She stumbled from the bed, dragged on trous and tunic, shoes, ran downstairs from the Family wing and through the house toward the laboratory, and as she ran she heard her mother screaming in her brain, felt the horrible emptiness of the link to her father. He barely lived.
As she came closer and closer to the lab, heat mounted. She stopped in horror to see flames devouring the last of the portraitsalong the corridor from the laboratory to the main building.They jumped into her mother’s salon. The way to the laboratory was blocked.
“Call the FireMages!” she screamed to her mother, mind and heart and soul.
She dared not ’port to the laboratory. No way of knowing what shape it was in. So she ’ported to just outside the front door of the main Residence. Her heart clutched in her chest. Her throat closed.
The laboratory was a ruin. It appeared as if there’d been an explosion. She ran to the tumbled walls of the lab, depending on the link to her father to tell her where he was. His life force was thready. The heat burned the soles of her summer workshoes, and she sent precious energy to shield them and keep them cool, was glad she didn’t wear sandals. She didn’t recognize anything of the lab. If it wasn’t for the main Residence, she wouldn’t have known even the alignment. Stopping over a place that felt more of her father than anything else, she probed. He was under there! Buried. She didn’t have the strength or the Flair to move the rubble atop him.
Desperate, she did something she’d never attempted. She drew the Time Wind around her, rich in this place of centuries of experimentation, and moved backward into the grayness of the past.
She was in the middle of the lab. Huge deadly shadows moved like threatening enemies. Her father was on his hands and knees. Dufleur couldn’t understand it. The lab was still whole. Then her father staggered to his feet. Took a pace toward the outer door.
BOOM! The room rocked. Dufleur staggered, grabbed her father. Held his solid, living body tight. But when she stepped back into the future, her father vanished from her arms, and a cry tore from her soul. After her eyes cleared she found her experimenthadn’t worked. Her father was not alive and well. The paradox of time was something even Thymes didn’t understand. But her experiment hadn’t been a complete failure. Her father was no longer buried but burned and broken at her feet. His head showed an ugly, bloody dent.
“Father,” she screamed and knew her screams were lost in her mother’s, in the shouting of the FireMages as they battled the fire that devoured the Residence, in the Residence’s screams itself. No! Dufleur knelt, put her arms around her father, teleportedto Primary HealingHall.
Where they tore her father from her arms.
She struggled and found herself battling Saille Willow. Her breath came in panting gasps.
“Dufleur,” he said, and when she looked at him, his expressionof concern, the comfort of their link seemed so precious that she couldn’t face it. He was so whole. She was so fractured.
Saille let her pull from his arms. They were weaker than he cared. The nightmare—the memory—had been so terrible.
She left the bed, gave him a sad smile, turned away to dress. “It could have been worse. It could have been a nightmare about the dark cult.” Her gaze lifted to his. “If you stay with me, you’ll get to experience that, too. Unquestionably.” Her beautiful mouth turned down.
He was more shaken than he wanted to admit, even through their link. The horror she’d gone through that night, pulling her father from the flames, ’porting him to Primary HealingHall, then returning to her hysterical mother and watching their home burn down.
“I thought your father died in the explosion.”
“He didn’t. He lingered three days. Burned over most of his body. Brain damage.”
“Shouldn’t your night ills be less? I thought you went to a Mind Healer.”
Another of those smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I did, D’Sea herself. I am better. But the Mind Healer’s best tool is distancingFlair—as if a great deal of time has passed. That doesn’t work well on me.”
“Because you experiment with time.”
“Yes.” She didn’t look at him and drew on her coat.
“What are you doing?”
She grimaced. “The best way to settle myself . . . Actually, the only way I’ve found to settle myself is to go to the Thyme Residence.” A shudder passed through her. “I’ve never been able to sense the HouseHeart, but I can’t give up.” She straightened.“I can’t give up on many things—finding the HouseHeart, experimenting with time, which is illegal here in Druida, clearingmy father’s name as a madman, trying to have my mother love me.” Shaking her head, she met his gaze with hers in the briefest of slanting glances. “I am not a good candidate for a HeartMate.”
“You’re mine,” he said roughly.
But she opened the empty chamber that had been her secret laboratory and walked to the center. She looked at him with holloweyes. “I don’t expect you to come.”
It was like a body blow. Before he could find his breath, she’d teleported away. He couldn’t find his clothes.
“Lights!” he commanded, pounced on his clothes, and dressed in both the elegant suit he’d worn to her opening and his outer gear.
He didn’t know the location of the old Thyme Residence well enough to teleport to it. He swept the fearful knowledge that Dufleur continued her father’s work to the back of his mind so it wouldn’t petrify him.
Dufleur had said this had happened before. Probably many times. There’d be another who had accompanied her.
Fairyfoot! he shouted mentally, followed his link with her to find her sleeping on a mossy bed in the warm humidity of the conservatory. Prepare to be ’ported.
An instant later she was hissing in his arms. Claws set in his forearms, and he ignored the small pangs.
“Dufleur has had an awful nightmare about the loss of her father and the Residence. She’s gone to D’Thyme Residence.”
Fairyfoot’s hissing subsided. Her face wrinkled in a cat-frown.Nothing there but ruin.
“Nevertheless, I want you to give me a good image and coordinatesso I can teleport us.”
Shivering, Fairyfoot said, It will be very cold.
“Yes, but I don’t want her there alone.”
Weathershield, Fairyfoot demanded.
“That is not one of my skills.”
She spat. The nice scarf with warmth spells, then.
He dragged the scarf from around his neck. “A belated New Year’s gift from me to you.”
Purring, she snuggled in. Good FamMan.
The fine knit would not withstand her claws, and the scarf would be wrecked for his own use. “An image, if you please.”
It formed in his head. A mid-sized estate on the south edge of Noble Country, snow covering the dips and protuberances of ruined walls. He took the image, tested it with his Flair. “Very good.”
I ’port very well. Not like some Cats.
Was that a slur on his own Fam? He hadn’t explored Myx’s talents. “We will teleport on three . . . one FamCat—”
Just ’port.
So he did.
It was late, but the weather was clear—and bitterly cold. On the far edges of Noble Country, the ruins of T’Thyme Residenceshowed as broken columns and piles of brick and stone in the dark. As broken as her heart at the sight of her lost home. She’d lost two people she’d loved that horrible night. Her father and the Residence.
Her hands fisted. Despite what the rest of the nobles thought, her father would never have put the Residence or the rest of them in danger if he’d suspected his experiments threatenedthem. Never. He always did his trickiest work in a cabin in the Hard Rock Mountains—a place they’d had to sell after he died. A place that had had four owners and was currently vacant,called Time Passes. Dufleur suspected that the time currentsaround their cabin, which had been used by Thymes for centuries and rebuilt every generation, had warped. No doubt it would take her or her descendants, should she have any gifted in grea
t Time Flair, to put right. No one had asked her, though.
She smiled at the thought that GraceLord Agave had purchasedthe place and had not been able to mitigate whatever was wrong. Well, the Agaves hadn’t been working with time for three and a quarter centuries.
She walked up to a ragged column that came to her chin. The last time she’d seen it, it had been a dingy gray, now it was as white as she remembered from her childhood, when the Residencehad been pristine. She touched fingertips to it and found the color came from frost, not the scouring of weather, which had cleansed it.
Tears froze on her cheeks. A Residence established in the first years of the colonists had long become sentient, a member of the Family. Her father wouldn’t have imperiled it. Or her. Or her mother.
Swallowing hard, she boosted her weathershield so she wouldn’t be clumsy. She carefully picked her way over the rubble, smoothing her way with Flair. Teleporting was Flair she was using more and more often instead of hoarding her power.
Her lack of work with her Flair made her heart ache, too.
Though ruined, she knew every inch of this land, and picked her way to exactly above the hidden HouseHeart. The passages to the ancient, sacred place were caved in, as was the room itself, and the altars to the elements—the hearth fire, the fountain, the air vent, the rich loam of the earth.
She could only pray, as she had for the last year and a half, that the HeartStone had been spared.
Seeing T’Ash earlier in the week had reminded her that his childhood home had perished, too, yet he’d rebuilt. His HouseHeartmust have survived. With Passiflora there, and the matter of HouseHearts so sensitive, Dufleur hadn’t approached him to ask about it.
After the first shock of her father’s death had worn off, she’d visited here, and several times thereafter, mostly on holidays. She’d searched D’Winterberry’s library on HouseHeart information,had even gone to the PublicLibrary and asked for help, but little had been found.
She’d last been here just before the turn of summer into autumn,calling for the HouseHeart. Hearing no reply. Then there had been tufts of grass and other sturdy plants showing green. It hadn’t been as wrenching as this place on a dark winter night. She wouldn’t come here again this winter. But she was here now.
Coughing to clear her throat, she dragged in barely warmed breaths and surveyed the landscape. Blinked again and again. Settled her emotions. She lifted her arms to the twinmoons, slivers, near new. Summoning her Flair, she said the opening rhyme to enter the most sacred and protected place of a Residence,the HouseHeart.
Nothing.
She steadied her voice and her Flair, ignoring the winter night that pressed in upon her, circling her spells like a snappingbeast. Said the words again, with feeling.
No reply.
For the next attempt, she relaxed her tense body and centeredher Flair, deciding to end the request for entry with a hard mental knock. Again she said the prayer, punching it up with Flair. Then continued with a long benediction that she would have said once inside the HouseHeart itself.
The faintest stirring. ThymeHeir?
Her breath stopped in her chest. A tiny voice. She couldn’t even tell if it was the Residence voice she knew, or one that came before her time, or one that had evolved since the explosion.With soft, warm thoughts, she sent, Thyme Residence?
Yessss. Falling on a sigh.
“Dufleur!” Saille said.
She spun, tottered, caught herself, grumbled a couple of swear words.
He stood outside the rubble of the Residence, hands on his hips, frowning at her. Fairyfoot sat wrapped in his scarf on his shoulder. He looked cold, but determined.
What should she do? How did she dare reveal her HouseHeartto him?
How did she dare walk away from a HouseHeart that might be crippled or dying?
“Dufleur?”
He wouldn’t go away. She knew that about him now.
Dufleur? asked the HouseHeart; perhaps it had withdrawn only to the HeartStone.
Do you need help? she asked.
The Residence sobbed.
Oh, Lord and Lady.
Help. Dark. Cold. Too QUIET! Alone, alone, alone.
She looked at the ground where the HeartStone was buried in a building that had collapsed around it. She wondered how much of the Residence’s mind survived. Could the ResidenceLibraryalso have endured?
“Dufleur?” Saille stepped over the first line of bricks.
“Stay there. Please!”
He halted.
Placing her hands palm down, she sent Flair questing to her Residence’s soul. The HeartStone was whole, had sent additionalparts of itself into the marble cobblestones that had surroundedthe lapis lazuli slab. Perhaps six stones in all.
Saille was her HeartMate. He could help. If she dared. Dufleur, the Residence whispered.
“I’m here, and I’ll help. Now.” She met Saille’s eyes. “I’ve finally discovered that Thyme Residence lives.”
He nodded. “A blessing.”
She watched him. He didn’t come storming across the debris to take charge. He honored her request that he stay where he was—though she had no doubt that if danger threatened, nothingshe could say or do would keep him from acting. He knew the sensitivity of the HouseHeart, the HeartStone—a GreatLordwould. So he kept watch.
But she could almost hear the Residence dying under her feet. She moistened her lips, then regretted it as the cold wind kissed them. She’d let all her spells go when trying to reach the HouseHeart and hadn’t even noticed. Now the frigid cold wrapped her until she trembled in the embrace. Not at all like Saille’s embrace when they’d loved together.
Not at all like the hours she’d spent in the womb warmth of the HouseHeart as a child. She locked gazes with Saille. Will you help me save the Thyme HouseHeart?
Triumph blazed in his eyes, but his reply was steady, solid. I would be honored.
A huge step, trusting him with the HouseHeart. But before she could do any further analysis of her emotions, he was by her left side, holding out his hand—his bare right hand. His face held a half-smile, but she thought she could still see that light of success flashing deep within his eyes.
She’d willingly lowered the barriers she’d set between them. For a good cause.
He’d been clever enough to place himself exactly where he’d be needed for great Flair work, taking this seriously. She put her hand in his. His fingers closed cold over her own chill ones, but natural attractive energy spurted between them, warming them.
Taking her seriously. She should have realized that he’d followher.
She liked the energy cycling through them, the strength of it and of him. With a shaky smile, she met his gaze. They would work great magic together, and that would bind them together, too.
Everywhere she turned, he was there, tying them together. With sex. With dancing. With the mind link. With Flair.
She took his hand, the scent of him, healthy soil, fresh breeze, drifted her way. But she couldn’t let him distract her during this, the most important venture of her life. Saving the Thyme HouseHeart, the kernel of the Residence itself. More tears stung her eyes, dried on her cheeks under the weathershield.
We can do this, Fairyfoot said with supreme confidence, steppingfrom Saille to Dufleur, managing to make the transfer still wearing the scarf like some elegant garment. Wasn’t the collar enough? Focus.
Twenty-three
So she integrated Fairyfoot’s energy flow and strength into her own, squeezed Saille’s hand. He squeezed back, and she stitched the three of their Flairs together.
Then she submerged herself in memories of the HouseHeart.Herself with her father as a small child, holding tools as he taught her the rituals of the Thymes. Learning the couplets to unlock the door, the way to the secret passageways, how to manipulatea few molecules of time to enter.
Celebrating rituals herself there. Suffering through her first and second passages as her father held her, helped her, there.
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br /> How it looked, like a rounded cave cut out of rock, but with small white lights providing constant illumination. The tiny bubbling fountain, the equally small firepit, the soughing of the winds—the atmospheric wind of air and the rich wind of time—through specially made crevices. The small deeply soft chinju rug. Barely enough room for three, but her mother had always preferred Family rituals in a spacious room of the Residence.
All gone.
Dufleur sniffed, pushed the tears aside.
The HouseHeart lived in the HouseStone. All the Residence’s personality, its life, its memory flowed from the HouseStone. The ResidenceLibrary, the knowledge garnered by the Residence and by Thymes and stored with the house entity,was an extension of the HouseHeart itself.
The heart and soul of the Residence came from the HeartStone.Dufleur thought the HouseHeart itself had been the entirefloor of the cave.
Now broken.
She visualized the smooth slab that was the HeartStone, a deep blue lapis lazuli with silver sparkles and one discrete streak. As thick as her little finger. As wide and deep as both of her hands together.
The Thyme HouseStone.
Thyme, Thyme, Thyme. Time, time, time. Mine, mine, mine. She whispered, she lilted, she sang to it.
Yours, it whispered back. Thyme’s. Time’s.
No longer alone. No longer without energy or strength or light or Flair.
The stone whimpered.
Hanging on hard to Saille’s hand, she said to the Residence, I am going to probe around you. Are you whole?
Whole, well-protected once.
And you will be again. You are six stones?
Withdrawn to six. Lost much, many, lost . . .
I am here, and my HeartMate, and my FamCat.
She sensed the HouseStone focusing on her, something outsideitself and its tragedy. HeartMate for the ThymeHeir. Blessing.
Yes, a GreatLord. Willow.
There came a hum of approval, of hope. A GreatLord with great Flair is here. I sense him! More hope and a touch of joy.
Send me the arrangement of the six stones.
Heart Dance Page 23
