My bedroom was a chamber fixed in time, arranged and decorated according to the tastes of a fourteen-year-old maiden. I liked it still, it was true. The colors were restful, the gilt sang to me as prettily as it ever had.
But I was older than lavender walls and flowered curtains. I was old enough now to appreciate a plain square room with beveled windows, and precious gemstones glinting around a fireplace. A canopied bed with fur coverings, large enough for two.
I stood motionless for a moment at my doorway and simply took it all in.
I'll never have to sleep here again. I'll never have to stay trapped in here, afraid of my Weaves, ever again.
I found my valise and packed swiftly. It wasn't very large, and I could fit only three gowns into it, but I knew I'd have to hug it to me the entire time I was atop Sandu's back, plus his own satchel. Possibly he could carry them both in his talons or teeth, but I imagined that would be cumbersome. He'd already have a person sitting astride him for days. I'd hold the luggage if I could.
When I'd crammed everything in that I could and still get it closed, I went to my writing desk, pulled back my chair. I had a stack of paper and a penwork box I kept in a drawer, and to my great surprise the ink inside it was still wet.
I dipped the quill, brushed the tip of the feather under my chin, thinking, and then began to write.
Dearest Lia,
Thank you for my life. I know if Kindness and Grace dwell within me at all, they sprang from you. You have been a truly Excellent Mother. I pray you'll be pleased to know that it is through you I've found I can Love.
His name is Alexandru, and he is the Alpha of the Zaharen. You know him, and you know the castle. I hope you come to visit us there. I hope you find a mate who
I hope you can be happy.
Your daughter,
—H.
It seemed acceptable. I wondered suddenly what Sandu would Read in it were he here, and was doubly glad he wasn't.
In our years ahead I was going to have to be very careful about my writing, I supposed. It was an unnerving thought, to realize that someone might know more of me thanI did, just from a few scribbled words, even if that someone was my mate.
I sanded the note, folded it, and stood up to slip it under her door, or perhaps her pillow. But as I stood my hand brushed the stack of virgin paper before me; the sheets skidded sideways across the surface of the desk and ruffled down to the floor.
"Blast."
I bent to scoop them back up, careless. But as I bent down, I noticed one of the sheets wasn't virgin. It had writing on it. My handwriting.
I pulled it free of the rest and stared at it. A beam of sunlight falling across my hands made the letters appear bluish purple.
R.,
You are with child. Don't wait for Lia. Just go.
—R.
All the pages fell free of my numbed fingers, a soft papery rustle that blanketed the rug and the hem of my skirts, and in that brilliant splash of light, they shone like fresh fallen snow.
I decided not to tell him.
Perchance it wasn't true. Perchance it was true when I wrote it then , in the future, but it wasn't now; I was in a different ripple of time now. It seemed too enormous to comprehend. I felt no different than I had yesterday, or the day before, except for that nervous, thrilling energy that zinged through my limbs, and the more sensual awareness that I had been with a man, and so I actually wasn't the same.
Perchance it wasn't true.
But the dragon in my heart knew that it was.
Things had changed for us. That's what Future Sandu had told me. Things had changed, and Future Honor—Rez—thought our English parents would have cause to celebrate it, enough so that she would risk her life returning to the shire.
Gervase and Josephine might celebrate a grandchild.
A flutter of panic began to bloom within me. It was too soon, I told myself. Too soon for this.
I hadn't wanted a mate, but I had one. I hadn't dreamed of drowning in love, but it appeared I was going to anyway.
But this. A baby, on top of everything else ...
A strange laugh forced its way past my lips. I wasn't even certain whose child it would be, the prince who'd deflowered me or the one I was about to run away with. Did it even matter?
I crumpled the paper in my fist. I looked around, found a lamp that had been left burning, removed the glass and held the edge of the note over the flame until it caught.
The last smoking bits singed my fingers; I shook them clear. The ash fell pale and feathery, dusting the table beneath in flakes.
A voice called from beyond my closed door; it was the maid. "Senyoreta?" "Yes."
"Did you wish for a breakfast tray?"
I looked up. "Are there crumpets?"
A pause. "I'm sorry—are there what?"
"Never mind," I said, without turning around. "No breakfast today. I'm going out."
"Yes, senyoreta."
Before I left the room, I swiped my hand through the air above the ashes, and scattered the flakes to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-One
Along the white-cliffed coast of southern France, not too distant from the city of Marseilles, was a series of caves that had once sheltered dragons, and then humans, and then eventually no one at all, because as the aeons had passed their entrances became submerged beneath the enameled blue Mediterranean. Accessing these caves now required the ability to swim to great depths, and to discern which sort of darkness between the limestone stalactite teeth might eventually lead to a space with a bubble of ancient air trapped inside it, and which might just lead to more water.
Within the greatest of these caves, one with an entrance tunnel that sloped sharply upward and so was spared the worst of the sea's invasion, was a cavern large enough for a tall man to stand fully upright. The walls were curved and covered in images: primitive handprints outlined in black and red, simple drawings of bison, horses, fish. There were even scattered depictions of what might have been, to one who didn't know better, curling snakes with talons and wide open wings.
And there was a box.
It was a modern sort of box, nothing natural to the cave. It was composed of oiled wood with gold metal hinges and brads, because she'd known that gold would never rust, not even under the sea. Inside the box was a silk bag with a drawstring cord, and inside the bag was a pendant, heart-shaped, made of silver. The silver was tarnishing, and there was nothing to be done about that. But embedded in it, as brilliant and evil as the day they had first been set, was a series of sky-blue diamond shards: the last known fragments of Draumr.
The box had been placed in the cave five years earlier, just because.
Because Lia had always known the future was an untrustworthy thing.
Because the gambler in her, the wily dragon, demanded a plan of last resort.
And because all the other pieces of the diamond, which had been in Zane's ring, had mysteriously vanished, and she would not risk these vanishing too.
Lia flew past the cave on her way to Paris. If she cocked her head and listened very hard, she could hear the lure of the shards, their soft broken calling to her that felt—for a perilous few seconds—like the most urgent yearning ever, even with miles of air and sea stretching between them.
She flattened her ears. She winged higher, putting more distance between her and the cave.
She'd retrieve the box on her way back.
He was dreaming.
Strange, because he seldom dreamed. He was not the dreamer of the family; he was the more practical hand and voice, the procurer of life's necessities, of all tangible things great and small. But tonight he was dreaming.