The Time Weaver

something too low for me to catch. Zane gave a ragged sigh. He brushed his lips to her cheek, and then to her mouth.

I stood there soggily, dripping water, openly gawking. For all that they were both fully dressed and standing with a good foot between them, it was like they were making love to each other right there in the foyer. A white- hot heat seemed to envelop them both, sealing them away from all the rest of the people in the chamber.

My parents would barely even touch fingertips in public. I'd never seen adults act anything like this. It was rawly intimate, and I felt a spear of pure envy stab through me.

For the first time in my life, I thought: That. I want that. I want to be that loved.

A liveried footman carrying a tray of empty cups bumped into me, apologized over the clatter of china, and when I glanced again at Zane and Lia, they were both looking back at me. A pretty flush now stained her cheekbones—not rouge at all.

'Honor,' she said warmly. With her hand still clasped in her husband's, she came to me by the doors. 'Honor. I feel as if I know you already, but how happy I am to meet you now.'

I gathered myself. I averted my gaze from her face, from that too-entrancing wink of blue at her throat, and gave my best curtsy. It was a little shaky.

'I'm very pleased to ...' I began, but trailed off, because despite all my mother's rigorous lessons in social discipline, I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I'm very pleased to be abducted by you? So sorry that I don't know you in the least?

Men and women swished back and forth across the lobby. Their voices were birdlike, their jewelry offering sporadic bursts of song that washed bright and loud through the air.

Lia released Zane's hand—not before giving his fingers a quick squeeze, I noticed—and took up both of mine. When I lifted my eyes again, her smile had returned. I couldn't help but begin to smile back.

'Dear girl,' she said. 'My dragon-girl. How would you feel about coming to live in Spain?'

Yesss, Ssspain, the fragments of Draumr whispered, from him and from her.

'What is in Spain?' I managed to ask.

'Your future,' said the Lady Amalia simply. 'I've dreamed it.'

A runner and a thief. Fugitives, the both of them, with such prices on their heads that would make even Blackbeard shudder. They stood before me and offered me what no one else ever had, a chance to live beyond the rigid rules of the shire, beyond bruises, beyond my own deep-tendriled fears that had bound my every breath.

'Yes,' I said, relieved. 'Spain. Thank you.'

Chapter Three

The first time he saw her wasn't in a fashionable Viennese opera house, or strolling down a street in Bucharest, or framed in the glass window of a carriage. It was in the middle of a spring-swollen river in the mountains. He was eighteen, and she was crouched alone upon a rock, stranded.

Sandu noticed her hair first. It was the only thing about her that moved. He was high above her, very high, gliding along a jet of northern wind, enjoying the brisk cold bite of it that whistled along his scales and rushed tears to his eyes.

He'd been practicing kiting most of the morning, winging high into the luminous center of the sky until he found the perfect upsweep of air to support him. With his wings spread and his legs extended, Sandu would hover in place like a solitary fragment of midnight, fixed to the heavens.

It took mastery and stern concentration, an instinctive knowing of the gusts that would flip him if they could, slam him back to earth. The winds that howled along the spines of the alpine gorges would like nothing more than to turn Prince Alexandru of the Zaharen into a fine smear of blood upon the dirt below.

But he was better than that.

He was, in fact, better than anyone he knew at flight, and he took a secret pride in that. Although he'd been born a human-shaped child, it was a distant memory to him now. Without his will, without his even trying, he'd shifted into Something Else as he'd aged: more than just a man or a prince or even a dragon. Sometimes he thought it was like he'd snared a thread of blue from the heavens and swallowed it, and it had enwrapped his heart.

They were joined now, Alexandru and Sky, perfect reflections of each other. Up here, alone, he could at last be himself. He could be free.

His people, human or dragon alike, would gather in the hamlets and all along the crenulated edges of his castle when Sandu chose to soar. Those who could would sometimes follow him; day or night, every drakon of the mountains burned to fly.

But on that particular morning, he had been unaccompanied. He'd slipped out before dawn without any fanfare, restless and eager to escape the formality of the day he knew would come. Stretching his wings was a necessary solace.

When the mists caught between the highest eastern tors had lifted from pink into pearl, he knew it was time to return home. Duties awaited him. Papers, plans. All the winds of the world would not spare him from that.

Then came that flag of color beneath him that had snared his attention. It was bright, much brighter than the dark rock around it, or the raging green-and-foam river that had carved its path through the granite of the canyon. The flag glinted in shades of copper, dancing above the rapids.

He passed it, circled back, staring. A woman's hair.

He'd made another full loop before his mind accepted what his eyes were showing him. Yes, there was a woman in the river, hunched low upon a drenched rock with her arms around her knees, her face upturned to him. She seemed without clothes.

The wind shifted and her hair blew across her eyes. She lifted one arm—white skin, a quick and nervous push of her hand along her forehead to clear her vision—and stared back at him.

Sandu Turned to smoke. Instant buoyancy, all resistance to the wind gone, all the mechanics of flight and angles and gravity rendered moot. There were times when being smoke was even better than being dragon.

Smoke could maneuver down to the river in a way a dragon could not. Smoke could twine as thin as a whip against the channel of air that rushed atop the water, regroup without effort into the thickness that resembled his human shape. Smoke gave him weight upon the rock in front of her, feet that found a reasonable footing against the slick stone, a body and head and a face, inches from hers, because, honestly, it wasn't much of a rock and there was hardly any room.

The woman had stood too, staggering a bit to find her balance as he Turned to man in front of her. She gazed at him with wide blue eyes. Very blue eyes, dark as a bruise. She was pale and thin and much younger than he'd first realized—not a woman at all. A girl still. A maiden.

And drakon .

It was the second-most obvious thing about her, after that streamer of hair. It washed over him now in pretty little sugary waves, that sense of one of his own, a pulse that throbbed and matched his heartbeat, his blood. Electrical. Unique.

Even with her youth, she felt strong, stronger than most. The people of the mountains had mingled for centuries with the Others, and so their talents waxed and waned according to the whims of their ancestry. But this girl's power thrummed over his skin.

She didn't look like anyone he knew. The drakon ran the gamut of colors in their human shapes, but he'd never seen anyone in the castle or any of the villages with splendid hair like that, copper and rose and gold.

Still, she'd know him . She had to. All the peasants knew their prince.

Sandu smiled down at her, benevolently, because her eyes were still so wide. He offered her the traditional greeting her blood entitled her to. 'Gentle One. What are you—'

The girl shoved him off the rock.

The surprise of it kept him whole, and when his back hit the water he went all the way under, thrashing like