The Time Weaver

In the early morning somberness of September 26, 1788, mere hours after Amalia Langford dreamed about empty Darkfrith and a drawling girl, hours after she met her Gypsy boy spy to learn that fate had wiggled around her determined plans and sent the prince of the Zaharen to her daughter anyway, Lia experienced one last dream.

She'd returned home because she was weary, and she needed to mull the facts she knew. She did not go back to her bed but instead to the chaise longue in the Blue Parlor, the one with the rug that reminded her of sandy feet and fragrant sex and panting pleasure.

She missed her husband with a severity that felt like an actual knife to her heart. It closed her hands into fists so tight she'd later discover blood from her nails cutting into her palms.

As the predawn gray began to creep into the parlor, Lia abandoned the chaise longue, which was of stuffed satin and shockingly uncomfortable, and stretched out on that span of woven turquoise instead.

She didn't even think she'd closed her eyes.

The dream started high above her, floating, then plunged without warning through her like a solitary leaf caught in a waterfall. It took her down with it, took her in water and light, and Lia realized that this dream wasn't like any of her others. In this dream, she could see.

She stood beside a lane of hard-packed dirt, with milkwort and grass trying to grow along its edges, but it washot, so hot, and the grass had all wilted and crisped brown at its ends, and the sky was a bleached bone above her.

The sun beat down on the top of her head; she cast no shadow. The air and the grit and the dirt: Everything shimmered with heat.

A wasp buzzed past her. She turned around and there was the fence overgrown with dog rose, and dusty hedges poking through, and there was the gate, and there was the sign on the gate that read in very big, bold letters: DANGER, INFLUENZA. Only the A in DANGER was obscured, because there was a man's hand pressed flat over it, and that hand belonged to Zane.

He was wearing an outfit she didn't know, formal court clothing, a skirted coat and buckled breeches, truly splendid. One of his many disguises, she assumed; certainly they never ventured anywhere together that required such finery.

In the harsh light of the day he sparkled so radiant with silver and pale yellow she had to narrow her eyes to take him in.

'I had to,' he said to her, glancing back at her, very calm. 'Do you understand?'

Lia wanted to answer him but found she could not. She had no voice.

'I had to,' he repeated, as if she argued. 'She forced me.'

He took his hand from the sign and left behind a bloody red handprint, a stain of a shape that actually did resemble a capital A, and he held out that dripping red palm to her.

'It was them or you, snapdragon. That's not a choice. She didn't leave me a choice.'

Who? she tried to cry, but still made no sound. Terror had begun to climb acidic into her throat.

'She's not Honor any longer, you know. She hasn't been for years. Her name is Rez, and we should have let them have her as a girl, but we didn't, and they're all dead now.'

He was a courtier who came toward her with that bloody hand, blinding silver and light, that calm, reasonable tone.

'For you, beloved,' said her husband, his red fingers reaching for hers. 'I killed them all for you.' Then she screamed.

Chapter Twenty

I thought I should return to the apartments to say farewell to Lia. It wasn't as if I never meant to see her again, ever, but there was no question that I would be leaving, and I honestly wasn't certain how she would react to that. For two females whose Gifts shoved us both willy-nilly ahead in time—as differing as those Gifts might have been—we seldom discussed my future. I'd been living with her and Zane for over seven years as their daughter. It was a convenient fiction for us, I suppose, but our story was beginning to show its age.

My age.

Most young women of twenty-one, human or drakon, would have wed by now and even borne children. At the very least, they would have been courted. There would have been balls or assembly hall dances to attend, teas and posies and flattering comments about the color of their eyes. Back in Darkfrith it seemed there had been a wedding capping every week between spring and autumn. More often than not, the grand ballroom at Chasen Manor hosted the receptions deep into the night. I'd been to some as a girl, and those I did not attend I could still hear, the music and laughter and champagne toasts wafting over the treetops of Blackstone Woods, right in through my bedroom window.

Those things were never going to happen for me. I had known that the instant I'd finished reading my very first letter to myself.

But I was going to have something. A December wedding, I guessed, which sounded passable. Better than a wedding, I would have a companion. A prince. And even though I'd told myself about it years earlier, my Weaves and my Natural Time had at long last caught up with each other, so now it had the weight of reality. The prince of the Zaharen had found me, had courted me, and if our courting had involved no tea or posies, my heart was stolen just the same ... whether I liked it or not.

My suitor was a drakon who perceived me without flattery, who'd called me stupid and stubborn—perhaps not entirely without cause—and who liked me anyway. An Alpha who would ask me to marry him every single day for over a year. A dragon who'd fished me from a river and from the sky, and kissed me like he was starved for me, like I'd never tire him or bore him or aggravate him enough for him to step back and say, No, wait, I was wrong. Who was ready to claim me despite the consequences, because at last he realized that I belonged to him, even though I had known it since I was a child.

After all these years, I was no longer going to be alone.

So yes, I was leaving Barcelona and Lia. And Zane too, wherever he was. It wouldn't be without a measure of sorrow, but I was going.

I would be riding a dragon home.

Sandu had desired to come with me to the apartments, but I'd convinced him I was better off going alone. He had to go steal back his own belongings anyway, which he'd left in the belfry at the king's residence. We could meet up again at my Casa de Cors Secrets, whose secret hearts were about to lack one from their sum.

'Anyway, you said you were eager to get back,' I reminded him, drawing a finger lightly down the intriguing bumps of his rib cage. 'That every hour away from the castle mattered.'

We were both in my bed, both disrobed this time, with the sheets drawn up over our heads. I smiled at him beneath them, a fellow conspirator tangled up in his limbs.

He trapped my hand, held it to his chest. 'Yes. But suppose something happens? It's better if we stay together.'

'What might happen? I'll get struck by a carriage while walking there? Horses run the other way from me. It's only Lia. She's gentle as a sparrow, I promise.'

'Yes,' he said again, and nothing more.

'Oh, no,' I groaned, and buried my head against his shoulder. 'Not you as well.' 'Pardon?'

'I should charge a shilling every time I have to see that expression,' I grumbled. 'That dreamy, happy, ridiculous look men get woolgathering over her. I'll call it 'Lady Lia's Lovers' Lost Look.' You know her, don't you?'

'No,' he said, turning his face away from me, gazing up at the sheet. 'Not really. I met her briefly, back when I was first brought up to the castle. She and her husband were there. It's how we first discovered each other, the different tribes. Amalia and Zane found us in the mountains.'