The Time Weaver

'Yes, senyoreta.'

Before I left the room, I swiped my hand through the air above the ashes, and scattered the flakes to the floor.

Chapter Twenty-One

 Along the white-cliffed coast of southern France, not too distant from the city of Marseilles, was a series of caves that had once sheltered dragons, and then humans, and then eventually no one at all, because as the aeons had passed their entrances became submerged beneath the enameled blue Mediterranean. Accessing these caves now required the ability to swim to great depths, and to discern which sort of darkness between the limestone stalactite teeth might eventually lead to a space with a bubble of ancient air trapped inside it, and which might just lead to more water.

Within the greatest of these caves, one with an entrance tunnel that sloped sharply upward and so was spared the worst of the sea's invasion, was a cavern large enough for a tall man to stand fully upright. The walls were curved and covered in images: primitive handprints outlined in black and red, simple drawings of bison, horses, fish. There were even scattered depictions of what might have been, to one who didn't know better, curling snakes with talons and wide open wings.

And there was a box.

It was a modern sort of box, nothing natural to the cave. It was composed of oiled wood with gold metal hinges and brads, because she'd known that gold would never rust, not even under the sea. Inside the box was a silk bag with a drawstring cord, and inside the bag was a pendant, heart-shaped, made of silver. The silver was tarnishing, and there was nothing to be done about that. But embedded in it, as brilliant and evil as the day they had first been set, was a series of sky-blue diamond shards: the last known fragments of Draumr.

The box had been placed in the cave five years earlier, just because.

Because Lia had always known the future was an untrustworthy thing.

Because the gambler in her, the wily dragon, demanded a plan of last resort.

And because all the other pieces of the diamond, which had been in Zane's ring, had mysteriously vanished, and she would not risk these vanishing too.

Lia flew past the cave on her way to Paris. If she cocked her head and listened very hard, she could hear the lure of the shards, their soft broken calling to her that felt—for a perilous few seconds—like the most urgent yearning ever, even with miles of air and sea stretching between them.

She flattened her ears. She winged higher, putting more distance between her and the cave.

She'd retrieve the box on her way back.

He was dreaming.

Strange, because he seldom dreamed. He was not the dreamer of the family; he was the more practical hand and voice, the procurer of life's necessities, of all tangible things great and small. But tonight he was dreaming.

He must have been, although to Zane's best recollection he was actually stealing through the chambers of the palace of Versailles, moving silently from room to room, because it wasn't yet dawn, and he could not reasonably summon his coach and depart before then without raising unnecessary conjecture.

It was never in Zane's best interest to arouse conjecture.

He'd been unable to sleep. His waking mind had become mired in a loop of exhaustive unpleasantness, of tactical arson and bullets, and how many men it would take to flush and ambush a sleeping English village, and how much coin it would take to ensure their utter silence, and what to do about the smoke that would rise and disguise what wasn't smoke—

He could not sleep. He needed to leave, and he could not sleep, and so he thought he'd been exercising one of his very best skills as a distraction: prowling.

He'd wound his way out of the wing of Unpleasant Cells, where most of the official visitors to the king and queen were housed. He'd passed, unseen, footmen nodding off at doorways, and hall-boys flopped about on beds of blankets, their livery and wigs and shoes all placed prudently near to their heads as they dozed.

Padded rugs were better for prowling than bare wooden floors, or—worst of all—marble tiles, so he'd been aiming for those, sliding from salon to salon, most of them unlit, looking close at paintings and sculptures, the intricate gilded friezes, mentally estimating the weight of the chandeliers, or the cost of the ivory and malachite inlay along the walls. There was an entire long gallery of mirrors that had been done up in nothing but real silver: silver chairs, silver pedestals and urns, silver tables, silver cherubs hoisting silver-dipped candles—if he hadn't been so rotten sure his luggage would be searched upon leaving, he might have lessened the unspeakable extravagance of the place a fraction.

As if anyone but the servants would have noticed.

He'd left the gallery of silver untouched. He was in another salon, one of those named after the Roman gods; he could never keep them all straight. He was standing stock-still and looking out the window at the starlit expanse of one of the gardens, and it was at that particular moment that Zane realized he was dreaming, because there was a mist of smoke against the panes, inexplicable smoke, not from a fire at all. It pressed against the glass and found a weakness, some chip in a panel, perhaps. And it poured into the salon and became his wife.

His wife.

He did not move. He only stood there and tipped his head and looked at her, lovely naked Lia, standing motionless as well with a particularly large and saccharine portrait of Diana with a stag hung behind her back.

The name of the room popped into his head. Salon de Diane. Of course.

'Awake?' murmured his wife, with an expression on her face he couldn't quite peg.

'Perhaps,' he answered, careful. 'You?' 'Oh, yes. Bad dreams.'

'Snapdragon.' He did awaken, then. She was here,here , and not held hostage by a murderous madwoman—

He went to her on his silent feet, his hands at her shoulders, gathering her hard into his embrace. And for a flicker of a second, everything was right, just as it had always been. She fit snug against him and her arms lifted to hold him back, and her hair smelled like wonderful summer roses, and he was so goddamned happy to just have her with him again he felt a burning prickle behind his eyelids that threatened to become something more, something entirely ill-suited to a hard-grown criminal.

But ... there was a resistance to her he'd not felt before, or at least not for a very long while. A definite lack of the trusting pliancy that usually defined her.

It sent a chill down his spine and brought forth another unexpected thought:She knows.

Instead of acknowledging that chill, or even worse, that subtle menacing thought, Zane opened his hands upon the smooth flat of her back and took another breath of roses. Then he released her.

'Did you tell her you were coming here?'

Lia watched him steadily, her hands at her sides. She didn't bother to ask who he meant, and the chill bit into him deeper. 'No.'

He lowered his voice and spoke very quickly; he wasn't certain they were alone any longer; he wasn't certain of that at all. 'Good. Listen. I need you to evaporate for a while. Whatever you do, don't return to Barcelona. Go—go home to the beach house. I don't think she knows about it, we never told her, and—'

'Where will you be, Zane?'

The palace was still and silent, holding its breath, as soundless a place as he'd ever heard.

He took both her hands and drew her back to the wall, to the darkest of the shadows. A basalt bust of a crowned Caesar in a toga smirked at them from its pedestal.