The Time Weaver

herself. To her dismay and eventual fury, but for one solitary exception—when she was very old and used her considerable skills to trick the Dragon of Time, a trick she could only use once—she could not even return to it in its pristine state. She was tainted,verboten .

Even with trickery, she would never encounter her husband or daughter again.

Every Weave, another piece of her torn away, more blood, more anguish. Each one diminished her by degrees.

She devised a plan to write a letter to her younger self, a letter explaining what was to come. She'd done it before, long ago, and it seemed to be the best she could manage now.

But when she did, nothing changed. She would write to herself, mail it years before, and wait.

Nothing changed.

Write the letter, hide it in places Honor Carlisle might look. Nothing ever changed.

Write the letter, send it to Lia, begging for help. Nothing.

Rez realized she did not remember fixing this. She never remembered fixing it.

Somehow she had ended up in the wrong ripple of time, blighted. Alone. She could not change this ending.

Her years dragged on. To her credit, and with a great deal of unspoken, bitter turmoil, she attempted to live peacefully. She attempted to live in anonymity, far from England and Germany, far from her own brutal kind. But Rez was a wounded beast with a heart ripped in two, and a Gift that never ceased to carve away at her.

An empty womb and ever empty arms: Her ragged soul began to shrivel. So perhaps the madness was an inevitable thing.

Madness whispered to her in the voice of Draumr, that long-lost wicked diamond:

One lassst chance. Sssaaaave the Weaves, ssssaaaaave them. Go back and kill the English before they come. Before any of thisss ever sssstarts. Kill the English drakon before they kill him.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Within the crystalline and dreamlike walls of the castle known as the Tears of Ice, no one called  princesse.

I moved through the hallways more an apparition than royalty, content to mostly observe for now, and that suited me. I enjoyed it.

There were footmen who followed me when they thought they should, and maids who found me formal gowns,robes a la frangaise from God knew where or when, and helped me dress in them. Men and women either full human or else with faint emanations of drakon— carmine lips, translucent skin, movements a tad too swift or supple for ordinary Others—served me breakfasts and teas and dinners, and opened thick wooden doors for me, and brought me figs and wine as I gazed out from any of the crenulated terraces.

Over the centuries the quartzite had begun to melt. That's why the fortress was named what it was, for the frozen rivers of crystals that dripped from casements and corners. Viewed from any approach, it was a castle of sugar cubes that had been caught in the rain: sparkling pale and set improbably at the top edge of a very bleak crest, jutting out without concern for gravity or weather or even time itself.

Zaharen Yce persuaded anyone who viewed it that, just like the mountains, it had always been there, and always would be there, and the melting, glinting rivers down its walls would always flow.

Inside, however, its hidden heart was revealed.

The heart of the castle was more than stone walls, more than even the sumptuous furnishings or the ghost-colored bumps of diamonds studding every room and corridor. The heart was a constant hum of energy, ever present beneath all the metal and stone songs, all the murmured conversations and footfalls and noises of a place that held over two hundred residents.

It was hard to hear at first. In fact, for my first few days and nights there, I missed it entirely. I did get the sense of something beneath it all, some manner of elemental cohesion that eluded me, the newcomer, the woman who'd descended to the mountain upon the back of the Alpha.

'Just listen,' counseled my would-be husband, as we lay in the big canopy bed at night. 'Just still your soul and listen, Rez, and you'll riddle it out.'

'Riddle what out?' I asked, fretful, because the hum surrounded me and the dragon inside me knew it, even iff heard only the more commonplace melodies of the hearth.

'Riddle out why you belong here.' He smiled at me from his pillow, the firelight a dim burnish on the window glass behind him.

'I already know why.'

'Yes. But beyond me, river-girl, and beyond even the bond of our feelings. Beyond all that is this place. This sky and mountain, where our kind first were created. We're perched in the middle of it, right now, that invisible edge between heaven and earth. We're immersed in that ancient magic, the strongest magic known. It fills our pores and shines out of us, every one.'

'Our pores ,' I said. 'Egad.'

His laughter was a rumble that shook the bed. He leaned closer with a sly, seductive smile, and the silky blue fall of his hair slipped from his shoulders to mine.

'Our every organ.' His hand found my breast, a bare brushing of skin to skin that gave me goose bumps. His fingers began a downward slide, his hand turning over, the backs of his nails dragging lightly over my flesh. 'Our every . little . bit .'

'Oh,' I said, or something that only sounded like that, because by then he had found the most sensitive part of me, and it seemed like magic indeed, that he could touch me and stroke me and fill me with joy with just his hand.

How could I still my soul when he tormented me like that?

But it did happen. I think the first time I felt truly in harmony with my new world was the fifth night, when I stood outside on the terrace closest to our tower bedroom, a half-finished glass of wine in hand. We'd made love and then slept, and then I awoke and he didn't. I hadn't been able to fall back asleep.

The terrace was empty of anything but stone and a few cold, unlit torches. No doubt there were eager footmen lurking somewhere nearby, ready to spring into action and open more doors for me, but it was late, and luck was on my side. I had managed to elude them.

The wine was white, dry but not too dry, and the chill of the night only made it more fine. I stood beneath an endless silver ocean of stars; the mountains were silvered with them, jagged silver with glossy black shadows, and the gold ring on my hand shone silver too.

I transferred the wine to my other hand. I pressed the one that wore Alexandru's ring to my belly. 'Are you there?' I whispered. 'Are you in this time, little baby, or no?'

My body gave no answer. The ring was a bright hard gleam against the woolen weave of my robe.

But . there was the something, rising up all around me. I held motionless, my breath caught, straining to gather it closer.

It was noiseless. It was infinite. It was an awareness, a light, better and brighter and more beautiful than even the frosted fall from the stars. I closed my eyes and let it warm me, let Rez the dragon lift her head and stretch her wings and sigh yes, yes, this is what we need.

I opened my eyes again, and the range of mountains before me stretched up to claw the glowing firmament, and the air was thick with unvoiced music, and the magic bathed me, even my pores.

We had been born here. All dragons, from all times and places, first came from here, this soundless, slender breadth of Milky Way and rocky tors.

I'd been lost as a girl in a river, and lost in other ways ever since.