by Shana Abe
“Imagine,” said Prince Alexandru, “that you were born a rather ordinary child. Ordinary for your kind and place, I should say. And you grow up living as any other child around you would. Mostly happy, sometimes not. Muddy, clean, fed. You don’t live in a castle but you have a room with your own real bed, not a pallet, and parents who care for you as they can. But then one day, without warning at all, something extraordinary happens to you, something you did not anticipate in any possible way, but it befalls you anyhow.”
“Ha,” I said, from my place in my bed, covered in blankets and propped up upon pillows. The rainlight was thick as soup, but he’d found one of the Venetian glass candelabras from the dining chamber and had lit every candle; the single brazier in the cathedral, as I had already known, listed dangerously sideways, as it was missing a leg.
He’d placed the candelabra atop the commode. Light danced up the chiseled stone wall above it, smoothed thin by the time it reached the window; the glass branches had been shaped into snakes and flowers, glimmers of violet and sapphire blue.
I’d hung a long mirror on the opposite wall, which caught the reflection of the flat windowpanes. With the proper tilt of my head I could view an infinity of colored snakes and Sandus, each one tinier than the last.
He’d released my hand to go fetch the candelabra, and since he’d been back, even after pulling the chair up close to my bed again, he had not reclaimed it.
I kept both hands folded on my lap. The blankets were drawn up to my shoulders. It was still cold.
“What was this extraordinary thing?” I asked.
“Two things,” he said, holding up two fingers. “One, you’re seven years of age, and your older sister comes to you in the dead of night and proclaims that you’re the new Alpha of your tribe, because the old prince is dead.”
“Your … sister?”
“She was the bride of the former Alpha. Technically, even after his death, she had no power to rule, but she held on to it anyway. She passed that on to me.”
“The hut,” I said, understanding. “You were born in a hut, not a castle. I saw it.”
“Did you?”
“Not the, er, process itself. I saw you as a baby. I’d been trying to Weave back to you after our conversation in your library, but I ended up there instead. You were with your mother.”
Alexandru glanced downward and then back up, regarded me broodingly.
“I was only there a minute,” I said, and paused. “She looked happy.”
“Yes.” He sighed, leaning back. “So now you are the new prince, and you do live in a castle. And for a while you have guidance, you have family who are there with you to aid you, and despite all the folk of your tribe who stare at you and judge you and find you lacking, you feel … as if it might work. As if it might indeed be destiny. When the Turn comes to you at fourteen, you’re beyond relieved. It means your position is just a little, a little, more secure. But one by one your family either succumbs to death or departs your realm, and you end up alone.”
“How old were you then?” I wondered.
“Fifteen.”
I’d been taken from my parents at nearly the same age. I remembered how that felt, to be young and solitary, a stranger amid strangers. Even with all the excitement filling my days, the cacophony of astonishing new places and things, there remained that seed of fear—of rejection, suffering, pain—lodged in my heart that never withered.
I didn’t wait for Sandu to take my hand again. I reached for his.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I don’t tell you this to gain pity. I’m telling you so you’ll understand. Two great things happened to me. Two.” His lips made that dry smile. “Would you care to guess the other?”
Me, I wanted to say, and bit my tongue.
“It might have been you,” he agreed, reading my face, and his smile softened. “But I wasn’t counting Honor Carlisle. Not for this tale. The second unexpected event that came upon me was a new Gift, one I’d never heard of anyone else having before, not human or drákon.”
“Really?” I pushed myself up higher on the pillows. “What?”
He picked up the battered note I’d brought back from the meadow, which had been resting upon my legs.
“I Read,” he said.
“Well, so do I, honestly, but—”
“No, Honor. I can Read, the way you can Weave. An utterly unique dragon trait. I Read the true lettering behind any words. I Read the true intent of the scribe behind the ink. Fresh words, invisible to everyone else.”
One of the Roma below us in the atrium had begun to practice a song on his guitar. Someone else joined in with the harmony. I realized without an ounce of surprise it was the same tune I’d heard drifting through the dark green crystal forest.
“You Read true hearts,” I guessed, and the prince inclined his head in acknowledgment.
“Then—you must know mine. You had me write out all those things. That was why, wasn’t it?”
“That, and I wanted to see if one of us belonged in an asylum. It seemed like it might actually be me.”
I shook my head.
“Think,” he said. “A comely maiden, a dragon-maiden, magically appearing and disappearing throughout the hours of my life. No name, no fixed age, just a face and blue eyes and not even smoke to reveal her. What might you have thought, were you me?”
“That I would have damned well asked her to write me out something sooner.”
He laughed, his face sharp as a hawk’s in the gold-and-gray light. “You’re wiser than I, no doubt, senyoreta. I cannot be surprised at that.”
I flicked the edge of the note he held between his fingers. “Did you write this? What does it truly say?”
“I did write it. And it says …” His lips curved in an expression that might have been cynicism or might have been doubt, or a mixture of both. “Between the words, it says, She belongs to you. Claim her. The ending no longer matters.”
We stared at each other as the song below us lifted into its rippling chorus.
“That …” I rubbed my palms along my thighs. “Is that good?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you might be so gracious as to consent to tell me.”
The Gypsies broke off their playing. Their voices reached my chamber in echoing spurts and laughter, a good-natured argument punctuated with plucked notes.
The infinite Alexandrus in the mirror all leaned closer to the woman in the bed; every endless fall of black hair a sift of dark along their shoulders.
“What happened next, Honor? Now the story returns to you. What happens in our future, the one you just touched?”
There seemed no better answer than the truth.
“I live with you,” I said candidly. “At Zaharen Yce. We’re a couple, engaged. And when I found you, we made love. It didn’t feel like the end.”
“I—I took advantage of you? Just now, in the future?”
“No, my prince,” I replied. “I would say there was no advantage. We were on near equal footing, although you had the comfort of already knowing the outcome. And it was lovely, that outcome. I’m not sorry in the least,” I finished, taking in his affronted air. “I’d do it again if I could.”
He stood and pushed a hand through his hair. He paced to the mirror but didn’t look into it, staring down instead at his hands, at the note he still held.
“You kissed me,” I said, unmoving, watching him, “and you held me and you made me feel like I was cherished. Like I was adored. I’d never known that depth of kindness or attention. You’re the most astonishing being I’ve ever encountered. I wish only that you could have been there. You, Sandu of right now. Because the person you’re going to be, Alexandru of the Zaharen … there was no shame. I’m your mate. You knew it, and you were brave enough then to claim me, despite all my flaws. I’ve never in my life felt so safe.”
His fingers crushed the note as if it were afire.
“I did that?”
“You did. And thank you.
Thank you yet again.”
“Perhaps I only fooled you. Perhaps I made you feel the way I thought you needed to feel to … give me what I wanted.” He glanced up, and through the mirrored glass his eyes held mine. “I’m not a kind man, Honor. Never believe it. There’s no real place for that in my world. A kind man would have been slain as soon as he’d been left vulnerable at Zaharen Yce. An Alpha, however—an Alpha manipulates every situation to win. That’s what I do. I’ve grown extremely skilled at it. Perhaps it’s even a Gift.”
“Do you suppose you’ve won?” I inquired, curious.
He dropped his gaze; a corner of his mouth curved. “Apparently.”
“I’d say we both have.”
With a sudden rousing “hep!” of encouragement, the men below took up the song again. It echoed the rain now, threaded back and forth through the pattern of the storm.
“There’s something else I must tell you,” I said. “Some other time I Wove to accidentally, that you need to know.”
“Yes?”
“I think it was the future. It must have been. But I don’t know how far ahead I went. I was trying to find you again, and I was there at your castle, but it was empty. No one lived there. I think there had been an attack. Things were broken. Everyone was gone.”
“Zaharen Yce has been attacked by man before,” the prince said. “In the past.”
“I don’t believe this was the past, or the work of men. Even the diamonds were gone.”
He closed his eyes and tipped his face to the ceiling.
The ending no longer matters.
“I cannot,” he began, in a flat, tense voice, and then paused. “I cannot let my reign lead to the end of us. Of my kin. Even if I loved you. Even if you loved me, forever and all time, I cannot let that come to be. It does matter.”
I sat up; all my wooziness was gone. I swung my legs to the edge of the bed and pushed free of the covers. The floor was a shock of hard cold against my feet, but it was all right. I drew up behind him and wrapped my arms loosely about his waist, resting my cheek against his back.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” I said. “No—what I believe. I believe that endings can be changed. I believe that time can be twisted like wire, and reshaped. And I refuse to believe the man I met years from now would put his own pleasure above duty, yet still he wished to wed me. We can control our ending. Maybe we’ve already begun it—every change we make now, everything we do, spreading in ripples out to our futures. We know what the English want, and what they believe. We work to defuse them. And maybe the Prince Alexandru I met in that meadow in the months ahead of us knows all this too, which is why he wrote to you what he did. I tried to Weave back to the empty castle, and I never could. So maybe that future has already been erased.”
I felt his hands skim the backs of mine. “That—was one of the most self-serving arguments I’ve ever heard. There must be something wrong with me. I found it exceedingly seductive.”
“If you found that seductive, why don’t you turn around? I’ll teach you how you taught me to kiss.”
His head dipped; silent laughter shook his body. “Which me?” he inquired after a moment, husky.
“Both,” I answered, and freed my hands to step in front of him.
She was chilly, still made of ice, his time traveler. She’d been washed and dried and he smelled no blood about her any longer, but she looked so blanched, her hair a messy tangle down her back, it seemed impossible she’d be up on her feet already. If he touched her directly he had the uneasy notion he’d shatter her, a thousand little shards of white-and-copper Honor at his feet.
But her arms about him had felt strong. Her grasp seemed certain.
He started with her hair, his fingers finding one of those warmer-looking locks. Yet even that was cool, he discovered, with a texture that was not quite silky soft, but more interesting than that, because it curled like a spring unwound around his finger. He let his hand open into her hair, feeling the coils slide between all his fingers—and then the sudden difference in the surface of her shift, muslin, paper-thin. A narrow strip of lace framed her bare skin from her shoulder to the scoop of the neckline. It was the color of browned sugar, almost hidden behind the shimmer of her hair.
“Have you seen my home in the winter?” Sandu heard himself ask, unreasonably fascinated by that contrast of sugar and copper-rose.
“Yes,” Honor said.
“There’s a moment at sunrise. It only comes with the December snow. There’s this moment when the sun is nearly there, but not, and the light is lifting behind the peaks, and right before the sun breaks through, the whole world is washed in color. This color.” He lifted his hand and let her curls slip free between their bodies, drifting back to her chest. He shook his head, bemused. “I never thought to see it anywhere else on earth.”
“We’re getting married in December next year,” she said gravely. “That’s what you told me.”
“Did I?” He felt that slow, sinking intoxication gliding through him again, that feeling that none of this could be real; she looked at him without coyness, without teasing, only that sharp, fragile beauty that defined her, the elusive impression of ice still surrounding her.
He wanted to make love to her. He would make love to her, blackguard that he was, he already had—
Sandu shook his head again, fishing for a lucid thought. “You said you had no desire to wed.”
Honor considered it, her brow puckered, her gravity undiminished. “I must suppose I’m going to change my mind.”
“We’d wear crowns in December,” he said, and let his fingertips touch the top of her head, lightly, hardly there. “Crowns of holly. That’s our tradition for weddings. Every season, a crown of greens. Gentians for spring. Peonies for summer. Wheat for fall. But for winter we wear the leaves and berries of the snow.”
“What else?” She placed her cool hands against his chest.
“Hot wine.” He eased into her slightly, wanting to feel her resistance, the pressure of her palms, and as if her mind knew his, she obliged him, pushing back gently, less a rejection than a testing of the space between them. “Spiced with cloves and cinnamon, heated in a cauldron, because there’ll be so many of us. Music. An orchestra, with dragons in livery to play. We’d be in a round chamber as big as a ballroom, with soaring windows on every side, the mountains purple and white everywhere you look. Painted stars above us, painted beasts, all of them silver against darkest blue.”
The rain shifted outside, blowing harder and then not, and the candle flames bowed low in unison before steadying. Honor took a step closer to him.
“And it will be snowing,” she said. “Softly, nothing fierce. Enough just to rim the windows. I remember snow like that. So downy and thick that when you stepped out into it, it was like you were muffled in a great white blanket.”
He closed his eyes, seeing it as if he were there, so clear: the Convergence Room draped in gold and ivory, the snow building against the blackened solder of the northern panes, because the winter winds always blew from the north. His people there, standing, witnessing. Honor’s hands clasped in his.
“We’ll dance all night,” she said, another step to him. “We’ll dance after the snow stops, and the sun begins to rise. Then you can show me your color.”
Her last few words had been a murmur against his chest. He bent his head, brushed his lips to those December curls. She was real. He knew that. She felt real, and she tasted real, and going forward with her into this future she’d created for them would mean a reality he could hardly yet fathom.
She was going to love him. That was the other hidden message behind his future note. He was reminding himself of her first letter, and that whatever else this was, it was love.
He’d had so precious little of it in his life. He’d had his parents’ distant kindness and his sister’s determined guidance; to Sandu love had been a kinship of blood and common purpose, and he had turned to it enough to recognize its comfort, but what he
felt with Honor Carlisle was not comforting.
It was arousing. It was to acknowledge a deep, dark splinter of vulnerability, somehow wedged in his soul. It was to become too easily entranced with the play of light over her soft skin, all kinds of light. To fight his constant compulsion for her touch. To dream of her eyes and lips during hard, restless nights.
To hunger.
His instincts howled at him to bind her to him now, to claim her in truth. If she was ice then by God she would melt; what came after that, he did not know, but it seemed to loom beautiful and wild at the brimming edge of his imagination, just beyond reach.
When Alexandru spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
“Are you certain this is what you want?”
“My prince. This is what I’ve crossed time itself for. Over and over, for you.” She lifted her head, her face all in shadow, ghost and ice and dark winter eyes. “For you.”
He kissed her. It wasn’t like before, in the tower, when he’d tried to be soft about it and instead had been helplessly aflame. He wasn’t attempting softness any longer; he was the flame, and when her arms encircled his shoulders he only pulled her closer, thawing her body with his heat.
He felt her lips part, and that fed the scorching in his blood. She returned his kiss with an ardor that was anything but cool.
Because the winter still has the sun, he thought dizzily. A flush of color, and light brighter than diamonds across the snow.
He was beyond combing through his thoughts for sense; she was the snow and the sun, the ice and the flame. He was weight atop her in the bed, the dragon only just holding on to his skin; the man who buried his face against her neck to find her flavor there, that pulse in her throat that excited him in the blackest way, deep in his groin. He kissed her, he licked a path up to her ear and inhaled her again, and all the while his hands were finding the shape of her, the smooth, firm chill of her arms, the dip of her waist. The shift crumpled in his grip, the paper-cloth tugged higher and higher until he rolled off her to remove it completely.
She didn’t rise to help. She only arched her back into a pretty bow and stretched her arms hard, and when it caught against her hair she collapsed down again, smiling.
