The Time Weaver

Chapter Seventeen

I've met someone. A man. Adrakon, I mean.

Oh?

A prince, actually. I...he's...he's really quite wonderful. In fact, I love him. So much.

Another cup, my dear?

What? No. No, thank you. Did you hear me, Papa? I've found my mate. It's Alexandru of the Zaharen. We're engaged.

Ah.

I live in his castle . we have a little .

Yes.

...you'll be so ...pleased...she's—

—Lia would toss in her sleep, frowning—

Tell us the truth, Honor. Tell me. Are you involved somehow with thesanf inimicus?

... mmm ...

Honor! Tell me!

—Her heart rate would increase. Behind her closed lids, her pupils would begin to dilate— I'm sorry. It will be swift. But it's best if you go now.

—Her blood would be changing, chemical changes. The magic in her, the animal, would be heating every cell. Her fingers would clench her sheets—

No, no, I don't want this. I've changed my mind, I don't agree to this! Let go of me—he's here! My lord! My lord, I beg you! What happened? Tell me what happened! Tell me what you did to

my—

Nothing happened, Josephine. Before I could touch her, she Wove away. Even in hersleep,she Wove away.

God help us.

No, Gervase. We won't wait for God.

—Lia would open her eyes, gasping, and lose control—

Her dreams had begun to twist out of shape.

Perhaps it wouldn't have been so troublesome had she not been sleeping alone for so long. Zane had been gone for three months, eighteen days, eleven hours. None of the clocks in the apartments were ever wound precisely and so none would ever chime in unison; she didn't know how many minutes to add to her tally.

Zane had been gone too long. But it always felt like that.

It seemed to her that she managed to muddle through her days well enough. She had a household to run, however unusual it might be. She had servants and shopping and even lent her hand in the kitchen from time to time, although this tended to silently enrage Mateo, the cook. When she'd had enough fuming, sidelong glances and burned soup with supper, she retreated back to her own domain.

Plaster and gilt. Gemstones and silk. A missing husband, and a daughter whose growing absences were no less worrisome.

In her darker, grimmer moments Lia would ponder the notion that she wasn't entirely sure what she was about, what any of them were about. She'd set her little family on this path because the dreams told her she would. She'd had Zane steal Honor because the dreams revealed Honor was stolen by Zane. She'd moved them all to Barcelona because in the dreams they were in Barcelona. She'd even put her husband at risk because the dreams had him with the sanf , and those were the worst dreams of all. Thank God they were short; she'd never once had to suffer through more than a few minutes of Zane immersed in his own very dark moments, surrounded by those who plotted to eliminate her kind. Becoming one of them.

And he was good at it. Naturally he was, the infamous Shadow of Mayfair, a man still with a bounty of over four hundred pounds on his head back in London—she checked the foreign periodicals at the circulating library, which were refreshed every other month—a man like that was going to be very, very convincingly wicked.

A few spoken exchanges. No sight, of course, in the dreams. The words were enough.

—like this, see? You hold the knife the other way, they're going to have time to Turn.

Yes, I see.

It's the small ones you need to worry most about. The females. Remove the head, or remove the heart. It's a lot of blood if you—

Whenever Lia awoke from one of these dreams, these particularly nasty glimpses into that Other World she'd sent him to, she would have to leave her bed, and sometimes her room. And sometimes the apartments entirely.

More than once she'd discovered she'd Turned to smoke the second her eyes had opened. She'd be halfway to the moon, a wisp of almost nothing material, before she felt safe enough to Turn again.

Up there in the sky, she was protected. Nothing was going to harm her there. The city below was a smeary fretwork of light, and no man or bullet or arrow could fly as high as she. Even the dreams couldn't chase her if she ventured high enough; they died without the thick miasma of the earth to support them.

At least, that's what she wanted to believe.

On especially bad nights she'd fly far, far over the sea. She'd imagine what it would be like if she kept going. If she just didn't turn back. If she managed to hug the curve of the globe she might one day end up back in the Antilles, and if she landed there, he might be there too, waiting for her. He might be standing on the white sand crescent beach that had backed against their home, with coconut trees shading the roof, and the enormous turtles that swam, undisturbed, in the warm shallows close to shore.

Every year, sea turtles were born on the beach. They would hatch and crawl toward the water as quickly as they could, and there would be Zane, that dread wicked Shadow, guarding them from the stray dogs that wanted to come, or the gulls, his island trousers rolled up and sand sprinkling his calves and his hands out as he coaxed them forward, as if by his voice he could herd them more quickly to the safety of the waves. And then Lia would walk out in her bare feet past the deck, and all the little baby turtles would scramble faster.

If she just kept flying, she might see that again.

But that was not where her future lay. Not yet.

Zane was in France. She knew that because he'd taken great pains to keep her informed of where he might be next, and what he might accomplish. They were both excited about the fact that he'd finally broken through to the upper echelon of the sanf inimicus , that he'd finally been invited to hover in the orbit of their leader.

Their excitement had, naturally, taken different courses. Zane had delivered the news over tea, his voice an unaffected murmur, his eyes a feral gleam in the cool civility of the Blue Parlor of their palace suites, which had been done up in aquamarine and azure, and had the turquoise rug from Morocco spread at an angle across the civilized floor.

They'd made love on that rug, back in the beach house. Too many times to count, she'd been on her back on that rug, or he on his, perspiration and kisses and slippery limbs and laughter. She'd stared at it as he told her, found the swirl in the corner that always reminded her of a rose, though it wasn't, and kept her gaze there as he talked.

Because when his eyes shone like that, yellow and fierce, it shook her to the core. It reminded her of all that he was and was not: human, not drakon. The entire sum of her soul, and just a man. Who, despite the force of her ferocious, monstrous love for him, was never going to have an armor of scales or the elusive trick of smoke.

Who was in mortal danger because of her.

Stupid, selfish Lia.

She'd sent him straight into the mouth of the beast. And he had only sipped his tea and smiled at her when she lifted her stricken eyes to his. He'd leaned over the tea table and kissed her quickly, before she could voice any of the useless protests that were ready to come.

She had begged him to join the sanf inimicus. And now she was begging him to get out. She'd never wanted him so close to their center.

He wouldn't do it. All this time invested, all this hatred, and he would no sooner leave now than he would leave Lia forever, because her cause had become his, just as everything in their married lives had done.

He could find the leader, he told her. He could get close. And then ... he could do what he'd been known to do back in the days before they'd wed. Mad King George's hair-raising bounty wasn't entirely without cause.

But he'd been gone now for three months, eighteen days ... twelve hours. And she didn't like to sleep without him.

Her dreams were twisting. New endings, shorter interludes, more often snippets than entire scenes. They were losing their cohesion as well. Or at least her understanding of their cohesion.

Yet Darkfrith was a corpse, over and over.

Different causes. Fire. Desertion. Ambush. Poisoned wells. They all amounted to the same deathly conclusion, including the new one she'd had tonight. The one that wrapped around her in slow creeping horror. The one that had felt so,so real.

An old man talking, his accent thick and coarse. A girl, better bred. The smell of grass overwhelming again, of rocks and dirt. The buzzing drone of a horsefly or a wasp.

Lia'd actually felt the heat of the sun beating down on her head as they spoke.

Watch it, luv. You don't never want to go in there.

I wasn't.

The girl was quick, defensive. She sounded young enough to feel guilty at her trespass, old enough to be sly.

Yeah? 'Cause it looked to me like you was just about to scale that fence. Can't you read the sign, girlie?

What sign?

That one there. The one wot says 'Danger, Influenza' in them big red letters. You blind?

A silence. Then the girl spoke more slowly. Is that what happened to them? Influenza?

Aye. Every single one of 'em, dead as a doornail. Whole village wiped out. Manor house too, buggering marquesses and earls. The man spat, very clearly. Cursed place.

But...that was long ago. Wasn't it? Years past.

Aye. Years and years. Funny thing about curses. About 'ow people don't forget.

Surely...after all this time...

Nah. You listen to me, now. Darkfrith's a dead man's land. Never a reason in the world to climb that fence, you 'ear? Not unless you got a taste for an early grave. Go on, then. Get come to your mum.

Her voice turned surly. I haven't got a mum.

The man spat again Bugger you, then—just buggering go.

Amalia gazed up into the darkness of her bedroom. She did not Turn to smoke. She stared very hard at where she knew the decorative cornice lining the upper length of the wall at the foot of her bed would be, although it was nearly impossible to see, just a suggestion of molded acorns and vines and birds highlighted by the streetlamps shining beyond the balcony doors.

She didn't know the old man in this dream. But the girl . the girl had sounded almost exactly as Honor had once. Fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Honor, or perhaps a little younger, although Lia had never heard a younger Honor's voice. Only the cadence was different, the vowels a tad more drawn. It lent the girl a refined, brooding tone, one Lia remembered well from her brief stint in finishing school: The very most blue-blooded girls spoke in such a way, those gimlet-eyed, drawling girls born of coroneted dukes and princes and earls. Had Lia spent more time in human society, she herself might have spoken the same way.

This female was not Honor. But who the devil else could it have been?

Amalia sat up. She slipped from the bed, found her wrap and walked silently to her daughter's chamber.

When they'd first arrived, the rooms that were to become Honor's had been decorated in a theme that Lia had privately named Bloody Awful Red. The walls were red, the rugs were red. The chairs and divan and bed covers, all red. The only relief came from glimpses of the waxed linden floor, and the muddy yellow accents that might have once been more goldenrod, but now resembled dried mustard.

She'd allowed Honor to choose the new decor. She'd guided her new adolescent daughter away from the more lurid bright purple she'd seemed initially to favor, and Honor—so biddable then!—had instead decided upon walls of pale, cool lavender, with accents of apple green and seafoam and pearl, and real gilt applied along all the edging, because they could afford it. And because petite, timid Honor had held Lia's hand and confided softly that it sang her to sleep like a harp.

Not tonight though, apparently. Lia stood at the threshold of the doorway and knew that adult Honor wasn't sleeping in her bed now, harp-gilt or no.

It was the second night in a row she'd been missing. It was senseless to fret over a Time Weaver's unexpected absences; she'd long ago learned that. Honor was here and then she wasn't, and that was simply the nature of who she was. Who she'd turned out to be. She'd be back here again when she was here again.

When she was sixteen, she'd vanished for an entire ten and a half months. Months. Liahad fretted then; she'd wept and worried, and even Zane had developed a habit of pacing through her bedroom twice a day, checking.

When she'd Woven home again, she claimed she had no memory of where she'd been, or when. She seemed sincerely astonished that it was winter now instead of spring, and what had happened to summer? And why did her gowns no longer fit? Or her stockings or slippers?

She'd never vanished for so long again, and she'd never gotten those memories of her sixteenth year back. Or so she'd said.

Lia'd never had real cause to doubt her daughter's word ... but perhaps there was a sliver of the Shadow in her, after all. They'd been married long enough to grow saturated in each other's ways, even the secret ones. She loved him for his light and his dark.

And the dark Shadow inside Lia whispered,She's not away right now. She's in hiding. Hiding from what?

As if it were a just-right cue in a play, a faint, thin scratching came from the direction of the front door, the sound of a single fingernail being drawn slowly down the wood, so very small and furtive Lia knew none of the servants would hear it.

None of them were meant to. It was a sound designed specifically for Lia, for her dragon hearing.

She worked the series of locks without needing to see them, her fingers knowing the proper twists and turns. They were oiled every month; she made sure of that. They produced only the barest of clicks.

She cracked open the door, acknowledged the figure standing there in the unlit hall with a nod of her head, then shut it again.

He waited for her on the park bench, just where he always did. Day or night, rain or sun, they met in the same place, on this bench, underneath this cypress tree. The path that led to the bench was gravel and not very popular; there was a greenhouse farther down the way containing koi in pools and giant tropical flowers, but it had a cobbled lane fronting it and that was the way most people took.

It was a wooden bench, and the slats were still moist from the rain of before, but it wasn't so bad. He was a child used to discomfort, and used to dismissing it. Up until the Girl had invited them all into her gorjo church, he had never guessed what it had been like to have a fixed roof over his head. They had wagons, his clan, and they moved about at will. But for some reason the elders had decided the discarded church would become their new center, and the boy Adiran was no longer lulled to sleep by the sway of his pallet, or the clopping of horses' hooves, constant in his ears.

He had a real mattress now, though, and the rain never leaked through the tiles to tap him on the head the way it would before in the wagon. Those things were pleasant.

Adiran unsheathed his knife and began to clean his nails, alert to the night sounds of the park while he waited. There were bugs and rats scurrying about, and the three-bowled fountain nearby making its muted splish-splish-splash as the water dribbled over the edges of its basins. A pair of toads were grunting in the underbrush. There were larger sorts of rats hanging about as well, human rats, but he knew how to avoid them. They lingered in the densest of the shadows, men looking for women, men looking for other men . or boys.

Adiran was especially skilled at avoiding those.

It was a large enough park that most of that sort lingered at the other end, closer to the back gates, and anyway there were plenty of places to hide, so he never truly worried. Yet when he first heard the footsteps coming down the path he tensed instinctively, ready to bolt.

But they were her footsteps. He'd trained himself to recognize her gait, more subtle than a cat's. In fact, he'd spent a good many hours in private trying to imitate it, with moderate success. If he could learn to move as silently as the Lady did, who managed it bound up in her gorjo skirts and baubles, who knew where barefoot, unadorned Adiran might go? It was a good trick, especially for a woman. He admired all good tricks.

Behind the cat-tread sound of the Lady came a new one, also stealthy, but far louder than hers. He shifted forward on the bench, searching the shadows. There she was, a female shape down the meander of the path—and there beyond her loomed the other shape, clearly a man.

The Lady heard him too. She stopped, turned about. The man did not stop. He walked closer and closer.

Adiran stood, then climbed atop the bench for a better view. He'd seen this happen before, different versions of this. He wondered sometimes if the Lady had them meet out here just so it might happen. It seemed like there were plentiful other places around town that would have worked as well as this bench, places that were convenient to the midnight vendors offering sticks of grilled fish and mugs of sangria, for instance. But the Lady preferred the park.

The man was speaking to her. Adiran couldn't quite make it out, but he imagined her shaking her head no , and then her murmured no .

The man's voice grew more insistent. When he moved his arm to grab hers Adiran did see what came next, because there was this peculiar, unexplained flash of light that showed him. That, too, had happened before. The light was tinted golden and flared very briefly, like she'd scratched a match to life but an exceptionally bright one, right up by her face, but he'd never smelled the sulfur, so he still wasn't sure how she did it. It was another very good trick.

In that frozen second of illumination he saw the man's heavy face, his cravat and jacket lapels and the slope of one shoulder. The Lady had her back to Adiran. She wore a shawl with a long fringe.

Then everything plunged black again and Adiran heard a distinctivesnap , and the man screamed.

Really screamed, high as a girl. He hit the gravel with his knees, keening and cursing, and the Lady walked away from him without another word, without any indication whatsoever of being rushed.

"There you are," she said to Adiran, as if he'd been hiding. "Shall we walk?"

"Yes," he said, and remembered to add, "my lady."

He jumped off the bench and stuck the knife back into the waistband of his trousers. He couldn't help a quick, backward look at the man, just to see if he had gotten up to follow them, but he couldn't see well enough to tell. Since the Lady strolled on in her tranquil, cat-footed way, he assumed the man was no longer a threat.

He wondered which of his bones she'd broken.

"Adiran," said the Lady in her velvet voice, and he recalled himself at once.

"There's a man," he said. "Staying with her."

"What manner of man?" she asked, not even sounding surprised.

"Tall, dark-haired. Gray eyes." He dared an upward glance at her. "One of you," he said.

She looked very deliberately back down at him. They were approaching a more open section of the park and he could see her face, because the trees had thinned and his eyes were swift to adapt to the wan city light.

That blond beauty, remarkable and foreign, and that gaze that was brown and black both, bottomless in a way that made him feel all queer inside when he held it too long, like he was staring into a mirror composed entirely of inside-out stars. Everything reversed, and strange, because in those moments he felt that he was grown and she was not, that she was small and charmed and needed his protection.

Then he blinked, and he was a Roma boy again, and she was the gorjo Lady.

"What is the man's name?" she asked.

He'd heard it, but it was another foreign thing to him, hard on his tongue. "Zan-du."

"And how long has he been there?"

"Two nights."

"Including tonight?"

"Yes."

"In the same room?" she inquired mildly.

"Yes," he answered, with some force.

She was silent, walking. He stubbed his toe on a rock and hopped a few steps, then went back and kicked it off the path.

"And today," he said, catching up, "she had another bleeding, a big one. Biggest I've ever seen. It took a very long while to clean her up."

"With the man still there."

"He was. He wouldn't leave her. They've been alone together a lot ," he emphasized, in case the Lady had misunderstood his meaning. She seemed far too unruffled by his news, wrapped in her shawl, her lips gently pursed. "If they were of my tribe, they would have been forced to wed by now."

"Indeed," the Lady said, thoughtful, and slowed to a halt.

They were within a stone's throw of the front gates, which were always left open no matter the hour, so what was the purpose of them, anyway? The trees planted here were palms. Their fronds rustled with a breeze that never even made it to the gardens below, they grew so high.

Adiran and the Lady stood in the shadow of one of those palms. He watched the contrast of paler gray and darker gray swaying back and forth along the path and up her dress, slipping like a shroud over her shoulders and face.

"Thank you," she said, and he knew this was the end of their encounter. She held out a hand to him. He opened his and accepted the coins she gave him without glancing at them, without counting them or testing them, which was such a violation of all he'd been taught that it was a good thing none of his family was there to see. He'd be cuffed for certain.

But she looked at him with those black-star eyes. And he didn't wish to insult her by counting. She smiled at him. "Go eat, Adiran. We'll meet another time."

He swept her a bow he'd copied from this cavalier he'd followed once for a whole day, just to see where the fellow went. Then he took off running, glad to be free again.