The Time Weaver d-5

by Shana Abe

  "Can you fix it?" I asked, and even to me, my voice sounded very small. I heard in it all the years of my childhood, all the yearning to belong, for Josephine or Gervase to look at me and smile and soothe away my wounds, to take lasting note of me and all my turmoil and put it right like they never did.

  Because Lia was also my mother, I realized. In all the ways that counted, she was.

  "There is an answer," Amalia replied. "It is that you must never wed him. Never be with him. Never bear his child."

  "No," snarled Sandu at once. He rocked forward a step but couldn't do more than that;Draumr had us fixed.

  Lia transferred her dark gaze to him. "Rez cannot live here with you," she explained with awful kindness. "Rez cannot come to be. It's Rez they desire to obliterate, not you. The English will invade one way or another, my lord, but they'd let you live were she not your mate."

  "She is my mate. It cannot be undone."

  "I know. My dear friend, I know all about bonded hearts. So here is what will happen: You're going to leave Zaharen Yce forever, both of you. You're going to Weave ahead to the future, Honor. Far, far into the future, with him. And you'll never return."

  My lips parted in dismay. There were so many things wrong with that plan, I could barely stammer out where to begin. "I-I can't! I can't Weave with another living thing! I've never been able to!"

  "You will this time, though."

  "No, but—"

  "Honor," she interrupted firmly. "You will ."

  Wiiiiiill, throbbed Draumr , swooning deep. Wiiiiiill....

  There were people outside in the courtyard. I'd only just noticed them. We were invisible to them, lost behind windows, but they moved slowly, languidly, as if they too were caught in the swooning net of the diamond.

  "Wait," said Sandu, strained. "Wait a moment, please." "Your Grace?"

  "I . I thought I knew what love was," he said heavily. He looked at me, so dearly fierce, his face angled with light and shadow. He drew his fingers down my cheek, his gaze lost, absorbed. "If it means dying for her, I would. Gladly. Dying for them, for my people, I would. But leaving them. Abandoning them." He closed his eyes to shut me out; the lines bracketing his mouth deepened. "I'm sorry. I cannot."

  Lia's tone turned astringent. "You would leave them for that love. To remain here is to doom them. If you choose that path, what lives in your heart isn't love but merely pride. I expected more from the male who won my daughter's heart."

  I swallowed. The song was thick in my throat, blocking my own words, and I swallowed again.

  Don't, is what I would have said, if I could have. Cowardly me, I would have pleaded Don't choose them over me. Please, please, don't choose them.

  But I said nothing.

  Instead, Lia spoke for us both, and she was no coward. She was merciless.

  "Everyone dies if you stay. I've dreamed it. Rez's letter reveals it. Is that the future you desire?"

  Sandu looked like a man who was splintering in two deep inside, silently, invisibly. He was harsh, dark, and bright, his hands working into fists at his sides. He would not raise his eyes to mine.

  "The English will come anyway," Amalia tried again, as if explaining a logic problem to a very young child. "They've been planning to for years, and ultimately there will be no preventing it. But if you are gone, they will take over in peace. I know them. Without the potential threat of your rule, your tribe will be treated with respect. Their ways and traditions will be honored, as long as they don't flaunt their heritage, which may sound severe, but it's better than annihilation. The very best you could hope for if you stayed, Prince Alexandru, would be to become a puppet leader, enslaved to Darkfrith and its Council. Otherwise, I suppose a few years from now you'll fight to your death, and your daughter's death, and destine what's left of your kin to disaster. You cannot win against them. I don't believe that the child I raised would fall in love with an entirely stupid man, so I must assume you're intelligent enough to realize that."

  Now he looked at me, a hot and helpless look, and Lia saw that too.

  "You have a choice this morning, my lord. You have a chance to seize destiny by the throat." She lifted a hand to the blurry figures in the courtyard. "You can save them,all of them. Or not. I must wonder ... what manner of ruler are you? What matters to you most?"

  The drakon behind the glass were swimming in light, picking up chunks of fountain, putting them down again.

  I asked her, too afraid to hope, "You've dreamed it that way? Everyone safe?"

  If only, if only that bleak Future Rez would never come true—

  "I will," she answered, with simple surety.

  "All right," Alexandru rasped, facing her, expelling a breath. "Damn you, and let's do it." "Turn around, both of you."

  Draumr moved my feet for me. I felt Lia's hand push aside my hair, stroke the bare skin of my neck, the curve of my back that the gown did not cover. Her fingers burned like the sun.

  There was a wedge of shift showing above the scalloped back neckline of Honor's gown, as well. Lia smiled at the sight of it, that girlish bit of lace against a border of sequins, a smile that felt like laughter and tears both.

  The valise was at her feet. She bent down, removed the knife. It was one of Zane's, one he'd left for her protection, which was a dear and silly thought, but the edge was brutally keen.

  "Don't move. You will not feel any pain." She closed her eyes, thought about it—just the right place —then pricked the flesh above Honor's shoulder blade with the honed tip.

  Blood welled up, began a scarlet trickle down the slight curve of Honor's back to the edge of the gown. Prince Alexandru jerked in place.

  "Be still," Lia snapped, a little appalled herself at the amount of it. She pressed a hand over the cut. Honor turned her head, made a soothing sound toward the prince, smiling up at him.

  When they'd divided what was left of the wicked stone that had once been a wicked whole dreaming diamond, Lia and Zane had agreed that she would take the three larger splinters and he would have everything else, all the dust and smaller splinters and chips. Her three pieces of Draumr were narrow and pointed, almost like needles. She'd removed them from the pendant days before, torn them out atop a white limestone cliff with sensitive dragon claws, and she knew firsthand how sharp they could be. It wasn't difficult to press them deeper into the wound.

  Two splinters to Honor, that diminutive creature of formidable talents. One to the prince, who'd shrugged off his coat and waistcoat and shirt without another verbal protest, only a fearsome scowl at the floor.

  "No pain," Lia chanted softly, standing on her toes to reach the marbled crest of his shoulder, another small cut, another diamond needle inserted. "No pain."

  She sank back to her heels, wiping the blood down the folds of her robe, faintly sick despite herself. She dropped the knife back into the open neck of the valise and took a breath.

  This was the end. The edge of all her hopes for this young drakon woman, her ambitions for her, right here and now.

  "Neither of you will remember those pieces are there. The song will always be with you, but it never vexes you. You'll both heal and never even see the scars, or remark upon them. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," said the prince.

  "Yes," whispered Honor.

  "Good. Listen."

  Lia was speaking. I was listening to her, admiring the serenity of her voice, that calm reassurance that had always seemed to be such a fundamental part of her. Whenever she spoke like that, in that tone, a tiny over-wound part of me deep inside began to relax, like a coiled spring easing loose.

  She's so pretty, this Mama, I thought, watching her. Not because she's drakon. Just because she is.

  Alexandru clasped my hand. I held the other over my stomach, and wondered why I felt so very fine.

  "You will remember only what I say to you now," Amalia said. "Honor, you will Weave with your mate. You have that power. Do you feel it?"

  "I do," I answered, marveling. And it
was true, there was something new blooming inside me, something born of fearless Rez the dragon and my own more sensitive heart. It warmed through me, a magic stronger and better than any tug of Weave I'd ever felt before. It was potency without doubt, certainty without hesitation, a deep mighty sparkle in my bones. I was going to Weave with Sandu.

  Finally, I was powerful enough to share my Gift.

  "You will Weave to the future, generations away from now. You will spend the rest of your lives there, and you will never, never return to this time or any time near it. In fact, after this last Weave, you'll never Weave again. Can you do that?"

  "Yes," I replied, smiling. "I can do that. Thank you."

  She took a step back from us, her robe a puddle of silk around her feet.

  "Your lives are ahead of you now, but don't ever regret what you had here. You will adapt to whatever the future holds, and in those years ahead, you will thrive. Do you understand?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  She nodded, and in her long hair and robe and the swelling amber sun, she looked a stern angel. "One last thing. You'll always be the child of my heart. Go filla. Be happy."

  Something was happening to me. It was a Weave, but it was open and brilliant, shining as bright as the hammered gilt walls of the Great Room. Within it stood my mate, the prince of the Zaharen, that blue-dark and elusive dragon of my childhood dreams. Only we were both grown now, and he was mine, mine as certainly as I was his. He looked at me unafraid, and in his eyes the light pooled and swirled and became twin delicate silver spirals of infinity.

  "I love you," I said to him, as the coming wave of the tide lifted his hair, dissolving indigo into radiance. "Whenever we've been, whenever we're about to be, I love you. That's our constant. No matter what, it will never change."

  Love you, he mouthed back, smiling, stepping closer to me, and the only reason I couldn't hear him any longer was the song that surrounded us, an intensely soulful and beautiful song that had become more than music. It was the thread and fabric of the Weave itself, binding us together. It soaked into me, seared through me in undiluted joy.

  Love you forever, river-girl, Alexandru said silently, and hand in hand we jumped the wave and swept ahead to find our fresh ending.

  They melted away. It was like that, a melting, Lia thought, standing alone now in the studied sophistication of the castle parlor, her arms hugged to her chest to hold in the ache. She might have even glimpsed a flash of something like light in their final half-second before her. Better than light. It had texture, and feeling, and it had resonated of bliss.

  Her very last sight of Honor had been of her blazing smile, aimed up at the young Zaharen prince.

  But now they were gone. And there were, she reckoned, at least a dozen people pressed against the other side of the wooden door that led back to the main hall, holding their breaths, quiet as mice. She didn't know how much they'd heard or how much they might have guessed, but it wouldn't do to leave them unprepared. Their lives were changing soon, certain as the rising moon. Someone had to tell them.

  She tightened the belt of the robe, picked up her valise, and walked to the door.

  With her every step, she was bathed in yellow sun. And it felt good.

  Epilogue

  February 1789

  Four Months Later

  The ocean lapped at her dreams.

  It was soft and ticklish, because the waves that hit the cove had to break through a long, bony reef of white and pink coral first, and the coral absorbed most of their force. By the time the waves broached the sugared shore they were little more than playful curls of foam, and bubbles left to swell and pop along the tide line at their retreat.

  Beneath the waves would drift the sea turtles, peaceful in their rest, massive and silent and dark. "What a smile," whispered her husband in her ear, his breath also a tickle.

  Lia opened her eyes. She saw first the section of oak timber crossbeam supporting the ceiling above her, a thick shadow against the paler plaster, all of it tinted pearly blue with Caribbean moonlight. Then Zane lifted up to one elbow. His hair fell across his face, and he shook it back without looking away from her.

  "You were dreaming," he said.

  She rubbed a hand across her lids, languorous and warm. "Yes."

  "The future?"

  "Yes."

  "And ...?" he prompted, a single eyebrow arching, the word a deliberate stretch of sound. She reached up to capture a lock of his hair, twirling it around her finger. "It's happy," Lia said.

  He rolled atop her, trim and muscled, bunching the sheets between them. The tickle of his next words transformed into a slower, more sensuous caress against her lips.

  "My dearest heart," her true love murmured, smiling his rakish thief's smile. "I could have told you that." New York City, 1898

  Paola and Lucy worked together at the shirtwaist factory, and had for the past nine years. Same shift, their machines bolted side by side, their heads bent at identical angles from seven in the morning until eight o'clock in the evening, scarred fingers shaping the stabbing course of the needle, Mondays through Saturdays and a half-day Sunday too, with only a single precious forty-minute break at three. They even pumped their floor pedals in mechanical unison, thump-thump-ta-thump, twenty-two shirts per girl per shift, or else.

  There were times Paola feared she'd never be able to massage away the hot stony pain that yoked her shoulders. Still, they had it better than the girls on the night shift, who had to finish the same amount of work by the meager gas jets above the machines, set too high to be any sort of genuine help.

  But the break:

  Three o'clock, heads up, necks cracked, chairs shoved back. Three-oh-three, at the main door; a wait while the foreman sticks his fat fingers into their pocketbooks, rifling through their kerchiefs and pennies for any stolen scraps of lace. Three-fourteen, and if they had hurried they were at the edge of the park, moving at a brisk clip to their favorite bench, which was nearly always unoccupied because a prickly hedge had sprouted wild next to it and appeared to drape over its slats, discouraging all but the most determined of loungers.

  Paola and Lucy were very careful to redrape the branches of the hedge back over the bench each afternoon before they left. The thorns were formidable, but not any worse than the sewing machine needles that would pierce clean through a hand in a blink.

  And there they'd sit, eating the mashed brown bread and treacle from their luncheon tins, savoring the cigarettes Lucy stole from her father and smuggled to work in her bodice, which burned so harshly in Paola's throat it left her with a cough every time.

  A good cough, because it meant she was outside, under the sun, even if only for these treasured few minutes. Out of the enclosed stench of the factory.

  Even in the rain, even in sleet, they sat outside and smoked.

  But today was merely damp, with late spring clouds puffing up dark over the edges of the trees, too far away still to soak this afternoon's break.

  "Look." Lucy nudged her hard in the ribs with an elbow. "There she is." Paola narrowed her eyes through the pall of blue smoke.

  She walked alone, slowly down the park path, not seeming to mind the patches of wet and mud that pocked the sparse gravel, only stepping over them absentmindedly, like she missed them all without even trying. She was dressed well—she was always dressed very well, in garments much finer than anything the factory had ever produced. It had been clear from the instant they'd first noticed her, months past, that she was rich. Massively rich, society rich, the sort of rich that meant no holes in her stockings and no treacle for lunch, ever. Her complexion was unblemished, her hair such a bright, glinting red-gold it looked like actual strands of polished copper wound up in a fashionable puff beneath her hat.

  Today she wore nearly all cream: a cream wool coat with black piping and pearled buttons from collar to hem; a cream felt hat with a wide, smart brim and the scarf hanging loose to wind around her neck. Cream gloves. Not a spot to be seen. />
  Paola nearly sighed with envy. Cream. The worst color on earth for practical wear.

  Her coat was nearly shapeless, but it was clear anyway that the woman was heavy with child. She kept her hands in her pockets or else cupping her belly, emphasizing its roundness.

  In Paola's village back in Sicily, a woman so clearly close to her time would have been confined to her home, wealthy or no. It would have been shocking indeed to see her out strolling through town by herself; people would wonder if she'd been hexed.

  But this was not Sicily. This was America, it was the rolling acres of Washington Square Park, and although the woman had the sort of blazing, unreasonable beauty Paola had only ever seen in printed fashion plates, they'd never once witnessed anyone in the park bother her.

  "And there," muttered Lucy, with another nudge, and jerked her chin toward a different path.

  No, no one ever pestered the woman, and Paola suspected that this was the reason why ... and the reason why she and Lucy took such pains to make it to the park each day by this time.

  Because of him .

  Like clockwork they would meet, the man and the woman, each drifting in from different directions, she with her daydreamy, pregnant grace, and he with a pace that was far more .

  Paola frowned and drew at her cigarette, trying to think of just the right word.

  Sleek. His pace was sleek, like the panther she'd ogled once at a traveling circus her grandfather had taken her to when she was a child, a fearsome trapped thing walking circles behind the bars of its pen.

  The man moved like that panther might have, had it ever had the freedom of space, swiftly, fluidly, as if the soles of his shoes barely scuffed the earth.