The Time Weaver

Chapter Twenty-Three

When the princess named Rez Wove away from the massacre at Zaharen Yce, she went ahead in time. Far ahead.

For a very long while, she was stuck there.

As a girl she'd already endured the experience of losing nearly a year of her life. She never recalled her trials as a sixteen-year-old, although she did live through them. At the age of twenty-five, she lost another six and a half years to the Dragon of Time, which took particular delight in devouring her then.

An enraged drakon , a screaming drakon , mother to a freshly slaughtered child, wife to a freshly slaughtered mate—in her involuntary Weave away from the dungeon of Zaharen Yce , she was especially delicious.

When she was thirty-two, she awoke one morning with nearly all the memories of her previous life restored intact. She sat up in her narrow, cotton-sheeted bed and realized that she was in Germany, that Germany was at war, and that she was English.

That she wasn't human. And it was not her war.

Rez attempted to Weave back. Over and over again, she flung herself back in time, but she never did return to the scene of her family's demise. She never even managed to get close.

Zaharen Yce had turned its back on her. Whatever magic had lived in it before the pillaging, whatever welcome she'd once received, had all been revoked.

It did not have life , this castle. Not in the way the dragons did, or the forests, or even the lesser beasts. But it had a sort of memoried awareness, a sense of being, and of having been. Polarity, chemistry. Every block of quartzite, every single embedded gem, every grain of sand in the mortar ... all of it, polarized like a magnet, drawing sweet, heavy magic to it, basking in it.

Until that day it did not.

Dragons may change the chemistry of stones; stones may change the chemistry of dragons. On that cold March day in 1791, the crimson flowing deaths of its inhabitants changed the chemistry of Zaharen Yce forever.

A smaller mind might describe the years that followed as accursed, for both Rez and her former home. She herself began to believe in witches and curses, in all manner of jabbering ghouls, although that might have been merely the onset of her madness sinking its first juicy tendrils into her.

The castle now existed as a hulking shell. Its polarity had been reversed, rejecting all magic, rejecting Rez 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.