"Zaharen Yce has been attacked by man before," the prince said. "In the past." "I don't believe this was the past, or the work of men. Even the diamonds were gone." He closed his eyes and tipped his face to the ceiling. The ending no longer matters.
"I cannot," he began, in a flat, tense voice, and then paused. "I cannot let my reign lead to the end of us. Of my kin. Even if I loved you. Even if you loved me, forever and all time, I cannot let that come to be. It does matter."
I sat up; all my wooziness was gone. I swung my legs to the edge of the bed and pushed free of the covers. The floor was a shock of hard cold against my feet, but it was all right. I drew up behind him and wrapped my arms loosely about his waist, resting my cheek against his back.
"I'll tell you what I think," I said. "No—what I believe. I believe that endings can be changed. I believe that time can be twisted like wire, and reshaped. And I refuse to believe the man I met years from now would put his own pleasure above duty, yet still he wished to wed me. We can control our ending. Maybe we've already begun it—every change we make now, everything we do, spreading in ripples out to our futures. We know what the English want, and what they believe. We work to defuse them. And maybe the Prince Alexandru I met in that meadow in the months ahead of us knows all this too, which is why he wrote to you what he did. I tried to Weave back to the empty castle, and I never could. So maybe that future has already been erased."
I felt his hands skim the backs of mine. "That—was one of the most self-serving arguments I've ever heard. There must be something wrong with me. I found it exceedingly seductive."
"If you found that seductive, why don't you turn around? I'll teach you how you taught me to kiss."
His head dipped; silent laughter shook his body. "Which me?" he inquired after a moment, husky.
"Both," I answered, and freed my hands to step in front of him.
She was chilly, still made of ice, his time traveler. She'd been washed and dried and he smelled no blood about her any longer, but she looked so blanched, her hair a messy tangle down her back, it seemed impossible she'd be up on her feet already. If he touched her directly he had the uneasy notion he'd shatter her, a thousand little shards of white-and-copper Honor at his feet.
But her arms about him had felt strong. Her grasp seemed certain.
He started with her hair, his fingers finding one of those warmer-looking locks. Yet even that was cool, he discovered, with a texture that was not quite silky soft, but more interesting than that, because it curled like a spring unwound around his finger. He let his hand open into her hair, feeling the coils slide between all his fingers—and then the sudden difference in the surface of her shift, muslin, paper-thin. A narrow strip of lace framed her bare skin from her shoulder to the scoop of the neckline. It was the color of browned sugar, almost hidden behind the shimmer of her hair.
"Have you seen my home in the winter?" Sandu heard himself ask, unreasonably fascinated by that contrast of sugar and copper-rose.
"Yes," Honor said.
"There's a moment at sunrise. It only comes with the December snow. There's this moment when the sun is nearly there, but not, and the light is lifting behind the peaks, and right before the sun breaks through, the whole world is washed in color. This color." He lifted his hand and let her curls slip free between their bodies, drifting back to her chest. He shook his head, bemused. "I never thought to see it anywhere else on earth."
"We're getting married in December next year," she said gravely. "That's what you told me."
"Did I?" He felt that slow, sinking intoxication gliding through him again, that feeling that none of this could be real; she looked at him without coyness, without teasing, only that sharp, fragile beauty that defined her, the elusive impression of ice still surrounding her.
He wanted to make love to her. He would make love to her, blackguard that he was, he already had —
Sandu shook his head again, fishing for a lucid thought. "You said you had no desire to wed."
Honor considered it, her brow puckered, her gravity undiminished. "I must suppose I'm going to change my mind."
"We'd wear crowns in December," he said, and let his fingertips touch the top of her head, lightly, hardly there. "Crowns of holly. That's our tradition for weddings. Every season, a crown of greens. Gentians for spring. Peonies for summer. Wheat for fall. But for winter we wear the leaves and berries of the snow."
"What else?" She placed her cool hands against his chest.
"Hot wine." He eased into her slightly, wanting to feel her resistance, the pressure of her palms, and as if her mind knew his, she obliged him, pushing back gently, less a rejection than a testing of the space between them. "Spiced with cloves and cinnamon, heated in a cauldron, because there'll be so many of us. Music. An orchestra, with dragons in livery to play. We'd be in a round chamber as big as a ballroom, with soaring windows on every side, the mountains purple and white everywhere you look. Painted stars above us, painted beasts, all of them silver against darkest blue."
The rain shifted outside, blowing harder and then not, and the candle flames bowed low in unison before steadying. Honor took a step closer to him.
"And it will be snowing," she said. "Softly, nothing fierce. Enough just to rim the windows. I remember snow like that. So downy and thick that when you stepped out into it, it was like you were muffled in a great white blanket."
He closed his eyes, seeing it as if he were there, so clear: the Convergence Room draped in gold and ivory, the snow building against the blackened solder of the northern panes, because the winter winds always blew from the north. His people there, standing, witnessing. Honor's hands clasped in his.
"We'll dance all night," she said, another step to him. "We'll dance after the snow stops, and the sun begins to rise. Then you can show me your color."
Her last few words had been a murmur against his chest. He bent his head, brushed his lips to those December curls. She was real. He knew that. She felt real, and she tasted real, and going forward with her into this future she'd created for them would mean a reality he could hardly yet fathom.
She was going to love him. That was the other hidden message behind his future note. He was reminding himself of her first letter, and that whatever else this was, it was love.
He'd had so precious little of it in his life. He'd had his parents' distant kindness and his sister's determined guidance; to Sandu love had been a kinship of blood and common purpose, and he had turned to it enough to recognize its comfort, but what he felt with Honor Carlisle was not comforting.
It was arousing. It was to acknowledge a deep, dark splinter of vulnerability, somehow wedged in his soul. It was to become too easily entranced with the play of light over her soft skin, all kinds of light. To fight his constant compulsion for her touch. To dream of her eyes and lips during hard, restless nights.
To hunger.
His instincts howled at him to bind her to him now, to claim her in truth. If she was ice then by God she would melt; what came after that, he did not know, but it seemed to loom beautiful and wild at the brimming edge of his imagination, just beyond reach.
When Alexandru spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
"Are you certain this is what you want?"
"My prince. This is what I've crossed time itself for. Over and over, for you." She lifted her head, her face all in shadow, ghost and ice and dark winter eyes. "For you."
He kissed her. It wasn't like before, in the tower, when he'd tried to be soft about it and instead had been helplessly aflame. He wasn't attempting softness any longer; he was the flame, and when her arms encircled his shoulders he only pulled her closer, thawing her body with his heat.