The Time Weaver

by Shana Abe

  Young or old, it seemed that drákon males seethed with the instinct to seduce, not merely sexually but intellectually, emotionally; without even trying, they could hit every pitch-perfect note. Unsuspecting females tumbled like skittles in their paths.

  Poor Honor, because this male would be no different. Ebony hair, which didn’t happen in her tribe, but the same sinuous elegance, the same instinctive sensuality that lured the eye and kept it there, appreciating every last detail.

  The same lust too, she thought. Prince Alexandru and her daughter clung to each other like wool in winter static. If they pulled apart, Lia was sure she’d see sparks.

  Useless to ask if they were already lovers. She knew that they were, but even if she hadn’t, she would have guessed by the intimacy of their postures, how they leaned into each other, how even shaken, he hovered over her, and even drowsy, she accepted it.

  Honor, the timorous child who’d never relaxed enough to fully welcome physical touch, not even a buss on the cheek.

  Oh, Lia thought, watching them, aching, let this be true. Let what they have be real and true.

  Honor looked so vulnerable. She wore no paint, and her hair had been pinned into an uneven pile that tumbled down her back, and the style of the gown she wore was both too old for her and too young. A wedge of lace from her shift showed past the edge of her bodice, as if she’d had no maids to help her dress.

  When she lifted her eyes to Lia’s again, some of the sleep had vanished from her gaze.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “Wait,” said Lia. “There’s more.”

  Then she gave them both the second letter, the one that sealed their fates.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lia,

  You don’t know me. My name is Réz. I used to be Honor Carlisle.

  My Natural Time now is well ahead of yours. I’m older than you, than I ever knew you to be. I live in what you would call the former Colonies.

  I’m trapped. My life has dwindled to a pinprick. I survive in individual moments. I eat, I sleep. Every third day I walk to the village market to wander the stalls and the chitter-chatter colonists stare at me, five hundred forty-seven steps there. Five hundred forty-seven steps back. I count the alien insects that creep across my floor. I sleep.

  I sleep.

  Even awake, I’m so tired I don’t have the power to lift the carving knife I keep ready on the kitchen table, right there in front of me, such a friendly shape. I can’t even lift it to finish this misery. Everything is gray and mud.

  I cannot remember the precise day my life ended. I’ve tried so hard my head aches and my entire body trembles, but my mind is in tatters. So much about those years elude me now. But in the sum spring of 1792 1791 the English are going to attack Zaharen Yce. They are going to kill everyone.

  It’s been decades since the assault on the castle, and as I’ve said, my life has dwindled. Details drift away from me. I’ll tell you, though, I’ll tell you what I remember most are the screams. Even as I pen this, I still hear them how they

  The weight of my daughter in my arms just before she was torn from me. Her head beneath my chin. Her hands around my neck.

  I had a daughter.

  I Wove away that day. I did not mean to I swear to God I never meant to i would never have but it happened and i couldn’t stop

  They’re all dead. I cannot Weave back. Every time I try, I’m thrown here again. The best I may hope is to Weave sometime near you before it happens and post this letter. I’m enclosing something else, a declaration I stole from Darkfrith, the one time I was able to Weave there before they stopped me. I found it in the desk of the Alpha. I don’t know when that was, but I know I never saw it before that day.

  My tatty mind keeps thinking. I think and think, and the one phrase that never leaves me, that remains my constant miserable companion is this: sanf inimicus. And by the stars, Lia, sometimes that phrase seems more like deliverance.

  The things in my head, Mama. The hobgoblin, nattering things.

  Please. If you ever loved me at all, I beg you to please save my family.

  —Réz

  Last Princess of the Zaharen

  “Would you like to know how it’s going to happen?”

  Lia’s voice floated with casual nonchalance through the parlor, which seemed very hot to me. I did not know why the room had to be so hot; it was nearing winter, and the sunbeams slanting in held at best a tone of ambered coolness. Motes of dust danced through them, spinning their own small jigs.

  I’d already read Réz’s hobgoblin letter. Read it, absorbed it, let the horror of it pass into Alexandru’s hands.

  “How what will happen?” I asked, unable quite to tear my gaze from the motes. It seemed to me they were dancing to the unearthly poem of Draumr, keeping time with its funeral dirge.

  “The manner in which they try to kill you,” she said. “Your English parents, I mean. Would you like to know? It’s in the late afternoon. It’s summer in Darkfrith, and lilies are in bloom. There’ll be a measure of laudanum in your tea. Your mother will hand you the cup. You’re going to drink it. You speak of missing them—of your prince—and I believe you were even attempting to tell them about your daughter—”

  “Our daughter,” Sandu whispered, less than a sound, a scant parting of the air.

  “—but the laudanum is potent, and you fall asleep first. They plan to behead you, which you may recall is our traditional method of handling drákon enemies. Your mother will cry, your father won’t let her watch. They both agreed to it, though.”

  I wrenched my gaze back to Lia. The cooling sun put fire in her hair.

  “I remember that,” I said. A pulse of fright reached me, breaking past the numbed horror of the letter. “I remember Sandu telling me in the meadow … how I’d go to them, to tell them we were engaged …”

  “In an effort,” she continued steadily, “to soothe your mother’s sensibilities, they plan to use an ax instead of the Alpha’s teeth. It’s really all very civilized.”

  “But I live.” I jerked a hand toward the letter Sandu still held.

  “Yes. You Weave away, even after falling asleep. You Weave back here, I assume. But the English know about you now, that you’re aligned with the Zaharen. After you go to Darkfrith, they know, and they know also that you’re sanf. The proposal for unifying the tribes is merely a ruse, one they decide they no longer need. They come here to destroy you.”

  “I’m not—”

  “But you will be,” bit out my second mother, a sentence so sharp it stilled even the motes.

  I faced Sandu, desperate. “What does it say? Can you Read it?”

  His eyes scanned the page again, gray and unfathomable. The funeral song of Draumr groaned between us, slinking and slithering around us, and it was all I could do not to go to him to pull him close. I’d gone hollow inside. I needed to feel him, his heat. His life.

  “Nothing,” he said at last. He looked up at me. “It says nothing else. I think it must be the entire truth.”

  “It can’t be,” I burst out. “That can’t be our future! That can’t be me!”

  I didn’t have to go to him; the prince came to me. He cradled me in his arms and pressed my cheek to his chest. I was breathing too quickly. The room began to blur.

  The end, your end, the end, moaned Draumr.

  “That is not going to be your future,” agreed Lia, and with that single statement, Draumr suspended, an abrupt, waiting hush.

  “Come stand before me, both of you,” she said.

  Like it had never desired to be anything else, the shattered diamond song swelled back to life, wrapped around Lia’s command so that we had no choice but to obey it, because now it was lovely and long and persuasive.

  She looked us over with a sigh. “I’ve had too much a hand in this, I think. I never meant to muddle things so. It happened. I knew you were destined to be with Alexandru, that it would enrage the English, and thought to circumvent it. I kne
w about the cathedral, Honor, and let it be, because it was in Spain still, and I thought, well, at least she’s staying here. But perhaps, in attempting to avoid the future I dreamed, I’ve only caused it to happen. Had I left you in Darkfrith, had I let you grow up there, or been killed there—” She broke off, biting her lip. “Maybe none of this would have occurred. I honestly don’t know.” A hand lifted to her forehead; she seemed tired suddenly, thin and waifish. “The future has always been dark to me.”

  “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 Joséphine 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. “Réz cannot live here with you,” she explained with awful kindness. “Réz cannot come to be. It’s Réz 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. Réz’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 drákon 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 Réz 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 drákon 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 Ho
nor.

  “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 drákon. 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 Réz 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.