“As you wish, M’Lord. But have a care for yourself, as well. M’Lady is not happy with either of us at the moment.”
The Mage took up his new form as if to do so were an everyday occurrence. Roanen cringed slightly at the sound of popping flesh and grinding bones, gritting his teeth as Shammall shifted. The Mage grew shorter, more slender, almost effeminate, his skin so black it appeared as if he had been heavily singed in Ayailla’s fire, his hair the color of freshly mined coal. The Dark Elf male who stood in Shammall’s place waved his hands once, surrounding himself with an aura of sweet perfume. His robes turned to sheerest gauze, floating lightly around his body, so thin that the hair on his chest would have been visible through the filmy silk, had there been any. Roanen sniffed in distaste. “Ye go as a courtesan?”
“There is no better way to gain information, M’Lord, than in a Lady’s bed. Women love to talk, and few men know enough to listen.”
Roanen looked across the camp to the muddied ashes of his tent. “I shall keep that advice in mind, Mage. Though at the moment I have no’ a bed. But if I mean to win my wife back, I shall have to start someplace. What did ye tell her?”
“The truth, M’Lord. Or as close as I might care to come. That Ayailla was killed in battle. That I journeyed to the Plane of Souls, seeking the return of her spirit. That she followed me willingly.”
“Will she stay?”
“I did not give her a choice, M’Lord. I told her Marylin was dead.”
“Ye lied to her? Ye just said ye told her the truth!”
“I told her as much as I could, M’Lord. And that is not so far from the truth. She cannot live in two times at once. She must choose. ‘Tis better she chooses our time. If prophecy is to be believed, the future of our world hangs on her choice.”
Roanen paced beside the fire, a heavy scowl creasing his forehead. “I do not like this. I do not like deceiving her.”
“Then do not, M’Lord. There is but one spirit. One spirit, two bodies. She must choose. One must die. Help her make the right choice.”
“I can no’ ask this of her!”
“You have already asked more! And what of you? What of your choices? If we live by the prophecy, you will die! What choice is that?”
“I made my choice, long ago. An hour, a day, a year, it will be enough. She is my breath. My life. Without her I have no reason to live.”
Shammall snorted softly. “Love. I thank the gods I am spared such Human emotions. May the gods be with you, M’Lord.”
“And with ye, Shammall.”
The Mage laughed as he faded into the growing dusk. “Élandine. Shammall is no more. Tonight I am Élandine, The Beautiful One. Courtesan to the Queens.”
“Élandine,” Roanen whispered to the night. But there was none there to hear his voice.
Forgive me, Mother, for I have violated thy code. I have taken what was no’ mine to take. Help me, Mother. Help me to heal her heart. Grant me thy endurance and faithfulness, Brother Wolf. I shall have need of ye most this night.
Gathering his wits, and his courage, he crossed the small camp to his wife’s bedside.
* * * * *
“There is no’ so much in a name, my love.”
The deep, voice, smooth as aged whiskey, startled her from her tears. Marylin stared up at the giant standing over her. Stripped of his armor, wearing only a charcoal gray tunic and a kilt of soft gray and blue hues over dark charcoal leggings, he looked even more like the man from the ferry. He no longer looked as if she might shatter him with a word. Strange, but her humiliation seemed to have lent him strength. For some reason his strength angered her all the more. “No? But what if the name is all I have left of who I was?”
“We have had many names through the ages, Mel~amin. I do no’ love thee for thy name.”
“Don’t you understand? The Mage was wrong. I cannot deceive you, Roanen. I will not. I would like nothing better than to be the woman you loved, but I’m not Ayailla. I’m—I was—Marylin. And if what the Mage says is true, I died over four hundred years ago, without ever knowing the kind of love you had with your Ayailla. I wish—I wanted to be Ayailla for you. But I’m not. I’m not!”
Tears streaked down her face, mixing with the rain and the ash and the pain. To have come so far, only to have lost again. She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them tightly, rocking as she cried for the love she had never known.
Roanen scooped her up, holding her tightly against the soft wool of his tunic. She wanted to scold him, to tell him she was much too large to treat as if she were but a young child. She wanted to snuggle there against Roanen’s massive chest, until she could will herself to be the woman he wanted her to be. She wanted the rain to stop and the tent to be as it had been before, whole and sound, so that she could be alone with this man, away from the prying eyes that must think her a fool, away from the sights and sounds of a world too fantastical to be believed.
The tent, at least, cooperated. The ashes reformed until it stood whole and undamaged, the rain but a memory that made furtive noises against the sturdy hides. For some reason that power, that magic that must be Ayailla’s, not hers, caused her even more misery. She cried for herself as well as Ayailla, and for all they both had lost.
Roanen sat on the edge of the raised platform that was the bed, holding her while she cried, his voice the low rumble of a waterfall, soothing as his hands stroked over her skin. “A dozen times, in a dozen lives I have found ye, and always ye have known me, always I have loved ye. I have wronged ye, calling ye back from the realm of forgetfulness. I should have waited, trusted, known that we would find each other again, in another place, another time. But I was no’ ready to let ye go. I thought only of myself. Forgive me my weakness.”
A dozen times? A dozen lives? “I don’t understand,” Marylin admitted. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Ye are Ayailla, my love. Ye are my wife.”
“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? I’m Marylin! Marylin, from the twenty-first century. I’m not your Ayailla! I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I can’t be the woman you think I am!”
“Ye are Marylin, and I would never take that away from ye. I shall call ye Marylin, if it pleases ye. But ye are Ayailla, too. As ye were Nylanéfer and Gwenevier and Catherine. The gods have blessed us with a love that is stronger than time and death. Always I have loved ye. Across more than four thousand years and dozens of lifetimes I have chased ye, and always ye have searched for me as well. I do no’ remember all, but I know I was made to love ye and only ye. A restless spirit inhabits us, and we are no’ happy until we find one another again. I remember Marylin, and the time ye speak of. I searched for ye everywhere. Once I thought I had found ye, but ye slipped away like a shadow in the midst of a storm. Chance. Fate. Perhaps the gods were against us that time. I came close, so close that time, but I was too late.”
The man on the ferry. He had looked at her, stared at her, called her with his eyes. She’d wanted to go to him, felt so drawn to him. Then the storm had hit, the crowd had shifted, the boat had docked, and she’d been alone.
She’d made love to him in her dreams, and he’d made her a promise.
Marylin raised a shaking hand to touch his face now, torn between her reality and the one he built for her with his words. Star-crossed lovers, doomed to wander the Earth in search of each other? Doomed to find one another only to lose once again to old age and death? How could God, her God, his gods, how could any god be so cruel?
How could she believe this, any of this, was real? If she embraced this dream, how would she live when she opened her eyes to find nothing but a timeworn inn and the aftermath of a surf-pounding storm? She’d searched for love all her life, thought once she’d found it with Gray, before she realized she could never hold him, never make him into what she wanted him to be. But this, what she sensed lay just beyond the wall she could not allow to crumble, this was a force stronger than any she’
d ever known.
“I’m afraid,” she whispered. “If I let myself love you and you’re not real, I’ll be so much more alone when I wake up again.” It had happened before.
“I am real, my love,” he assured her as he pressed his lips to her hand. “I am as real as ye want me to be. If this is but a dream, then we are both dreaming, and I have found ye here. For us, even the dreaming is real.”
“But if we both dream, then when you wake up, you will be alone, too, because Ayailla will be gone.”
“No, my love. If Ayailla is gone from me, if I have lost her again, then I will come to the dreaming to search for ye here. Will it be so bad, to know ye have but to sleep to find me again? Will ye no’ wait for me here?”
Wherever, whenever you are I will find you. Forever and always, my love. I will find you again!
Marylin knew she was losing, losing her hold on herself and her sanity. His lips were so close to hers. So close. She felt her body responding to the nearness of him, to the heat that was his life’s force pounding beneath her fingertips where they pressed against his chest, to the pureness of the love that she saw in his eyes, to all that he was and all that he could give her if she would just believe. “I’ve found you before in my dreams. Whether you’re real or not, you’re real to me. Make love to me, Roanen. Give me sweet memories I can cling to in the daylight, so that I will search for you always in my sleep.”
She felt his pulse jump under her touch, felt his body tense, his arms pulling her closer. Yet he hesitated. “Are ye—can we—Ayailla—she carried our child. The baby was but six weeks along. After the summoning, there was blood. So much blood. Ye may no remember, but perhaps the body needs time to heal?”
Marylin caught his hand, holding it against her breastbone. “I’m sorry, Roanen. I don’t remember. I feel fine. There’s no reason you should not make love to me. But I—Marylin—I cannot have babies. I’m too old. And I had an illness as a young woman that scarred my fallopian tubes. The doctors have tried to repair the damage, but I cannot conceive.”
“That was another time, another place,” he reminded her. “Here ye are no’ too old. Ye have lived but a third of thy life. ‘Tis foretold in the prophecy. Ye will have babies here, at least one more. She stands Guardian to the races, holding back the dark tide. Her name is to be Evalayna.”
Prophecy. In a land of Magic and mysticism, where a woman might live a century and a half, there would be prophecy. Marylin leaned back against him, wanting to believe. “Teach me, Roanen. Teach me to love again. Teach me to believe.”
Long dark hair touched lightly with silver cascaded over her as he bent his head, his lips caressing her temples, her eyebrows, her eyelids before they found their way to her mouth. Sweet, soft, the tease of a butterfly’s wing, the touch, then again. He was bolder now, sucking her lower lip between his as she parted to him, her breath a sigh of acquiescence. Real or dream, it no longer mattered. He knew her and still he loved her.
She would have turned in his arms to face him fully, but he swept her hair aside—Ayailla wore it long—to settle his lips against her neck at the base of her robe. Shivers coursed over her skin like small trails of electricity. She turned her head away, arching her neck, granting him access to as much of her skin as he wanted.
“So beautiful. So perfect.”
She’d never felt perfect before. Not in this lifetime. Or was it the last one? Each touch of his lips, each stroke of his hands, so sure, so knowing as they skimmed over her body to rest in just the right spots, made her feel beautiful, and more alive than she ever had before.
How did he know to touch her just there, where the curve of her hip met the small of her back? How did he know his kisses along the edge of her neck would coax her head back against his shoulder, baring her breasts for his touch as her robe fell open?
Her body knew him, knew his touch and responded. Her mind knew him, knew him as more than a dream remembered. He was no stranger, this dream lover. Yet each kiss was new, as if he explored her for the first time.
“Lord Lindall?”
Marylin cursed the voice from beyond the tent that intruded like a knock at her heart. Her body cried out with the loss as Roanen ceased his attack on her senses. “Wait here for me, my love,” he murmured as he rose, sliding her deftly to the furs that covered the dais. “ Much as it pains me to leave you, I must see to the men, else we will have no privacy. I will be but a moment.”
The cold where his body no longer protected her raised goose bumps along her arms and thighs. Marylin stood long enough to survey the bed, making a few careful mental adjustments to the place where she intended to gift this intimate stranger with her virgin soul. She thought of a mattress, something luxuriant as well as comfortable, but immediately dismissed the idea. She should not ask for things that were not of this world. The magic might become confused. A down comforter? Was that too much to ask? It appeared as easily as the mud and ruin of but a few minutes ago had vanished. The hides moved to cover the floor like a carpet, while a deep feather bed softened the hard lines of the dais.
She scattered a dozen silk pillows across the dais for both atmosphere and comfort. She could hear Roanen’s voice, a deep rumble, almost a growl, from beyond the tent, instructing the guards that he was not to be disturbed. From off in the distance the mournful call of a lone wolf split the night air. Another voice answered, closer, and soon a chorus took up the calls, as if they were passing messages back and forth. Rather than fear, something in her strained to understand, as if she should have known their language. Something in her longed to join the pack, to answer the call.
Shaking herself out of the strange reverie, she dismissed the wolves as she concentrated on the room. The setting must be perfect. She imagined the soft perfume of wildflowers as a crisp breeze blew all traces of smoke from the room. She searched the tent with her eyes, but found no washstand or mirror with which she might study her reflection. She was plain enough as it was. ‘Twould not do to have the residue of burnt tent streaked across her face.
The thought gave her pause. What face would stare back at her from the mirror? Hers? Or Ayailla’s? Surely a body could not transcend time and space. The corporal entity must be left behind for the spirit to travel.
Would she know the difference? Except for the dress, dark cobalt robes dusted with snow, the body Shammall had shown her could as easily have been her own. What if—what if what Shammall had said was true? Could she really be dead? She didn’t feel dead. Not now. She’d never felt more alive. Perhaps the Elf-Mage had given her a new chance to salvage a wasted life.
No. She would not—could not—think of this time and place as reality. This was but a fantasy she was indulging. Still, she needed a mirror. If she was to bed the love of her fantasy life, she would at least indulge in some warm water and a moment in front of a mirror…
Why could she not think a mirror into existence? Were there limits to what she could wish for and hope to have appear? Well, then, how about some light? A dozen short, fat, flickering candles that would add light as well as fragrance to the room?
No sooner thought than they appeared. She thought of the mirror once more. Nothing. Damn. A stand with a washbasin and a pitcher and a mirror on the back? She got the washstand, exactly as she had pictured it, minus the mirror. All right. No glass. Anything shiny enough to offer her a reflection, then. She rethought the washstand. A highly polished silver oval appeared between its ox-bow frames.
Hesitant, now, she dipped the cloth in the water—warm this time—slowly raising her gaze. Her own face looked back at her, streaked and smudged and slightly fuzzy, yet still her own. She ran the cloth over the streaks, frantically trying to restore order to her image and her emotions. Her hair was a tangle, a rat’s nest of unimaginable proportions. A brush. She needed a brush. A—
The brush appeared, Roanen’s huge hand wrapped firmly around the handle. He stood behind her, his chin level with the top of her head. One arm slipped around her waist while the h
and armed with the brush went to work, gently stroking through the tangled length of her curls.
Next to Roanen she felt once again, as she had in her dreams, small, and protected. She shivered as she let herself relax against him, giving herself up to the heat and strength of his body. The fear and uncertainty faded under his touch. Real or not, she would have this memory of a man who had loved her.
“Ye are so beautiful to me,” the man in the silver mirror whispered. He bent his head to nuzzle the skin where he’d brushed her hair back away from her neck. “So delicate, like a fragile flower.”
Delicate? Fragile? Marylin closed her eyes, willing the tears away. Dear God how she’d wanted to hear those words. Wanted to be something other than what she was—too tall, too old, too unloved. An over-the-hill ex-wife. A stuffy old college professor with nothing but her job and her dreams left to cling to.
Now a stranger stood behind her, merely brushing her hair, and she found herself transformed. For him, for this man, this here and now, she was small and delicate and fragile. For this man she would be anything, everything.
The feel of the brush caressing each strand of hair was almost too erotic to bear. She fairly hummed with tension as he continued his slow, measured strokes. “I remember the first time I saw ye. I thought ye a goddess, dropped to Earth, walking along the Nile. Ye wore a wrap of white linen, so fine-spun that in the sunlight your nipples seemed to beckon to me. I was but a youth, assigned to the temple as a guard. I swore ye were more beautiful than Nefertiti. Ye scolded me for my blasphemy, but ye did not send me away.”
Yes. She remembered. She had had this dream. “There were cats…”
“Indeed there were cats. Hundreds of them. The sacred cats had free reign in the temple of our goddess.”
“Bast.” She’d always loved the statues of Bast, the goddess with the body of a woman and the head of a cat. Bast was the protectress of the Royal House and of the Two Lands—upper and lower Egypt.
Threshold Volume 2 Page 4
