He paused beside the bench positioned where it would catch the shade of the biggest orange tree when the sun was high in the sky. Running a finger over the clumsy jointing between two of the pieces that formed the back, he wished vainly that he'd had time to fix it.
Even knowing what was going to happen, he couldn't make himself stay by the bench, not when Sarai was in the house. He had no photographs of her, nor had any of the paintings he'd attempted ever done her justice. His artistic talent was plebeian at best. Only in his dreams did he see her.
He took only a step and found himself in the main room. Half shop, half kitchen, the room should have been utilitarian, but Sarai had hung baskets of plants and painted flowers on tiles set in the floor, making it feel welcoming. On the worktable set near the back of the room, his mate ground a cinnamon stick into fine powder with quick, competent hands.
He sucked in the air to savor her scent, flavored by the spice she worked with, as it often was. His favorite was Sarai and vanilla, but Sarai and cinnamon was almost as good.
She was so beautiful to him, even though he knew that others might not find her so. Her hands were callused and strong, with nails trimmed blunt. The short sleeves of her dress showed muscles gained both from her work and from running as a wolf in the wilds of the nearby hills. Her nose, which she despaired of, was long and strong, with a delightful little bump on the end.
He reached out, but he could not touch her. "Sarai?"
When she didn't turn to him, he knew that it was going to be the bad dream. He fought to get free as hard as one of his wild-wolf cousins with a foot caught in an iron trap might have, but he couldn't chew off his leg or force the trap that held him here. So he had to watch, helpless, as it happened again.
Hooves rang on the cobbles he'd laid outside the door to keep the mud at bay. Sarai clicked her tongue lightly on the roof of her mouth in displeasure-she had always hated to be interrupted in the middle of mixing her medicines.
Still, she set her mortar and pestle aside and brushed off her apron. Irritated or not, he knew she would never turn up her nose at business. Money was not to be sneezed at, not in those days. And, for Sarai, there should have been nothing dangerous about a visitor.
A human soldier was no threat to a woman who was also a werewolf, and Napoleon's rise to power had interrupted that other, more dangerous, warfare. The few witchblood families left in Europe had quit killing each other at last, forced instead to protect themselves from the ravages of more mundane fighting. She had no reason to worry, and she couldn't hear Asil's frantic attempts to warn her.
The door opened, and for a moment, Asil saw what Sarai had.
The woman in the doorway was slight-boned and fragile-looking. Her dark hair, usually unruly and curly, had been tamed and rolled into a bun, but the severe style only made her look younger. She was sixteen years old. Like Sarai she was dark-haired and dark-eyed, but unlike her foster mother, her features were refined and aristocratic.
"Mariposa, child," Sarai exclaimed. "What are you doing riding so far on your own? There are soldiers everywhere! If you wanted to visit, you should have told me and I'd have sent Hussan out for you to keep you safe."
It had been two hundred years since anyone had called him by that name, and the sound of it hurt his heart.
Mariposa's mouth tightened a little. "I didn't want to bother you. I'm safe enough." Even in his dreams he knew that her voice sounded odd, unlike herself: cold. His Mariposa, his little butterfly, had been emotional above all, dancing from anger to sullenness to sunshine with scarcely a breath between.
Sarai frowned at her. "No one is safe enough. Not in these times." But even as she scolded her, she enfolded the girl she'd reared as her own in her arms. "You've grown, child, let me look at you." She took two steps back and shook her head. "You don't look well. Are you all right? Linnea promised she'd take care of you...but these are dark times."