This female was not Honor. But who the devil else could it have been?
Amalia sat up. She slipped from the bed, found her wrap and walked silently to her daughter's chamber.
When they'd first arrived, the rooms that were to become Honor's had been decorated in a theme that Lia had privately named Bloody Awful Red. The walls were red, the rugs were red. The chairs and divan and bed covers, all red. The only relief came from glimpses of the waxed linden floor, and the muddy yellow accents that might have once been more goldenrod, but now resembled dried mustard.
She'd allowed Honor to choose the new decor. She'd guided her new adolescent daughter away from the more lurid bright purple she'd seemed initially to favor, and Honor—so biddable then!—had instead decided upon walls of pale, cool lavender, with accents of apple green and seafoam and pearl, and real gilt applied along all the edging, because they could afford it. And because petite, timid Honor had held Lia's hand and confided softly that it sang her to sleep like a harp.
Not tonight though, apparently. Lia stood at the threshold of the doorway and knew that adult Honor wasn't sleeping in her bed now, harp-gilt or no.
It was the second night in a row she'd been missing. It was senseless to fret over a Time Weaver's unexpected absences; she'd long ago learned that. Honor was here and then she wasn't, and that was simply the nature of who she was. Who she'd turned out to be. She'd be back here again when she was here again.
When she was sixteen, she'd vanished for an entire ten and a half months. Months. Liahad fretted then; she'd wept and worried, and even Zane had developed a habit of pacing through her bedroom twice a day, checking.
When she'd Woven home again, she claimed she had no memory of where she'd been, or when. She seemed sincerely astonished that it was winter now instead of spring, and what had happened to summer? And why did her gowns no longer fit? Or her stockings or slippers?
She'd never vanished for so long again, and she'd never gotten those memories of her sixteenth year back. Or so she'd said.
Lia'd never had real cause to doubt her daughter's word ... but perhaps there was a sliver of the Shadow in her, after all. They'd been married long enough to grow saturated in each other's ways, even the secret ones. She loved him for his light and his dark.
And the dark Shadow inside Lia whispered,She's not away right now. She's in hiding. Hiding from what?
As if it were a just-right cue in a play, a faint, thin scratching came from the direction of the front door, the sound of a single fingernail being drawn slowly down the wood, so very small and furtive Lia knew none of the servants would hear it.
None of them were meant to. It was a sound designed specifically for Lia, for her dragon hearing.
She worked the series of locks without needing to see them, her fingers knowing the proper twists and turns. They were oiled every month; she made sure of that. They produced only the barest of clicks.
She cracked open the door, acknowledged the figure standing there in the unlit hall with a nod of her head, then shut it again.
He waited for her on the park bench, just where he always did. Day or night, rain or sun, they met in the same place, on this bench, underneath this cypress tree. The path that led to the bench was gravel and not very popular; there was a greenhouse farther down the way containing koi in pools and giant tropical flowers, but it had a cobbled lane fronting it and that was the way most people took.
It was a wooden bench, and the slats were still moist from the rain of before, but it wasn't so bad. He was a child used to discomfort, and used to dismissing it. Up until the Girl had invited them all into her gorjo church, he had never guessed what it had been like to have a fixed roof over his head. They had wagons, his clan, and they moved about at will. But for some reason the elders had decided the discarded church would become their new center, and the boy Adiran was no longer lulled to sleep by the sway of his pallet, or the clopping of horses' hooves, constant in his ears.
He had a real mattress now, though, and the rain never leaked through the tiles to tap him on the head the way it would before in the wagon. Those things were pleasant.
Adiran unsheathed his knife and began to clean his nails, alert to the night sounds of the park while he waited. There were bugs and rats scurrying about, and the three-bowled fountain nearby making its muted splish-splish-splash as the water dribbled over the edges of its basins. A pair of toads were grunting in the underbrush. There were larger sorts of rats hanging about as well, human rats, but he knew how to avoid them. They lingered in the densest of the shadows, men looking for women, men looking for other men . or boys.
Adiran was especially skilled at avoiding those.
It was a large enough park that most of that sort lingered at the other end, closer to the back gates, and anyway there were plenty of places to hide, so he never truly worried. Yet when he first heard the footsteps coming down the path he tensed instinctively, ready to bolt.
But they were her footsteps. He'd trained himself to recognize her gait, more subtle than a cat's. In fact, he'd spent a good many hours in private trying to imitate it, with moderate success. If he could learn to move as silently as the Lady did, who managed it bound up in her gorjo skirts and baubles, who knew where barefoot, unadorned Adiran might go? It was a good trick, especially for a woman. He admired all good tricks.
Behind the cat-tread sound of the Lady came a new one, also stealthy, but far louder than hers. He shifted forward on the bench, searching the shadows. There she was, a female shape down the meander of the path—and there beyond her loomed the other shape, clearly a man.
The Lady heard him too. She stopped, turned about. The man did not stop. He walked closer and closer.
Adiran stood, then climbed atop the bench for a better view. He'd seen this happen before, different versions of this. He wondered sometimes if the Lady had them meet out here just so it might happen. It seemed like there were plentiful other places around town that would have worked as well as this bench, places that were convenient to the midnight vendors offering sticks of grilled fish and mugs of sangria, for instance. But the Lady preferred the park.
The man was speaking to her. Adiran couldn't quite make it out, but he imagined her shaking her head no , and then her murmured no .
The man's voice grew more insistent. When he moved his arm to grab hers Adiran did see what came next, because there was this peculiar, unexplained flash of light that showed him. That, too, had happened before. The light was tinted golden and flared very briefly, like she'd scratched a match to life but an exceptionally bright one, right up by her face, but he'd never smelled the sulfur, so he still wasn't sure how she did it. It was another very good trick.
In that frozen second of illumination he saw the man's heavy face, his cravat and jacket lapels and the slope of one shoulder. The Lady had her back to Adiran. She wore a shawl with a long fringe.
Then everything plunged black again and Adiran heard a distinctivesnap , and the man screamed.
Really screamed, high as a girl. He hit the gravel with his knees, keening and cursing, and the Lady walked away from him without another word, without any indication whatsoever of being rushed.
"There you are," she said to Adiran, as if he'd been hiding. "Shall we walk?"
"Yes," he said, and remembered to add, "my lady."