The Time Weaver Read online

  The Zaharen skipped Enlightenment. Oh, they have their own fine satins and wigs and jewels, but it’s all purely for their pleasure. They gain nothing with pretense. In nearly every way that matters, it is still a feudal society.

  The most obvious commonality between us is that they do follow an Alpha, but he doesn’t even have a Council to co-govern, as ours does; ultimately he acts alone in all his decisions. And the Zaharen drákon comply, no matter what. It’s in their blood.

  Yes, our Sandu is their Prince Alexandru. Yes, he’s been chosen as their Alpha. And he’s strong and beautiful and—confound it, just stop Weaving to him. You don’t have enough control yet to Weave back in case of disaster, and you know it.

  Look here: see how my hand trembles, how the ink splotches and my sentences quiver across the page? Tonight I was nearly caught. Tonight could have been the end of everything. I ended up in a ballroom. During a ball. And he looked at me like I

  Oh, dear. I write you this letter knowing you haven’t even made my mistakes yet. But you’re going to. I want to change the future, but it’s like pushing a boulder up a mountain. I never win. What I will in retrospect never matters. The future simply rolls right over me, no matter what.

  Keep all this from Lia and Zane. Burn it, burn it. They will not understand.

  Five hours ahead,

  —H.C.

  Fifth Letter

  You’re nineteen. You’re desperate to know what happens. You’re desperate to know even just a little of what will be. I recall that Lia seems acutely reluctant to share your future. Has it not occurred to you there’s a good reason for that?

  Yes, you will be married to him. There. Now you know.

  Stop Weaving for practice. You’re paying a price for it, one you haven’t even noticed yet. But I have. Please stop.

  Remember what the legends of our kind tell us: None of the Gifts are free. None of the glory comes without sacrifice. Our particular sacrifice is rather horrific.

  Save the Weaves for emergencies. Settle your heart, and look ahead with clear eyes from your Natural Time. Do not be so eager to touch the future. Savor your today.

  I wish I believed my words would make a difference. I wish I could change myself, and what is to come. I’ve tried so hard to put things right. I don’t even think you’re going to get this note. I don’t know, I don’t know, I can never tell.

  Twenty-five years ahead,

  —you

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the age of fourteen, I was kidnapped from my home by a pair of infamous outlaws.

  Infamous to my kind, at least. And I suppose that, truthfully, the word kidnapped might be an exaggeration. After all, I knew it was going to happen, and I was fully prepared to comply. I’d warned myself days in advance about Zane, and about Draumr. Still, I have to admit I was secretly shocked when it actually occurred.

  I’d been waiting, fully dressed, sitting upright upon my bed because somehow it didn’t seem very dignified to greet one’s kidnappers prone. I’d said my good-nights to my parents hours earlier that evening, as required, kissing the air by their cheeks—Joséphine always carefully scented of lavender; Gervase of pipe tobacco and harsh silver, his face angled away from mine—and neither of them had noticed anything amiss. It was hardly surprising. Neither of them ever seemed to notice anything amiss with me. They certainly never spoke of the numerous bruises or bloody scrapes I tended to acquire. My mother’s cool hand lingered on my arm a few seconds longer than usual, perhaps, but that was all.

  I withdrew to my room, packed my case, and waited.

  Plum House was a fine Elizabethan mess of a place. The main structure had been commissioned by the Alpha of our tribe long ago to lodge the gamekeeper of the shire, and the remaining two wings and solariums had been added helter-skelter by various ancestors since. The Carlisles had always been the gamekeepers of the tribe, and so the House was always our home.

  Of course, the job of gamekeeper for Darkfrith had a different meaning than what it did for the rest of the world, for the Others. The challenge was not to keep the rapacious animals out of the confines of the shire, but in.

  Still, we were gentrified enough by the time of my birth that the title was largely ceremonial; there were very few attempts at escape any longer. We were beasts, yes, but beasts who enjoyed the luxuries afforded us by maintaining our human façade. My father’s actual employment was the management of the tribe’s vast silver mines. It meant that while he was absent from Mother and me a great deal, we had the means for three young housemaids from the village and a cook, which pleased Joséphine very well. She and the staff rattled around the halls, polishing the dark Tudor panels and all the narrow-paned windows, shaking dust from the tapestries, concocting meals and teas and elegant soirées to which the Marchioness of Langford, the wife of our Alpha, would occasionally come.

  Whenever the marchioness came to tea, my presence was required. I would sit in silence and not toy with the ribbons on my gown, and not breathe very deeply because of my corset, and nibble at tiny frosted cakes and crustless sandwiches, and all the drákon ladies would remark upon my fine manners. My mother would incline her head graciously.

  The truth was, I was too petrified to speak. My mother, with her icy kohled gaze ready to find fault with me; the marchioness, with her daunting haute couture and imposing French wigs; all the simmering, contained ladies of the shire who beneath their imported satins and bell-beautiful voices burned to be as vicious as the menfolk were allowed to be—every single one of them frightened me, and always had. I had been born a timid gray mouse into a den of starving lions.

  I did not belong. I was nothing like any of them. It didn’t astonish me in the least to learn that my life was in danger; it had seemed apparent to me since I was a small child that, sooner or later, one of the real drákon would end up killing me.

  I didn’t even resemble the rest of them, not really. We were a clan of mostly fair, blond beauties, and although I had inherited my mother’s blue eyes, my own hair wasn’t the color of wheat, or sunshine, or summer flax. It was a shade caught between red and ginger, a little of both, not quite either. I was pale like all the girls, but while their skin shone with the translucent clarity of fine alabaster, my complexion looked to me more like chalk. I was scrawny, timid, and not very tall. A certain cadre of the village children found it persistently amusing to refer to me as the runt.

  As in, Look, it’s the runt. Let’s show her what happens to the weakest of the litter, shall we? Oh yes, let’s.

  So on that sweltering summer night of July in 1782, I felt little more than wonder that somehow, for some reason, all of that was about to change. I was leaving. I was Gifted—I would be—and I was leaving.

  I was a Time Weaver, apparently. Whatever that meant.

  My bedroom’s sole window faced north, so it was always one of the gloomiest chambers in the house. I was comfortable in that gloom, seated at the edge of my bed, listening to the cockchafers whirring in the woods nearby, the soft perfume of the honeyed wax the second maid had rubbed into the armoire that morning wafting sweet against my face.

  Generations past, one of the young brides of the House had planted love-in-a-mist outside my sill. The flowers bloomed in a tangle of pink and mauve all summer long and spilled petals with the slightest hint of a breeze; they, too, were scented of honey. If I concentrated hard enough, I could hear the drifting petals tip-tap the spaded earth where they landed.

  It was hot. I was wearing my best apricot silk dress with a buffon for modesty and a mobcap that dripped Irish lace to my shoulders. Eventually I removed the buffon from my bodice; it was far too warm to be wrapped in a muslin kerchief up to my neck. Despite my resolve not to nod off … I did. I only realized it when I lifted my head, because there was a sharp new twinge in my neck, and the slow, pensive music of the dream I’d been having did not fade.

  I turned toward the sound, pushing back the lace from my cheek. Yes, there were notes floating around me, simple and
haunting notes, a tune so familiar and yet not … like a lullaby with words you can’t quite remember.

  The dreaming part of me thought, That’s a diamond? Because it was unlike any I’d ever heard before. Most gemstones sing to our kind, metals too, but diamonds sing strongest. They surround us with melodies that are always clear and keen, sparkling with life. We drákon love diamonds. Young or old, every female of the shire had at least a glittering pair of earbobs or a handful of fiery-cut rings. During my mother’s especially stylish assemblies, the din from the ladies’ necklaces and charms could drown out entire conversations.

  Yet this song slipped over me like a cloud, dulcet and eerie, devouring my senses. It made me feel at once both happy and languorously indifferent. It made me want to close my eyes and release my very last breath.

  Then came the voice, whispering between the notes.

  “Honor …”

  It was no natural voice. It was sly and gentle and chilled my skin.

  “Honor Carlisle. You alone will hear me. You alone will sense me. Come to me.”

  I was on my feet before I’d realized I had moved. Layers of skirts and petticoats rustled back into place, brushing the tops of my slippers. The case felt suddenly light as air in my arms.

  “Come.”

  And the music wrapped around me so completely that I practically glided out my door.

  It was well after three in the morning. Everyone else in Plum House was asleep. Mother, Papa, the maids and the cook, who snored. No one heard me leave. No one but me heard the brass latch of the front door give its low amiable hum as my fingers closed about it. No one but me saw the starlight sketching the grass of the front lawn, or heard the press of my footsteps through the blades.

  There’d been no rain for weeks, and the lawn was turning brittle. I’d leave a path here, I knew that, but it didn’t matter.

  “Hurry, Honor.”

  I reached the edge of our estate. Should I turn right, I would meet the road that led to the village, to the august mansion that housed the Alpha and his kin. Should I turn left, I would enter the thick black forest that surrounded my home, crisscrossing trails soon lost to peat and bracken and streams, and eventually a wide, churning river.

  The notes, the voice, were coming from the forest. So I went left.

  I knew my way through these woods. I’d grown up here, after all, and had claimed even the densest thickets as my own. Maidens without friends tended to spend hours exploring alone. And maidens who made enemies needed places to hide—I had plenty of those.

  Blackstone Woods welcomed me with its familiar heady fragrance, rich and loamy, but even that was dulled beneath the uncanny notes of the song pulling me onward. The moss cushioned my steps; feathery ferns brushed my ankles; twigs crunched and leaves sighed and the voice had gone silent, but that was all right, because I knew where he was now, the man who had come for me.

  He was on the river. He was in a boat on the River Fier, standing alert beneath the dim starlight, one hand lifted before him, a faint sparkle of blue shining from his open palm.

  I should have been afraid. I was afraid nearly all the time, afraid of my parents, afraid of my species, afraid of myself. I was afraid of the dark, and of mirrors, and of the Council, of the strange smiles of the village boys and the casual cruelty of the village girls. I definitely should have been afraid of this notorious thief who was going to do who knew what with me.

  Yet I was not.

  Because of Draumr. I felt it from yards away, the music growing stronger and sweeter, drugging my senses. I floated forward and thought blissfully, This is what it’s like to fly. This is how it must feel when we Turn. Finally I understand. This is flight.

  The River Fier was never asleep, and the skiff rocked gently with the tugging of its currents. The man held his balance easily, lean and shadowy against the steel-gray ribbon of water beyond him, his shirt ruffling with the small breeze, his hair a long braided plait that swung all the way down to his waist. He watched me approach without another word. When I was close enough I was able to make out the color of his eyes: a wolfish amber, so clear and bright it seemed nearly inhuman. But he was human. I knew that much about him. He reeked of human sweat and musk.

  “Get in,” he said. His fist closed around the sparkle of blue, and I felt a rush of pleasure so intense my eyes nearly rolled back.

  “For God’s sake,” muttered the man, and grabbed me by the arm. “Spare me the swooning spells of adolescent girls. Bloody damned diamond. Honor Carlisle, I presume? Get in. Now.”

  The notes echoed him, yesss, get in, but I took a slow, river-scented breath. “Where are—”

  “And do shut up,” the man said pleasantly. “Aside from the fact that I’d rather leave this place with my head still attached to my shoulders, I doubt there’s anything you could say to me I would find of interest.”

  That was my introduction to Zane, the Black Shadow of Mayfair, the Secret Worm of the Sanf Inimicus—and my new father.

  It was his wife, Lady Amalia Langford, who had planned the abduction. It was Lia—who also grew up in the shire—who knew the surest way to smuggle me out of it was by water, where scents were swept quickly away, and no physical traces were left for the hunt.

  I settled with my case upon the damp bottom of the skiff and watched Zane row, the flexing muscles beneath his shirt, fresh perspiration glinting along his chest and forehead, his gaze constantly searching the horizon. He steered to hug the shore, floating beneath the branches of the river oaks when he could, mottled shadows of charcoal and ash skimming over us both. Every now and again a different sort of shadow would flit across the surface of the water—swift and sinister, slim as a snake before vanishing against the trees. The air above us then would give the barest, barest groan as it was sliced apart. It was the only discernible sound beyond the diamond and our breathing, and the soft splash of the oars cutting into the Fier.

  Zane looked grim. He should have. Had one of those dragons soaring overhead happened to notice us, it would have meant his head indeed.

  That is, I supposed, unless he managed to bespell the dragon first with the stone. He’d put the blue sparkly thing in his pocket but I still heard it. It swathed me in a song of contentment, and I didn’t think I could be any happier to be kidnapped by a rude, smelly human and whisked away down a river to the unknown.

  We met Lady Lia in Harrogate two days later. Harrogate was a spa town, stinking of sulfur from the natural hot springs that bubbled up from the earth, with hotels and restaurants all faced in creamy pale marble, and people of every sort of fashion and station crowding its streets.

  It was raining by then, not a little rain, but great sheets of water falling from the sky. It was warm still, nearly tropical, I imagined, although I had no real idea what tropical might feel like; it was merely a word I’d read in books, as distant and foreign to me as Chinaman or polar bear or freedom.

  The rain fell and fell and swirled eddies of garbage and filth along the curbs, and flooded the meager storm drains, and soaked through my new oiled cotton cloak that Zane had purchased for me, since I had brought no cloak of my own.

  But the rain was little help with the constant stench of sulfur rolling about the town in acrid curls of mist. Passing through one was eye-watering. Were it not for the shards of diamond Zane still carried and used on me—stay with me, keep quiet, you’re my daughter if anyone asks, a London tailor and his daughter on holiday—I would have turned around and slogged back to Darkfrith, no matter how my life was endangered. But the pieces of Draumr never ceased their song, and so I managed only to cup a hand to my nose and mouth as we traversed those streets, trying not to inhale very deeply.

  It turned out that the fragments of the diamond were embedded in a ring, something like a signet. He wore it day and night now with no gloves; I remained a few steps behind him as we walked, so I could follow the pale blue sparks of it with the swinging arc of his hand.

  I had never before been around so many hum
ans. There were fat ones and thin ones, many with grime darkening the folds of their pocked skin. Some had wooden teeth and some had no teeth at all. They wore homespun and brocades and wigs hopping with fleas. They shoved by us without apology, bellowing and belching and farting through the rain, and I was more profoundly grateful than I could say when Zane tugged a handkerchief free from the cuff of his sleeve and handed it back to me, so I could crumple that to my nose instead.

  He threw me a look from beneath the brim of his tricorne. Water fell in a straight silvery line down the center fold, missing his nose by inches.

  “The sulfur will throw them off” was all he said, but I understood him completely.

  I skipped over the corpse of a rat that had washed up to the sidewalk, finally able to breathe. The kerchief was linen and lace, perfumed with pleasant spices. I discovered later that Lia had commissioned that perfume for him herself, had it made in small batches by nuns in the south of France and delivered every Christmas.

  I could certainly understand why. Lady Amalia lived with her husband in this human world. Yet she was both nobility and drákon, one of the most pure-blooded of us all. She would need every defense she could muster.

  I’d never known her in Darkfrith. She was well over a decade older than I, and had vanished from the tribe entirely when I was just a young child. Even had we been of a closer age, we would not have mingled. The children of the Alpha were privileged enough to leave the shire and live with their parents in London for the season, learning their glamorous human ways, establishing themselves as the aristocracy the human kingdom required. They seldom mixed with our village society until it was time to choose mates.

  Lady Lia hadn’t even made it that long. She’d chosen her mate from this sea of Others, and it was enough to end her alliance with the tribe.