The Wizard of Seattle (32 page)

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.

T
remayne 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.

Tremayne stopped several feet away and stared at her with a hunger that was alien to everything she knew and yet awoke sensations in her body she instinctively understood, however much they shocked her. For a moment he seemed unsure what to say. When he did speak, his voice was abrupt but not hard or harsh. “What in hell are you doing leaving the city this late in the day?”

Roxanne lifted her chin and fought inwardly to hold her voice steady. “Sanctuary is not a prison.”

“I know that.” He was impatient now, frowning, but his eyes were still darkened with more primitive feelings. “But it’s afternoon now. You could be caught out here when the Curtain falls and be in danger.”

“I know I’ll be outside the city tonight, it’s unavoidable.” She didn’t know why she was telling him this. “I have to cross the valley.”

“The only thing on the other side of the valley is the village.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Why do you have to go there?”

Her chin lifted another inch, and the blue eyes flashed. “Not that it’s any of your business, but my mother lives there.”

Was she being truthful? Or had she given herself enough time to heal from what had been done to her and meant now to find the men who had attacked her? Tremayne hesitated, every instinct warning him not to admit to having knowledge of what had happened to
her; if she wanted him to know, she would tell him herself. Before he could say anything, she was going on, her voice soft but not at all weak.

“Wherever I choose to go is my own concern. If you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of ground to cover.”

She made as if to walk past him, giving him a wide berth, but Tremayne turned with her and fell into step. “I haven’t seen the village yet except from a distance.”

Roxanne didn’t stop walking or look at him, but her fingers tightened around the walking stick. “I don’t believe I invited you to accompany me.”

“If I waited for that, I’ve a feeling I should grow old and crotchety before I heard it,” he said a bit dryly.

She nearly smiled, but they had reached the forest, and she knew the Sentinels at the gate would soon lose sight of them. Did she really want to be alone in the valley with this male? Even if he seemed different from the other male wizards, a difference that roused strange feelings inside her, and even if Serena and Merlin’s odd relationship made such a thing at least imaginable, could she afford the risk?

A part of her wanted to take the risk; but it was impossible, her mind kept insisting. Even if their trip across the valley was peaceful, he was bound to interfere with what she had to do, and the last thing she wanted was to be forced to fight him.

“Roxanne?”

“I don’t need your company,” she said carefully, refusing to look at him. He was an arm’s length away from her side, yet she was overwhelmingly conscious of him, tall and powerful and a
wizard
. She should be afraid of him, yet she wasn’t….

“You will when the Curtain falls,” he said matter-of-factly. “If I’m with you when any of the village men see you at night, they’ll assume you’re my concubine.”

“I belong to no man,” she said, her intense voice so low, it was almost a whisper.

“I know that, Roxanne. But what’s the harm of protecting yourself with a bit of deception? Come, allow me to travel with you, please.”

“You ask for too much. I don’t know you, but I know what you are, and I have no reason to trust that.”

Tremayne was silent for several steps, then said, “At night both of us are unable to use our powers in the valley, and during the day you could injure me as easily as I could injure you; I would say the risk you run in trusting me is a lesser danger than the one you face from the village men. I wish only to be with you, Roxanne. Can’t you accept that?”

She was silent.

Still Tremayne felt hopeful. She hadn’t said no, after all. He kept his voice easy and neutral. “We should be able to cross the valley and return in two or three days, don’t you agree?”

After a moment she said, “That is … the usual time it takes for the trip.”

He managed not to yell in triumph and was even able to speak calmly. “Good. Is your mother expecting you?”

“No, though I usually try to visit every few weeks.” Roxanne felt guilty as soon as she spoke, but the feeling didn’t prevent her from lying to him.

“You plan to be in the village only during the day, of course.”

“Of course.”

Tremayne thought about it for a moment, then frowned. “Your mother is powerless?”

“Yes.”

He looked quickly at her delicate profile, finding her expression a bit tense but composed. “Then your father is a wizard?”

Guarded blue eyes met his briefly. “Yes,” she replied in a flat little voice. “Though, of course, he knows nothing of my existence. If he had known, I would have been killed at birth like all his other female oftspring.”

Tremayne felt a sudden shock, a peculiar certainty that might have been psychic. “Roxanne … who is your father?”

Her smile was filled with a terrible irony. “Your host and kinsman, Tremayne. Varian is my father.”

The male guards and female wizard Sentinels were so astonished when Roxanne walked off with a male wizard that they were drawn several steps away from the gate as they looked after the shocking pair. That was how Kerry was able to slip through the gate and out of the city unnoticed.

On her back she carried a small pack that matched Roxanne’s, and she walked with a stick that, also like Roxanne’s, was nearly as tall as she was. She managed not to giggle and give her presence away as she snuck out behind the guards and Sentinels, but she was so excited, she could hardly bear it, and nearly danced with delight. In all her eight years, she had never been allowed far enough from the city to lose sight of the gate, and then never alone.

She hadn’t been sure she could sneak out when Roxanne left, since children were never allowed out alone, but Tremayne’s appearance had provided the distraction that had made her escape possible. And it was an even better game to follow Roxanne when she was with that tall male wizard with the smiling eyes and kind voice. He would tell her more about the sea beyond this valley’s mountains; she just knew he would.

And Roxanne wouldn’t be
too
awful mad, surely. After all, Kerry could take care of herself. She had a good sense of direction, she knew how to conjure something simple to eat if she got hungry, she was real good at conjuring fresh water for drinking and mirrors from sand, in case one became necessary, and she had Chloe in her backpack for company.

She slipped into the woods slightly north of Sanctuary’s walls and made sure the trees screened her from sight of anyone standing near the gate, then she turned west in the general direction the other two had taken and marched on happily, wondering where Roxanne was going.

The morning air was a bit chilly even after the sun came up, but to Serena it felt good. Still, after she’d followed the stream a few yards and found a level place on the mountainside with a wide, deep pool suitable for
bathing, she murmured a quick spell to warm the water to near body temperature to make the bath more enjoyable.