Шэна Эйби - The Time Weaver

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.