The Time Weaver Read online

  Sandu shook his head again, never taking his gaze from mine.

  “A femur. That’s what they say. His femur. One of the most celebrated dragon-hunters of all time, reduced to bits of bone and dust, enshrined in gold and kept behind bars. I wonder what he’d think of the two of us, standing free here before him.”

  I was prattling and I knew it. I closed my mouth with a snap.

  Alexandru lifted a hand to my face. The festival receded, the bells and stone songs and my nervousness and all the human chatter receded. I felt his fingertips skim the curve of my cheek, glance the powdered coils of my hair. An energy hit me, his energy, waves of swooning power floating through my veins, and it felt so splendid and so right I thought I might never move again.

  I smelled orange and spices and him. His next words reached me soft as silk.

  “Are we still to be wed, Honor Carlisle?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered, unable to look away. “I haven’t told me.”

  His smile again, that subtle one. His gaze dropped to my lips.

  From beyond the walls of the palace came an explosion. The crowd in the Grand Salon let out a cheer, began to press their way upstairs or down.

  “Fireworks,” I murmured. “For the festival.”

  The pair of guards looked back at us, both of them at once. Sandu gave a slight shake of his head, eased away from me.

  “May I offer my escort, senyoreta?”

  I nodded, mute, and he presented me with a formal, seamless bow that even the king would have envied.

  She took him to an inner courtyard paved with limestone but dotted with living trees, each one shaped precisely, emerald oval leaves, a lingering hint of nectar still discernible from the sap beneath the bark.

  Orange trees, thriving out here in this arid, perfect heat. He felt the fruit he still held in his palm, the pulpy weight of it, and let his nails dig in a little to release a spray of scent. It was better than the human perfume that clouded around him. It was second best, however, to the scent of Honor, standing still and calm less than a foot away. She was close enough that her skirts brushed his legs, and still he wanted closer.

  She smelled like … he didn’t know. Like herself, like his dreams, like sweet breezes but more sultry. Like jasmine and honey.

  She wore no human cologne. The powder on her hair was scented, and the satin of her gown was scented, but he’d learned to dismiss chemical notes like those a long while ago. Her lips were rouged, and might have tasted of raspberries had he nerve enough to find out … perhaps he was imagining that. Perhaps it was only a wish. He enjoyed raspberries. And he enjoyed gazing at her lips, their sweet reddened pucker.

  She felt his attention. With a howling-loud firework discharging into white above them, her eyes cut back to his.

  Brilliance; a hot clear light that lifted her irises nearly to turquoise, that reflected off her skin in a way it never would for a human female. She looked back at him soberly, framed in curls and a dark fall of netting. Above them a shower of luminous sparks began their slow dying float back to earth.

  Alexandru felt strange. He felt almost intoxicated, actually. It was disconcerting enough that he pressed his nails harder into the orange, let the juice run over his fingers. He looked away from her to break it apart into segments, and then ate one without tasting it.

  Honor watched the heavens. When he offered her a wet piece of pulp from his palm, she accepted it without glancing back at him again, without even removing her gloves. She brought the piece to her lips and sucked at it thoughtfully, and the strangeness enveloping him rose to dizzying new heights.

  The people around them were gasping and clapping at the show, applauding every boom that shuddered the air. Several of the youngest children had abandoned their baskets of petals to simply squeal in delight.

  The winds from the sea were sending ash-colored smoke into streaks, blowing the white sparkling flowers in the sky into pinwheels, into comets.

  “Will you come home with me?”

  Her invitation was low and even. When he turned to her she was still in profile, blinking at a dazzling new blossom of fire.

  He didn’t know why he hesitated. There was no reason to. He’d come for this, he knew that.

  Sandu frowned down at the broken fruit in his hands. He’d come just for her.

  “I’ve a supper prepared,” she said, replacing her veil. With her features completely covered once more, she faced him. He was graced with that enigmatic smile. “Only that. If you like.”

  He made himself nod. He dropped the remains of the orange to the limestone and presented his arm, and together they began to wend their way out of the palace of the Others.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Zaharen Yce will die like this:

  It is a time of advanced weaponry. Mankind has mastered the technical intricacies of shooting metal balls through soft flesh at high speeds: bullets replace musketballs; cannonballs replace arrows. Sabers and bayonets are still satisfyingly lethal at close range. Horses are still used in most battlefields.

  But there won’t be saber fighting within the castle. And there are no horses willing to ascend the mountain. Even the mighty birds of prey avoid the winds that rush along the white-crystaled slopes on this day.

  It begins after breakfast. In the morning salon, servants are clearing the main table and sideboards, stacking china platters in their arms, retrieving silver salvers, the Belgian coffee service of etched gold. The air is still redolent of sausages and buttered crumpets and eggs. One of the younger footmen bobbles a cup but retrieves it midair, right before it would have shattered upon the floor. It earns him a stern look from the steward but a quick hidden smile from an even younger maid, which warms the footman from head to toe.

  They are childhood sweethearts. He plans to wed her. He’s already consulted her father and the Alpha of his tribe, both of whom have given their consent.

  By now the sky burns that hard, lapis blue visible only from the most exalted places on earth. There are no clouds. There is only the teasing scent of spring, elusive, because it’s March, and even though the true thaw won’t come for another two months, green shoots have begun to break the crusted snow along the riverbanks. The dense layers of beech and pine comprising the forests seem less skeletal. A day before a single brown bear was seen loping through them in a panic, the first bear to venture close to the castle in years.

  The enemy advances from the south. They chose this direction with great deliberation. South is disingenuous; south is not their home. However, south is more mountains—curving, distant peaks not so high as that of Zaharen Yce, but high enough.

  It is the Alpha, fittingly, who senses them first. He’s on his way up the main grand staircase, which is of marble. His fingers trail the banister, which abruptly feels different to him somehow; it’s of gold-plated brass. Both the metals sting his hand.

  He stops. He looks around, the hair on his scalp and arms prickling. The nearest window faces east, which shows him nothing amiss. He swivels about and bounds down the remaining stairs and Turns to smoke at the last step, leaving behind in the foyer his breeches and shoes and the imported silk shirt he favors.

  He does not take the time to Turn human again to command open the main doors of the castle. He barrels through a south-facing window, shattering the glass, something smoke is not supposed to be able to do.

  In the music room his wife finds her feet, lifting her toddler in her arms. She rushes to her own window, where beyond the eaves the sun begins to steal through, and observes the Alpha transforming from smoke to dragon, an ebony thread with wings flashing silver against the blue.

  He is a lone speck. She watches as other threads begin to join him from below, but they are slow, all of them so slow, and the Alpha is far ahead.

  There are not many Zaharen with the Gift of the Turn. Nearly everyone feels the sudden wild tug of their leader, but only seventy-eight of them are able to drop their bread or hoes or shepherd’s crooks and take fli
ght to follow.

  They meet at the shining edge of the horizon. They meet a force of over five hundred.

  There are no bullets. There are no bayonets. But there are teeth and talons, and blood begins to rain from the sky and stain the snow below. One meadow in particular appears abloom with scarlet flowers.

  Later on, the peasants will refer to this meadow as the place of trandafiri moartea. The roses of death. It will be considered profane.

  Dragons may perish in any of their three forms. Very few of the Zaharen are smoke when they are killed; most of them fall to the ground in pieces. They fall without noise. Dragons have no vocal cords.

  There is a hamlet nearby. It is walled, like most of the alpine settlements. The people inside it never cry out, never weep. They hide in root bins and cellars. They burrow into mounds of turnips or potatoes and shield the bodies of their children with their own and flinch against the steady, ominous shuddering of the earth.

  Their Alpha dies out there.

  He was a particular target. His body is severed at the neck from behind. It lands heavily against an edging of trees, the wings ripped apart by bare branches.

  The initial conflict lasts twelve minutes. In another eight minutes, the first of the invaders reach the castle.

  There are a handful of Zaharen dragons awaiting them there. Older males, or the very young. Their blood splatters the castle walls, more red on white.

  The wife of the Alpha is no longer in the music room. She has retreated to the dungeon with her child and a few servants and has armed herself with the best of human technology: a repeating rifle, a pistol, and a very sharp cutlass. She is adept with them all.

  Of all the dragons of the mountains, she alone could escape unharmed. But she alone is the reason the invaders have come. And she will not leave her toddler.

  The invaders find her at once. Her scent is distinctive, as is the scent of her power.

  She slays three drákon in rapid succession but the fourth one reaches her, swipes out a claw and snags her in the arm, the one holding her child.

  She screams. The child drops. She’s dragged to the ground and just as the dragon leans down to close its jaws upon her head, she vanishes, still screaming.

  The year is 1791, two years before France will enter its final, convulsive death throes and devour its monarchy.

  Honor is twenty-four. Alexandru was twenty-six. Their daughter was nearly two.

  CHAPTER NINE

  She lived, apparently, in the halls of an empty cathedral.

  It was a cathedral, or had been once, but it wasn’t truly empty. After the press of people in the palace, jammed in the streets, it was a shock to discover a building such as this, with open passageways of colorful ceramic tile, and chipped pillars of onyx, and towering stained glass windows, many broken, covered from the outside with boards. Alexandru smelled no rodents, no pigeons or even insects, only the residue of all of them, and the heavier, more fragrant whiff of rain, perhaps a few hours away.

  But there were humans dwelling in the shadows. Young ones, a few very old, all of them shrouded in blankets or shawls, all of them watching in silence as he and Honor crossed the floors. A child of about seven had cracked open a side door for them at Honor’s single sharp rap; that child trailed them still.

  Male. Grubby. Brown-eyed, garbed in cotton and wool with an incongruously new leather belt stiff around his waist. Sandu sensed no metal upon him but for the buckle, so if the boy was armed, it wouldn’t be with a gun or blade.

  Honor had exchanged a few muted words with one of the older Others before melting into the shadows herself. He heard her pause a few paces in, felt the weight of her gaze as she turned about. She’d smiled back at him and tipped her head toward the dark, an invitation to follow.

  “It’s safe,” she said. “I promise.”

  So he was following.

  The cloistered air carried a dull, cool tang. In fact, it was much cooler in here than it had been outside, certainly far more so than the overstuffed palace. He moved through its gloom listening hard: the hushed singing limestone, the rumbling onyx, a few brighter notes of garnets and granite thrown in.

  Angels in the windows regarded them with flat glass eyes. Every now and again they passed a single-flamed lamp set within an alcove, and then the colored panels would flare and shimmer in time with his footfalls.

  Honor made no attempt to touch him again. She seemed perfectly at ease with the child behind them as they glided deeper, and then higher, into the bowels of the building. With her hair covered, her figure draped in elaborate ebony, she blended too well with the shadows; he followed her by the sound of her gown, the skirts brushing the floor, a cadenced bare hiss of satin over tile.

  At the end of a corridor the boy suddenly darted ahead. He rushed to a pair of closed wooden doors and pushed them open with both hands, revealing a slender rectangle of light, a glow that deepened and expanded until it was a pair of blown-glass candelabras on a table, a gleam of blue and violet against the night.

  It was a private chamber, even more splendid than the halls, with settees and chairs and rugs and that long, glossy table laden with food.

  Honor began to strip off her gloves. She waved a hand at the boy, who dipped a bow and shot Sandu a look from the bottom of it, then retreated as far as a corner, settling on a stool.

  “I purchased it a few years ago,” she said, and for a peculiar instant he thought she was speaking of the child; serfdom was a very recent memory in his land. But then she glanced at him from over her shoulder, freeing herself of the veil, and Sandu realized she meant the cathedral, this echoing and glass-shining place.

  “You reside here?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  The table was set with china and silver, platters of cold meats and olives and cheeses, a carafe of chilled red wine gathering dew along its curves. Sliced bread lay in a fan upon a platter, surrounding a bowl slick with oil and spices. He realized that he was hungry—it had been a long while since he had eaten anything but the orange and he was starving, actually—and when Honor took a seat at the head of the table he was already only a step behind her, in time to hold her chair, to glimpse the movement of her fingers against the burled wood arms.

  “An interesting home,” he said. “Very … Gothic.”

  “Romanesque, actually.” She reached for the wine, began to pour into the goblets nearby. “It’s the devil to heat, if you’ll forgive the saying. At least it’s temperate here most of the year.”

  “Who are those people?”

  She positioned a drink before him. Secure in his corner, the boy produced a fiddle and bow. “Just people. People who needed a place. Strays, rather like me.”

  “They’re not your servants?”

  “Not in the traditional sense. They’re Roma, their own unique tribe. Grandparents and parents and grandchildren, everyone interconnected. They stay here betimes, I stay here betimes. They bring me things when I need them. It suits us all.”

  He’d spent too many years holding court; the compliment came easily, without thought. “You have a generous heart.”

  Her head tilted as she looked back at him, neither agreement nor disagreement, only that rich blue gaze, unsettling. Her skin glowed pearl against the stark bodice of her gown, the ice-pink teardrops of her necklace.

  Alexandru glanced away. He unwound the bells from his wrists, set them gently upon the table, as the Gypsy boy began to play.

  Slow notes, almost a lullaby. The boy was surprisingly good.

  “Do they know about you? About … what you are?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, frank. “I imagine not. Certainly not the Weaving part, and as for the rest …” She lifted her hands, palms out. “They have no reason to suspect I’m more than what I seem. I look just the same as everyone else.”

  Hardly.

  He nearly said it aloud—she could not be so ignorant of her own person as to be serious—but this time something in her gaze stopped him.
Alexandru said instead, “Yet otherwise, when you’re not here, and not, ah, Weaving …”

  “Otherwise I am the obedient daughter of Lia and Zane Langford. Yes, you know that name. We rent a set of apartments here in the city.”

  He sat back in his chair. “I didn’t realize—you are their child?”

  “Lia says so.” The doors opened again; a pair of adolescent girls slipped inside bearing ladles and spoons. They moved to the food without speaking.

  “They’re my second family. My first was back in Darkfrith. If you’ll recall, I mentioned this before. In fact,” Honor lifted a hand again and one of the girls pulled a sheet of paper from her apron, handed it to her with a curtsy, “I took the liberty of writing down some of the more salient facts. Since you seem to enjoy that.”

  Sandu accepted it, skimming the words.

  Stolen as a girl

  My Life in Danger from the English

  Saved by Zane and Lia

  But Trapped in Barcelona

  Drawn to you

  Don’t know why

  Sorry

  And gleaming between all that, her secret message: You Make Me Unafraid

  He refolded the sheet, studying her, the face of perfect lines, the hair coiled in tinted powder, the intense eyes painted dark, sophisticated. She was, by her own admission, two years older than the last time they’d met, and the changes were subtle but there. Yet he found that he could still see that little girl in her, that girl he’d first met, who’d had no paint or powder or even poise. He could see that same burning concentration behind her gaze, passion and stubbornness and tremulous courage.

  It was the strangest sensation, like he was looking at a rice-paper image traced over another. Old. New. And yet they were both the truth.

  The song from the fiddle began a crescendo. Honor flicked her gaze toward the boy. He caught her whispered “suaument,” and the melody softened instantly back into its lullaby.

  Alexandru pinched a hand to the bridge of his nose. He was becoming light-headed again. That had to be the reason for his lack of mental balance around her.