The Wizard of Seattle (19 page)

She drew an audible breath. “You asked me to trust you, to accept this little trip of ours without posing too many questions, and I agreed to that. But I didn’t agree to stop thinking, Richard.”

Merlin heard something in her voice he’d never heard before, not hostility but something very close, and he found it both disturbing and painful. For all her occasional arguments and minor defiances through the years, Serena had never been in any way antagonistic toward him. Was it only because of Roxanne’s bitter words, or did the very atmosphere of Atlantis kindle suspicion in everyone exposed to it?

He turned his head slowly and looked at her. She was clearly as tense as she sounded, as tense as he felt himself, and he knew he had to tread carefully. “I never asked you to stop thinking,” he said quietly.

“Then don’t ask me not to think about all this.”

“Think what you like, Serena. But be careful in drawing conclusions. Remember your own analogy? This place
is
like a jigsaw puzzle; we won’t know what the picture is until we have all the pieces assembled.”

After a long moment she looked away from his steady gaze. Her features were still a bit strained, but her eyes were not so much wary now as uneasy. “The sun’s going
down. We … aren’t going to transport up into the mountains to get away from the Curtain, are we?”

“To understand this place, we should experience as much as possible. Even the Curtain. And until we see one of the wizards here transport, it’s one ability we won’t be using. They may not believe they can fly any more than the powerless people of this time believe they can.”

“Then I have a suggestion,” she said. “Before the sun goes down, maybe you should conjure up a couple of guns.”

Merlin shook his head reluctantly. “Cheating with coffee or blankets is one thing; we can’t bring devices from our time into this world, even to protect ourselves. The risk of changing the future is too great.”

She didn’t argue with him; she didn’t even seem surprised by what he said. She simply looked at him and said, “In that case I think I’ll go and find myself a couple of really big, heavy sticks.”

“That might be a very good idea,” he conceded.

She felt hideously uncomfortable, Serena decided. The sense of being in an alien place seemed multiplied at night, with the unfamiliar night sounds and the queer faint shudders of the earth beneath her body. She noticed the latter only when she lay down to sleep, those almost imperceptible pulses in the ground that were even more frightening than the earlier earthquake because they were continuous reminders of instability. And the Curtain.

When she had sat near the fire with Merlin just after dark, both of them gazing up at the luminescent mist thickening in the air above the air above the valley and nearly hiding the full moon just on the wane, Serena had managed to feel a bit detached, marveling as the visible spillover of wizards’ energies took on a life of its own. But with every passing hour, as the sky darkened to a peculiar blood red and seemed to pulse with energy, she felt more uncomfortable, lethargic and weak, until finally she bade Merlin a quiet good night and
went to join the sleeping Roxanne in the larger of the two lean-to’s.

She would have preferred to remain with him, to talk about what they had so far learned about Atlantis, but Merlin had made it clear he had no intention of speculating until they had more information. At least that was what he said. Serena knew it wasn’t that simple. She didn’t have to read his mind to know that he was deeply disturbed by what information they had already, and he had withdrawn from her again, retreating behind his remote mask to keep distance between them.

The truth, Serena thought, was that he didn’t want to discuss some of what they’d learned because it cut too close to them and to the tension between them.

Neither of them had actually mentioned what Roxanne had said regarding male and female wizards—that they apparently never engaged in sex together—but Serena couldn’t stop thinking about it….
no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power
. Even when there was no force? When it was not merely sex, but lovemaking? Were there no wizards capable of trusting each other enough to mate?

That question troubled Serena more than all the others, causing her to consider her relationship with Merlin in an entirely different light. She knew no wizards other than him in their time; if she
had
known others, would she have seen the same male/female segregation in their society? Was it considered normal even in their time? And was her relationship with Merlin so tense and tentative now for that very reason—because an unthreatening girl child had become a woman he could never trust?

Was the “boundary” he had told her they mustn’t cross an uncompromising and ancient line born out of hate and suspicion, created to divide not Master and Apprentice, but male and female wizards?

The questions and thoughts followed Serena into a shallow, restless sleep, the last sight to meet her eyes that of Merlin sitting by the fire, his face turned upward as he studied the shifting, glistening Curtain. When she woke abruptly, the fire had burned out, Merlin was not
visible—probably sleeping in his own lean-to—and Roxanne lay stiffly beside her.

Serena’s instincts told her more than her clouded senses, and she put a gentle hand on the younger woman’s rigid arm. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “Cry if you need to. Grieve. Get mad about it. Then you can really begin to heal.”

Roxanne did cry, almost silently but with such intensity that her slender body shuddered beneath the force of her pain and grief and rage. Serena didn’t attempt to soothe or stop her; she merely provided a willing shoulder and compassionate silence.

Exhausted at last, Roxanne slept, but Serena lay awake for a long time. She realized she was listening tensely to the unfamiliar night sounds of Atlantis, that being reminded of what had happened to Roxanne had made her nervous and more than a little frightened—enough so that sleep was not going to come easily. Packs composed of some of the village men hunted most nights, Roxanne had told her, hopeful of finding a careless female wizard who had strayed too far from Sanctuary and had gotten caught by the night and the Curtain.

It was all because the male wizards had, long ago, created the fiction that by possessing a female wizard sexually, a powerless man could acquire some of her power.

“Never mind that it isn’t true,” Roxanne had said bitterly. “The males made it
seem
true by gifting an occasional rapist with a little bit of power—not enough to hurt the males, of course. They still do it sometimes, still reward the rape of a female wizard. So we’re all vulnerable at night.”

“But the rapists have to live in the daytime, too,” Serena had protested. “If a woman is raped, can’t she go after them later, when she can use her powers?”

“If she survives.” Roxanne’s voice was bleak. “Most don’t. So even though any of the wizards in Sanctuary would destroy the rapists without hesitation, there’s usually no way of knowing the guilty men. And we can’t destroy them all….”

Serena gazed across their darkened camp, thinking, acutely aware that her body was far weaker than she was accustomed to, that the Curtain had drained her strength even though she hadn’t attempted to use her powers. Despite the large branch that she had earlier found and put nearby for defense, the truth was that she was hideously vulnerable to anyone or anything that might attack her.

All her life Serena had been carelessly certain of her strength, her power; it had formed the core of her self-confidence and presence. She had felt vulnerable emotionally, but never physically, and her sense of helplessness now was as alien as this place.

She was afraid and felt very, very alone. Worst of all, the person closest to her was no longer someone she could instinctively and trustingly go to with her fears. Now she hesitated, wary and uncertain.

Because he was a man—and a wizard.

By midway through the following morning, they were no more than a mile from Sanctuary. Roxanne hardly spoke—not at all to Merlin—and kept close to Serena. The fragile blond was pale but controlled; she seemed physically all right, or else was drawing on her wizard’s powers, because she had no trouble in walking steadily with the other two.

Still, Merlin called a halt after they’d been traveling for a few hours. He had carefully avoided getting near Roxanne, but it was obvious to Serena that he’d kept an eye on the young wizard and knew she needed rest, even if she wouldn’t show it or admit to it.

Serena left Roxanne sitting on a fallen tree and moved a few yards away to join Merlin, who stood on the bank of a wide but shallow stream they would have to cross.

“This water’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked.

He nodded. “You can smell the sulfur. I’m willing to bet most of the groundwater’s no good. The wizards can create fresh water, but I don’t know what the villagers do.”

Serena started to suggest that maybe the lake near
the village contained drinkable water, but she caught a glimpse of his left hand just then, and all thoughts of water vanished. With a gasp she caught his hand and lifted it between them. His arm tensed as if to draw away from her, but then relaxed.

“What happened?” Cradling his hand in both hers, she stared down at the vicious blisters marking each of his long fingers. Burns, she realized. Then she remembered, and looked up at his face quickly. “Roxanne had burns like these all over her hands when we found her.”

Merlin met her gaze, his own calm. “Yes.”

“You had to find out, didn’t you? You had to try and use your powers last night.”

“Of course,” he answered matter-of-factly. “We couldn’t know for sure that the Curtain would affect us as it does them until I made the attempt.”

“‘So now we know it
does
affect us.”

“Yes. And I wouldn’t advise you to try. The effects are rather painful.”

Serena looked down at his hand again, knowing that the burns must have been much worse when they were first inflicted than what she saw now. Wizards tended to heal from their rare injuries extremely quickly, but not even a Master wizard could heal himself. Merlin had once told Serena he believed that inability was simply another reminder that no mortal being could be all-powerful.

She very gently traced one blister on his index finger with the tip of her thumb, not even conscious of her desire to heal him until the blister began to fade.

“Serena …”

“Roxanne can’t see what I’m doing.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“Healing the skin is simple,” she murmured, touching the blisters one by one and watching them fade away, replaced by healthy skin. “It was the first thing you taught me when I began studying healing.”

“You promised not to attempt to heal anything until I said you were ready,” he reminded her.

Serena looked at his unblemished skin with satisfaction, then met his eyes innocently. “How can I be expected
to keep a promise I won’t even make for millennia?”

“You won’t be
born
for millennia. Don’t split hairs, Serena.” But his low voice was amused rather than annoyed.

They were both speaking quietly, aware of Roxanne’s presence a few yards away.

“It’s still a fact that I can hardly keep a promise I haven’t made yet. That isn’t logical.”

“Logical? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it you who once said that math wasn’t logical?”

She dismissed the memory with a shrug. “Numbers confuse me. But I’m very good with words, you know I am, Richard. And ideas. I may be new to this time travel business, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. And I
know
that promises I made in our time aren’t valid here.”

His half smile faded a bit. “Even the promise you made to obey me?”

After a moment Serena let go of his hand, rubbing her own down over her thighs in an unconsciously nervous gesture. “Even in our time that promise was reserved for the workroom and my lessons,” she reminded him, striving to keep her voice easygoing. “You’re my Master as a wizard—not as a man.”

Merlin nodded slowly. “I wanted to make sure you remembered that. I haven’t forgotten it, Serena. And I won’t. No matter what happens here, no matter what ideas and customs these people have, you and I are from a different time. We can’t let ourselves be torn apart by what’s destroying them.”

She gazed up at him, and for the first time since Roxanne had talked about this place and its people, Serena remembered all the years that Merlin had virtually raised her. She owed him a great deal, far more than she would ever be able to repay.

Without his willingness to guide her, she probably would have ended up using her inborn powers simply to survive any way she could. Instead he had given her the first real home of her life and had not only taught her the skills of a wizard, but also provided her with an
excellent model of what a decent human being should be.

The recent strain between them, strong and bewildering though it was, had not erased her memories of those times or her awareness of how much she owed Merlin, and she couldn’t allow Atlantis to wipe them away, either.

At the very least she owed him her trust—unless and until
he
did something to betray that trust. What other wizards, male or female, did was hardly something for which she could hold him responsible.

Serena drew a breath and nodded. “Point taken. I’ll try to remember that what happens here doesn’t necessarily have to affect us.”

Merlin didn’t ask her to explain the qualifier. “Good. Now, I’m going to follow this stream a bit father north and see if there’s a better place to cross.”

“You could just conjure a bridge.”

“I probably will, but I hesitate to use my powers too often until we find out just how much these wizards are capable of.”

“That makes sense. I’ll stay here with Roxanne.” She had taken no more than two steps away when he said her name, and she paused to look back at him.

He lifted his left hand, the thumb brushing over the unmarked fingertips lightly. “Thank you.”

“Any time.” She went back to join Roxanne, unaware of smiling until the younger woman’s openly curious stare made her aware of it. “Is something on your mind?” she asked lightly, sitting down on the fallen tree.