The Time Weaver

But the festival swarmed the streets with its own siren call, and Honor had stood here—right here, just beside her—on the balcony, watching, inhaling the smells, and whispered only, 'All that laughter. What must it be like?'

So they'd abandoned the balcony, dressed up in crisp Spanish lace and shawls and descended their tall, locked-away palace down to the crooked streets.

It had been every bit as noisy and stinking as Lia'd feared. Beneath the veil her eyes were running from the smoke, and her ears were throbbing from the drums and bells and people shouting, and Honor's smile was so wide and delighted that when she flashed it toward Lia, the extravagant, drakon beauty that only just waited beneath the surface of her youth shone more brightly than all the torches.

They'd remained out all night. They'd danced with strangers, dined upon warm fruit and sweetmeats, shared wine. At the tail end of the celebration they were seated together alone upon the damp brink of a beach, shoes off, their veils discarded into long twists of lace snakes that rolled with the breeze against the sand.

An abandoned bonfire had mumbled down into a pile of embers upwind; the air smacked of charred laurel and brine.

Lia's coiffure had begun to weigh too heavy upon her head. She was working on removing her pins, collecting them carefully to her lap, when Honor spoke.

'Why did you save me from the shire?'

She glanced over with her hands still up in her hair; Honor only gazed fixedly at the sea. She sat curved with her arms wrapped around her knees, her shawl a tender bunching of cashmere against her chin and cheek.

Amalia lowered her hands, the last pin between her fingers. There were so many things she could have said.

Because the dreams told me to.

Because you were innocent, and did not deserve to die.

Because parents should always protect their children, even drakon parents. Because I was heartsick for a family. And so were you.

'Because we're kin' is what Lia finally answered.

'You're not my mother.'

Under the inexorable slap of water to sand it wasn't an accusation, only a softly stated fact ... but oh, it stung.

She kept her face to the breeze. 'Do you remember the wild do grose that would grow in Darkfrith? How it'd wrap along the hedges and creep into the rye, and come back every year, even when the farmers pulled it out?'

From the edge of her eye, she saw Honor hesitate, then give a nod.

'Love is like that. It grows in thorny fields as well as fertile ones. It's inexplicable, and undeniable. There was a hole in my life, and a premature ending for yours. So fate gave me my dreams, and you a longer ending. A much longer one, I hope. We were chosen for each other. We were meant to be.'

'You . love me?'

'Yes. You're my daughter now. You're of my heart.'

Honor had said nothing else, only hunched down deeper into the sand.

It was a sennight later, long after the last of the smoke had cleared from the air, that Lia had discovered the note shoved under her pillow, written in an unmistakable girlish hand.

Thank you. I will love you too.

She was not Mama or Mother or even Mare . Honor had never once called Lia by anything but her given name. But she had penned that note.

The night song from the distant fiddle paused, started again. A clot of men on the street below had staggered to a halt beneath her to sing off-key, their torches casting a diabolic glow straight up to where she stood.

The silence of the apartments behind Amalia beckoned. She released the railing, turned back to her room and to her empty bed.

When I was twenty-one, what I knew of the sanf inimicus would fill barely a thimble. Our ancestral folklore was rife with stories of humans hunting us; even human history boasted tales of brave men slaughtering dragons, or of dim-witted women being stolen by them. We knew we were unwelcome in the world of the Others, of course we knew. It was the reason we pretended to be them. It was the reason we spent our lives, generation after generation, incognito.

But I don't think we English drakon had a specific name for the hunters. I don't think any one of our stories ever called them by that name.

Still, they did exist.

They had been conceived in the Carpathians ages ago, just as we had been. Confirmation of them had only just surfaced in the shire right before Zane had taken me away, and that was the last I'd even thought of them until Alexandru's first accusation to me, there in the library of Zaharen Yce.

Yet my initial introduction to the sanf inimicus actually came by way of Josephine and Gervase.

My father was a trusted advisor to our Alpha, probably because, like the Alpha, he was obsessed with ensuring the tribe's silver fortunes. There was a lot of it to ensure.

Whenever he was home, Gervase reeked of silver. I don't believe he spent much time deep within the mines themselves, but he worked surrounded with all forms of the ore. As a girl I used to imagine that the crude metal had permeated the crevices of his body and hardened around all his inner organs. He would bawl, spit, and sweat silver.

Like the rest of us, he knew his place in the tribal hierarchy. He was both smart and obedient; he would never challenge for a higher status. Why bother? He already had Plum House and the Alpha's ear, and a position all but the council members would envy.

Whilst I, the runt of the litter, had evolved into a very skilled eavesdropper.

So when the whispers about the human dragon hunters began, I opened my ears. I learned that the Darkfrith Council had secretly sent out ambassadors to the Zaharen drakon , sent three strong young drakon men to the wild crescent of the Carpathians to seek out our hidden cousins—one, two, three.

The sanf inimicus had tracked and killed two of them nearly at once.

Not merely killed.

'They took their hearts,' my father told my mother, his voice so strained with rage I barely heard it through the keyhole of their bedroom door. 'Their hearts, Jo. Ripped them beating right out of their chests, like godforsaken wolves .'

My mother made a stifled sound.

'Aye, their hearts and all their papers, their wallets and horses—the bastards took everything. Left only their tribal signets, so we'd know. So we'd know they knew about us .'

Josephine's response sounded far more composed. 'Will they come here?'

I don't know why my father lied to my mother; I wouldn't have. She was very good at detecting lies, at least with me. Perhaps the smell of so much silver dulled her senses.

'No,' he said. 'No, pet. We're far too protected for that.'

It occurred to me later, much later, that he'd been disingenuous about the wolves as well. Tearing out the hearts of their prey sounded much more like something a dragon would do.

I lay in my bed in my cathedral that night, thinking about what Prince Alexandru had said. About how my old tribe believed I was sanf somehow. That I would betray them in the most despicable manner possible.

I had not been happy in my life in Darkfrith, but joining the sanf inimicus would mean striking out at everything I was, not just my kin but my heritage. It was unthinkable.