The Time Tutor (3 page)

She was about to reach out and pull the bell rope to ask Susan, her maid, about the card, when something compelled her to turn it over. Scrawled across the back, in blood-red ink, two lines of verse:

Do not run and tell your Mother

Come to the Angel under Cover

She raised her eyebrows. Then—because red ink was often scented with rose—she raised the card to her nose and sniffed. And sniffed again. The ink had a sweet smell, yes, but it was spicy. She searched her memory: cardamom.

She committed the address to memory, swung her legs from her bed, walked over to the fire, and tossed the card onto the coals. She watched as the paper darkened and then burst into flames.

 • • • 

Three days, and the wretched girl still hadn't taken the bait. Dar sat hour after hour in the dark storefront he'd rented, dressed in rusty old clothes, with a bothersome horsehair wig on his head and spectacles teetering on his nose. He toasted his toes by the fire, trying not to dream of jumping to an era that had central heating. At least there was brandy. He poured himself another couple of fingers.

Maybe she wasn't coming. Maybe she'd told Hannelore, or Bertrand, about the card he'd sent. But he'd seen Bertrand over dinner last night—in the eighteenth century this time—and he hadn't said a word about it. Dar had spent the first few courses listening to Bertrand's conviction that sending the girl endless mimsy-pimsy love notes was the way to win her heart. “No woman worth wanting wants to be wanted that relentlessly,” Dar had finally said. But Bertrand hadn't been interested in pearls of jaded wisdom. He'd retorted that it was quite obvious that Dar did not know the difference between taking a woman to bed and taking her into his heart. “That, my friend, is the only true word you have spoken this evening.” Dar had raised his glass. “May it ever be so!” Bertrand had refused to raise his glass in return, and the dinner ended on a sour note.

Just as well, Dar thought, staring at the door that never opened, never proffered his prey. Let Bertrand get used to not liking him.

In the normal course of things, Dar taught the essentials of time travel to newly hatched Ofan simply by being, himself, a passionate believer in knowledge for knowledge's sake. A fiery-eyed hater of the Guild and their obfuscations of the talent. An eloquent discourser on the shoals and shallows, the currents and eddies of the River of Time. A damn good teacher, plain and simple.

But today's tutorial wouldn't be in the service of training Ofan. Today's tutorial was a trap. Dar knew the weakness in the life that the Guild offered. Hannelore wasn't teaching her Favorites to jump in time, and that was her big mistake. She plied them with jewels and parties and her own endless wit, but he could give them what they all really wanted, whether they admitted it or not: knowledge. The power to use and understand their talent. The ability to travel through time. It was too intoxicating a desire to quash forever. How could you sever that part of yourself—that most amazing part—and sell it for a poxy life of locked-away partying? Dar could show them the world. And if he could get this particularly troublesome young lady to take his arm, trustingly, in the belief that she was about to learn what Hannelore wouldn't teach her, then he could whisk her away to somewhere and sometime that the Guild didn't care about. Marrakesh in the sixteenth century. Saxony at any time. Settle her in, maybe find her a man . . . then leave her there, without teaching her how to get back. In comfort, of course. But safely out of Bertrand Penture's lovelorn reach.

How long was the confounded girl going to take?

She came at sundown. Dar had just gotten to his feet and gone behind the counter to get more candles, when the shop door finally opened and a cloaked figure entered. She stepped forward, pushing her hood back with one hand. “Ignatz Vogelstein? I believe you sent me an invitation.”

It was dark in the shop but he could tell that the girl was very pretty. Her eyes were enormous, and in the shadows they looked as if they might actually be purple, which was surely impossible. He couldn't tell how old she was, but it was some variation on young. He sighed, and prepared himself to be bored. Time to begin his performance.

“Greetings,” he said, stepping out from behind the counter and bowing very low over her hand. “Greetings, young creature, beautiful seeker of knowledge! Come in, come in. Come, sit in this chair. Yes, yes . . . make yourself comfortable, my dear. My name is Ignatz Vogelstein, Time Tutor. I am versed in the secrets passed down through the ages by Chronos himself, and I am ready to lay them all at your exquisite feet.” And then he bowed again, came up, and bowed once more. There was no overdoing it with young women. They encountered the world as if it were a play, the more overblown the better.

But when he came up from the last bow, he found himself confronted with a gaze both penetrating and contemptuous, and a mouth firmed in disapproval. His wig suddenly itched. “Er,” he said, awkwardly dropping into the chair that faced hers. “May I offer you . . .” His sentence fizzled. He had nothing to offer but the dregs of some barely passable brandy.

The young woman smoothed her hands over the material of her cloak, and he realized that, like an ass, he hadn't offered to take it from her. Now she was sitting and it was too late for courtesies.

“No thank you,” she said, in answer to the question he'd never asked. “Mr. Vogelstein, I assume you summoned me here for a purpose. I am in full possession of all knowledge that I might need and I have no interest in learning anything from you. But I am interested in finding out more about you. I represent an organization that oversees what we know about time, and you are not on any of our official rosters.”

“You are in full possession, are you, my pretty one?” Dar got his gumption up and waded in once more, attempting to save the situation. He waggled his eyebrows, exactly as his own, loathsome tutor had done. “Full possession, you say? I very much doubt it. But you are lucky! I”—and here he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“I am the greatest time traveler of them all, able to bend the hours to my smallest whim. And you, you are chosen by the stars to learn my secrets.”

The girl got to her feet. “Mr. Vogelstein,” she said, “you are clearly either a fraudster or delusional, or both. I take my leave of you. Expect further investigation by my organization.” She turned and headed to the door.

“Confound it!” Dar scrambled to his feet, grabbed the wig from his head, and threw it on the ground. Then he ripped off his spectacles, threw them down, too, and ground them under his heel. “Beelzebub and all his demons in hell! Come back here!”

The girl turned slowly and stared at him. “Pardon me?”

Dar crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her, his temper flown away with the smoke up the chimney. “Goddammit, you blasted chit, sit down. If you won't take your medicine with sugar, I'll give it to you neat.”

 • • • 

Alva turned to find the time tutor transformed in a moment from a hunched-over charlatan in a moth-eaten wig and spectacles that gave back the light of the candles into a tall, broad-shouldered man with wiry black hair and angry dark eyes. The schoolmaster's outfit looked ridiculous on him, now that he was standing at his full height and radiating outrage. She blinked, and then, although she was still pulsing with rage, she found herself fighting back a smile. He was a rogue. And, for her sins, Alva liked rogues. She admired the way they tweaked the world by the nose; she admired their gambler's spirit. And she liked sparring with them. “My
medicine
?” She took not one step back toward the chairs. “Do you think I am ill, sir? I assure you I am very well. You are the one in need of a physic.”

The man achieved his goal by taking two steps toward her. He was tall, and he loomed over her. He was angry, but the threatening stance was bluster. She could tell by the way he moved; he wouldn't hurt a flea, at least not physically. He would choose, instead, to blister a flea with verbiage, or confound a flea with a smoke-and-mirrors story, or failing all that, hail a flea as a friend and offer it a drink.

She liked him. She looked up at him: A frowning mouth set beneath a hawk nose. His eyes were tea brown, and his black eyebrows were all saturnine angles. She liked him very much. He was handsome, not because his features were beautiful, but because they were harsh, and vital, and entirely expressive of his volcanic mood. He was both thrilling and just a little absurd. It was a combination that was true, in her experience, of most temptingly dangerous things, like too-wild horses, and thunderstorms, and dark stairways leading who knows where.

His scowl deepened. Her smile was enraging him, so she widened it just a thread. “Women!” He said it like a curse.

“Women?” She looked him up and down, her gaze lingering on the place where his collar was badly frayed. She reached up and touched it, and—to her delight—he flinched. “I'm surprised, dressed as you are, that you have any experience whatsoever of my sex.”

He took a step backward, as if she might burn him. “I have experience; never you doubt it.” He held up a hand, warning her off. “But I've never understood you . . . you females. Slippery, insinuating—the lot of you.”

“Ah.” Alva nodded benignly. “I see. Poor man. It is that you are a misogynist. How dreary for you.”

“A
misogynist
? Sweet song of the spheres, I give up.” Alva watched with glee as he slumped, defeated, into a chair. “Fine.” He waved a hand, and she noticed that it sported a very fine gold signet ring. So the schoolmaster's clothes were a costume; that was most certainly a gentleman's ring. “Go. You are a witch, and I've botched it anyway, made a damned fool of myself. Get out of here. Go back to the Guild, back to Bertrand, see if I care.”

All of Alva's senses sharpened. “What did you say?”

“Go back. Go back to Bert—” The time tutor froze, clearly realizing he had made a terrible mistake. “Never mind,” he muttered. “Forget I said anything. Blast!”

Alva took a step forward. Slumped as he was in his chair, it was her turn to loom over him. “Did you just say
Bertrand
?”

He flung his arms out wide. “Forget it. Leave. You wanted to a moment ago—why won't you now? Confounded woman, you're like a cat; you can't make up your blasted mind.”

“But . . .” Alva turned in a slow circle, looking closely now at the time tutor's dingy shop. There was nothing to mark it as in any way dedicated to the study of time. Indeed, it seemed to be an old draper's shop, long given over to dust and cobwebs. “What is this place?” She came round again full circle. “Is this an Ofan retreat? Are you . . . Ofan?” She felt a rushing in her head and a tingling in her hands. This was confirmation: The Ofan were real
.
“And if so, how do you know Bertrand Penture?”

He must have sensed that rush of excitement in her. His eyebrows went up, and his gaze sharpened; she felt herself pinned by his attention, like a specimen to a card. This was
him
, now, looking at her, seeing
her
for the first time.

He reached up for her hand, and she found herself giving it to him. She could feel the tension in his hold, the strength. He tugged, and she followed—he pulled her so close that her skirts overswept his feet. “Yes, I am Ofan.”

“And what can you, Ofan by your own admission, know of Hannelore von Trockenberg's Favorite, Bertrand Penture?”

He considered her for a long moment, his eyes traveling over her face and down her body. She held herself very still under his wandering eyes, her chin high. If it were not for the strangely gentle warmth of his hand, keeping her close, she might have stepped back, might have left. These were deep waters.

“What do
you
know of Bertrand?” he finally asked.

Alva felt her eyebrows twitch, and cursed herself for showing even the smallest reaction. If Bertrand was a spy, then this man knew it. Should she tell him that she suspected Bertrand? But if Bertrand wasn't a spy . . .

“Do you love him?”

Alva laughed. She couldn't help it. All her worry about spies, and he was thinking about romance. “We are talking of love?”

“Aren't we? A beautiful woman. A handsome man. Living together in that glittering Guild mansion.”

“You have a rather plodding understanding of how love works,” she said, smiling down at him. “I am to love Bertrand simply because he is handsome and I am beautiful? I thought we were talking of the Ofan, Mr. Vogelstein, and the Guild. I thought we were going to talk of great and important things, and of that highest human goal, knowledge.”

“Cabbages and kings,” he said nonsensically. It was the first time she'd seen him smile, and it spread quite deliciously across his face. It made him look somewhat older, for it brought out the laugh lines in his cheeks and at the corners of his eyes. “Why did I bring you here?” He jerked hard on her hand, tumbling her down into his lap. “You are exactly right. I brought you here to talk of knowledge. I brought you here to undo you with it. I brought you here to seduce you.”

 • • • 

Dar allowed satisfaction to wash over him like an ocean breeze. The girl was in his lap, her hands on his chest, and she was staring at him with those huge, violet eyes. She had surprised him, at first, by seeing through his charade. Perhaps he had slightly overdone it. And she'd disarmed him for a second there. Bertrand would thank him someday for getting him out of a trap. The girl was far too strong a flavor for Bertrand. She'd almost been too much for Dar, and he had yet to meet the woman who could best him. Almost too much, but not quite. He was back on track now.

“I'm not going to seduce you like a lover,” he murmured, controlling his free hand's wild desire to be tangled in her hair. “I'm going to seduce you with the secrets of time, with the incredible power you hold in your very being—a power that the Guild wants to keep from you.”