What could she say to that? A bit unsteadily she murmured, “I usually felt terribly ignorant and frustrated when I couldn’t do the things that seemed to come so easy to you.”
“I know.” He reached over and touched her cheek lightly, just a fleeting contact, and the hard, firelit planes and angles of his face seemed to soften. “But if you only knew how astonishing you’ve always seemed to me. Serena, you’re impatient and emotional and sometimes wildly erratic, and you haven’t been in training even half your life—yet your accomplishments are nothing short of incredible. You’re going to be a Master wizard, probably seventh degree, and if it takes you a little longer to achieve that level, the difference will be that when you get there, you’ll be complete. Whole. With nothing lacking.”
Serena drew a breath, surprised by the tribute. “I never knew what you thought about my abilities.”
“No. I kept my beliefs to myself. If you had known, you would have tried to use them against me.”
She started to object, but her indignation was short-lived. “I probably would have at that,” she admitted somewhat ruefully. “It always was hell trying to get my way when you were opposed to something I wanted to do.”
“If it’s any comfort, your attempts were always charming rather than petulant, and I consider it a character-building exercise that I was able to withstand you.”
His dry tone made her laugh, but it was a brief sound of amusement. All during the conversation she had been trying to figure out what was wrong. He was being astonishingly open and honest with her, which definitely gave her hope, and yet he was still restrained—not guarded exactly, but as if he was waiting for something unpleasant to happen. Serena was almost sure it wasn’t because he had to fight to make himself drop his guard with her. This was something else.
“Richard, what’s the matter? I mean, I’m glad we can be so honest with each other finally, but … what is it you aren’t telling me? Why are you so tense?”
He turned his head to gaze into the fire, avoiding her eyes, and countered her question with careful words of his own. “Down in the ruins I felt you pull back, and I could see the restraint in your eyes. The reluctance. Then you asked about the blond as if she’d been on your mind all along, and it seemed to me you were horrified by what you heard when I answered your questions. So I can’t help wondering if… anything … has changed for you.”
“Did you think it would?”
“It crossed my mind.” His lips twisted slightly, and he continued to gaze into the fire.
Serena stared at his profile, aware that his tension was greater now. But he had surprised her, and it took her a moment or so to find her voice. “Do you really believe love is so fragile? Richard, if finding out you have the ability to take away my powers wasn’t enough to change how I feel about you, how could anything else do it?”
He looked at her finally, and his face was still, unexpressive. But there was a hint, just a hint, of vulnerability in his eyes.
Instinctively she reached out, taking one of his hands in both of hers because she needed to touch him. “When you explained who that blond woman was, what I mostly felt was jealousy,” she admitted. “That’s how I’ve felt about her all along. Finding out she’s a … a paid bedmate didn’t really change that.” She paused, then added deliberately, “Of course, if you go back to her, I’ll cut your liver out.”
Merlin smiled slightly. “Will you?”
“Yes. Or do my best to turn you into a toad. And we won’t even discuss what I’ll do to her. Remember those intense emotions of mine.”
His long fingers twined with hers. “Thanks for the warning.”
“Don’t mention it.” Serena kept her voice grave. “As for what happened in the ruins, I pulled back—very reluctantly—because I thought we were rushing things a bit. And because you were still struggling against that damned taboo.”
“You felt that?”
She lifted his hand quickly and brushed her lips across his knuckles in a fleeting caress. “I could almost see it. Richard, what we need isn’t more time—we’ve had plenty of that in every sense of the word—but more understanding of each other, and more willingness to be honest like this. If we become lovers before we’re ready to be, I think it’ll destroy us both.”
He nodded. “You’re saying that what we’re really lacking is trust, aren’t you? At least … trust on my part.”
Serena hesitated, but only briefly. “In all trust lies the possibility of betrayal. We put ourselves at risk when we care about someone, because we trust them not to hurt us. Not to betray our confidence in them.” She took a quick breath and let it out slowly. “For a while—not very long—my trust in you was put to the test. I found out what you could do to me, and it was terrifying, especially when I heard so many tales of how brutal the male wizards here were. But it was relatively easy for me to hold on to my trust in you, Richard, because you had never hurt me and because you had gone to the extraordinary lengths of traveling back in time to try and change history so you wouldn’t have to take my powers.”
“You don’t fear I’ll betray you?”
“No. But even if I were afraid of that possibility, I’d still trust you. I’d take the risk. I don’t have the luxury of doing anything else. A part of Edling in love with you is being vulnerable.” She hesitated, then added quietly, “Don’t you see, Richard? You wouldn’t have to take my powers as a wizard to destroy me. You can do that as a man. It wouldn’t be hard at all.”
In the firelight her green eyes were mysterious pools, dark and bottomless. He thought again of how seductive the notion was of losing himself in them—and this time there was no fear of the idea. He leaned toward her, and her erotic lips were soft and silky and warm under his. He kept his eyes just barely open, and through her lashes he could see the gleam of her eyes.
The kiss was not brief, but it was more tender than passionate, careful and sweet.
When he finally eased back, Merlin tried to control a voice that insisted on emerging huskily. “It would be impossible, Serena. I don’t ever want to hurt you. And more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, I want to trust you.”
She smiled at him. “Then that’s enough for now. We’ll find the rest, I know we will.”
Merlin hoped she was right; he didn’t know how much more of this he could stand. For a man who had been virtually isolated and unemotional for most of his life, he was certainly making up for the lack now.
Serena released his hand reluctantly and said, “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since we got here, so I think I should take advantage of being above the Curtain. If you don’t mind …”
He gestured slightly, and a comfortable lean-to appeared several feet back from the fire in the shelter of a granite outcropping.
She looked, then returned her gaze to him. “There’s only one,” she noted neutrally.
“I’m not very sleepy,” he told her, wryly conscious of understatement. “If I change my mind, it’s easy enough to conjure another or a cushion by the fire. Besides … I’m a little apprehensive about Varian. He gave in far too easily, from what I know of him. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was somewhere about trying to find you.”
Serena had forgotten the other wizard so completely that it took her several moments to remember the acquisitiveness in the eyes that had stripped her naked. “Oh, him,” she said finally. “Do you really think he could be watching?”
“No, because I’ve hidden our camp. If he’s near, he won’t be able to see us. But I’d rather stay alert for a while just to be sure.”
She nodded and climbed to her feet. Then a thought occurred to her, and she gazed down at Merlin with a slight frown. “You said that I’d be a Master wizard one day, and I know that’s assuming we do change our present and change the attitudes of male wizards in our time—but what about us? When we step back through the gate, won’t we be changed, too?”
Merlin shook his head. “No. If we’re successful, we will have cre
ated a slightly different reality for ourselves, but because we were in this time when it happened, we’ll remember our lives as we lived them.”
“What about other people? The other wizards in our time, let’s say. If we’re successful, they will be different, won’t they?”
“Yes, very likely, and they may well have different memories than we do. For instance, since the Council will, presumably, have no ban against females to enforce, they won’t remember that I was ever called to explain myself on that topic. But that memory still exists for me because I lived through it.”
“So … we’ll retain our own experiences. But will the other wizards have memories of us that we don’t? I mean, say they had a wizard gathering for Christmas or something and we came because I wouldn’t have been forbidden. Is that possible?”
“Serena—”
“But we won’t remember that because we were here. So who was there singing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ with all the other cheerful wizards? Our doppelgangers? And are those two impostors banished to some weird twilight zone because we return to our proper time?”
“Stop scaring yourself.”
Serena heard herself laugh a little. “It’s not hard. Please tell me we don’t have doubles.”
“We don’t have doubles. Serena, you and I have been very isolated from other wizards, and I don’t see why that would change even if the society of wizards has. You would still have come looking for me when you were sixteen, and since wizards have always learned their craft with a single Master away from others, I would have trained you virtually the way I did. The other wizards won’t remember ever seeing you because they didn’t—though they’ll likely know about you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Remember what we discussed before we left Seattle? The theory is, we can’t change our pasts because if we did, the reasons we had for coming back in time would no longer exist. Paradox. Satisfied?”
“No. I think there’s a hole in there somewhere, but I guess we’ll find out when we go back to Seattle.” She only hoped she didn’t have nightmares. She was halfway to the lean-to when another question caught her interest, but she didn’t ask until she was comfortably wrapped in blankets against the night chill and turned on her side to gaze toward the fire and Merlin. “Richard?”
“Hmmm?”
“While we’re being so honest with each other …”
He turned his head toward her, his profile sharply outlined by the leaping flames. “Yes?”
“How old are you?”
A little chuckle escaped him. “Judging by the questions you asked when you first came to me, quite a bit younger than you think. Wizards aren’t ageless, though we do tend to live quite a bit longer than our powerless counterparts.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I’m thirty-six, Serena. Now get some rest.”
She was smiling. “All right. Good night.”
“Good night. Sleep well.”
Serena thought she probably would, even if she did dream about doppelgangers.
Disgusted, Varian finally conjured himself a warm fire and hunkered down beside it, wrapping his coat around him for added warmth as the chill of the night increased.
Goddamn that Merlin! The younger wizard had somehow managed to elude Varian despite all his efforts, taking his redheaded bitch and going to ground with her somewhere up here. Not that Varian could blame him for being selfish by keeping her to himself, but it was terribly frustrating nevertheless.
He considered making his way to Justin’s palace and spending the rest of the night there, but discarded the thought quickly; he was never at ease around other male wizards except in the fortress of his own palace. He also considered conjuring a shelter for himself, but decided against that, as well, because he preferred not to alert Justin to his presence by expending that amount of energy.
So he was condemned to spending an uncomfortably chilly night up here, an indignity he laid at Merlin’s door. Still, he felt a certain amount of respect. The wizard of Seattle was clearly both canny and skilled, and he obviously intended to protect his concubine however it was necessary.
Couldn’t blame him for that, either, Varian acknowledged silently. One look at that vibrant red hair, luscious, ripe body, and beautiful face, and most any man would be caught even before he got close enough to meet those snapping green eyes and hear her pleasing voice….
He shifted on the hard ground, suddenly uncomfortable as his manly parts swelled and throbbed and protested the constriction of his trousers. God rot the bitch, just the thought of her was enough to have him randy and ready to ride her! He wanted her, and he intended to have her—no matter how vigilantly Merlin protected her.
In the meantime a long and decidedly chilly night lay ahead of him.
It was just after dawn when Serena woke and crawled out of her lean-to. The fire was still burning, and Merlin was asleep on a pallet nearby, his coat wrapped around him and his lean face peaceful. Serena crept close and knelt down, careful not to disturb him. He was incredibly handsome, she thought, admiring the perfection of his strong features. The liquid dark eyes were hidden from her by thick lashes, but even those were sexy in a way she couldn’t define.
Compulsively she reached out a hand and very softly touched his tumbled black hair—and her senses nearly went into overload. Soft, thick, a bit damp from the morning dew. Alive under her fingers. All of him was so alive. Even without his intense black eyes radiating power, his strength was obvious. Serena brushed a curl off his wide forehead and wondered if she could heal him.
The vague thoughts coalesced, and her fingers stilled, lightly touching his hair. Could she heal him? He hadn’t said no, she remembered. In fact, he hadn’t commented at all when she had asked him to let her try.
The problem was, Serena didn’t know how to try. This wasn’t a relatively simple case of healing a burn or mending a broken bone or sealing a tear in the flesh. Nor was it as exacting as the deft manipulation of a virus. This was something almost abstract. Merlin’s wound was emotional, maybe even psychic—as that word pertained to the soul. His deepest instincts had been … maimed, his natural responses curbed and repressed.
There was no way she could repair all that damage; much of it he would simply have to do himself through the natural course of time and positive experience, the way humans had always cured their inner wounds. But perhaps she could make a start, she thought. Drive a gentle wedge to prop open a door—just a small door, carefully chosen.
She tried to focus, tried to single out one thing on which she could concentrate all her ability, and when she found it, she directed a narrow, careful flow of positive energy and healing wishes.
She wanted him to heal, wanted it desperately, and that determination infused the brief stream of energy with a strength that made it even more positive.
Was it successful? Serena didn’t know. She sat back on her heels at last and gazed down at him, still sleeping deeply, his handsome face relaxed. If she had done it, then the door was open now for him to begin trusting her; the inclination toward mistrust that had been seared into his instincts would be softened, blurred a bit, more receptive to his intellect’s desire to change. A beginning, no more.
If she had done it.
Serena eased up and away from him, still not wanting to disturb his sleep. But she was wide awake and restless, and the faint gurgle of a nearby stream (created by one of the wizards on this mountain, Merlin had noted when they’d climbed up here; the fresh water was undoubtedly careless runoff from some pleasure pool higher on the mountain) sounded awfully tempting. The bathing facilities in Sanctuary were adequate, though hardly inspiring, and the idea of bathing under the brightening sky of Atlantis appealed to Serena.
Why not? With a little luck Merlin would wake up and come looking for her, finding her rising up out of the water like … like who? Neptune (or Poseidon) was the malegod of the sea, she remembered, but who was the femalegod? Anyway, she’d be
rising out of the water like the femalegod of the sea, all naked and wet and tempting and—and she’d probably be draped with the decidedly unattractive freshwater equivalent of seaweed, because that was just her luck….
Smothering a laugh at her own absurd thoughts, Serena went to take a bath.
TWELVE
Tremayne reached Sanctuary in early afternoon after having parted from Merlin at the base of Varian’s mountain hours before. He would normally have volunteered to accompany Merlin—more of a stranger here than himself—to the Old City, but after what he had learned of Roxanne’s experience, he was anxious to see her, to try to convince her that he had no intention of harming her in any way. Tremayne hadn’t needed Merlin’s warning to know she was unlikely to put much trust in any male, even less a wizard, but he was determined to do whatever he could to win her trust. And there was so little time before he had to leave….
He was no more than a hundred yards from the gate and approaching from the southwest when he saw Roxanne pass through it, pause to speak briefly to one of the female wizard Sentinels, and then begin walking due west away from the city. She had a small backpack and used a walking stick nearly as tall as she was, around which her fingers whitened tensely when Tremayne approached her quickly.
She halted, knowing they were within view of the gate and that the Sentinels undoubtedly watched. Oddly, she wasn’t afraid of the tall male wizard striding toward her, but her heart pounded erratically and she felt very nervous. She hadn’t expected to see him…. No, that was wrong. She had been expecting him ever since their last encounter, when he had said those incredible, stunning things she hadn’t been able to believe. Something inside her had insisted he would return.
Especially after Serena had told her that Tremayne had invited Merlin to meet his distant kinsman Varian. She wondered dimly if only she among all of them felt this strange sense of fate weaving connections like an inescapable web.