The Time Weaver

trouble?'

'Decidedly.'

'No doubt you'd prefer someone who obeyed your every whim.'

His brows began to climb. 'How intriguing. Is that likely?' 'I don't know. I don't know the females of your tribe.'

'Well, if you'd only mentioned the possibility before,' he murmured, lifting his cup to his mouth. 'I do wish I'd thought of it. What a lot of time and effort I might have been spared.'

His tone was dry and his gaze was focused beyond mine, past the little courtyard of the boardinghouse where we planned to sleep through the day, past the neat garden of flowers and herbs and the white picket fence that defined the edge of the yard. There had been chickens picking through those flowers when we'd first arrived; they'd all scattered to the winds. Alexandru was looking at the mountains that rose in the distance, blue shadows from here, a mere promise of what was to come.

I set my cup upon its saucer, the taste of the chocolate abruptly sour on my tongue. I couldn't fathom I'd not considered this before.

He was the Alpha of his tribe. By default, he would be the greatest prize for mating. In Darkfrith every single maiden, every one, dreamed of joining the Alpha's family, even if they didn't like their choices for doing so.

How much more aggressive might they have been, all those females, knowing their chances of becoming part of the head family would be limited to the seduction of a single male?

I tried to mentally summon any of them—faces, names—and could not. I did recall a blur of voices and gowns from that one disastrous Weave to the ball, but otherwise it seemed like I'd nearly always Woven to him when he was alone.

'Sandu. What are they like? The females?'

His gaze cut back to mine, the early sun glossing his hair.

'Acquiescent? Submissive?' I persisted. 'Comely?'

His mouth curved from over the rim of his cup. I narrowed my eyes.

'Well? Am I going to have to fight them or not?'

'Fight them? Good heavens. Is that how it's done in your tribe?'

'Sometimes. If the situation demands it. If there's a boy—a male, and he's been dallying about with more than one girl—sometimes it becomes a battle of dominance. The Alpha female must win.'

And oh, those Darkfrith girls. Those girls with their slanting looks and pretty pouts, and figurative claws. And fangs. Sometimes the battles were physical and sometimes they were more cunning than that, whispered rumors that tailed you, hushed giggles hardly suppressed behind lily-white hands.

Girls bigger than you, relentless girls homing in on you, the powerless. Pushing you down, pulling your hair, tripping you until you wept.

I remembered Wilhelmina and the particular pitch of her laughter as she stood over me before the silversmith's shop when I was eight. How light and trilling it sounded already, just like it would when she would be older, and courted by all the boys.

That was never going to happen to me again. I would never submit again.

I sat forward in my chair. 'Is that the custom in your tribe? Do the females fight over the males?'

Alexandru stared at me, his expression arrested, the chocolate cup frozen in his hand.

I kicked at him. 'Tell me. How many others?'

His lips began to pinch flat; his lashes lowered. I realized that he was laughing at me. 'I fail to find the humor in this,' I said in frigid tones.

A babble of squawking came from the open door behind us; it seemed most of the chickens had fled inside. The hausfrau who'd taken us in poked her head out the door, her hair covered in a yellow kerchief, her eyes inquisitive hazel. Sandu sent her away again with a regal flick of his fingers.

'Rez' He looked full at me, set his cup upon the table. 'There are no other females. You're the only one.'

'What, never?' I demanded, skeptical.

That pinch returned to his lips, just a shade. 'Perhaps notnever . I am a male, and I have been alone for a very long while, and for all those years I did fear you an illusion, so I hope you might forgive me that much. But as far as I'm concerned right now, there has only been one female I've ever truly noticed, and who has ever truly noticed me. Only one. And she's the only one I'll ever notice again.'

I regarded him silently. One of the chickens made it as far as the stoop behind him, released a piercing bwaak! at us before dashing back inside.

'Will you marry me?' Sandu asked.

'No.'

He picked up his chocolate again, unperturbed, his gaze drifting back to those distant blue mountains.

They traveled mostly at night, although as they soared closer and closer to home, he began to feel more comfortable remaining aloft during the early daylight hours. He made certain they kept high enough to remain a mirage if viewed from below; a part of him worried over it, chewing over the fact of their altitude again and again like a dog over a shabby bone. Logically Alexandru understood that it would hardly matter if she fell a hundred feet or a thousand feet; neither distance would mean a pleasant ending.

But the less logical side of him—this new and unknown side, which seemed rooted in nameless, churning emotions—thought Stay low, lower, she'll be safer that way.

He'd lost count of how many times he'd twisted his head back to look at her, using his eyes to convince his mind that the insignificant weight upon his back was still there. She'd be sitting upright above his wings or else leaning forward on her elbows, her cheeks and nose pink with wind, her hands tight in his mane. He always found her hair first, that flip of coppery flame snapping out behind them like a bright pennant he'd won and was carrying home.

She'd wanted to hold the luggage, which was preposterous. It was fine in his claws; he was accustomed to transporting things in such a way. He needed nothing to distract Rez from her primary job: remaining on top of him.

He'd warned her before they'd begun that if he ever discovered her with her eyes closed, he'd land at once, city or countryside be damned, and he was sincere. Once, as they were following the lustrous polished line of the Danube, he'd turned his head and discovered her face to his neck with one eye closed and the other one open, the wind whipping her hair back and forth around her teasing smile.

Sandu found himself becharmed. Not merely charmed, because she wasn't merely charming. Becharmed, bespelled, whatever word might best suit this unexpected mixture of feelings that swept through him in a combination of tenderness and amusement and ferocious protectiveness. The closest sensation akin to it was how he felt about his position, his place as leader, but even that was born more of war and determination than love.

Miles above the earth, with the music of the wind and stars combing through his whiskers, he'd mull on that.

Love.

At times the clouds would engulf them in their acres of blue-cooled mist, and then, when looking back would make no difference because he wouldn't see her anyway, Alexandru concentrated on feeling her. Feeling her heat, and the pressure of her legs, and the small tuggings that came and went through her fists.

He couldn't do it for very long. The heat of her would translate almost instantly into darker, deeper thoughts of her body, and of beds and pillows and being hot inside her.

Never before had he known the peculiar discomfort of flying aroused. Sandu tried to avoid the cloud banks when he could.

In their hotel room in Obuda, he'd come upon her in her boudoir without knocking, some thought at the edge of his tongue, something about the distance left to travel, not far now, and how to count the miles by the lakes below.

But she didn't notice his entry. She was standing before the cheval mirror placed in the corner, dressed in her chemise and stockings and nothing else. The chemise was white, with ribbons of cherry-red threaded through the neckline and sleeves, woven in a pretty pattern around the hem. The drawstring neckline was loosened, and