by Shana Abe
She was there and then she wasn't. No smoke or dragon. Just the empty air, the silent woods. The roaring river. Sandu was left astonished, standing alone. If it weren't for the little-girl footprints pressed in the mud beside his, he would have sworn he'd dreamt the whole episode.
But they were there. They were.
That had been the first time.
A fortnight later he'd been asleep in his bed in the castle. The official royal chambers had once been the solar of the ancient fortress, modified and restructured over the centuries so often and by so many hands that by the time Sandu was to claim his place there, the space was a cluttered confusion of gilt and diamonds, crammed with artwork and imported furniture, everything to the touch slippery fabric or cold stone or dark-grained, heavy woods.
He'd spent exactly one week in the solar. After that, Sandu had discovered the tower room at the western end of the keep, and it had been his sanctuary since.
It wasn't precisely unadorned. But it was simple. Large, square, and echoing, it held a canopy bed, a mahogany secretaire , a Renaissance table of mother-of-pearl inlay and padded chairs. The fireplace had been rimmed in precious stones, and there were Turkish rugs strewn about for warmth. As Alpha, he'd made only a single major, modern improvement to the tower. He'd added a water closet, and liked it so much he'd commissioned ten more for the rest of the castle.
But the very best part of his private chamber was the view.
Eight glazed windows had been set in the walls, each one reaching nearly from floor to ceiling. Their beveled lozenge panes flared with sunlit prisms or the milky moon. From this lone, high tower, he could gaze in almost every direction, see nearly every corner of his realm. By day the rugged crests of the mountains greeted him, snow-kissed, clouds sweeping down their flanks to caress the green valleys and walled villages below.
By night he slept amid the stars, suspended in their brilliance; it was almost as perfect as flight through the purple-velvet heavens.
So, he'd been asleep. He thought he'd been asleep, because he was burrowed beneath his covers, and the fire in his hearth had dwindled to occasional sparks and embers. He frowned at them from his pillow, wondering what it was about them tonight that seemed different. The fire was lit every evening, even in the summer months. Zaharen Yce, the Tears of Ice, was a castle actually composed of quartzite and music and very chilled air, and no change of seasons would alter that.
But the embers seemed different. After a while—he wasn't certain how long—a new spark flowered and broke apart, and that's when Alexandru realized that their difference was not in color, or heat, or even their small lazy rustlings.
Their difference was that there was a naked woman standing to the right of the hearth. Beyond the post of his canopy, he could just see the outline of her leg, her calf and thigh and the curve of her hip. The bare russet glow of her skin.
He sat up. He stared at her from the soft trap of his bed.
Surely it wasn't the same maiden as two weeks ago. She didn't look quite the same. She was older, for one thing. Her hair was longer. She stood taller. Yet she might have been that child's sister: same coppery mane, even more glimmering by the light of the dying embers. Same long-lashed blue eyes glancing back at him.
And she was drakon , and she was nude. Just like that girl had been.
"I know this place," she said slowly. She spoke in English, solemn words, trailing a hand along the rubies and emeralds and topazes embedded in the mortar around the marble mantelpiece. Her face turned back to the embers; her profile was orange and dark. "I know these gems. I know their music. I've heard all this before."
Sandu made certain not to move; he only cleared his throat. "Have you?" "And I know you." She shot him a look. "Don't I?" "No," he said.
"But ..." Her brows drew together; he saw then that he'd been fooled, just like the first time—she wasn't much older, probably barely as old as he. She crossed her arms to her chest and took a step forward, and the window behind framed her in stars. "Your face. I know your face."
"Did you Turn to get in here?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Not even to smoke?"
"No ."
"Then if this isn't a dream," he said carefully, "I'd appreciate an explanation."
"As would I."
She didn't smell like a dream. She didn't smell —but she was scented, very close to how that little girl had been. Yet it was warmer, more feminine now. More like flowers and honey than simple sugar. And strength. Still that.
Perhaps she sensed the change in him, his sudden unexpected arousal, because she eased back into the shadows. One finger tapped a topaz at the corner of the mantel, sending it into arias.
"How do you sleep with all this noise?"
"It's not noise." He inhaled through his teeth, slowly pushing back the covers. "It's beautiful." "They're loud." "They are soothing."
She seemed about to add something else, then lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "As you like. You do seem to sleep very soundly."
He could Turn to smoke. He could be before her in an instant, in less than a heartbeat. He could touch her and verify that she was real—
"You know, I'm not ." The woman dropped her hand, gave a small, embarrassed laugh.
"Not what?" One foot free. The other. He slipped from the bed.
"Not certain why I'm here. Or how."
"Let us talk then, English. Let us unravel it together."
"No, I'm not—" She started again, earnest, but vanished midsentence, a blur of tarnished light and dark that melted into empty night.
And she'd been telling the truth. No smoke.
This time he had no proof. This time he realized it might well have been a dream. A strange dream, of a strange female, and he should stop drinking spiced wine before bed, because clearly it was having a deleterious effect on his slumber. The first thing he did the next morning was ask to be served sherry instead.
But in his heart, Alexandru knew she'd been no illusion. The copper-haired girl was either a spirit set to haunt him, or else real.
Either way, it seemed like ill news.
He kept her to himself. It would not do to instill unnecessary fears into his people; his hold over them required their absolute confidence, and life here was difficult enough. The sharp-edged mountains, the stark terrain. The long, brutal winters that shriveled crops and souls until spring cracked open all but the meanest of the thick turquoise ice. It was a land saturated in legends and violet shadows, where a wolf howling from the woods became a man-eater, a baby-stealer, and the sweet dew found on edelweiss was said to be fairy's broth, poison to all pure hearts.
Where the dragons that lanced across the moon at night were either protective demons or avenging angels, depending on who was asked.
There were humans who hunted them, and a distant clan of kin who craved to conquer them. Surely those were problems enough.
He would not deliberately add to the shadows by speaking of this girl. He would not endanger his reign.
Yet three times more, he'd glimpsed her. They did not speak again; there was no opportunity. In each instance she was there mere minutes or seconds, still unclothed, still pale, appearing somehow each time a little older or a little younger ... perhaps that was nothing more than a trick of the light.
He began to wonder, rather seriously, if he were losing his mind.
He found himself searching around corners, examining empty spaces. Scrutinizing even the smallest flickers of movement around him, ready to pounce.
And this is what Sandu saw:
She was a nymph in a field of August grasses, ducking behind a pine just as he was Turning to dragon for flight.
She was sudden color against the drab inner wall of the granary, wheat chaff whirling in a tempest between them, because he and the servants were hauling out bags of rotting grains from a leak in the roof they'd just discovered that must have been there at least a year.
She was a ghost in a ballroom, standing poised and
naked for a brief, amazing fifteen seconds against the mural of gods decorating the eastern wall.
It was the harvest ball, a festival of darkness and jewels, tables laid out with all the fruits of their hard year's work: apples and pears and gaudy-striped gourds; braided breads and mulled wines; enormous haunches of seared meat; poached fish from the lakes; soured cream and cheese from the cattle. Sugared almonds, crepes, chocolate. Iced cakes trembling with glasshouse flowers, dusted with flakes of silver and gold.
Champagne. French. Because Sandu insisted upon that.
It was a chance to give his people a taste of true wealth and they reveled in it, nobles and peasants alike. Thin- or thick-blooded, they were drakon, and this was their night. And if, as the hours flowed like the wine, the laughter grew too loud and the violins too frantic, if eyes flashed and glowed and followed him as he moved, searching for the least sign of weakness in the Alpha of this ragtag, elegantly savage tribe—at least Alexandru had the champagne to cool him.
He savored it, every drop. The bubbles burned in crystal fire along the roof of his mouth.
He'd been seated alone at the head table, sprawled back to eye the sinuous beast that clung to the eaves high above them all in silence and shadow, bloodred wings fanned open, a gaze of bright goblin orange surveying the chamber below.
He wondered idly who it was this year. The nobles took turns up there; it was considered a rite of passage of a sort. He supposed someone had told him whose turn it was but he—
A woman shrieked. A platter fell.
Sandu turned only his head, already discerning the nature of the shriek—startled, high-pitched, not panicked—and the food that spilled—berries in cognac, the platter a ringing pewter—and from across the chamber, through the slippery candlelight and dancing shades of his kin, he found her.
Like he was suddenly staring at her from the end of a telescope, his senses honed. His blood began to hum.
She was older again, like him, long hair. Frozen. Pale against the wall, pale against the vivid formal clothing of everyone else. Eyes gone to round, astounded blue.
The beast at the ceiling shifted, leaning down closer, wicked claws digging into stone. The girl's face jerked upward to take in its abrupt orange interest.
From his gilded chair, from his linened table, Alexandru could clearly see the white of her fingernails on the hand pressed to her throat. Hear her stifled intake of breath.
But even as the serving maid who'd dropped the tray gave a second shriek and pointed, the copper-haired girl was gone. Blurred away, just like all the times before, with no trace left behind.
At least she'd been seen. At least, at last. The maid had seen her, the guests standing nearby had seen her, the dragon in the eaves. So he wasn't mad, and she was real.
Somehow real.
And then had come the letter from Spain, and everything changed.
Chapter Four
I had a secret.
Considering who and what I was, declaring that I had a secret was nothing more extraordinary than saying, / breathe. I am.
My life was a basket woven of secrets, it seemed. I was a secret from the shire of my birth. I was a secret from the fine people of Barcelona, where I now lived. I was a secret from my real parents, Gervase and Josephine, and a secret from my false parents, Zane and Lia.
I was nearing the age of eighteen, and every day I ate and drank secrets like candy, like wine. If I tried to repress them, if I tried to mash them down under the relentless light of the Spanish sun, they squeezed up again through the cracks of night. They haunted my dreams.
The greatest one, of course, was him.
The prince.
Alexandru.
I knew that was his name, because I'd heard the drakon surrounding him call him that. Not many did—I supposed it was because he was royal and they were not—and it took me over a year of Weaving to him before I was able to sift through the strange foreign words enough to recognize the syllables of his given name. Sometimes he was Alexandru, and sometimes just Sandu, which I definitely liked better.
Prince Alexandru of the Zaharen was an Alpha with gray chill eyes and a fine mouth that never smiled. He was pale and lean in the most charismatically feral way of our kind, with straight long hair so deeply black it shone blue, and cheekbones sculpted sharp like his mountains. His voice was nearly always unnervingly gentle; when he spoke, it felt like electric shocks along my skin. Prince Alexandru sat on a throne in a sumptuous Great Room of green damask and hammered gold and watched the shadows and the light like a shark waiting restlessly for a little fish to swim by.
And all the little fish gave him a very wide berth indeed. Even the servants who brought his chalices of wine and finger bowls of lemon water avoided his gaze when they could.
Prince Alexandru was a leader locked in a silent, frigid war, although it took me a very long time to realize that, and even longer to realize with whom.
Sandu, though ... Sandu was a man who slept. Alone. In a solitary tower chamber, with nothing to comfort him but a few blankets and stars and the songs of all the diamonds and colored gemstones pressed into the walls.
In sleep, his body relaxed, his face relaxed. In sleep, I could imagine him smiling. His hands atop the covers of satin and fur, long, strong fingers stroked with firelight. His hair unbound, smooth as ink across the pillows.
I'd watched him brush it out once early one winter morning, the strands crackling, his gaze distant, an emerald ring flashing on his thumb. I'd Woven to a far corner holding my breath but when my back touched the cold wall I think I must have released it, just a tiny bit; I hadn't meant to. He'd paused, head cocked, frowning at his reflection in the small mirror before him. Before he finished twisting around, I was gone again.
Stolen moments. That was how I knew Sandu.
I wasn't certain if it was Sandu or Alexandru who commanded his animal side, the huge gleaming black dragon who'd once plucked me from a river. He'd been both merciful and cruel, so perhaps both.
And I wasn't certain which aspect of him intimidated me more. I'd grown up with an Alpha heading my tribe, and I had a healthy respect for their power. I'd learned very quickly in life that the strongest ruled the weakest, and if you weren't prepared to be ruled, then you'd better fight or run. Alpha males not only fought, they won. If they had to kill to win, so be it; those were our ways. The shire of Darkfrith had an entire field devoted to the charred bones of those who had chosen to contest the rules of the tribe.
One glance into this prince's pale gray eyes and I could easily envision his own field of bones.
And yet ... there was that sleeping man. The curve of his lips. The twin straight strokes of ebony brows, so peaceful. Sable eyelashes, thick and spiked. He never slept with a nightshirt on, not that I could tell, not even during sleet or snow. His shoulders were broad and muscled, ivory skin, a V of short curling hair winnowing down his chest. When the fire was bright enough, if he rolled over, if he shifted or moved his hand or parted his lips on a sigh .
Oh, those nights. I found it so hard to Weave away.
Back then I had no choice, though. I couldn't control my Gift. I'd be sitting at the kitchen sideboard peeling apples, or walking through a park, or reading at my desk. And then I'd simply be somewhere else. Some time else.
Nude.
That part was always awkward, to say the least. Usually the first jolt of realization that I'd completed a Weave would be someone screeching at the sight of sudden, unclad me appearing from nowhere.
With Lia's encouragement, I began to cloister myself in the suite of apartments we rented in one of the old palaces of the Gothic Quarter. We agreed it was far easier for me to duck behind a table or a curtain there than to hide in public. The few servants we employed were silent and stone-faced and paid exceedingly well to avert their eyes from anything unusual; I was not the only drakon in the residence with unexpected Gifts. My Weaves typically placed me about a year or two in the future, as far as I could fathom, but alm
ost always in the same place I'd just left.
So, for the sake of modesty, my bedchamber became the safest location. Within weeks, I had memorized every plastered inch of it.
At first I hated Weaving. I hated the nauseating, pulling lurch of it in my stomach. I hated being clothed one moment and not the next. I hated that all I had was a half second's warning it would come, like that feeling that rises through you just before you vomit, and you know there's nothing you can do to prevent it. You're enslaved to the whims of your own body.
That was Weaving.
And then, when I started to go to him instead of to my bedroom, it became even worse.
I was young and afraid. Of course I was afraid. I didn't know who this dark youngdrakon could be, or why I kept ending up in his proximity. The Weaves were a compass and he became my North. I just kept going back. I discovered later that in our Natural Time, Prince Sandu was only a little over a year older than I. But in the Weaves I usually leapt ahead, and he was much older.
After the sixth Weave to him, I told Lia everything; I had no reason not to. I trusted her. I even loved her. Then she told Zane.
And I think that —that moment, that conversation for which I wasn't even present—was the beginning of our end.
I remember five days passed, uneventful. The evening of the fifth day the three of us were seated on the stairs of the Catedra/ in the Barri Gotic, enjoying the soft spring twilight. There were street vendors hawking food and glass-windowed shops selling baubles. It was crowded: young couples with stern duenas in ebony lace hissing and trailing behind them, families with children bickering over sweets, everyone ambling the narrow, cobblestone streets to take in the balmy air, the rising moon. We three were pretending—Lia loved to pretend—that we were also an actual family, appreciating the descent of the lemony blue night.
Zane only did it for her. I knew that.
A pair of gray-whiskered men were on the stairs below us, strumming havaneres on their mandolins for the passersby, singing sea-songs in wavering, graveled voices. A few tunes in, Lia rose to toss a handful of coins into the hat placed beside them.
