The Time Weaver

Chapter Twenty

I thought I should return to the apartments to say farewell to Lia. It wasn't as if I never meant to see her again, ever, but there was no question that I would be leaving, and I honestly wasn't certain how she would react to that. For two females whose Gifts shoved us both willy-nilly ahead in time—as differing as those Gifts might have been—we seldom discussed my future. I'd been living with her and Zane for over seven years as their daughter. It was a convenient fiction for us, I suppose, but our story was beginning to show its age.

My age.

Most young women of twenty-one, human or drakon, would have wed by now and even borne children. At the very least, they would have been courted. There would have been balls or assembly hall dances to attend, teas and posies and flattering comments about the color of their eyes. Back in Darkfrith it seemed there had been a wedding capping every week between spring and autumn. More often than not, the grand ballroom at Chasen Manor hosted the receptions deep into the night. I'd been to some as a girl, and those I did not attend I could still hear, the music and laughter and champagne toasts wafting over the treetops of Blackstone Woods, right in through my bedroom window.

Those things were never going to happen for me. I had known that the instant I'd finished reading my very first letter to myself.

But I was going to have something. A December wedding, I guessed, which sounded passable. Better than a wedding, I would have a companion. A prince. And even though I'd told myself about it years earlier, my Weaves and my Natural Time had at long last caught up with each other, so now it had the weight of reality. The prince of the Zaharen had found me, had courted me, and if our courting had involved no tea or posies, my heart was stolen just the same ... whether I liked it or not.

My suitor was a drakon who perceived me without flattery, who'd called me stupid and stubborn—perhaps not entirely without cause—and who liked me anyway. An Alpha who would ask me to marry him every single day for over a year. A dragon who'd fished me from a river and from the sky, and kissed me like he was starved for me, like I'd never tire him or bore him or aggravate him enough for him to step back and say, No, wait, I was wrong. Who was ready to claim me despite the consequences, because at last he realized that I belonged to him, even though I had known it since I was a child.

After all these years, I was no longer going to be alone.

So yes, I was leaving Barcelona and Lia. And Zane too, wherever he was. It wouldn't be without a measure of sorrow, but I was going.

I would be riding a dragon home.

Sandu had desired to come with me to the apartments, but I'd convinced him I was better off going alone. He had to go steal back his own belongings anyway, which he'd left in the belfry at the king's residence. We could meet up again at my Casa de Cors Secrets, whose secret hearts were about to lack one from their sum.

"Anyway, you said you were eager to get back," I reminded him, drawing a finger lightly down the intriguing bumps of his rib cage. "That every hour away from the castle mattered."

We were both in my bed, both disrobed this time, with the sheets drawn up over our heads. I smiled at him beneath them, a fellow conspirator tangled up in his limbs.

He trapped my hand, held it to his chest. "Yes. But suppose something happens? It's better if we stay together."

"What might happen? I'll get struck by a carriage while walking there? Horses run the other way from me. It's only Lia. She's gentle as a sparrow, I promise."

"Yes," he said again, and nothing more.

"Oh, no," I groaned, and buried my head against his shoulder. "Not you as well." "Pardon?"

"I should charge a shilling every time I have to see that expression," I grumbled. "That dreamy, happy, ridiculous look men get woolgathering over her. I'll call it 'Lady Lia's Lovers' Lost Look.' You know her, don't you?"

"No," he said, turning his face away from me, gazing up at the sheet. "Not really. I met her briefly, back when I was first brought up to the castle. She and her husband were there. It's how we first discovered each other, the different tribes. Amalia and Zane found us in the mountains."

"She's very beautiful," I said.

"She was."

"Hmm."

His lips pressed into a smile. "Honor. I wasseven ." He rolled over to face me again, twisting the covers, yanking them down so that both our heads were exposed. "Perhaps she was beautiful, but you ." he leaned down, placed a feathery kiss upon the corner of my mouth, "... as it happens, are mine."

"That makes me the most beautiful," I insisted against his lips, unmoved.

"Of course."

It was a while yet before we left the bed.

In the end, Sandu had agreed to let me go back to the palace apartments alone. I think he sensed that there was more to my refusal than I was admitting, and was chivalrous enough to let things be. We parted ways at the door of the cathedral. After he bowed to me and walked off I lingered against the wall, my back to the limestone, watching him merge with the Others on the sidewalk and down the street, sending a flock of pigeons drowsing on a roof across the way into an explosion of flight. I watched for a good long while, until he turned a corner and I couldn't see him any longer.

The truth was, I didn't want him with me because I didn't know what Lia might say to him. If she might manage to convince him not to take me. She'd always been so determined to keep us here in Spain. She was beautiful, and damned clever; I dreaded the thought she'd be able to cite some ominous Future Dream and change Alexandru's mind.

But it turned out that Amalia wasn't at home. Nemesio answered the door for me—in my jittering state of excitement and dread, I'd forgotten my key—and grunted the news that the lady had left a half hour past after checking the morning mail, and had yet to return. No, he didn't know where. Yes, there was breakfast, but only if I hurried, because it'd been set out some time ago and the girl was about to take it back to the kitchen. If I'd wanted it warm, I should have been here for it when it was warm.

As his hulk of a figure clumped away from me down the corridor I realized there were some things about this life I would not miss.

And yet .

I'd spent so long here. I'd grown up here, in these rooms. And it had been nice. Mostly nice.

My bedroom was a chamber fixed in time, arranged and decorated according to the tastes of a fourteen-year-old maiden. I liked it still, it was true. The colors were restful, the gilt sang to me as prettily as it ever had.

But I was older than lavender walls and flowered curtains. I was old enough now to appreciate a plain square room with beveled windows, and precious gemstones glinting around a fireplace. A canopied bed with fur coverings, large enough for two.

I stood motionless for a moment at my doorway and simply took it all in.

I'll never have to sleep here again. I'll never have to stay trapped in here, afraid of my Weaves, ever again.

I found my valise and packed swiftly. It wasn't very large, and I could fit only three gowns into it, but I knew I'd have to hug it to me the entire time I was atop Sandu's back, plus his own satchel. Possibly he could carry them both in his talons or teeth, but I imagined that would be cumbersome. He'd already have a person sitting astride him for days. I'd hold the luggage if I could.

When I'd crammed everything in that I could and still get it closed, I went to my writing desk, pulled back my chair. I had a stack of paper and a penwork box I kept in a drawer, and to my great surprise the ink inside it was still wet.

I dipped the quill, brushed the tip of the feather under my chin, thinking, and then began to write.

Dearest Lia,

Thank you for my life. I know if Kindness and Grace dwell within me at all, they sprang from you. You have been a truly Excellent Mother. I pray you'll be pleased to know that it is through you I've found I can Love.

His name is Alexandru, and he is the Alpha of the Zaharen. You know him, and you know the castle. I hope you come to visit us there. I hope you find a mate who

I hope you can be happy.

Your daughter,

—H.

It seemed acceptable. I wondered suddenly what Sandu would Read in it were he here, and was doubly glad he wasn't.

In our years ahead I was going to have to be very careful about my writing, I supposed. It was an unnerving thought, to realize that someone might know more of me thanI did, just from a few scribbled words, even if that someone was my mate.

I sanded the note, folded it, and stood up to slip it under her door, or perhaps her pillow. But as I stood my hand brushed the stack of virgin paper before me; the sheets skidded sideways across the surface of the desk and ruffled down to the floor.

"Blast."

I bent to scoop them back up, careless. But as I bent down, I noticed one of the sheets wasn't virgin. It had writing on it. My handwriting.

I pulled it free of the rest and stared at it. A beam of sunlight falling across my hands made the letters appear bluish purple.

R.,

You are with child. Don't wait for Lia. Just go.

—R.

All the pages fell free of my numbed fingers, a soft papery rustle that blanketed the rug and the hem of my skirts, and in that brilliant splash of light, they shone like fresh fallen snow.

I decided not to tell him.

Perchance it wasn't true. Perchance it was true when I wrote it then , in the future, but it wasn't now; I was in a different ripple of time now. It seemed too enormous to comprehend. I felt no different than I had yesterday, or the day before, except for that nervous, thrilling energy that zinged through my limbs, and the more sensual awareness that I had been with a man, and so I actually wasn't the same.

Perchance it wasn't true.

But the dragon in my heart knew that it was.

Things had changed for us. That's what Future Sandu had told me. Things had changed, and Future Honor—Rez—thought our English parents would have cause to celebrate it, enough so that she would risk her life returning to the shire.

Gervase and Josephine might celebrate a grandchild.

A flutter of panic began to bloom within me. It was too soon, I told myself. Too soon for this.

I hadn't wanted a mate, but I had one. I hadn't dreamed of drowning in love, but it appeared I was going to anyway.

But this. A baby, on top of everything else ...

A strange laugh forced its way past my lips. I wasn't even certain whose child it would be, the prince who'd deflowered me or the one I was about to run away with. Did it even matter?

I crumpled the paper in my fist. I looked around, found a lamp that had been left burning, removed the glass and held the edge of the note over the flame until it caught.

The last smoking bits singed my fingers; I shook them clear. The ash fell pale and feathery, dusting the table beneath in flakes.

A voice called from beyond my closed door; it was the maid. "Senyoreta?" "Yes."

"Did you wish for a breakfast tray?"

I looked up. "Are there crumpets?"

A pause. "I'm sorry—are there what?"

"Never mind," I said, without turning around. "No breakfast today. I'm going out."

"Yes, senyoreta."

Before I left the room, I swiped my hand through the air above the ashes, and scattered the flakes to the floor.