by Shana Abe
In their hotel room in Óbuda, he’d come upon her in her boudoir without knocking, some thought at the edge of his tongue, something about the distance left to travel, not far now, and how to count the miles by the lakes below.
But she didn’t notice his entry. She was standing before the cheval mirror placed in the corner, dressed in her chemise and stockings and nothing else. The chemise was white, with ribbons of cherry-red threaded through the neckline and sleeves, woven in a pretty pattern around the hem. The drawstring neckline was loosened, and two long strips of satin floated against her arms as she regarded her own reflection, pensive, both palms spread flat over her abdomen. Late autumn light filtered through the organza curtains behind her and lit every inch of her to a peachy glow.
The hotel was named the King’s View, and Prince Alexandru was not unknown here. Composed of creamy brick and marble and overlooking the great river itself, it was the preferred lodging of traveling diplomats and aristocrats or anyone aspiring to either. The senior footman had recognized him as they’d ascended the front steps, and by the time they’d reached the threshold of the main doors the manager himself was there, bowing low with effusive greetings, accepting the coat and stick and hat Sandu had only just donned twenty minutes before.
“Merci,” Sandu had said, and then drew Réz gently forward. “Ma femme, la princesse.”
The manager transferred his attentions instantly, how delightful, he had not realized, Her Grace honored them, champagne of course, and fresh flowers, the bridal suite was regretfully booked but the king’s own rooms were free …
During all this Réz only inclined her head with just the right degree of imperial condescension—did she speak French? he’d never even thought to ask—but Sandu thought he’d felt a stiffening in her posture, barely there.
He might have only imagined it. Looking at her now, so slim and girlish, with her hair curling wild down her back and her fingers pushed apart, she looked more elfin than dragon, a sprite wandered into the elaborately embellished royal suite of the best hotel in Hungary.
“Princesse,” he said softly, from his place in the doorway.
She looked up at once, dropping her hands. Their eyes met through the mirror glass.
“I hope you didn’t mind,” he said. “As one day, it will be true.”
“One day,” she agreed, and added, “I suppose I never thought of it before. The title.”
“It can be a surprising thing,” he conceded, feeling the smile that wanted to come.
Her gaze lowered to take in that promised smile; her own began to rise in answer. “Will I get a crown?”
“Holly,” he reminded her.
“I like holly.”
“Good thing. I fear there’s not enough gold left in any of the mines for the other sort.”
“But there are diamonds in the walls, and emeralds around your hearth. Those will do. Your castle twinkles with song.”
He pushed off the doorway, giving a bow of acknowledgment. “I’m glad you like it.”
Réz laughed. “It is noisy.”
“We’ll drown it out.”
“How?”
“By making our own music, of course.”
Her brows knit; the peached light shimmered through her shift as she turned to face him. “Oh, that was truly dreadful.”
“My apologies. English is not my best language.”
“Alexandru,” she said, meeting him in the middle of the room, her fingers on his, her eyes deep as oceans, “that would have been dreadful in any language.”
“I love you,” he said, and in the sudden silence of the splendid chamber heard his own heartbeat, thudding hard.
“It’s soon, I know,” he said.
The windows had been left open a little. The organza puffed and fell like living breath, and beyond them a bell from a ferry on the river was clanging in clear, insistent tenor. The swell of air stirred her hair, lifted his own from his shoulders.
He pushed it back with one hand. “And perhaps you don’t feel the same about me. Not yet. That’s fine. But I wanted you to know.”
She’d dropped her gaze again. He was left to look at the reddish brown crescents of her lashes, the straight line of her nose and lips that gleamed rose and tender gold. Her fingers remained curved loosely over his.
“Mate,” he tried, and she glanced up.
“This is how we are,” she murmured. “You said that to me once.”
“I did?”
“I thought at the time you meant—something physical. But I understand you now. This is how we are. More than physical. More than animal. Two hearts as one, unable to part. This is what it means to be bonded.” She shook her head. “I’d never guessed. I’d never come close to guessing how this might feel. You are the center of me. I think I … I think I wouldn’t want to live without you.” But the soft wonder of her voice had transitioned into something tinged more of indignation. She regarded him more directly, confrontation in her stance now, as if she dared him to refute it. “I don’t want to live without you.”
“Perhaps I’ll find you a crown of gold, after all,” Sandu said, and to his surprise, they were just the right words. Her edge of confrontation melted away into the spreading light.
“No, I’ll take the holly.”
“And me.”
“And you, le prince. Of course, you.”
He lifted her hand for a kiss to shield his smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When the princess named Réz Wove away from the massacre at Zaharen Yce, she went ahead in time.
Far ahead.
For a very long while, she was stuck there.
As a girl she’d already endured the experience of losing nearly a year of her life. She never recalled her trials as a sixteen-year-old, although she did live through them. At the age of twenty-five, she lost another six and a half years to the Dragon of Time, which took particular delight in devouring her then.
An enraged drákon, a screaming drákon, mother to a freshly slaughtered child, wife to a freshly slaughtered mate—in her involuntary Weave away from the dungeon of Zaharen Yce, she was especially delicious.
When she was thirty-two, she awoke one morning with nearly all the memories of her previous life restored intact. She sat up in her narrow, cotton-sheeted bed and realized that she was in Germany, that Germany was at war, and that she was English.
That she wasn’t human. And it was not her war.
Réz attempted to Weave back. Over and over again, she flung herself back in time, but she never did return to the scene of her family’s demise. She never even managed to get close.
Zaharen Yce had turned its back on her. Whatever magic had lived in it before the pillaging, whatever welcome she’d once received, had all been revoked.
It did not have life, this castle. Not in the way the dragons did, or the forests, or even the lesser beasts. But it had a sort of memoried awareness, a sense of being, and of having been. Polarity, chemistry. Every block of quartzite, every single embedded gem, every grain of sand in the mortar … all of it, polarized like a magnet, drawing sweet, heavy magic to it, basking in it.
Until that day it did not.
Dragons may change the chemistry of stones; stones may change the chemistry of dragons. On that cold March day in 1791, the crimson flowing deaths of its inhabitants changed the chemistry of Zaharen Yce forever.
A smaller mind might describe the years that followed as accursed, for both Réz and her former home. She herself began to believe in witches and curses, in all manner of jabbering ghouls, although that might have been merely the onset of her madness sinking its first juicy tendrils into her.
The castle now existed as a hulking shell. Its polarity had been reversed, rejecting all magic, rejecting Réz herself. To her dismay and eventual fury, but for one solitary exception—when she was very old and used her considerable skills to trick the Dragon of Time, a trick she could only use once—she could not even return to it in its pristine stat
e. She was tainted, verboten.
Even with trickery, she would never encounter her husband or daughter again.
Every Weave, another piece of her torn away, more blood, more anguish. Each one diminished her by degrees.
She devised a plan to write a letter to her younger self, a letter explaining what was to come. She’d done it before, long ago, and it seemed to be the best she could manage now.
But when she did, nothing changed. She would write to herself, mail it years before, and wait.
Nothing changed.
Write the letter, hide it in places Honor Carlisle might look.
Nothing ever changed.
Write the letter, send it to Lia, begging for help.
Nothing.
Réz realized she did not remember fixing this. She never remembered fixing it.
Somehow she had ended up in the wrong ripple of time, blighted. Alone. She could not change this ending.
Her years dragged on. To her credit, and with a great deal of unspoken, bitter turmoil, she attempted to live peacefully. She attempted to live in anonymity, far from England and Germany, far from her own brutal kind. But Réz was a wounded beast with a heart ripped in two, and a Gift that never ceased to carve away at her.
An empty womb and ever empty arms: Her ragged soul began to shrivel. So perhaps the madness was an inevitable thing.
Madness whispered to her in the voice of Draumr, that long-lost wicked diamond:
One lassst chance. Sssaaaave the Weaves, ssssaaaaave them. Go back and kill the English before they come. Before any of thisss ever sssstarts. Kill the English drákon before they kill him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Within the crystalline and dreamlike walls of the castle known as the Tears of Ice, no one called me princesse.
I moved through the hallways more an apparition than royalty, content to mostly observe for now, and that suited me. I enjoyed it.
There were footmen who followed me when they thought they should, and maids who found me formal gowns, robes à la française from God knew where or when, and helped me dress in them. Men and women either full human or else with faint emanations of drákon—carmine lips, translucent skin, movements a tad too swift or supple for ordinary Others—served me breakfasts and teas and dinners, and opened thick wooden doors for me, and brought me figs and wine as I gazed out from any of the crenulated terraces.
Over the centuries the quartzite had begun to melt. That’s why the fortress was named what it was, for the frozen rivers of crystals that dripped from casements and corners. Viewed from any approach, it was a castle of sugar cubes that had been caught in the rain: sparkling pale and set improbably at the top edge of a very bleak crest, jutting out without concern for gravity or weather or even time itself.
Zaharen Yce persuaded anyone who viewed it that, just like the mountains, it had always been there, and always would be there, and the melting, glinting rivers down its walls would always flow.
Inside, however, its hidden heart was revealed.
The heart of the castle was more than stone walls, more than even the sumptuous furnishings or the ghost-colored bumps of diamonds studding every room and corridor. The heart was a constant hum of energy, ever present beneath all the metal and stone songs, all the murmured conversations and footfalls and noises of a place that held over two hundred residents.
It was hard to hear at first. In fact, for my first few days and nights there, I missed it entirely. I did get the sense of something beneath it all, some manner of elemental cohesion that eluded me, the newcomer, the woman who’d descended to the mountain upon the back of the Alpha.
“Just listen,” counseled my would-be husband, as we lay in the big canopy bed at night. “Just still your soul and listen, Réz, and you’ll riddle it out.”
“Riddle what out?” I asked, fretful, because the hum surrounded me and the dragon inside me knew it, even if I heard only the more commonplace melodies of the hearth.
“Riddle out why you belong here.” He smiled at me from his pillow, the firelight a dim burnish on the window glass behind him.
“I already know why.”
“Yes. But beyond me, river-girl, and beyond even the bond of our feelings. Beyond all that is this place. This sky and mountain, where our kind first were created. We’re perched in the middle of it, right now, that invisible edge between heaven and earth. We’re immersed in that ancient magic, the strongest magic known. It fills our pores and shines out of us, every one.”
“Our pores,” I said. “Egad.”
His laughter was a rumble that shook the bed. He leaned closer with a sly, seductive smile, and the silky blue fall of his hair slipped from his shoulders to mine.
“Our every organ.” His hand found my breast, a bare brushing of skin to skin that gave me goose bumps. His fingers began a downward slide, his hand turning over, the backs of his nails dragging lightly over my flesh. “Our every … little … bit …”
“Oh,” I said, or something that only sounded like that, because by then he had found the most sensitive part of me, and it seemed like magic indeed, that he could touch me and stroke me and fill me with joy with just his hand.
How could I still my soul when he tormented me like that?
But it did happen. I think the first time I felt truly in harmony with my new world was the fifth night, when I stood outside on the terrace closest to our tower bedroom, a half-finished glass of wine in hand. We’d made love and then slept, and then I awoke and he didn’t. I hadn’t been able to fall back asleep.
The terrace was empty of anything but stone and a few cold, unlit torches. No doubt there were eager footmen lurking somewhere nearby, ready to spring into action and open more doors for me, but it was late, and luck was on my side. I had managed to elude them.
The wine was white, dry but not too dry, and the chill of the night only made it more fine. I stood beneath an endless silver ocean of stars; the mountains were silvered with them, jagged silver with glossy black shadows, and the gold ring on my hand shone silver too.
I transferred the wine to my other hand. I pressed the one that wore Alexandru’s ring to my belly.
“Are you there?” I whispered. “Are you in this time, little baby, or no?”
My body gave no answer. The ring was a bright hard gleam against the woolen weave of my robe.
But … there was the something, rising up all around me. I held motionless, my breath caught, straining to gather it closer.
It was noiseless. It was infinite. It was an awareness, a light, better and brighter and more beautiful than even the frosted fall from the stars. I closed my eyes and let it warm me, let Réz the dragon lift her head and stretch her wings and sigh, yes, yes, this is what we need.
I opened my eyes again, and the range of mountains before me stretched up to claw the glowing firmament, and the air was thick with unvoiced music, and the magic bathed me, even my pores.
We had been born here. All dragons, from all times and places, first came from here, this soundless, slender breadth of Milky Way and rocky tors.
I’d been lost as a girl in a river, and lost in other ways ever since.
No longer.
“I’m home,” I realized aloud, and Zaharen Yce offered her silent accord.
Eight days passed. Eight days, nine nights. I moved from being an apparition in the halls to a creature of denser substance, one who felt she had a better right to wear the decidedly foreign, old-fashioned satin gowns that shimmered with crystals and beads and countless tiny sequins. To have meals served to her, or doors swung wide at her approach. I met the eyes of the drákon who moved through their lives around me and began to notice their patterns. Who spoke with whom. Who smiled, who did not. Which of the female nobles would regard me from over their fans, and which would turn their faces away and not regard me at all.
I didn’t worry about them. Certainly I’d already assessed every eligible maiden of the fortress—and a few who weren’t so eligible but looked dagg
ers at me anyway—and decided I could defeat them all. I was small, yes, but ardently determined to hold my place, and perhaps the other females sensed this. Or perhaps it simply wasn’t the Zaharen way to fight openly. No one challenged me. No one precisely welcomed me, either, barring the servants.
But it was fine. I was home, so everything was fine.
I toured the castle slowly, savoring each chamber or gallery or corridor, tracing my fingers along the diamond walls when I could, otherwise just listening, holding my soul in quiet. My favorite room, besides our bedroom, was the one Sandu had described to me back in Spain, the one that would host our wedding. It was called the Convergence Room, and I think it was one of the few places in the castle that really, obviously wasn’t meant for humans. It was simply too yawning big and high.
That, and there were dragons painted upon the ceiling. Olden dragons, medieval, I guessed, roughly styled into the plaster but still brilliant with life. The stars painted in regular intervals between them shone with six points; it was a hidden heraldry, there for only those who knew to look up and discern it.
Alexandru had said there was no true wealth left to the Zaharen, but I found it difficult to believe. Every single room seemed to glisten with rare furniture and tapestries, huge paintings, gold-dipped chandeliers.
Ah, yes. The gold.
Like the diamonds in the mortar, gold leaf had been applied liberally practically everywhere but the water closets.
I’d not noticed it so much before in my Weaves, probably because my focus then was always Sandu—or else Weaving swiftly away again. Barring our plain tower room, gold sang and sang throughout the inner sanctum of the castle. Even in hallways with no natural source of light there would be some shimmery reflection against the ceiling from a window unseen, a door, some dusky polished glimmer to guide me on.
The most impressively gilded room of all was the royal Great Room, where the prince would sit and listen to the petitions of his people.
