The Time Weaver

Chapter Ten

Across the city, across the man-built grimy peaks and turns of the many rooftops that made up this particular quarter of Barcelona, above all the other noises begat from the Festes de la Merce, Lia heard the music.

She was standing at the balcony off their bedroom, modest enough in her wrap of flowing silk that was pale as peaches, as the first light that would spill over the long blue horizon of the Caribbean and break into opals across the waves. She kept her hands fixed to the iron railing before her, because it hurt a little—iron always did—and that kept her grounded to earth. That kept her from Turning.

But the music would not cease.

Like the roofs, it was also made by man. A fiddle, she thought. Perhaps a viol.

She did not know why it struck her so coldly on this warm night. She did not know why she felt a chill as the melody pulsed around her, tantalized her, repelled her. It was a song she'd not heard before, she was sure of that much. Yet it spoke to her as if they were old familiar friends.

I'm here. You tried to stop me. But I'm here. It has begun.

Perhaps it was just because of the festival. Perhaps she was oversensitive to this particular night, to the parties and drunken carousing. The smoke in the air.

One year, their second autumn here, she and Honor had ventured out to become swallowed by the Festes. It had been a first for them both; for all her years away from the deliberate isolation of the shire, Lia'd never grown comfortable in truly large crowds of Others. There was something about them that whetted her animal instinct, some subtle, tingling, disquieting thing: beyond the smell of them, beyond their bodily noises and emissions, their garish loud ways ...

Shoulder to shoulder with them, unable to see her way clear, Lia felt ensnared. And ensnared was a dangerous feeling indeed for a barely leashed dragon.

But the festival swarmed the streets with its own siren call, and Honor had stood here—right here, just beside her—on the balcony, watching, inhaling the smells, and whispered only, "All that laughter. What must it be like?"

So they'd abandoned the balcony, dressed up in crisp Spanish lace and shawls and descended their tall, locked-away palace down to the crooked streets.

It had been every bit as noisy and stinking as Lia'd feared. Beneath the veil her eyes were running from the smoke, and her ears were throbbing from the drums and bells and people shouting, and Honor's smile was so wide and delighted that when she flashed it toward Lia, the extravagant, drakon beauty that only just waited beneath the surface of her youth shone more brightly than all the torches.

They'd remained out all night. They'd danced with strangers, dined upon warm fruit and sweetmeats, shared wine. At the tail end of the celebration they were seated together alone upon the damp brink of a beach, shoes off, their veils discarded into long twists of lace snakes that rolled with the breeze against the sand.

An abandoned bonfire had mumbled down into a pile of embers upwind; the air smacked of charred laurel and brine.

Lia's coiffure had begun to weigh too heavy upon her head. She was working on removing her pins, collecting them carefully to her lap, when Honor spoke.

"Why did you save me from the shire?"

She glanced over with her hands still up in her hair; Honor only gazed fixedly at the sea. She sat curved with her arms wrapped around her knees, her shawl a tender bunching of cashmere against her chin and cheek.

Amalia lowered her hands, the last pin between her fingers. There were so many things she could have said.

Because the dreams told me to.

Because you were innocent, and did not deserve to die.

Because parents should always protect their children, even drakon parents. Because I was heartsick for a family. And so were you.

"Because we're kin" is what Lia finally answered.

"You're not my mother."

Under the inexorable slap of water to sand it wasn't an accusation, only a softly stated fact ... but oh, it stung.

She kept her face to the breeze. "Do you remember the wild do grose that would grow in Darkfrith? How it'd wrap along the hedges and creep into the rye, and come back every year, even when the farmers pulled it out?"

From the edge of her eye, she saw Honor hesitate, then give a nod.

"Love is like that. It grows in thorny fields as well as fertile ones. It's inexplicable, and undeniable. There was a hole in my life, and a premature ending for yours. So fate gave me my dreams, and you a longer ending. A much longer one, I hope. We were chosen for each other. We were meant to be."

"You . love me?"

"Yes. You're my daughter now. You're of my heart."

Honor had said nothing else, only hunched down deeper into the sand.

It was a sennight later, long after the last of the smoke had cleared from the air, that Lia had discovered the note shoved under her pillow, written in an unmistakable girlish hand.

Thank you. I will love you too.

She was not Mama or Mother or even Mare . Honor had never once called Lia by anything but her given name. But she had penned that note.

The night song from the distant fiddle paused, started again. A clot of men on the street below had staggered to a halt beneath her to sing off-key, their torches casting a diabolic glow straight up to where she stood.

The silence of the apartments behind Amalia beckoned. She released the railing, turned back to her room and to her empty bed.

When I was twenty-one, what I knew of the sanf inimicus would fill barely a thimble. Our ancestral folklore was rife with stories of humans hunting us; even human history boasted tales of brave men slaughtering dragons, or of dim-witted women being stolen by them. We knew we were unwelcome in the world of the Others, of course we knew. It was the reason we pretended to be them. It was the reason we spent our lives, generation after generation, incognito.

But I don't think we English drakon had a specific name for the hunters. I don't think any one of our stories ever called them by that name.

Still, they did exist.

They had been conceived in the Carpathians ages ago, just as we had been. Confirmation of them had only just surfaced in the shire right before Zane had taken me away, and that was the last I'd even thought of them until Alexandru's first accusation to me, there in the library of Zaharen Yce.

Yet my initial introduction to the sanf inimicus actually came by way of Josephine and Gervase.

My father was a trusted advisor to our Alpha, probably because, like the Alpha, he was obsessed with ensuring the tribe's silver fortunes. There was a lot of it to ensure.

Whenever he was home, Gervase reeked of silver. I don't believe he spent much time deep within the mines themselves, but he worked surrounded with all forms of the ore. As a girl I used to imagine that the crude metal had permeated the crevices of his body and hardened around all his inner organs. He would bawl, spit, and sweat silver.

Like the rest of us, he knew his place in the tribal hierarchy. He was both smart and obedient; he would never challenge for a higher status. Why bother? He already had Plum House and the Alpha's ear, and a position all but the council members would envy.

Whilst I, the runt of the litter, had evolved into a very skilled eavesdropper.

So when the whispers about the human dragon hunters began, I opened my ears. I learned that the Darkfrith Council had secretly sent out ambassadors to the Zaharen drakon , sent three strong young drakon men to the wild crescent of the Carpathians to seek out our hidden cousins—one, two, three.

The sanf inimicus had tracked and killed two of them nearly at once.

Not merely killed.

"They took their hearts," my father told my mother, his voice so strained with rage I barely heard it through the keyhole of their bedroom door. "Their hearts, Jo. Ripped them beating right out of their chests, like godforsaken wolves ."

My mother made a stifled sound.

"Aye, their hearts and all their papers, their wallets and horses—the bastards took everything. Left only their tribal signets, so we'd know. So we'd know they knew about us ."

Josephine's response sounded far more composed. "Will they come here?"

I don't know why my father lied to my mother; I wouldn't have. She was very good at detecting lies, at least with me. Perhaps the smell of so much silver dulled her senses.

"No," he said. "No, pet. We're far too protected for that."

It occurred to me later, much later, that he'd been disingenuous about the wolves as well. Tearing out the hearts of their prey sounded much more like something a dragon would do.

I lay in my bed in my cathedral that night, thinking about what Prince Alexandru had said. About how my old tribe believed I was sanf somehow. That I would betray them in the most despicable manner possible.

I had not been happy in my life in Darkfrith, but joining the sanf inimicus would mean striking out at everything I was, not just my kin but my heritage. It was unthinkable.

Free from the restrictions of the shire, I'd learned to embrace what dragon traits I had. I liked the slow, budding ferocity that had trickled—and then gradually rushed—through my blood as I had grown older. I liked hearing stones and metals, and being fleet, and being strong. I liked the looks men sent me now. That my complexion had finally gone to alabaster. That my hair no longer resembled reddish straw. I'd never possess Lia's cream-and-honey beauty, but I had my own kind of allure, something a bit more untamed. Or so I hoped.

I liked Weaving. I liked being able to escape the confines of ordinary time and place, even if only temporarily. The only thing I actively disliked still were the aftereffects from it, the shooting pains that would inevitably wrack me from my head to the tips of my fingers. The bloody noses that would leave me dizzy.

None of that was the fault of the shire, though. Was it?

Besides, I couldn't imagine why a group of humans who desired to hunt and kill dragons would accept a dragon in their ranks. It made no sense to me.

However .

Against my will, my thoughts returned to the letter I'd written to myself so far ahead, that fifth Letter Over Time. Its tone of understated discontent, which vexed me more than I liked to admit. Twenty-three years from now I seemed morose, confused, yet determined to change something I'd done. I'd spent a long time now trying to guess what that might be. Surely if it were joining the sanf inimicus—I'd never, never do that, but if I did —I would have told me. Something like that, something so spectacularly important, no matter how confused I was, I would have mentioned it.

Dear Honor, please do not become evil and hunt down your own kind.

Ridiculous.

I sighed and adjusted my nightrail so that my shins were uncovered. Even though it was September, the darkness felt too warm and I had already pushed off my covers. After dinner I'd taken the trouble of washing the powder out of my hair, which cooled me slightly, but it was very long and took forever to dry. I'd spread it out around me like a sunburst along the pillows, away from my body.

The old cathedral was long and skinny and yawning open in the middle, but lined with smaller, private chapels both above stairs and below. I'd claimed an upstairs one that must have once been devoted to some high church official; it was more spacious than the others, more elaborate, with carved, figured stone and rounded windows I'd already torn the boards from. I kept them cracked whenever I could, to allow the outside scents in. It was open and interesting and another aspect of my life that I liked, that I had this clandestine place, essentially all my own.

The Roma bedded down all over, scattered about the rooms or in the central atrium as it suited them. I never instructed them on where to sleep or eat or congregate. They dwelled here and I dwelled here; we were like ghosts haunting the same ancient home, brushing sleeves when we needed to, otherwise drifting through our own private worlds.

Once upon a time the cathedral had been named after a local saint, but I had unofficially renamed it La Casa de Cors Secrets. The House of Secret Hearts. I didn't think Zane or Lia knew about it. I'd never told them, and they were well used to me vanishing without word for hours at a time.

I'd come here whenever I needed an escape from the careful formality of the palace apartments. From Lia's sidelong, worried looks, or Zane's more blatantly watchful ones.

A terrible new notion struck me: Did Zane and Lia realize what the tribe thought of me, that I was sanf? As far as I knew, we were all three still in hiding from the English, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps they'd covertly resumed contact with Lia's family. Or maybe Lia's Future Dreams told her something, that I was tainted, not to be trusted.

It would explain those looks. It would explain—

No. It wouldn't be true, and for one very simple reason: Zane would have killed me already. I knew without a sliver of doubt he would destroy any threat to his wife, and that certainly included the sanf inimicus .

I brought my hands up to my face, closing my eyes in relief. I was never more unreservedly, profoundly grateful that my human father had turned out to be a ruthless son of a bitch.

Someone had made a horrible mistake, that was all. I wasn't evil. I was never going to be evil.

Beyond my windows a late storm was brewing, but it wasn't raining or even humid. Dry thunder grumbled through the floors and walls, and occasionally lightning flickered close enough to reveal the outlines of the room in pitch and ice-blue, the posts of my bed, the canopy curtains, the commode and armoire.

Young Adiran was bold and brash and not yet asleep. Between the thunder a floating string of melodies from his fiddle ricocheted up and up from the atrium. I wondered if he were playing so loudly on purpose now, to provoke either me or the prince. More likely the prince, I decided. His chamber was much closer than mine.

I'd placed Alexandru in one of the chapels that ringed the floor below. Obviously, we were not sleeping together. It had been clear from the moment I invited him across the threshold of the door he wouldn't consider it. A part of me was glad for it, but another part of me—that drakon part—burned red inside me. Hungry.

I wish I could say I was shocked at myself. I was not. I was becoming more and more accustomed to the dark, silky beat that thrummed through my blood now. It was nothing of the porcelain-faced, human-shaped female who wore gowns and drank wine in tiny sips and crossed her legs at the ankles to be polite. It was animal. And as much as it still sometimes scared me, out of every mysterious force that shaded my adult life, I liked it best of all.

Not evil, just animal. The most normal thing in the world for someone like me, a woman with a dragon trapped in her heart.

When the lightning flashed again, Alexandru was standing in the doorway of my room.

It was like a street magician's surprise—or more probably, something I myself would do. He was not there, he was.

I sat up, tugging my nightrail back down to my feet.

We gazed at each other for a long moment. He was barely perceptible against the paler limestone, mostly phantom color, shape and heat, although the heat part was almost certainly my imagination.

"Did you wish to fly?"

His voice was so soft, tailed by another growl of thunder and one of Adiran's more forceful refrains. I tipped my head, puzzled. Was it a test of some sort?

"Of course," I said.

"I meant," he cleared his throat. "With me."

"Oh." I sat up straighter. "Yes. Of course again."

"Now?" he inquired, when I made no move to leave the bed.

"There's a storm."

"We'll go above it."

"Will I be able to breathe?" I asked doubtfully.

I saw his sudden smile. "I don't know. You'll have to tell me when we get there."

The most envied girls in the shire were the sweethearts of the boys who could already Turn. I was old enough by the time I'd left that I, too, seethed with that envy, though the idea of any of those radiant, glimmering boys throwing me even a second glance was laughable. Still, I had a tender heart. I dreamed. And I sighed with the other unmatched maidens over the girls who could soar to the clouds with their loves, girls who kicked off their buckled heels and hucked up their skirts and climbed astride the backs of slender young dragons, their hair dancing out behind them as they'd take off.

We grounded things lived through their adventures, we simmered and ached as they described what it was like.

Utterly smashing.

I never stopped laughing.

He turned loops! He was upside down!

We tore through a rainbow. Did you see?

I maneuvered out of the bed, shoving my damp hair over my shoulders so that it licked at the small of my back.

Sandu's smile was gone. "You're very fair," he said from his position by the door, now sounding severe. "But you know that."

"So are you," I said.

"Do you require a change of clothing?"

"No. You've already seen me wearing less."

He looked away from me, around the room.

"Is there an access to the roof?"

"Through the bell tower."

"Very well."

He turned around and left without me. I wondered that he knew where to go until I realized that he probably always knew, in a general way, where the highest entry of any building would be. Anyone Gifted with flight or smoke would have ducked through countless bell towers, figured their way around every sort of architectural quirk to get to and from attics and roofs. And sure enough, he led the way without hesitation to the small timbered door that opened to the tower without pausing once, not even to see if I followed.

He knew that I would. He would hear my heartbeat, if nothing else.

I heard his

The door had a rusted bolt but was otherwise unlocked; there was no real reason to secure it. The only other dragon in the country was Lia, and if she wanted to come in, she'd probably have the good manners to knock at the main doors first.

I felt the gathering attention of the Roma downstairs. I heard the fiddle begin to taper into silence.

Sandu's hand was an elegant shape against the wood. He released the bolt and pulled at the latch, and the tower door cracked open without a squeak.