then shut it again.

  He waited for her on the park bench, just where he always did. Day or night, rain or sun, they met in the same place, on this bench, underneath this cypress tree. The path that led to the bench was gravel and not very popular; there was a greenhouse farther down the way containing koi in pools and giant tropical flowers, but it had a cobbled lane fronting it and that was the way most people took.

  It was a wooden bench, and the slats were still moist from the rain of before, but it wasn’t so bad. He was a child used to discomfort, and used to dismissing it. Up until the Girl had invited them all into her gorjo church, he had never guessed what it had been like to have a fixed roof over his head. They had wagons, his clan, and they moved about at will. But for some reason the elders had decided the discarded church would become their new center, and the boy Adiran was no longer lulled to sleep by the sway of his pallet, or the clopping of horses’ hooves, constant in his ears.

  He had a real mattress now, though, and the rain never leaked through the tiles to tap him on the head the way it would before in the wagon. Those things were pleasant.