The Time Weaver

It was his wife, Lady Amalia Langford, who had planned the abduction. It was Lia—who also grew up in the shire—who knew the surest way to smuggle me out of it was by water, where scents were swept quickly away, and no physical traces were left for the hunt.

I settled with my case upon the damp bottom of the skiff and watched Zane row, the flexing muscles beneath his shirt, fresh perspiration glinting along his chest and forehead, his gaze constantly searching the horizon. He steered to hug the shore, floating beneath the branches of the river oaks when he could, mottled shadows of charcoal and ash skimming over us both. Every now and again a different sort of shadow would flit across the surface of the water—swift and sinister, slim as a snake before vanishing against the trees. The air above us then would give the barest, barest groan as it was sliced apart. It was the only discernible sound beyond the diamond and our breathing, and the soft splash of the oars cutting into the Fier.

Zane looked grim. He should have. Had one of those dragons soaring overhead happened to notice us, it would have meant his head indeed.

That is, I supposed, unless he managed to bespell the dragon first with the stone. He'd put the blue sparkly thing in his pocket but I still heard it. It swathed me in a song of contentment, and I didn't think I could be any happier to be kidnapped by a rude, smelly human and whisked away down a river to the unknown.

We met Lady Lia in Harrogate two days later. Harrogate was a spa town, stinking of sulfur from the natural hot springs that bubbled up from the earth, with hotels and restaurants all faced in creamy pale marble, and people of every sort of fashion and station crowding its streets.

It was raining by then, not a little rain, but great sheets of water falling from the sky. It was warm still, nearly tropical, I imagined, although I had no real idea what tropical might feel like; it was merely a word I'd read in books, as distant and foreign to me as Chinaman or polar bear or freedom.

The rain fell and fell and swirled eddies of garbage and filth along the curbs, and flooded the meager storm drains, and soaked through my new oiled cotton cloak that Zane had purchased for me, since I had brought no cloak of my own.

But the rain was little help with the constant stench of sulfur rolling about the town in acrid curls of mist. Passing through one was eye-watering. Were it not for the shards of diamond Zane still carried and used on me —stay with me, keep quiet, you're my daughter if anyone asks, a London tailor and his daughter on holiday—I would have turned around and slogged back to Darkfrith, no matter how my life was endangered. But the pieces of Draumr never ceased their song, and so I managed only to cup a hand to my nose and mouth as we traversed those streets, trying not to inhale very deeply.

It turned out that the fragments of the diamond were embedded in a ring, something like a signet. He wore it day and night now with no gloves; I remained a few steps behind him as we walked, so I could follow the pale blue sparks of it with the swinging arc of his hand.

I had never before been around so many humans. There were fat ones and thin ones, many with grime darkening the folds of their pocked skin. Some had wooden teeth and some had no teeth at all. They wore homespun and brocades and wigs hopping with fleas. They shoved by us without apology, bellowing and belching and farting through the rain, and I was more profoundly grateful than I could say when Zane tugged a handkerchief free from the cuff of his sleeve and handed it back to me, so I could crumple that to my nose instead.

He threw me a look from beneath the brim of his tricorne. Water fell in a straight silvery line down the center fold, missing his nose by inches.

'The sulfur will throw them off' was all he said, but I understood him completely.

I skipped over the corpse of a rat that had washed up to the sidewalk, finally able to breathe. The kerchief was linen and lace, perfumed with pleasant spices. I discovered later that Lia had commissioned that perfume for him herself, had it made in small batches by nuns in the south of France and delivered every Christmas.

I could certainly understand why. Lady Amalia lived with her husband in this human world. Yet she was both nobility and drakon , one of the most pure-blooded of us all. She would need every defense she could muster.

I'd never known her in Darkfrith. She was well over a decade older than I, and had vanished from the tribe entirely when I was just a young child. Even had we been of a closer age, we would not have mingled. The children of the Alpha were privileged enough to leave the shire and live with their parents in London for the season, learning their glamorous human ways, establishing themselves as the aristocracy the human kingdom required. They seldom mixed with our village society until it was time to choose mates.

Lady Lia hadn't even made it that long. She'd chosen her mate from this sea of Others, and it was enough to end her alliance with the tribe.

Not officially. Officially, she was still drakon , and the hunt for her had never ceased. She was considered a runner, someone who had committed one of the most egregious of all tribal crimes, and should she ever have been caught, her punishment would have been dire. It was why she and Zane lived in careful anonymity, far from the shire. It was why he and I slunk about now, on the bustling, pungent streets of Harrogate, with our shoulders rounded and our heads down as we made our way to the hotel she had procured for us.

I felt her at once as we entered the lobby. It was nearly as crammed with people as the lane fronting the hotel, but the men and women here wore no simple homespun. The Coppice Court catered to the ton , mostly those traveling to and from the hunts in Scotland, and even the plainest frocks to be seen were layered with fringework and beading.

Gentlemen and ladies minced across the checkered marble floor. They prefaced each deliberate step with walking sticks of cherry or ebony topped with ivory, and carried small china cups of what appeared to be muddy water. Their faces were powdered; their lavish wigs were powdered; their lips and cheeks were painted uniformly red. They chirped at each other in civil tones that sounded a bit too pinched to me ... perhaps it had something to do with those cups of sulfur water.

Zane abandoned his slouch as if it had never been, shedding rain from his cloak in an impressive ring along the floor. With his pale amber eyes and tanned face and his braided rope of tawny hair, he looked abruptly like a corsair barging into a tea party. Several of the elaborately bejeweled women nearby gave gasping little twitters and snapped open their fans.

He paid them no mind. His gaze had gone instantly to a figure only half visible behind a green granite table spilling over with flowers and piles of fruits in crystal bowls. She wore a gown of coral, low cut, a wide sash of Prussian blue tied around her waist with the ends left to drape behind in a fashionable flutter along the polonaise of her skirts. Her hair was also powdered, her lips were also painted. Were it not for two wildly unusual discrepancies about her, she might have blended in seamlessly with this clutch of silk-cinched, cane-tapping humans.

One was her face. She was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Beneath the dusting of flour I knew her hair would be golden. I remembered that of her. Her eyes were deep brown, barely lined with kohl. Her skin was flawless, her teeth were white and straight and she showed them in a smile as she caught sight of her husband, turning to us fully. And when she smiled, it was startlingly clear that she was nothing like any of the other females around her. She glowed .

The other discrepancy was far more subtle, and far more ominous to me. It was a delicate glitter of blue from a heart-shaped pendant around her neck, a pendant that hung from a black velvet ribbon.

Lady Amalia, it seemed, had her own version of Draumr.

Zane handed his hat and cloak to a doorman without looking at him and strode away. It was clear I had ceased to exist.

I watched them reunite with an unabashed curiosity. I'd been traveling for days with this man, who'd barely spoken more than a handful of sentences to me. He'd been curt and brisk and sharp-tongued whenever I displeased him, but he'd always ensured that I ate well, that I slept enough. That I was comfortable and clean and not afraid. He'd told me that at least four times: Don't be afraid.

He'd given me his handkerchief in the street.

Lia met him with her hands outstretched. Her smile was truly melting. Zane took her hands in his and bent over her fingers with an elegant bow. I could smell his pleasure and hunger and relief even from all the way by the main doors, even through the horrible wafting sulfur. Lia dipped her chin and pulled him closer and murmured