Prince of Time

by Tara Janzen

  Not that Avallyn needed such prohibitions. One look at him in Racht had sunk him lower than beast fodder in her opinion. He couldn’t possibly be the Prince of Time. In all the history of the world no priestess had been bound below her rank, and certainly not to a tech-trash denizen of the Old Dominion. Nor would they be, ever. So Palinor had vowed, and Avallyn had heartily concurred. There must have been a mistake, and the priestesses would find it. Until then, the drunken time-rider was as close as they’d come, and he was to be taken north, to Claerwen. That was her job, and by the gods she would see it done.

  His curse had been only an expression of dissatisfaction, but it made her even more uncomfortably aware of him and the length of their bodies pressed together. She’d never been crushed up so close to anyone in her life, let alone a man who smelled like a Carillion wine vat.

  Her nose twitched, and she was tempted to try to deep-scent him, but caution and common sense overruled. Deep-scenting through so many layers of off-world wine was nigh impossible.

  No, she would wait until he was sober and they were in a safer place before she searched his mind.

  “Did the Lyran hurt you?” she asked. It was possible he had broken a rib, if not suffered worse injuries from his grappling with the beast, not that every square inch of him didn’t feel perfectly hale and hearty. She could actually feel his muscles contract and extend with every move he made. She could feel him breathing, his chest rising and falling against hers. Both were extraordinary and novel sensations.

  He gave a negative shake of his head, and a silken swath of midnight black hair slipped over his shoulder and brushed her cheek, so soft and fragrant, she instinctively turned her face into it. Lavender. The Carillions put lavender in their wine, and tangerines. The fresh citrus smell mingled with the flowery redolence and wrapped around the dark strands of his hair, utterly delicious, luring her closer with pleasant memories. She nearly nuzzled him before the scent faded and she caught herself. She pulled back, mortified at her reaction.

  It had been a week since she’d washed her face with the lavender-scented towels at the White Palace, but the fleeting memory had been startlingly clear in her mind—the heat of the desert suffusing her bones, the shade of the Lost Forest cooling her skin, Au Cade’s orange gown, her mother’s serene smile, and the warm towels offered by a child.

  Shadana. The wine was everything she’d heard and then some. If the scent alone could make her mother’s smile seem as close as this morn, what did the time-rider feel after a full night of drinking? What did he see and feel? Where, of all the places in his past, did the wine take him?

  Somewhere violent, she thought, remembering how he’d drawn his sword in Racht and slashed through the table, scattering people in every direction. The poor wretch, to long for wine that gave him naught but access to his nightmares.

  She shrugged off her moment of pity. He had made his own choices, most of them bad by her standards. Having Van’s skraelpacks and the Third Guard after him made her job a lot more difficult, but she was a Priestess of the Bones and would prevail. If he wasn’t hurt, they didn’t have time to waste hanging on the wall.

  “I estimate a seven-meter drop to the floor,” she said in a clipped, impersonal tone, ignoring the fact that they were practically laminated to each other. “We can be down in two minutes and still hold our lead.”

  Having summed up the situation, she started to slide out from under him, but he shifted his weight, stopping her.

  ‘Don’t move,” he murmured, and she thought she detected an unusual accent in his voice.

  Nonetheless, her brows rose. The wine hadn’t gone so far to her head that she was ready to concede her authority. She was in charge, despite his success with the zip line.

  “You’re wearing my tracking bracelet, time-rider,” she reminded him. “That means I give the—”

  “Shhh.” He cut her off with the soft sound, moving his mouth closer to her ear. A fresh wave of lavender and tangerines washed over her, flooding her senses and sounding warnings in her brain.

  Mother. What in the galaxy did the Carillions put in the stuff? The off-world wine was outlawed in two solar systems, and now she knew why. The potion rivaled any of Tamisk’s for danger to a sane mind.

  “You’re not the squeamish type, are you?” he went on, breaking into the muddle of her thoughts.

  The question was little more than the feel of his jaw moving against her cheek, the warmth of his breath on her skin, but she heard him and the surprising lilt that ran through his words. The thief did have an accent, a most unexpected one. He spoke with the cadence of an ancient tongue heard nowhere on Earth beyond the walls of the White Palace—Ilmarryn. One of the more rustic, dialectical voices, to be sure, but elfin all the same.

  “No,” she assured him, disconcerted by the wine, the question, and his accent, and even more impatient to be away before something dreadful happened. The Third Guard could come down the canal at any moment, skraelings in tow. The storm could break above them, sending a few hundred thousand megawatts of energy streaking down into the canal to fry them. Or, nearly worst of all, she could give in to temptation and turn her face into the curve of his neck.

  “No,” she said more strongly, forcing her attention off his hair and skin and the marvelous smells swirling around him. “I am not the squeamish type.”

  “Good. Then we’ll just stay put until they pass.”

  Alerted, she softened her voice to match his. “Until who passes?”

  The answer slid into view before he could reply, their serpentine forms winding a sinuous path through the rusted pipes and shredded cables connected to the wall above her right shoulder. Sewer snakes—hundreds of them—roused from their den by the crash, poisoned skin glowing with a toxic phosphorescence, razor-sharp scales fanning out along the finger-width length of their long, undulating spines.

  She shrank back, an involuntary gasp escaping her.

  The snake closest to her slowed and lifted its needle-nosed head in her direction. Eyes like red-rimmed seed beads held hers with a hot, steady stare as its tongue flicked out to smell the source of the sound.

  “Shh, geneth. Easy now,” the thief murmured.

  She hazarded a glance to her left, where he had been looking, and saw hundreds more of the snakes flowing down the wall, enough to make anyone swear—or pray.

  Sweet Mother. A shudder coursed through her body. The slightest touch of a sewer snake was enough to paralyze a limb and rot the flesh from the bone. The bite of the reptile ensured a torturous death—and a full score of them were mere inches from her arm. Her instinct was to throw herself off the wall and take her chances with landing on the floor of the canal, anything to get away from them, but the thief held her firmly to their perch.

  “You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?” he asked with a calmness she scarce could conceive.

  She shook her head, too frightened to speak.

  “Ah, then it must be me you find so alarming,” he said, turning toward her with a slight movement of his head. She instinctively lifted her gaze—and her breath slid to a slow, stunned stop.

  Shadana.

  Up close, the thief was far more alarming than he had appeared in Racht. His eyes glittered beneath thick, black lashes, the irises a strange indigo color, a richly saturated blue of startling darkness and clarity. Layers of jet black hair swept back off his face in a silken fall past his shoulders, with the time-rider streak stair-stepping the whole length in blocks of purest white. A day’s growth of beard shadowed the lean curve of his jaw. In truth, he looked an utter reprobate. He was unkempt, dangerously feral, and possibly the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

  “What’s your name, geneth?” he asked, his gaze holding hers with a directness she found unnerving.

  “Avallyn,” she managed to reply, wondering if the wine was coming over her again. She suddenly felt flushed everywhere they touched.

  He cast a quick glance at the sewer snakes and returned his attenti
on to her.

  “Avallyn,” he repeated, a faint smile teasing the corner of his mouth. “Is that all?”

  “Avallyn Le Severn,” she filled in, knowing for certain that Dray had made an error. The dark angel she faced could not possibly be the savior promised by the Red Book of Doom.

  “Well, you’ve had a good night’s work, Avallyn Le Severn,” he said. “How much bounty are you getting for me?”

  “Nothing.” Of course he would think the worst. She hadn’t had time to explain.

  His smile broadened, revealing a flash of white teeth. One winged eyebrow lifted in amusement. “Keeping me for yourself, then? I’ll try not to disappoint, but I’ve had a bit of wine, and I’m never at my best in my cups.”

  Her cheeks flamed at his insinuation. In the Old Dominion, only bounty hunters and the flesh peddlers of Pan-shei used tracking bracelets, or brothel bracelets as they were sometimes called. “You’re drunk.”

  “Aye, but not nearly drunk enough, geneth,” he told her, then turned his attention back to the snakes, leaving her to stare at him in confused dismay.

  They had made a mistake, a terrible mistake, she and Dray. The thief did have the time-rider blaze in his hair, but though rare, there were others who could claim the same deed, and one of them might turn out to be the true prince.

  But not this man.

  His crudeness aside, he could not possibly be the one for whom she had waited.

  The Prince of Time was scarred by the battles he had fought. So it had been written. Duty alone charted his course, not drunkenness. Nowhere had it been said that he would speak with the voice of a Kings Wood elf and possess the face of an Orion slave boy.

  The thief turned to her again, and a single truth hit home with a vengeance. Despite the artistry of his features, Morgan ab Kynan was no boy. Beneath his sable brows, his eyes gleamed with the unholy radiance of the wine and a shrewd intelligence that she felt taking her measure clear through to her bones.

  “Forty thousand marks,” he said clearly. “That’s the bounty the Warmonger has put on my head.”

  “I’m not after you for the bounty, or... or—”

  “Sex?” he filled in, his smile turning languid. “The only people who use tracking bracelets are pimps and bounty hunters. Which do you claim to be?”

  “Neither,” she said.

  His smile called her a liar.

  She called herself a fool. Once she’d seen the sort he was, she should have left him for the Lyran. Instead, she’d bound him to her with the bracelets.

  And she was twice a fool for the way his smile made her pulse race. He was supposed to have been her doughty consort, or Tamisk’s dismissible sot, not a recalcitrant, unpredictable tech-trash hybrid she had no prayer of controlling.

  She dared his gaze again and immediately felt the heat of another blush steal up her cheeks. She’d chained herself to a thief, a dangerous renegade, and until she reached Claerwen and had the bracelets removed, she couldn’t get more than thirty feet away from him.

  She hoped it would be enough.

  Morgan stared at his captor, utterly beguiled. If a more innocent sight than her blush existed in all the Old Dominion, he had not seen it. Despite his resolve to be done with her as quickly as possible, he was intrigued—and more than a little chagrined. He’d been captured by a child, or someone who was very nearly so, despite the soft, decidedly feminine curves pressed up against his body.

  Had he grown so unwary?

  Upon closer inspection, the girl’s resemblance to Llynya was not so perfect as he’d thought. ’Twas there, true, in the shape of her face, the slant of her cheekbones, and the curve of her mouth, but more than just her hair and the color of her eyes was awry. It had taken a rage-filled boar to unnerve the sprite, whereas his bounty hunter had faced down the Lyran with more courage than she was able to muster in facing him. Whatever defiance had been behind the icy look she’d given him in the square, it had been lost. Getting the tracking bracelet lock sequence out of her would be as naught, unless they were both poisoned by sewer snakes.

  He gave the reptiles another glance, but only a glance. To look at them too closely made his skin crawl. The scaly buggers were practically radioactive with toxic waste. He’d once seen a man who’d stumbled into a clew of sewer snakes and lived out a sennight, his skin rotting and draping off his body, his internal organs consigned to the fires of hell.

  Aja had been right. They should have left Racht hours ago, before the night had deteriorated into a series of catastrophes and too-close calls, and bounty hunters barely come into their own. ’Twas the wine that had stayed him, and the hope of another hour in the past, though why he would wish for another hour of his own private nightmare was a question he preferred to ignore.

  He looked at his captor again, taking note of the soft color still staining her cheeks and the wariness clouding her silvery gray eyes. His gaze drifted to her mouth, and he felt a stirring of desire. Aye, she had lips he would dearly love to taste, but she was far too dangerous for him to indulge himself in fantasy. No bounty hunter, however lovely, was to be trusted. Not with forty thousand marks on the line.

  A snake hissed close by, and her eyes widened in fear. A distraction was in order. The last thing he needed was for her to make any sudden moves.

  He lifted his tracking bracelet to where she could see it. “What are they made of, geneth?”

  Her gaze slowly came back to his. “Thullein,” she answered.

  He’d never heard of it.

  “And is it the thullein that makes them glow?” All the colors of the rainbow flashed and flickered from the lightbars on the bracelets, but it was the strange luminescence of the metal that intrigued him.

  “The changing nature of the metal causes it to give light once it has been conjured into a shape,” she said as if by rote.

  A frisson of unease coursed down Morgan’s spine. No tech-trash bounty hunter worth her weight in blastpaks would have talked about a metal’s changing nature or a conjured transformation. Metal was forged, tempered, ionized, magnetized, and subjected to at least a dozen other processes that Aja knew by heart and could perform when necessary. It was not conjured. Nothing was conjured except in the hearts and minds of the followers of any of the hundreds of religions the future had to offer. As far as Morgan had been able to piece recent history together, religion had been the most pervasive fallout of the wars that had nearly destroyed Earth. Zealotry abounded, except in the Old Dominion, the last bastion of science and technology, even if those disciplines had been reduced to rusty shadows of their former glory. The wars had turned people from the failure of science to the mystery of God, or gods, or demons. Anything went in the mystical marketplace.

  Which brought him back to his current situation. Worse even than a bounty hunter, he’d been captured by a religious fanatic. He bit back an oath and with effort put more warmth in his smile, hoping to ease her fear and thereby draw her out.

  “Is the nature of the lock sequence in the metal then, or is it in the lightbars?”

  “There is no nature for that which is not,” she told him, “unless it be in the hands of a mage.”

  His smile faded.

  “Are you telling me there isn’t a lock sequence for this damn thing?” He lifted his wrist.

  “Are you a mage?” she asked with what looked, unbelievably, like a measure of hope in her eyes.

  “No,” he said, feeling his bloody headache tighten another notch.

  “Then there is nothing. Nothing.” She shook her head, sending her odd concoction of twists and braids moving about her face. The action revealed another startling fact about her, one he thought at first was an illusion, but which closer notice bore out.

  Her ears were pointed—which made her a religious fanatic of unknown origin. Aja’s ears had a bit more angle to them on top than pure curve, but the girl’s ears were out-and-out pointed, delicately, like everything else about her. He tried to think if he’d ever seen the like, and if so
, where. Except for a few unavoidable off-world trips, he had kept pretty much to Earth and the Lunar settlements, but neither here nor out in the galaxy had he seen pointed ears on anyone who looked otherwise as purely human as she did.

  His unease was increasing exponentially with every new fact. If she’d planned on turning him in to the Third Guard for the bounty, she could have done it in Racht and saved herself a whole lot of trouble. She obviously had someone else in mind, and Morgan was definitely not interested in finding out who. He didn’t for a minute believe she wasn’t intending to sell him to somebody. Nobody passed up forty thousand marks. Christe. He hated to think who else might want his hide tacked to their wall.

  “Then how do we release them?” he asked through his teeth.

  “We don’t,” she said, lifting her chin and sounding admirably stoic about the situation.

  Morgan stared at her for a moment, then squeezed his eyes shut and began swearing in three languages he hoped she understood and at least two she probably didn’t. A child, to be sure—to have locked herself to him with no way to get out.

  What had she done? Forgotten to memorize the damn sequence? Or had she simply failed from the beginning to understand the nature of the equipment?

  Friggin’ nature, bah. He had to tighten his hold on the cables to keep from shaking her.

  “Milord? Are you there, milord?” Aja’s voice came over the tech-jaw.

  “Aye,” he barked, opening his eyes.

  “York and I are four points east of the first intersection.” There was a short pause, then, “Where are you?”

  “On the canal wall, chained to a bounty hunter and surrounded by sewer snakes.”

  Aja seemed to consider his situation for a moment before asking, “Do you need any help?”

  “No,” he snapped. What he needed was a lock sequence, and by God he was going to get one. Nobody made tracking bracelets without a lock sequence.

  “Who—”

  “Avallyn Le Severn,” he interrupted Aja’s question. “Ever hear of her?”