The Time Weaver Read online

  “I brought a lantern,” he said, setting my plate before me. “If you’d like.”

  “No. This is nice.”

  “I agree.”

  He eased back to the blanket, lifted his wineglass toward me and waited until I lifted mine.

  “To fate,” he said.

  I had no ready response to that. The rims of our glasses made a ting like the crystal lustres.

  “Alexandru.”

  “Réz.”

  I hesitated. “Am I sanf?”

  “No,” he said instantly. “Never believe it.”

  I sighed in relief. The wine tasted much sweeter after that.

  He knew what would come next. She’d told him, after all, all that time ago, and then reminded him again before she’d left. And although Sandu had never yet had reason to doubt Réz on any of her so-called predictions—or more plainly, her tellings of what was to be—he found himself slightly flummoxed at this one.

  It wasn’t Réz with him now, but Honor. All the fine and resplendent months he’d spent with Réz simply did not exist for this young woman, and would not for a while to come. Yet she had Réz’s face, and Réz’s voice, and those blue-bruised eyes that never changed, that had belonged to both Réz and Honor, even scrawny little river-soaked Honor, all the while.

  So he knew it was she. He knew her scent and her flavor and the way her lashes would drift closed as he kissed her. How her hands would feel upon him. The shape of her palms, the tension of her fingers and nails. The pretty noises she would make.

  Prince Alexandru looked away from Honor Carlisle. He poured himself another glass of wine and gazed up at the shining white moon, which also never changed.

  I thought it was that the air was thinner up here, way up in these unsullied mountains of Eastern Europe. It must be why the moon seemed so extraordinarily bright, why it was becoming increasingly more difficult for me to taste the meal or fill my lungs with any measure of satisfaction.

  I thought the supper well prepared. I thought the wine refreshing.

  I thought.

  But the truth was, I ate and drank because I couldn’t force my mind to consider what else there was to do here in this isolated place, with the blanket and grasses and the languid night—and because Sandu was doing the same.

  He ate with care from his selection of dishes, one or two bites of each, leaving most of it untouched. He tried a few grains of my paella and made a face, which wrung a laugh from me.

  “It’s the saffron,” I said, holding a spoonful of rice up to my nose, inhaling with appreciation. “Another acquired taste.”

  “An English dish?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  In fact, glancing around the blanket, I realized that nothing there was English fare. It had been so long since I’d had a true English meal, I barely recalled what they had been like. I barely recalled what I had been like, a young English maiden in my corsets and frilled lace caps. She was a child from another life.

  “Crumpets,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I liked crumpets. I remember that. Toasted crumpets with jam and melted butter to fill all the little holes. We’ve not found them in Spain. I haven’t had crumpets since I was a girl.”

  “There are crumpets back at Zaharen Yce,” said Alexandru seriously.

  “Truly?”

  “The chef prepares them just for you.”

  The unfolding thing in my chest opened wider, a trapped dragon waking, stretching under his gaze.

  He flicked a stray lock of hair from his cheek with a frown. “I’m sorry. I should have brought some.”

  “No,” I said, and moved to place my hand over his. “This was perfect.”

  A soft, soft silence descended between us.

  I realized I had changed something then. With that one impulsive, straightforward touch, I had changed entirely the energy flowing from me to him, and him to me. And all at once, everything made sense. I knew exactly why I had come.

  And so did he.

  Alexandru’s hand turned under mine. His fingers spread, interlocking with my own. I stared down at this, our simple union, and noticed for the first time that his hands were darker too, also of the sun. My own were as pale as the moon.

  He brought our joined fingers up to his lips, his breath a bare wisp across my knuckles, the lingering caress of his kiss.

  Desire bloomed inside me, luscious as honey. The air grew hot, the thin drift of silk I wore grew abrasive against my flesh, and when Sandu slanted his gaze back up to mine from over our hands I leaned into him, just as I had done mere hours or maybe years before, only this time he was no statue in response. He leaned down to me and took my mouth with his.

  He tasted of the sweet light wine and, more faintly, of the pepper of his stew, but instead of being pungent now it was utterly delicious, flavored with him. His hair draped my face and his, heavy strands that clung to my cheeks and neck and collarbone.

  I thought, It’s the same, and, No, it’s not, but it hardly mattered, because whatever else it was, this kiss lit through me like the white blazing moonlight, and I was aflame.

  His hands came up to my shoulders. I felt him through the fine weave of the shirt, and he was being so gentle, so careful, even as I was gasping and his lips traced a path from the corner of mine to my jaw, beneath my ear. I felt his mouth open and his teeth press lightly against the artery in my throat; he pushed me back like that to lie flat against the ground, Alpha even here.

  I surrendered. Grass on one side of me, the combed woolen blanket on the other. My hair was pinned beneath us, and his still fell across my face, slipped between the high open collar of the shirt in a sensation caught between a tickle and something much more gratifying.

  He lay above me. He was half on me, half off, his weight on his elbow. His leg skimmed possessively over both of mine, leather and muscle, the pressure of his arousal along my thigh, and then his knee went between mine. My legs slid open, and he made a sound like a growl in his throat.

  His hand found the curve of my hip, rode it upward, crumpling the shirt. The grass felt tender and the wool felt coarse against my newly bared skin, but best of all was his palm, his clever fingers, exploring the curves and valleys of my body, stroking the underside of my breasts. Finding a nipple, tugging at it, pinching, until my back made an arch and I had to turn my flushed face away from his.

  His mouth replaced his fingers. He suckled me there through the silk, his teeth and tongue far more torturous than his fingers. I felt the fire of his sucking, the white moon fire, lance my body all the way down to the new yielding wetness between my legs.

  My mother must have done this, my father. Lia and Zane, certainly. But no one had ever explained to me what it would be like, this coupling between male and female. I had only guessed and daydreamed, fueled by romantic ballads and books, and the way Zane stared at his wife, as if no one else in the world could be real.

  This was real. This was Sandu rising up to strip off his shirt and cravat. Returning to me, his hand moving downward as his mouth made that fire, his fingers tracing the flat of my belly, combing through the patch of curls beneath, a place no man had ever touched, that even I had hardly touched, but he found the bright hot center of me and stroked me there, and I could not stop the cry that rose from my chest.

  His head lifted. He watched me with his silver beast eyes, his hand moving up and down and up again, his fingers like demons, demolishing all the astonished words I might have used to protest—sparking the demon in me, aching for him. Opening my legs wider and twining my fingers in his hair.

  No, not a demon. The dragon in me.

  “Touch me,” he rasped. He lowered his lips to mine, not a kiss, a nip, a bite, pulling back just enough to form his words. “Touch me, Réz. You know how.”

  I didn’t, though. Maybe she did, this creature I was to become, but all I knew was that his pelvis was moving against me in a rhythm that throbbed in my veins. The thing inside me, the new and awakening bea
st, whispered, there; he wants you there, and shifted the back of my hand to the taut pressure at his breeches, exploring the outline of him through the supple doeskin. The way he stilled and then pushed harder against me.

  you have power, whispered the beast. he is the alpha but you have power over him. show him that you do.

  His breeches were buttoned up on two sides, a style I did not know, but my fingers found the way of it.

  One button at a time, forever and ever as his lips ravaged me, as his fingers slowly pressed their way inside me, another place no one else had ever touched.

  your boots, commanded the dragon and I together aloud, and he pulled away from me abruptly, bent over and shucked them off.

  I admired the flexing curve of his back. The sheen of muscle across his arms, how his tendons pulled, the hard hands firm over brown leather.

  your breeches, we said, and he yanked them off as well, peeling the doeskin down his legs, pulling free his stockings and garters until he was as nude as he had once been at that bell tower in Spain. When I had not been able to look away from him against the new dawn clouds, but he’d never noticed because he’d not met my eyes. Shy, beautiful prince.

  He met them now. He held them steady to mine as I found him and cupped him, shocked at my own boldness, but the Réz-dragon purred yes, yes, and so I kept going, learning the shape of him, so hot and firm. His skin there was softer than anything I’d ever felt. I curled my fingers and dragged my nails up along his length, to the full head atop, the most satiny skin of all.

  His eyes closed; his mouth tightened. He pushed into me again, a forced caress, but I wanted so much more.

  “Please,” I begged, no bold dragon to me now, just raw pleading.

  “Love,” Alexandru said, and came atop me.

  I was aware of the aroma of flowers and grasses and sweat. Of the pollen that had smudged between us, musky gold, mingled with the scent of our desire. The tight pull of the shirt, caught beneath my breasts. The crystal pendants flashed with moonfire now, a field of them beyond his shoulders, slight fallen stars littering the forest break.

  He pushed that satin head into me, stretching the place where his fingers had been. And it hurt—but the dragon smothered that, chanted, yes, yes, again and slow, deeper, slow, and I did not think we had spoken out loud until he obeyed, and I was able to crush my fingers into his arms and gaze up, alarmed, at his face.

  “This is how it is,” my prince whispered above me, his eyes locked on mine. “This is how we are.”

  He moved. It was a gentle rocking at first, a short stroke, and it hurt too. But beyond the hurt was something else, something Réz instinctively understood.

  Hunger. Curling deep hunger, with the promise of a great rushing tide pressing closer.

  He moved and he moved. I lifted my legs up to cradle him, a vermilion streak of flower upon my right thigh, smelling the grass and the moon and Alexandru, who captured my face with his hands as he worked deeper and deeper, plunging into me, as he ground me to the earth and began to break me apart.

  It hurt, it didn’t. It made me into the white fire, it lit me up and dissolved my bones. I was pure ache and pleasure and that wave that wanted to come, that was coaxed closer by his body thrusting into mine.

  I tipped my head back and could not close my eyes. When my climax crested over me, when I came with white-wringing cries, I saw only black Sandu and the moon, and the bright silver flame of his gaze as he pumped his seed into me, shuddering and moaning a sound like my new name.

  good, whispered the dragon named Réz. We lay with our arms wrapped around the prince, our legs at his waist, still stretching and yielding with his slowing respiration. that was good.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Despite the many myths that abound regarding these two mortal enemies, the truth is that the dragons existed in peace before the dragon-hunters decided to shatter them.

  Dragons drew their first breaths into raw lungs ages before mankind thought to mine the iron from the earth, to forge it into steel and shape it into barbs that might—might—stab through a glossy drákon scale.

  Before spears, before swords or crossbows were the serpents of the skies, magnificent in their lives, solitary in their deaths.

  But humankind does not well abide magnificence above it, and so the sanf inimicus came into being.

  A loose collection of human clans at first, slowly they gathered forces, recruited more, refined their skills. The sanf shone most brightly in what we now call the Dark Ages, when men in chain mail took pride in wounding or destroying all things lovely and mysterious. All things of magic and stars.

  It was the drákon, in fact, who granted them the title sanf inimicus: the soft enemy, villains without scales. It was meant as both a warning and an insult … but the humans seized it as a compliment instead.

  They were the declared enemy of the dragons. They had caused actual suffering among the beasts, and it gratified them mightily to be so noticed.

  Their wars swelled and lessened and swelled anew; the human weapons did reap their toll. Remorseless sanf chased the drákon over continents, over the seas, yet small as their numbers became, the dragons retained their unbending majesty. They would not surrender.

  Surrender, no. But hide, on the other hand … hide to safeguard their offspring, to ensure their future, to disguise themselves as their very foes …

  For a long while, for time stretching into centuries, the sanf discovered there were no more dragons to easily hunt. Men who had bathed in the blood of the dying monsters were themselves dying out, until their stories became worn, thin and distant, and their lessons washed over the fresh ears of human youth with barely a ripple of meaning.

  Eventually, the very notion of knights and dragons invoked little more than daydreams among the Others. Fairy tales, silly parables, nothing more.

  So matters stood for lifetimes. Until one day there came a creature who decided to change all that.

  Who decided to reignite the wars between monster and man, because the wrong side—the creature’s own-blooded side—had survived, and so had won.

  And thus, in the mad, latter days of eighteenth-century France, the sanf inimicus were reborn.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I had fallen asleep. I hadn’t noticed when, or even dreamed. I had blinked, that’s all, but when my eyes opened it was daylight, not night, and the prince lay behind me instead of above. I was on my left side, curled up, and he was spooned to my back, his upper arm a pillow for my head, and the blanket that had been spread beneath the food was now covering us both.

  A blade of grass was brushing my nose. I think that’s what woke me. I lifted my hand to wipe it away but it sprang right back. I mashed my hand over it to keep it flat.

  Daylight. A warm, masculine body curved into mine, and his other arm slung across my waist. I blinked again, and this time everything stayed the same. Sandu behind me. Sunlight above. The grass at eye level such an opulent and vivid green it didn’t seem real, like such a wet, heavy color could not even exist except in fevered imagination.

  The stream at the other edge of the meadow kept up its steady babble. In any other place in the world, except one, there would be birdsong rising from the woods to celebrate the day. Not here, though. Not with the two of us nestled here.

  “Jó reggelt,” rumbled a deep voice behind me.

  “Bon matí,” I replied, and eased my way upright to sitting. I lifted a hand to my heart—the dragon there awake too, for now content—examining the surrounding forest, the misty beams of eastern light slanting through. “Is it morning?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked down at the badly creased shirt covering me, that bed of meadow grass with its unreal saturation of green.

  I had been intimate with Sandu. I had had carnal knowledge of the prince of the Zaharen. Out here, in the open, without even birds to sing over the dried smears of blood on my inner thighs.

  The silver below us, though—that sang. And the crystal l
ustres too, spinning brighter than ever from their boughs.

  I waited for the usual blush to heat me; I could never seem to control it. But slowly I began to realize that I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed. Far from it. I felt … liberated.

  Sandu traced a finger down the length of my spine. He lay otherwise unmoving, only watching me when I turned my head to glance down at him.

  He was more tan, not just his face but his body as well. It made his eyes paler, his gaze even more mirror-clear. His hair fanned out from under one bare shoulder, a rich smoky shadow across the green.

  “When are we to wed?” I asked.

  “December. You hoped to give your parents time to come.”

  I looked around at the fragrant summer meadow. “Lia and Zane don’t live a season away.”

  “No. The other ones.”

  “What, the English ones?”

  “Aye. You thought it might be something of a peace offering, to invite them here. Things have—changed for us, Réz. I’ve promised not to tell you how. But we both thought your parents back in Darkfrith might have cause to celebrate our union. You’ve gone there now in a Weave, to see them.”

  “But—how could I—”

  “Believe me, I wanted to send a letter. But you’re good at your Gift, despite the consequences. You were certain you could manage to be there just a few days ahead or behind today, and you gave me your word you’d go directly to Gervase and Joséphine, and see no one else in your tribe. In and out. It was so important to you. You swore you’d stay safe.” He sat up, examining the slanted light. “And now, love … there’s not much time left.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But as soon as I uttered the words, I knew what he’d meant. I felt the slow gathering pull of the Weave that wanted to come.

  I looked at him with wider eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for coming to me. Thank you for staying.”