He jumped off the bench and stuck the knife back into the waistband of his trousers. He couldn't help a quick, backward look at the man, just to see if he had gotten up to follow them, but he couldn't see well enough to tell. Since the Lady strolled on in her tranquil, cat-footed way, he assumed the man was no longer a threat.
He wondered which of his bones she'd broken.
"Adiran," said the Lady in her velvet voice, and he recalled himself at once.
"There's a man," he said. "Staying with her."
"What manner of man?" she asked, not even sounding surprised.
"Tall, dark-haired. Gray eyes." He dared an upward glance at her. "One of you," he said.
She looked very deliberately back down at him. They were approaching a more open section of the park and he could see her face, because the trees had thinned and his eyes were swift to adapt to the wan city light.
That blond beauty, remarkable and foreign, and that gaze that was brown and black both, bottomless in a way that made him feel all queer inside when he held it too long, like he was staring into a mirror composed entirely of inside-out stars. Everything reversed, and strange, because in those moments he felt that he was grown and she was not, that she was small and charmed and needed his protection.
Then he blinked, and he was a Roma boy again, and she was the gorjo Lady.
"What is the man's name?" she asked.
He'd heard it, but it was another foreign thing to him, hard on his tongue. "Zan-du."
"And how long has he been there?"
"Two nights."
"Including tonight?"
"Yes."
"In the same room?" she inquired mildly.
"Yes," he answered, with some force.
She was silent, walking. He stubbed his toe on a rock and hopped a few steps, then went back and kicked it off the path.
"And today," he said, catching up, "she had another bleeding, a big one. Biggest I've ever seen. It took a very long while to clean her up."
"With the man still there."
"He was. He wouldn't leave her. They've been alone together a lot ," he emphasized, in case the Lady had misunderstood his meaning. She seemed far too unruffled by his news, wrapped in her shawl, her lips gently pursed. "If they were of my tribe, they would have been forced to wed by now."
"Indeed," the Lady said, thoughtful, and slowed to a halt.
They were within a stone's throw of the front gates, which were always left open no matter the hour, so what was the purpose of them, anyway? The trees planted here were palms. Their fronds rustled with a breeze that never even made it to the gardens below, they grew so high.
Adiran and the Lady stood in the shadow of one of those palms. He watched the contrast of paler gray and darker gray swaying back and forth along the path and up her dress, slipping like a shroud over her shoulders and face.
"Thank you," she said, and he knew this was the end of their encounter. She held out a hand to him. He opened his and accepted the coins she gave him without glancing at them, without counting them or testing them, which was such a violation of all he'd been taught that it was a good thing none of his family was there to see. He'd be cuffed for certain.
But she looked at him with those black-star eyes. And he didn't wish to insult her by counting. She smiled at him. "Go eat, Adiran. We'll meet another time."
He swept her a bow he'd copied from this cavalier he'd followed once for a whole day, just to see where the fellow went. Then he took off running, glad to be free again.
Chapter Eighteen
For every Gift, a sacrifice.
It was a concept the drakon understood well, both those born of green fields and those born of the mountains. To embrace greatness required an understanding of it first; no true understanding could come without tribulation.
So these creatures who were ever encased in songs from metals and stars and stones no matter where they journeyed, heaven or earth, had themselves no voice.
These children of the beasts who survived the grotesque, involuntary agony of their very first Turn had peers, friends, brothers who did not.
And these animals who speared the skies in broken rainbows of color, whose radiance was the roots of legend, whose splendor defied all mortal comprehension, were forced to walk the dirt with human faces, in human bodies, because their true selves were too awful and beautiful for humans not to fear.
What sacrifice, then, for she who could baffle Time itself?
Only one had this Gift.
The physical pain was just the preface of her story. The temporary loss of her blood, of her senses, were merely the beginning of what she would forfeit.
The soul of a dragon is a wild and untouchable thing. It shines gossamer, wholly pure no matter how sullied the body attached to it.
But for hers.
Hers became touched. Nipped. Small pieces and corners torn away, a little more, a little deeper, with each new Weave.
Such a soul would shine at first regardless. Especially hers: shy and wondering, marveling at every miraculous speck composing her miraculous life. Who might even notice a few minor fissures?
But Time itself could be a dragon, the most Fearsome Dragon of all, and it would have its way. Even one who might Weave around it must make offerings. Time would use its teeth to see to that.
So as this one creature, with her one Gift, aged and Wove, she had no notion that she was slowly allowing herself to be devoured. All the good in her, all the shy purity, digested and gone. Fragments of her caught up in its gums, and Time licked its lips and thought, Yes, delicious.
What soul she had left, those tattered pieces, grew sullied indeed.
Chapter Nineteen
In the early morning somberness of September 26, 1788, mere hours after Amalia Langford dreamed about empty Darkfrith and a drawling girl, hours after she met her Gypsy boy spy to learn that fate had wiggled around her determined plans and sent the prince of the Zaharen to her daughter anyway, Lia experienced one last dream.
She'd returned home because she was weary, and she needed to mull the facts she knew. She did not go back to her bed but instead to the chaise longue in the Blue Parlor, the one with the rug that reminded her of sandy feet and fragrant sex and panting pleasure.
She missed her husband with a severity that felt like an actual knife to her heart. It closed her hands into fists so tight she'd later discover blood from her nails cutting into her palms.
As the predawn gray began to creep into the parlor, Lia abandoned the chaise longue, which was of stuffed satin and shockingly uncomfortable, and stretched out on that span of woven turquoise instead.
She didn't even think she'd closed her eyes.
The dream started high above her, floating, then plunged without warning through her like a solitary leaf caught in a waterfall. It took her down with it, took her in water and light, and Lia realized that this dream wasn't like any of her others. In this dream, she could see.
She stood beside a lane of hard-packed dirt, with milkwort and grass trying to grow along its edges, but it washot, so hot, and the grass had all wilted and crisped brown at its ends, and the sky was a bleached bone above her.
The sun beat down on the top of her head; she cast no shadow. The air and the grit and the dirt: Everything shimmered with heat.
A wasp buzzed past her. She turned around and there was the fence overgrown with dog rose, and dusty hedges poking through, and there was the gate, and there was the sign on the gate that read in very big, bold letters: DANGER, INFLUENZA. Only the A in DANGER was obscured, because there was a man's hand pressed flat over it, and that hand belonged to Zane.