If Merlin had hoped that his clear vote of confidence in Serena’s potential might persuade the Council, he knew instantly that he’d been wrong. To a man, the faces across the table actually paled, and even the judge, normally impassive, was clearly appalled.
“It must stop,” the diplomat whispered.
“There’s no time to be lost,” the actor said nervously.
Quietly the judge asked, “We’re agreed, then?”
Without exception, the Council members nodded, looking away from Merlin. The judge nodded, as well, then stared down the table at his son and spoke heavily.
“The Council has decided. This woman must be rendered powerless. Because she is female and not yet in full control of her abilities, it will be possible for you to strip her of all levels of power.”
“What?” Merlin whispered.
The judge went on as if nothing extraordinary had been said. “The process is an ancient one, not commonly known, requiring several weeks to complete. I’ll give you the reference material before you return to Seattle. The woman will not be harmed by this, merely rendered powerless.”
“Merely.” Merlin’s voice was still hardly louder than a whisper. “Merely rendered powerless.”
“It’s the only way,” the senator told Merlin. “The law must be obeyed. We have no choice. Don’t you see that?”
The judge again waved a hand for silence. “The decision of the Council is final. Your punishment for breaking the law will be determined at a later time; the severity of that penalty will depend on your obedience now. You will render this woman powerless.”
“Or?” Merlin asked flatly. They were all staring at him with shuttered eyes and impassive faces, and in that moment he thought he could hate them.
“Or we will do it,” the judge replied calmly. “And you’ll pay a very high price for disobeying the Council.”
Ironically, Merlin was the most powerful wizard in the room in terms of raw force, and all of them knew it. But the simple fact was that he was under their control—not because he wanted to be, but because he had to be. No society of powerful beings could exist without a governing body; for wizards that body was the Council, and their decisions were final.
If he disobeyed, the punishment could be anything from the curtailing of his freedom to the reduction or even total removal of his powers.
That last would literally kill him, but it had been done more than once in the history of wizards when an individual had committed an unpardonable offense. It was not something he could fight with any possibility of success; power against power simply canceled itself out. So if the Council voted to take his powers and he struggled against it, there would be two dead wizards instead of one. Himself … and the Elder closest to him in raw force, the natural choice to be the one to seize his powers: his father.
They had him in a neat, bitterly effective vise, and he knew it. If he obeyed the Council, Serena would be stripped of her powers, and no matter how little the process harmed her physically, Merlin knew she would be destroyed by it. If he disobeyed the Council and they voted on the ultimate punishment for him—which was highly likely—he would be destroyed, and Serena’s powers would be stolen from her anyway.
Merlin didn’t realize the meeting was over until he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see the judge standing beside his chair. The others had gone.
“Come into the den,” the judge said.
Merlin rose and followed the older man across the hall to a smaller and much more intimate room of the big house. The fireplace in here boasted a roaring fire, and Merlin was drawn to it instantly. He felt cold. He stood at the hearth, watching the leaping flames.
“Have you slept with her?”
Merlin stirred impatiently but didn’t answer.
“Have you slept with her?”
“No, of course not.” He turned then and stared at the still handsome, white-haired man who was sitting a few feet away from him. “She was a child when she came to me—and that’s the way I saw her.”
“What about now?”
Merlin hesitated, images from recent years flashing through his mind. Serena in a clingy evening gown dancing gracefully; her long legs bared by shorts as she worked in the garden in summer; regal and beautiful in her Apprentice’s robe, green eyes flashing with humor and challenge….
Almost inaudibly Eric Merlin said, “I see she’s no child to you now.”
“Isn’t that my business?”
His father shook his head. “It would be bad enough if you had told any woman what you are—but a woman of power?”
“I didn’t have to tell her what I was. She recognized me the way I recognized her.” Merlin kept his voice calm. “The way beings of power have always known each other. She knew what I was, and she knew I could teach her. She was drawn across three thousand miles to find me.”
The judge frowned. “Then her instincts are strong. But it makes no difference. There is no place in your life for a woman of power, you know that. There’s no place in our world for her.”
“I can’t take her powers away from her.”
“You must.”
“I can’t!” Merlin turned back to the fire, and his voice was as fierce as the flames when he went on. “Can’t you see what you’re asking me to do? It would destroy her. A wizard isn’t something Serena wants to become, it’s what she is, as much a part of her as the blood in her veins. Taking her powers would be like … like taking the wings of a bird or the fins of a fish. She’ll die.”
“If the process is successful, she won’t remember that she ever possessed any power out of the ordinary.”
“I don’t believe that. It will kill her as surely as the loss of my powers would kill me, or the loss of yours would kill you. But suppose it’s true—what happens if the process isn’t successful? You don’t have to tell me. She’ll die. I say she’ll die no matter what.”
“You’re being unnecessarily pessimistic.”
Merlin laughed harshly. “Am I? Well, let’s examine this from a more general viewpoint, shall we? How many wizards are born in this modern world? How many never realize what they’re meant to be?”
“Richard—”
“You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones who take photographs with their minds, and bend spoons on television talk shows, and are studied in laboratories, wasting their powers because we didn’t notice they were there until too late and now no one can tell them what they really are.”
“There have always been some who didn’t recognize their abilities, but—”
Merlin turned back toward his father, and another bleak laugh escaped him. “Some? And what of the ones who’ll never be born, Dad, what about them?”
The elder Merlin shifted a bit in his chair. “Wizards are born in every generation. You know that.”
“Fewer and fewer of us. Especially since we’re all discouraged from producing offspring of our own. I must say, I’m glad you disobeyed that particular law.”
“It isn’t a law,” his father said instantly. “And I had the permission of the Council to marry.” He hadn’t been a member of the Council then, nearly forty years before.
“But we are discouraged from siring children, who would certainly inherit powers as I inherited yours.”
“You were born with far more than I could give you. One of the chosen few with almost unlimited power. Your equal hasn’t been seen in a thousand years.”
Unimpressed by the tribute, Merlin said, “And could such a wizard as I have been born to powerless people?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Merlin shook his head. “Then don’t you see how rare and valuable someone like Serena is—male or female? She was born to powerless parents. An ‘accidental’ addition to our race. The only way we’re to generate, it seems. Why is that, Dad? Why must we survive as a species only by chance?”
Again the older man stirred in his chair. “I can only tell you what you already know. Enough wizards a
re born by chance to ensure our survival as a race without the risks we run in producing our own offspring. According to the most ancient of our writings, our ancestors believed that sons bred dangerous ambition.”
“What about daughters?”
“There’s no mention of daughters in the writings, except to note that wizards must never sire them.”
… must never sire them …
Given their genetic material, which was identical in all meaningful respects to that of powerless men, wizards were as likely as any other group of randomly selected men to sire female offspring as well as males, Merlin knew. Daughters must have been born somewhere along the way, and the offspring of a wizard was always born with some degree of power.
Staring at his father, Merlin had a sudden chilly intuition that any female child sired by a wizard, no matter how healthy, had not survived long. For the first time in his life, he felt a pang of aversion for what he was.
Slowly he said, “So sons are feared because they breed ambition, and daughters are never to be born at all—or at least never to long survive their birth. I’m somewhat surprised I was allowed to survive.”
His father stiffened. “What are you accusing me of, Richard? There was never any question of abortion or infanticide, if that’s what you’re thinking. We may be discouraged from having sex with any woman who isn’t unquestionably barren, and we’re certainly discouraged from marrying, but when it does happen that a son results from such a union, we’re civilized about it.”
“Civilized,” Merlin said. “How nice.”
“Your sarcasm is uncalled for. The point is that I wasn’t searching for a wife when I met your mother. You know that. But there’s an exception to every rule. She was … a remarkable woman.”
“A woman who knew what you were.”
“Yes, but she was powerless. I would never have given in to my feelings if she had been anything else. The very idea is unthinkable. Richard, sit down.”
After a moment Merlin sat down across from his father in a matching chair, and sighed. “Maybe Serena’s an exception. Have you considered that possibility? She has so much power, Dad, so much potential.”
“Can you read her thoughts?”
Merlin shook his head. He wasn’t about to confess that Serena had an absolutely unprecedented ability to slip into his consciousness; that had shocked him to his bones, and he had no doubt it would horrify his father.
“Is that why you accepted her when she came to you? Because you couldn’t read her thoughts?”
“That, and the power I could feel in her. It honestly didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything seriously wrong. I barely remembered the law.”
“Until she got older?”
Merlin sat forward, his elbows on his knees, and stared at his father. “Yes. Until she got older. What does it mean? As a child Serena was no threat; as a woman she is. Yes, she makes me feel uneasy, wary sometimes—but why? She would never harm anyone. Least of all me.”
After a moment the judge shook his head. “I don’t know why. Why the law exists, what prompted it, or why we feel it so deeply. Our writings are ancient, but I’ve never found any reference to the creation of the law. All I know is that there must be no female wizards. And that we must never trust any woman.”
“You trusted Mother,” Merlin said.
The judge looked at his son, and there was an old, old pain in his eyes. “No. I didn’t.”
Merlin was only dimly aware that he had risen to his feet. “She lived with you for twenty years,” he said slowly. “Bore you a son. And she kept your secret. How could you not trust her?”
“She asked me the same thing. Over and over again she asked me. I never could give her an answer.” The judge hesitated, then went on softly. “She asked me that night, and when I had no answer for her, she rushed out of here in tears. An hour later her car crashed into a wall.”
“Are you telling me—”
“I’m telling you that … accident … shouldn’t have happened. That’s all I’m saying. That’s all I can ever know.”
Merlin turned away from his father to stare into the bright heat of the fire. Suicide? Dear God, had his mother killed herself? Clearly his father believed it, or at least believed it was possible. Was that the price she had paid for loving a wizard?
“Richard, you can’t blame me for being what I am. Any more than I can blame myself.”
“Why couldn’t you trust her?” he demanded harshly, not looking at his father because he didn’t know if he could.
“It’s not in me to trust a woman, just like it isn’t in you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’d better. For your own sanity if nothing else, you’d better. You feel it’s true even if you don’t think it is, and that kind of conflict will tear you apart. Go back to Seattle, Richard, and take her powers away as gently as you can. And then send her out of your life before both of you are destroyed by this.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You have to. Because you don’t have a choice.”
Serena was not, by nature, a patient woman. So it was very difficult for her to hang on to what little tolerance she had when Merlin returned on Friday afternoon and shut himself in his study. Since she was at work when he got home, she didn’t even see him.
“He said he’s not to be disturbed. For any reason,” Rachel informed Serena when she came home.
“He has to eat,” Serena objected.
“That’s your problem, at least until Monday,” Rachel said, a gleam of amusement in her eyes as she put on her coat and picked up her umbrella. “Dinner’s in the oven, but I’ve a feeling you’ll be eating alone tonight.”
To Serena’s frustration, the housekeeper was correct. Merlin’s study was barred to her—just as it had been once before. The door was unlocked, she knew that, but he wasn’t going to allow anybody to cross the threshold until he was ready.
That weekend turned out to be the longest one of Serena’s life. Reluctant to leave the house until she found out what had happened at the meeting of the Council—a group about which she was intensely curious simply because Merlin had told her very little about them—she occupied herself as best she could with her studies.
On Saturday afternoon she canceled a planned shopping trip with Jane. By Saturday night she found herself sitting on the stairs gazing at that closed door with what she didn’t realize was so much intensity that she actually started in surprise when she felt the barrier vanish.
Hesitantly she crossed the foyer and knocked softly on the door.
“Serena.” The acknowledgment was unmuffled by the thick oak of the door.
She opened the door and went into the study. Lighting kept the room from being too dark, but the study was still overpowering, filled with the ancient writings of a mighty race. The tall shelves, normally bursting with age-darkened heavy volumes written in odd scripts and ancient scrolls dust-dry and fragile, now showed gaps among the old books. Volumes were stacked, open and closed, on the floor, piled on the desk, and overflowed two chairs.
In the chair behind his cluttered desk, Merlin sat in an apparently relaxed position, his hands clasped together on the parchment pages of the book open before him. He was gazing across the room at her, impassive.
He looked tired, the sharpened planes of his face telling of too many long hours of study without food or sleep. His deep-set black eyes burned with the inner energy that was always a part of him, but there was something else, something even more vibrant than she was accustomed to seeing radiating from him.
“It’s been more than twenty-four hours,” she offered.
He was mildly surprised. “Oh? I hadn’t realized.”
“You have to eat.”
“Do I?”
She blinked. “Don’t you?”
With a sudden, slightly rueful smile, Merlin said, “Of course I do. But I’m not hungry right now. Sit down, Serena. We have to talk.”
Those four
little words were enough to make her feel extremely apprehensive, and his smile didn’t reassure her a bit, but she removed several books from the chair nearest his desk and sat down.
Master and Apprentice, that’s all we are. Master and Apprentice. There can’t be anything else.
With forced lightness she asked, “How was the Council meeting?”
“Difficult.” Without elaborating, Merlin abruptly changed the subject. “Do you trust me?” he asked her.
“Of course.” Her answer was instant, unthinking, and she felt an odd jolt when he seemed to wince. Was her answer unexpected, or simply unwelcome? She didn’t know. His features smoothed out quickly, and his voice was calm when he went on.
“Good. Because I’m going to have to ask you to hold on to that trust with both hands.”
She eyed him warily. “Why? Are you going to do something to make me doubt I can trust you?”
“I hope not,” he murmured, then shook his head a bit. “Serena, I can’t explain everything just yet. I know you’re tired of hearing that, but please try to be patient. I have my reasons, and they’re good ones. You have to trust me on that point.”
“All right,” she said, slowly and reluctantly—but he definitely had her interest. Since she did trust him, it didn’t seem too much to ask. For the moment.
“Thank you. If it helps, I believe you won’t have too many questions left by the time we get back.”
“Back? Where are we going?”
He looked down at the book lying open on his desk. “We’re going through a gate, Serena. A gate into time.”
That surprised her so much that she could only stare at him when he went on somewhat broodingly.
“We’ll have to be careful. Our presence alone could have unimaginable consequences. To change the past is to change the present. And the future.”
Serena was trying to fathom the undercurrents she could barely sense in him. It was as if he had severed some tie, burned his bridges behind him, and that unnerved her. How much was she to take on faith? Everything? Or could she ask questions? Uncertain on that point, she opted for a simple statement. “You haven’t taught me about time travel.”