The Time Weaver - Шэна Эйби

The Time Weaverby Shana Abe

What if everything you loved, and everyone, suddenly vanished?

Your parents, your children, your friends. Your home. Your town.

Your species.

All the living beings that defined your world, that gave your heart reason to pump the blood that animates your flesh, that caused you to wake each morning and open your eyes and turn your face to your window to witness the new sun in the new sky; laughter and love and meals around the table and running games in tall grasses, snowball battles in winter; gentle hands holding yours, warm kisses on your lipsall that gone.

What if it were your doing?

Your future unfurled before you like a map marked with a thick black arrow drawn irrevocably, relentlessly straight toward Extinction. You never knew. You never guessed, until the end.

What would you sacrifice to erase that map?

Prologue

Imagine a place empty of souls.

Imagine it lush and green and fertile, a land dripping with moss and dew, streams flowing like glass across peat and smooth dark rocks. Wild roses weep petals into the streams, sending them down and down hills into lakes that glitter sapphire and gold beneath the sun.

Pebbles of copper and silver live in the silt at the bottom of the lakes. Occasionally long speckled trout flick by, the fans of their tails stirring the mud into storms; fish do well in this place. They never hear the sad, persistent songs of the silver, the ardent copper, and there is no one above the water left to hunt them. The fish thrive.

Beyond the water the land is not yet so easy with itself. The scent of the creatures who used to dwell here still saturates the air. The decaying homes, the fallow fields, the deep tangled woods. The abandoned manor house on the knoll, still shining with windows, surrounded by grass and aspen and willows: everything smells of them, and all the little animals who would normally flourish in this green silence remain missing. It will take many years before any of them dare to reclaim the land.

Birds will appear first. Then rodents. Then badgers. Hedgehogs, red squirrels, moles, foxes, rabbits. And deer too. Along with the rabbits, deer will come last.

But theyre not here yet, not even the smallest of larks. For now, all that may be heard is the water rippling over the rocks, and a scattering of insects hiding beneath ferns or under the bark of the trees in the forest, chirping and breathing.

This place was named Darkfrith, for the woods and the water. The beings who dwelled herewho built the cottages and the mansion and the mines and millswere called the drakon .

They were dragons, of course.

There are none left now. But onceoh, yes, once upon a time, they ruled this empty place.

Beasts of brutal beauty and cunning, they had learned to blend with the Homo sapiens of the more ordinary world, to mask themselves as them, to conceal their true resplendence. Centuries past they had been driven from their homeland in the Carpathian Mountains, but in their flight these particular dragons had discovered the woods and lakesheard the silver calling to them from the buried veins deep inside the earthand decided to settle here. In England.

For a while, they managed it very well.

Darkfrith is a secret ripe corner at the northern edge of the country; remote, timbered and undulating, it offered nothing remarkable to tempt tourists or even common travelers. Occasionally a few would venture in anyway.

None of them lingered long.

By day they would discover a scene of idyllic perfection: lustrous-cheeked girls and strong, comely lads. Neatly tilled fields, Roman-straight orchards spangled with apples and pears, peaches and plums. Emerald hills that hugged the heavens, that invited the clouds down low for foggy kisses. A flock of black-faced sheep. That manor house, seat of an ancient noble family, gleaming with wealth. Silver mines. A bustling village. Everyone smiling and happy.

However, should he look more closely, the Traveler might notice how the smiles of the villagers never quite warmed their eyes. How there was but that lone drove of sheep, not nearly as many as the meadows could support. And how those sheep bolted from their keepers over and over again, even though they were herded only by children.

What the weary Traveler might perceive more quickly was the fact that Darkfrith had no inn. Not one. And the people of the shirenearly all of them blond and pale and handsomesomehow never had a single room to spare, not even a bed of hay in one of the barns.

He might take coffee in the tavern, or ale, should he prefer it. He might admire the clean cobblestone lanes and elegant limestone architecture, the aroma of spiced tarts or souffle au chocolat from the bakery, the books displayed in the bowfront window of the circulating library. But as the day would fade and dusk slowly darken into blue, the Traveler would begin to feel an uneasy sort of itching settle between his shoulder blades. A restlessness. The urge to press on.

For all their smiles, the villagers would make certain of that.

Because by night, Darkfrith became a very different place. By night, the smiling fair people were gone, and any Travelers left on the shire roads would have done well to duck their heads and move faster.

The skies writhed at night. The stars trembled, the moon shrank. The beasts took flight then, commanding the dominion of heaven: great, glimmering bands of dragons, curling and coiling and streaking through the dark. From over five leagues away, farmers would shiver and cross themselves for no reason; their wives would pull the shutters a little tighter against the unnatural moaning of wind carved by wings rising beyond the hills.

Everyone local knew not to venture to Darkfrith at night, even if they did not know why.

For sixteen generations the drakon thrived in this little pocket of the world.

By the time the seventeenth took their first toddling steps, it was done.

Here is the story of how they perished. Or perhaps its the story of how they did not.

Youll see.

Chapter One

Dear Honor,

I leave this letter for you knowing you'll find it in the Year 1782, at the age of nearly fifteen, right before your Gifts begin to fully emerge. This is going to sound mad, but you must believe me.

I am you, eleven months and four days from now.

Keep reading. This is not a jest.

You are a Time Weaver. You are the only Time Weaver born to the drakon. It's just as it sounds: You will have the ability to Weave through time when you wish itand sometimes, when you do not.

As it is when the rest of the tribe Turns to smoke or dragon, you will not be able to bring anything not of yourself with you when you Weave. You will reemerge in each new time exactly the same as you left the last, and (unless you Focus upon it very fiercely), in exactly the same place. However, you will be nude. You will have no jewelry. No weapons. Nothing left in your hands.

I am working, though, on a way.

I've not discovered what happens to all those things, because apparently they're not left in the previous time or place, either. They're Vanished. For now, don't Weave wearing anything you especially like.

When- and wherever you go during a Weave, however long you spend there, inevitably you will be drawn back into your Natural Time. It's rather like a pull inside you that grows stronger and stronger, until you can no longer resist it. Picture a strand of india rubber stretched long and thin and then snapping back to its normal shape. The strand connects you to your Natural Time. You always come back. And it's always the exact amount of time later there that you spent during the Weave.

That's another thing that's Vanished: the time you've spent away from your Natural Time. Once you Weave away, you can't touch it again. I've tried.

In a few nights, on July 6, a human man is going to come to the shire in secret for you. His name is Zane; you will recall he's the London Thief befriended by our Alphas, the Marquess and Marchioness of Langford, until he was banished for wedding their daughter. He will have with him some shards of a blue diamond once known as Draumr. He will summon you from your bedroom at Plum House, and you will go with him.

I know that at this point in your life, you've never heard of Draumr, so I will briefly explain: Draumr was a stone from our ancestral home in the Carpathian Mountains, and once upon a time it was guarded by, and belonged to, our cousins the Zaharen drakon . Its name means Dreaming Diamond, and it has a very long and unpleasant history relating to our kind. It enables whoever wears it or carries it (or its splinters, for that is all that is left of it in your Natural Time) to command the drakon. We have no choice, we must obey it.

Please do not attempt to resist it. Zane will not harm you. He will take you to a safe place. Your life is in danger in Darkfrith. You must not remain there. Zane is coming to save you.

To convince you I am who I say I am, I offer you the following:

1. The second plank under your bed is loose, and there is a space beneath. You keep all your romantic

novels Father thought he tossed away there.

2. Your first kiss came from Lord Rhys Langford, when you were eight and he twenty-two. He kissed you on the chin after Wilhelmina Grady pushed you down yet again, this time in front of the silversmith's shop.

3. You hunted Wilhelmina later that night, waited until she was alone, then threatened to cut off all her hair if she continued to hurt you.

4. You would not have cut off her hair (she did have a lot of it, though). Wilhelmina has always been extraordinarily large and short-tempered. But you were convincing. She never called your bluff.

5. Your secret tree in Blackstone Woods is an ash. You keep charms in its hollow; it's where I left you this letter.

6. Your favorite butterfly is the Brimstone. Your favorite wildflowers are harebells.

7. Here's the best bit: Approximately one week past, on a Tuesday, you lost an entire three hours. You were in your bedroom, feeling sleepy and reading (The Decline of Lady Pamela) whilst the hall clock was striking half past noon. And then all at once you were there on the bed cold and unclothed (you remember that ) and the clock finished its chimes at half past three .

You told no one about it, which was wise. You decided that you had fallen asleep, that you must have walked and disrobedeven the blasted corsetin your sleep. You were wrong. You never found that gown again, did you? Nor the book.

That was your first Weave, Honor. Eventually, the memory of it will return to you. (Hint: You went to a river.)

The rules of the shire are indisputable. You know what will happen to you if anyone discovers you're Gifted, especially since it's so rare these days for females to display Gifts of any sort. Yes, I realize you've daydreamed about being special, special enough to be given like a prize to the Alpha and his family to better their line. But believe me, your life with them will not be the stuff of dreams. You cannot Turn into a dragon; your Gift is unique ... and, some might say, dangerous. The Alpha and his Council would never have permitted you the Freedom of your Gifts. At best, you would have been kept in chains and darkness. You would have been wed and bedded as a prisoner, for all the rest of your life.

There is a much, much better future awaiting you. There is a prince, I swear it. A real one.

Put this letter now in your apron pocket. Burn it after tea today. The drawing room is always deserted then, and no one will see. Remember everything I've written here, but don't speak of it to anyone. Even Zane!

Don't be frightened.

H.C.

Second Letter

(I need to keep track, I think. This is the second letter I've written to myself Over Time.) Honor,

By now you're in Barcelona, living with Lia Langford, and sometimes her husband, Zane. Yes, I know he's still a criminal, and a human. But she's like you, Gifted and apart. Please listen to her counsel. She wants only the best for you and all of us.

You're surprised to discover that you miss Mother and Father, and even Darkfrith. Well, the woods at least. I'm four months ahead of you, so I know it can be difficult. Dreadful, even. But Lia, more than anyone, can help you understand what it's like to venture into the future, to wrest control of it. You need her. Not only is she one of the last few females who can Turn into dragon, she alone has the Gift of Dreaming Ahead, and she's seen what's to come. Perhaps she seems too strict sometimes; perhaps she seems unfeeling. She's not, though. I'm certain she misses Darkfrith too. Remember, she's a Lady, the youngest daughter of the Marquess and Marchioness, of powerful blood. And yet she's been vanished from the tribe since she was a young woman herself.

She'll teach you Control. She'll teach you Responsibility. You Must Learn These Things.

You're fifteen, so by now you know about Sandu. Stay away from him. He's not ready for you yet.

H.C.

Third Letter

The lovely heat. The white-salt scent of the Mediterranean floating inland, gentle against your face Pa amb tomaquet, sangria. Festival dancers in the streets, laughing boys with black hair. Yellow sunlight and ripe oranges spraying sugar as you peel them open, fresh flowers all the year long. Oh, Honor . there are many things to recommend Spain.

I know you feel ready to burst at the seams. I know you're Sick Unto Death of Catalan and watching the traffic on Carrer del Bisbe pass by from behind the glass of the bower, that particular warp in the pane that somehow always remains level with your eyes. Trapped. Pinned inside the apartments like a butterfly to a board. But you promised. You mustn't leave. You're not nearly skilled enough yet to control this Gift.

Do not Weave in secret to Sandu's castle. Don't seek him out again. And don't go home either, not unless you want to tempt fate. We're too young to die.

You're nearly sixteen, you're smarter than that. Be more careful. The English cannot know where you are. They cannot even know you're alive. You'd risk everything by Weaving back to Darkfrith, even for  a moment.

 I'm a year and a half ahead, and I'm still struggling to master this Gift. Listen to me. H.C.

Post Script: I know you're thinking of finding me in the future and the past. Don't. It won't work, you can't come anywhere near me. We cannot interact that way. That's why I'm hiding these letters for you to find.

Fourth Letter

I can't really believe how incredibly stubborn I am. You, Honor X. Carlisle, are an idiot.

STOP spying upon Sandu!! Are you mad? Are you trying to start a war with the Zaharen? If they discover you there they'll instantly think the worstthe worst for Darkfrith, I mean. Is that what you want? Tensions between the two tribes are serious enough. The last thing anyone needs is for the Zaharen to accuse the English of sending an infiltrator, or the English to accuse the Zaharen of kidnapping you.

However much the Zaharen look like us, however much they act like us and speak and eat and fly and huntoh God, Honor, they're not us. These are a kind of dragon that are pre -Darkfrith. Imagine our tribe before the ancient split. Imagine the most primal, untamed versions of our kind, and there they are, still thriving in the highest peaks of the Carpathian Alps. Alone. Untouched. They have no human checks or balances, they have nothing of the Others to impede them. And they definitely have no reason to follow all the silly little rules of our shire. Why bother?

They're accepted exactly as they are by the peasants of the mountains. Their castle, Zaharen Yce, has been perched upon its crest as far back as human memory stretches. In the hamlets all around, the Zaharen drakon are welcomed as guardian spirits. Feared as devils. They hide nothing of themselves from the Others, whilst we hide all that we are, just to survive.

You come from a Time of Enlightenment. You were born to a tribe of civilized monsters, dragons who are devious enough to wear satin and taffeta and powder their hair and never, ever whisper a hint of their true selves to the outside world.

The Zaharen skipped Enlightenment. Oh, they have their own fine satins and wigs and jewels, but it's all purely for their pleasure. They gain nothing with pretense. In nearly every way that matters, it is still a feudal society.

The most obvious commonality between us is that they do follow an Alpha, but he doesn't even have a Council to co-govern, as ours does; ultimately he acts alone in all his decisions. And the Zaharen drakon comply, no matter what. It's in their blood.

Yes, our Sandu is their Prince Alexandru. Yes, he's been chosen as their Alpha. And he's strong and beautiful andconfound it, just stop Weaving to him. You don't have enough control yet to Weave back in case of disaster, and you know it.

 Look here: see how my hand trembles, how the ink splotches and my sentences quiver across the page? Tonight I was nearly caught. Tonight could have been the end of everything. I ended up in a ballroom . During a ball .And he looked at me like I

Oh, dear. I write you this letter knowing you haven't even made my mistakes yet. But you're going to. I want to change the future, but it's like pushing a boulder up a mountain. I never win. What I will in retrospect never matters. The future simply rolls right over me, no matter what.

Keep all this from Lia and Zane. Burn it, burn it. They will not understand.

Five hours ahead,

Fifth Letter

You're nineteen. You're desperate to know what happens. You're desperate to know even just a little of what will be. I recall that Lia seems acutely reluctant to share your future. Has it not occurred to you there's a good reason for that?

Yes, you will be married to him. There. Now you know.

Stop Weaving for practice. You're paying a price for it, one you haven't even noticed yet. But I have. Please stop.

Remember what the legends of our kind tell us: None of the Gifts are free. None of the glory comes without sacrifice. Our particular sacrifice is rather horrific.

Save the Weaves for emergencies. Settle your heart, and look ahead with clear eyes from your Natural Time. Do not be so eager to touch the future. Savor your today.

I wish I believed my words would make a difference. I wish I could change myself, and what is to come. I've tried so hard to put things right. I don't even think you're going to get this note. I don't know, I don't know, I can never tell.

Twenty-five years ahead,

- you

Chapter Two

At the age of fourteen, I was kidnapped from my home by a pair of infamous outlaws.

Infamous to my kind, at least. And I suppose that, truthfully, the word kidnapped might be an exaggeration. After all, I knew it was going to happen, and I was fully prepared to comply. I'd warned myself days in advance about Zane, and about Draumr. Still, I have to admit I was secretly shocked when it actually occurred.

I'd been waiting, fully dressed, sitting upright upon my bed because somehow it didn't seem very dignified to greet one's kidnappers prone. I'd said my good-nights to my parents hours earlier that evening, as required, kissing the air by their cheeksJosephine always carefully scented of lavender; Gervase of pipe tobacco and harsh silver, his face angled away from mineand neither of them had noticed anything amiss. It was hardly surprising. Neither of them ever seemed to notice anything amiss with me. They certainly never spoke of the numerous bruises or bloody scrapes I tended to acquire. My mother's cool hand lingered on my arm a few seconds longer than usual, perhaps, but that was all.

I withdrew to my room, packed my case, and waited.

Plum House was a fine Elizabethan mess of a place. The main structure had been commissioned by the Alpha of our tribe long ago to lodge the gamekeeper of the shire, and the remaining two wings and solariums had been added helter-skelter by various ancestors since. The Carlisles had always been the gamekeepers of the tribe, and so the House was always our home.

Of course, the job of gamekeeper for Darkfrith had a different meaning than what it did for the rest of the world, for the Others. The challenge was not to keep the rapacious animals out of the confines of the shire, but in.

Still, we were gentrified enough by the time of my birth that the title was largely ceremonial; there were very few attempts at escape any longer. We were beasts, yes, but beasts who enjoyed the luxuries afforded us by maintaining our human facade. My father's actual employment was the management of the tribe's vast silver mines. It meant that while he was absent from Mother and me a great deal, we had the means for three young housemaids from the village and a cook, which pleased Josephine very well. She and the staff rattled around the halls, polishing the dark Tudor panels and all the narrow-paned windows, shaking dust from the tapestries, concocting meals and teas and elegant soirees to which the Marchioness of Langford, the wife of our Alpha, would occasionally come.

Whenever the marchioness came to tea, my presence was required. I would sit in silence and not toy with the ribbons on my gown, and not breathe very deeply because of my corset, and nibble at tiny frosted cakes and crustless sandwiches, and all the drakon ladies would remark upon my fine manners. My mother would incline her head graciously.

The truth was, I was too petrified to speak. My mother, with her icy kohled gaze ready to find fault with me; the marchioness, with her daunting haute couture and imposing French wigs; all the simmering, contained ladies of the shire who beneath their imported satins and bell-beautiful voices burned to be as vicious as the menfolk were allowed to beevery single one of them frightened me, and always had. I had been born a timid gray mouse into a den of starving lions.

I did not belong. I was nothing like any of them. It didn't astonish me in the least to learn that my life was in danger; it had seemed apparent to me since I was a small child that, sooner or later, one of the real drakon would end up killing me.

I didn't even resemble the rest of them, not really. We were a clan of mostly fair, blond beauties, and although I had inherited my mother's blue eyes, my own hair wasn't the color of wheat, or sunshine, or summer flax. It was a shade caught between red and ginger, a little of both, not quite either. I was pale like all the girls, but while their skin shone with the translucent clarity of fine alabaster, my complexion looked to me more like chalk. I was scrawny, timid, and not very tall. A certain cadre of the village children found it persistently amusing to refer to me as the runt.

As in Look, it's the runt. Let's show her what happens to the weakest of the litter, shall we? Oh yes, let's.

So on that sweltering summer night of July in 1782, I felt little more than wonder that somehow, for some reason, all of that was about to change. I was leaving. I was GiftedI would beand I was leaving.

I was a Time Weaver, apparently. Whatever that meant.

My bedroom's sole window faced north, so it was always one of the gloomiest chambers in the house. I was comfortable in that gloom, seated at the edge of my bed, listening to the cockchafers whirring in the woods nearby, the soft perfume of the honeyed wax the second maid had rubbed into the armoire that morning wafting sweet against my face.

Generations past, one of the young brides of the House had planted love-in-a-mist outside my sill. The flowers bloomed in a tangle of pink and mauve all summer long and spilled petals with the slightest hint of a breeze; they, too, were scented of honey. If I concentrated hard enough, I could hear the drifting petals tip-tap the spaded earth where they landed.

It was hot. I was wearing my best apricot silk dress with a buffon for modesty and a mobcap that dripped Irish lace to my shoulders. Eventually I removed the buffon from my bodice; it was far too warm to be wrapped in a muslin kerchief up to my neck. Despite my resolve not to nod off ... I did. I only realized it when I lifted my head, because there was a sharp new twinge in my neck, and the slow, pensive music of the dream I'd been having did not fade.

I turned toward the sound, pushing back the lace from my cheek. Yes, there were notes floating around me, simple and haunting notes, a tune so familiar and yet not ... like a lullaby with words you can't quite remember.

The dreaming part of me thought,That's a diamond? Because it was unlike any I'd ever heard before. Most gemstones sing to our kind, metals too, but diamonds sing strongest. They surround us with melodies that are always clear and keen, sparkling with life. We drakon love diamonds. Young or old, every female of the shire had at least a glittering pair of earbobs or a handful of fiery-cut rings. During my mother's especially stylish assemblies, the din from the ladies' necklaces and charms could drown out entire conversations.

Yet this song slipped over me like a cloud, dulcet and eerie, devouring my senses. It made me feel at once both happy and languorously indifferent. It made me want to close my eyes and release my very last breath.

Then came the voice, whispering between the notes. "Honor..."

It was no natural voice. It was sly and gentle and chilled my skin.

"Honor Carlisle. You alone will hear me. You alone will sense me. Come to me."

I was on my feet before I'd realized I had moved. Layers of skirts and petticoats rustled back into place, brushing the tops of my slippers. The case felt suddenly light as air in my arms.

"Come."

And the music wrapped around me so completely that I practically glided out my door.

It was well after three in the morning. Everyone else in Plum House was asleep. Mother, Papa, the maids and the cook, who snored. No one heard me leave. No one but me heard the brass latch of the front door give its low amiable hum as my fingers closed about it. No one but me saw the starlight sketching the grass of the front lawn, or heard the press of my footsteps through the blades.

There'd been no rain for weeks, and the lawn was turning brittle. I'd leave a path here, I knew that, but it didn't matter.

"Hurry, Honor."

I reached the edge of our estate. Should I turn right, I would meet the road that led to the village, to the august mansion that housed the Alpha and his kin. Should I turn left, I would enter the thick black forest that surrounded my home, crisscrossing trails soon lost to peat and bracken and streams, and eventually a wide, churning river.

The notes, the voice, were coming from the forest. So I went left.

I knew my way through these woods. I'd grown up here, after all, and had claimed even the densest thickets as my own. Maidens without friends tended to spend hours exploring alone. And maidens who made enemies needed places to hideI had plenty of those.

Blackstone Woods welcomed me with its familiar heady fragrance, rich and loamy, but even that was dulled beneath the uncanny notes of the song pulling me onward. The moss cushioned my steps; feathery ferns brushed my ankles; twigs crunched and leaves sighed and the voice had gone silent, but that was all right, because I knew where he was now, the man who had come for me.

He was on the river. He was in a boat on the River Fier, standing alert beneath the dim starlight, one hand lifted before him, a faint sparkle of blue shining from his open palm.

I should have been afraid. I was afraid nearly all the time, afraid of my parents, afraid of my species, afraid of myself. I was afraid of the dark, and of mirrors, and of the Council, of the strange smiles of the village boys and the casual cruelty of the village girls. I definitely should have been afraid of this notorious thief who was going to do who knew what with me.

Yet I was not.

Because of Draumr. I felt it from yards away, the music growing stronger and sweeter, drugging my senses. I floated forward and thought blissfully,This is what it's like to fly. This is how it must feel when we Turn. Finally I understand. This is flight.