The Time Weaver

by Shana Abe

  Adiran unsheathed his knife and began to clean his nails, alert to the night sounds of the park while he waited. There were bugs and rats scurrying about, and the three-bowled fountain nearby making its muted splish-splish-splash as the water dribbled over the edges of its basins. A pair of toads were grunting in the underbrush. There were larger sorts of rats hanging about as well, human rats, but he knew how to avoid them. They lingered in the densest of the shadows, men looking for women, men looking for other men … or boys.

  Adiran was especially skilled at avoiding those.

  It was a large enough park that most of that sort lingered at the other end, closer to the back gates, and anyway there were plenty of places to hide, so he never truly worried. Yet when he first heard the footsteps coming down the path he tensed instinctively, ready to bolt.

  But they were her footsteps. He’d trained himself to recognize her gait, more subtle than a cat’s. In fact, he’d spent a good many hours in private trying to imitate it, with moderate success. If he could learn to move as silently as the Lady did, who managed it bound up in her gorjo skirts and baubles, who knew where barefoot, unadorned Adiran might go? It was a good trick, especially for a woman. He admired all good tricks.

  Behind the cat-tread sound of the Lady came a new one, also stealthy, but far louder than hers. He shifted forward on the bench, searching the shadows. There she was, a female shape down the meander of the path—and there beyond her loomed the other shape, clearly a man.

  The Lady heard him too. She stopped, turned about. The man did not stop. He walked closer and closer.

  Adiran stood, then climbed atop the bench for a better view. He’d seen this happen before, different versions of this. He wondered sometimes if the Lady had them meet out here just so it might happen. It seemed like there were plentiful other places around town that would have worked as well as this bench, places that were convenient to the midnight vendors offering sticks of grilled fish and mugs of sangria, for instance. But the Lady preferred the park.

  The man was speaking to her. Adiran couldn’t quite make it out, but he imagined her shaking her head no, and then her murmured no.

  The man’s voice grew more insistent. When he moved his arm to grab hers Adiran did see what came next, because there was this peculiar, unexplained flash of light that showed him. That, too, had happened before. The light was tinted golden and flared very briefly, like she’d scratched a match to life but an exceptionally bright one, right up by her face, but he’d never smelled the sulfur, so he still wasn’t sure how she did it. It was another very good trick.

  In that frozen second of illumination he saw the man’s heavy face, his cravat and jacket lapels and the slope of one shoulder. The Lady had her back to Adiran. She wore a shawl with a long fringe.

  Then everything plunged black again and Adiran heard a distinctive snap, and the man screamed.

  Really screamed, high as a girl. He hit the gravel with his knees, keening and cursing, and the Lady walked away from him without another word, without any indication whatsoever of being rushed.

  “There you are,” she said to Adiran, as if he’d been hiding. “Shall we walk?”

  “Yes,” he said, and remembered to add, “my lady.”

  He jumped off the bench and stuck the knife back into the waistband of his trousers. He couldn’t help a quick, backward look at the man, just to see if he had gotten up to follow them, but he couldn’t see well enough to tell. Since the Lady strolled on in her tranquil, cat-footed way, he assumed the man was no longer a threat.

  He wondered which of his bones she’d broken.

  “Adiran,” said the Lady in her velvet voice, and he recalled himself at once.

  “There’s a man,” he said. “Staying with her.”

  “What manner of man?” she asked, not even sounding surprised.

  “Tall, dark-haired. Gray eyes.” He dared an upward glance at her. “One of you,” he said.

  She looked very deliberately back down at him. They were approaching a more open section of the park and he could see her face, because the trees had thinned and his eyes were swift to adapt to the wan city light.

  That blond beauty, remarkable and foreign, and that gaze that was brown and black both, bottomless in a way that made him feel all queer inside when he held it too long, like he was staring into a mirror composed entirely of inside-out stars. Everything reversed, and strange, because in those moments he felt that he was grown and she was not, that she was small and charmed and needed his protection.

  Then he blinked, and he was a Roma boy again, and she was the gorjo Lady.

  “What is the man’s name?” she asked.

  He’d heard it, but it was another foreign thing to him, hard on his tongue. “Zan-du.”

  “And how long has he been there?”

  “Two nights.”

  “Including tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the same room?” she inquired mildly.

  “Yes,” he answered, with some force.

  She was silent, walking. He stubbed his toe on a rock and hopped a few steps, then went back and kicked it off the path.

  “And today,” he said, catching up, “she had another bleeding, a big one. Biggest I’ve ever seen. It took a very long while to clean her up.”

  “With the man still there.”

  “He was. He wouldn’t leave her. They’ve been alone together a lot,” he emphasized, in case the Lady had misunderstood his meaning. She seemed far too unruffled by his news, wrapped in her shawl, her lips gently pursed. “If they were of my tribe, they would have been forced to wed by now.”

  “Indeed,” the Lady said, thoughtful, and slowed to a halt.

  They were within a stone’s throw of the front gates, which were always left open no matter the hour, so what was the purpose of them, anyway? The trees planted here were palms. Their fronds rustled with a breeze that never even made it to the gardens below, they grew so high.

  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 drákon 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 was hot, 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 Réz, 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 drákon, 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 Zaharen 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 drákon 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 aga
in, 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 was seven.” 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.