The Time Weaver

me. From drowning. I don't believe I said it at the time.'

He didn't take his eyes from my face. 'Two weeks later we spoke in my bedchamber. Yet you were older. Like you are now.'

'Yes. I was seventeen then.'

That single brow began to arch once more.

'I know how it sounds,' I said swiftly. 'I know how it must seem to you. I'm sorry to have been avoiding you all this time, but you see, I've just recently discovered ... I've gotten the news that we are to marry. You and I. And I thought ... I thought it might be best if I came here to talk to you about it.'

I ran out of breath. I sat there with the letter clutched in my hands and gazed back at him, feeling my face heat far warmer than the fire or the air in the room. Alexandru, however, seemed carved of pure, cool stone.

'I'm a Time Weaver.' My fingers knotted harder around the paper. 'That's the answer to all your questions. I'm drakon, and I Weave through time. No doubt Idid write this letter to you. Or—I will. Only not yet.'

'Time Weaver,' he repeated, neutral.

'Yes.'

'Drakon. And English.'

'Yes, yes. I should tell you right now that I'm not certain how long I'll be able to remain—' 'Are you also a member of the sanf inimicus?'

Of all the responses I'd expected, I'd never anticipated this. My jaw dropped. 'The—what? Are you serious? The dragon hunters? Of course not!'

Alexandru continued to regard me without expression. He only blinked once, and for a second—just a second—the mirror clarity of his gaze blazed to silver, liquid phosphorous. It was a dragon's gaze, fell and sharp, and if his voice could engender prickles, this look gave me a bone-deep chill. Then it slipped back into gray.

'Residing in Spain these days?'

'Yes. I ran away from England. Years ago. Rather, I was kidnapped.'

'I wonder if I might trouble you to write that down for me,' he said.

Another surprise. He seemed quite difficult to shock. 'Um ... which part?'

'Any of it. There's ink and a quill on my desk there. A sheaf of papers to the right.'

I stared at him for a moment longer and he stared at me. Even in shadow, he was so savagely handsome I felt my throat parch.

I could all too easily imagine his elegant fingers stroking my skin. His lips slick against mine. Our bodies—

'Very well.'

I stood and crossed to the desk, acutely aware of how I must look from behind, with my hair undone and the chemise probably revealing a great deal more of me than it hid. I found the quill, dipped, blotted, and began to scratch out a sentence on a blank sheet.

'What year is this?' I asked, without looking up.

'Seventeen eighty-eight.'

I would be twenty-one in this year. Wherever I was, I was twenty-one. And apparently not yet wed. God, it seemed a lifetime away.

'Here.' I thrust the paper at him. He accepted it, held it up to the light. No doubt the letters would run; I'd forgotten to sand it.

I am Honor Xaviere Carlisle. I am athe sole Time Weaver of our kind. Everything I've told you is truth.

I concentrated on returning the quill to the crystal inkpot, on rubbing away the fresh smear of ebony that stained my knuckle. When I peered up at him, Sandu's expression was still stone but his cheeks had gone red.

Red. He was blushing.

'Please believe me,' I said. 'I wished only to find you so that we may speak frankly. We are supposed to be married. And I ... wondered ... if you wouldn't mind, of course ...'

His lashes lifted. His gaze burned.

'If we didn't,' I finished weakly. 'If, perhaps, we could just go on as we are.' 'As we are ,' he echoed.

'Yes. I'm sorry. I have no wish to offend you. But I don't wish to wed you, either. What I've seen of wedlock is—difficult. I don't think I'm suited for it. Not that you're not comely,' I added hastily. 'Naturally you are. I mean, look at you. You've those eyes, and those shoulders. And your lips Meu Deu, your lips alone—'

'I beg your pardon,how old did you say you are?'

I steadied myself. 'Nineteen. I'm nineteen years of age right now. In your time, however—in this year, I'm older. No doubt I'm awaiting you.'

The candles in their wrought iron branches had been left aflame too long; one by one, they were flickering out. The chamber was growing dimmer and dimmer, which gave me a surge of courage.

'I've never been with anyone,' I admitted. 'Never even really kissed. I don't actually socialize at all. I spend a great deal of time indoors. So I don't know why I'd ...'

'Marry?' he supplied, exquisitely calm.

'I don't desire it. Might we just have physical intimacy instead?'

I heard the air leave his chest exactly as the penultimate candle extinguished. The room, the furnishings, the prince: We were all now things of shadows, little clear but the shining stars beyond the windows.

I felt the pull coming, the swell of its tide looming over me. I was better at predicting it as I aged. I was better at holding it off, even if for mere seconds.

I spoke in a rush. 'Find me now. Find me in my Natural Time. You can't tell the English, but I probably still live in Barcelona, in the Barri—'

I never got to say Gotic. I was gone again, yanked back home to my bed two years before I'd ever hand him that sheet of paper, with only the memory of his gaze, hot and silver and pinned to mine, and of his cheeks, still ruddy in the dark.

You might be wondering why I didn't just Weave right back to Sandu to finish our conversation. Certainly I tried. But a significant portion of the rules of my Gift remained a mystery to me. I had puzzled out the basics, such as that without great mental effort I would wind up nude, and in the same location. Yet the amount of time I remained in each Weave was inconstant. It might be minutes or hours or even months. And once I Wove to a certain time and place, I could never return to it precisely . nor to any period of time closely surrounding it. It became buffered in some way, untouchable by me.

Plus, the Weaves themselves were exhausting. As I grew older I began to develop headaches after doing them, and then minor nosebleeds. None of it ever lasted very long, but it was worrisome. Privately I wondered if this might be the beginning of the 'sacrifice' for my Gift I'd mentioned to myself in that troubling fifth Letter Over Time, the same letter in which I'd informed myself I was to wed the prince. The headaches weren't exactly horrific, but they were unpleasant. The nosebleeds didn't hurt now, but who knew what they might be like in the future? I had a ghastly vision of myself gaunt and drooping in a few short years, wandering around the palace like an unfortunate wraith with a handkerchief ever pressed to my face.

Amalia and I agreed that I needed to approach my Gift with caution. That I shouldn't try to explore my limits merely for amusement.

I did not consider Alexandru an amusement. But I didn't have enough skill to Weave near to him at that age for a good while after that conversation in the castle. I knew the sensible thing to do would be to wait for him to find me, as I'd instructed him. Two years. It needn't be too terribly long.

Of course, it was.

One of the peculiarities of my kind was that, like swallows and swans, we tended to mate for life. One mate, two hearts, that's it, forever and ever. The saddest, saddest sight in the shire would be a widow who'd lost her second heart, or betimes a widower. If they were lucky, they had children to surround them and help them slip into old age. If not, well, then they had the inescapable presence of the tribe, which would never leave them