The Time Weaver

I'm trapped. My life has dwindled to a pinprick. I survive in individual moments. I eat, I sleep. Every third day I walk to the village market to wander the stalls and the chitter-chatter colonists stare at me, five hundred forty- seven steps there. Five hundred forty-seven steps back. I count the alien insects that creep across my floor. I sleep.

I sleep.

Even awake, I'm so tired I don't have the power to lift the carving knife I keep ready on the kitchen table, right there in front of me, such a friendly shape. I can't even lift it to finish this misery. Everything is gray and mud.

I cannot remember the precise day my life ended. I've tried so hard my head aches and my entire body trembles, but my mind is in tatters. So much about those years elude me now. But in the sum spring of 1792 1791 the English are going to attack Zaharen Yce. They are going to kill everyone.

It's been decades since the assault on the castle, and as I've said, my life has dwindled. Details drift away from me. I'll tell you, though, I'll tell you what I remember most are the screams. Even as I pen this, I still hear them how they

The weight of my daughter in my arms just before she was torn from me. Her head beneath my chin. Her hands around my neck.

I had a daughter.

I Wove away that day. I did not mean to I swear to God I never meant to i would never have but it happened and i couldn't stop

They're all dead. I cannot Weave back. Every time I try, I'm thrown here again. The best I may hope is to Weave sometime near you before it happens and post this letter. I'm enclosing something else, a declaration I stole from Darkfrith, the one time I was able to Weave there before they stopped me. I found it in the desk of the Alpha. I don't know when that was, but I know I never saw it before that day.

My tatty mind keeps thinking. I think and think, and the one phrase that never leaves me, that remains my constant miserable companion is this:sanf inimicus. And by the stars, Lia, sometimes that phrase seems more like deliverance .

The things in my head, Mama. The hobgoblin, nattering things. Please. If you ever loved me at all, I beg you to please save my family.

—Rez

Last Princess of the Zaharen

'Would you like to know how it's going to happen?'

Lia's voice floated with casual nonchalance through the parlor, which seemed very hot to me. I did not know why the room had to be so hot; it was nearing winter, and the sunbeams slanting in held at best a tone of ambered coolness. Motes of dust danced through them, spinning their own small jigs.

I'd already read Rez's hobgoblin letter. Read it, absorbed it, let the horror of it pass into Alexandru's hands.

'How what will happen?' I asked, unable quite to tear my gaze from the motes. It seemed to me they were dancing to the unearthly poem of Draumr, keeping time with its funeral dirge.

'The manner in which they try to kill you,' she said. 'Your English parents, I mean. Would you like to know? It's in the late afternoon. It's summer in Darkfrith, and lilies are in bloom. There'll be a measure of laudanum in your tea. Your mother will hand you the cup. You're going to drink it. You speak of missing them—of your prince —and I believe you were even attempting to tell them about your daughter—'

'Our daughter,' Sandu whispered, less than a sound, a scant parting of the air.

'—but the laudanum is potent, and you fall asleep first. They plan to behead you, which you may recall is our traditional method of handling drakon enemies. Your mother will cry, your father won't let her watch. They both agreed to it, though.'

I wrenched my gaze back to Lia. The cooling sun put fire in her hair.

'I remember that,' I said. A pulse of fright reached me, breaking past the numbed horror of the letter. 'I remember Sandu telling me in the meadow ... how I'd go to them, to tell them we were engaged ...'

'In an effort,' she continued steadily, 'to soothe your mother's sensibilities, they plan to use an ax instead of the Alpha's teeth. It's really all very civilized.'

'But Hive.' I jerked a hand toward the letter Sandu still held.

'Yes. You Weave away, even after falling asleep. You Weave back here, I assume. But the English know about you now, that you're aligned with the Zaharen. After you go to Darkfrith, they know, and they know also that you're sanf . The proposal for unifying the tribes is merely a ruse, one they decide they no longer need. They come here to destroy you.'

I'mnot —'

'But you will be,'bit out my second mother, a sentence so sharp it stilled even the motes. I faced Sandu, desperate. 'What does it say? Can you Read it?'

His eyes scanned the page again, gray and unfathomable. The funeral song of Draumr groaned between us, slinking and slithering around us, and it was all I could do not to go to him to pull him close. I'd gone hollow inside. I needed to feel him, his heat. His life.

'Nothing,' he said at last. He looked up at me. 'It says nothing else. I think it must be the entire truth.'

'It can't be,' I burst out. 'Thatcan't be our future! That can't be me!'

I didn't have to go to him; the prince came to me. He cradled me in his arms and pressed my cheek to his chest. I was breathing too quickly. The room began to blur.

The end, your end, the end, moaned Draumr .

'That is not going to be your future,' agreed Lia, and with that single statement Draumr suspended, an abrupt, waiting hush.

'Come stand before me, both of you,' she said.

Like it had never desired to be anything else, the shattered diamond song swelled back to life, wrapped around Lia's command so that we had no choice but to obey it, because now it was lovely and long and persuasive.

She looked us over with a sigh. 'I've had too much a hand in this, I think. I never meant to muddle things so. It happened. I knew you were destined to be with Alexandru, that it would enrage the English, and thought to circumvent it. I knew about the cathedral, Honor, and let it be, because it was in Spain still, and I thought, well, at least she's staying here. But perhaps, in attempting to avoid the future I dreamed, I've only caused it to happen. Had I left you in Darkfrith, had I let you grow up there, or been killed there—' She broke off, biting her lip. 'Maybe none of this would have occurred. I honestly don't know.' A hand lifted to her forehead; she seemed tired suddenly, thin and waifish. 'The future has always been dark to me.'

'Can you fix it?' I asked, and even to me, my voice sounded very small. I heard in it all the years of my childhood, all the yearning to belong, for Josephine or Gervase to look at me and smile and soothe away my wounds, to take lasting note of me and all my turmoil and put it right like they never did.

Because Lia was also my mother, I realized. In all the ways that counted, she was.

'There is an answer,' Amalia replied. 'It is that you must never wed him. Never be with him. Never bear his child.'

'No,' snarled Sandu at once. He rocked forward a step but couldn't do more than that;Draumr had us fixed.

Lia transferred her dark gaze to him. 'Rez cannot live here with you,' she explained with awful kindness. 'Rez cannot come to be. It's Rez they desire to obliterate, not you. The English will invade one way or another, my lord, but they'd let you live were she not your mate.'

'She is my mate. It cannot be undone.'

'I know. My dear friend, I know all about bonded hearts. So here is what will happen: You're going to leave Zaharen Yce forever, both of you. You're going to Weave ahead to the future, Honor. Far, far into the future, with him. And you'll never return.'

My lips parted in dismay. There were so many things wrong with that plan, I could barely stammer out where to begin. 'I-I can't! I can't Weave with another living thing! I've never been able to!'

'You will this time, though.'