The world started to rattle again. She nodded.
His hands tightened on her wrists as he whispered, “It does to me too. Carling, I need to have a look at your back.”
She stared at him. “Why?”
The handsome, clean lines of his face were rigid with an emotion that rioted through the heavy afternoon air. “I need to look at your scars. It’s important.”
With a bewildered shrug, she leaned forward and bent her head. She held the caftan in place over her breasts and allowed him to ease the loose cotton material away from her neck. With a featherlight touch he pulled her hair to one side. He handled her as gently as if she were spun glass, and his big body was so near as he knelt in front of her, that she let herself lean a few inches farther to rest her cheek on his wide shoulder. He caressed the nape of her neck as he slid the caftan down her back.
She felt the breath leave him hard. His fingers were unsteady against her bare skin. She lifted her head to stare at the clean, spare lines of his profile. She was so close she could see the fine lines deepen at the corners of his eyes, and sense the shift in his throat muscles as he swallowed hard.
“What is it?” she asked.
She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. She could just see the ends of the long, white sinuous scars that crossed her spine like two snakes winding around a staff. She had lived with those scars for thousands of years. She knew them like she knew the back of her hand. She would never forget the night they happened, or how Rune had broken into the room to stop a third one from falling on her . . .
She stiffened. No. That hadn’t happened thousands of years ago. That had happened just minutes ago, this afternoon. What had happened before Rune took action? What had really occurred to her, four and a half thousand years ago?
“Something else happened before you showed up,” she whispered. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what originally happened to me.”
Before Rune had burst into the room, the priest had stood over her in a rage. He had shaken out the whip. He would have struck her again, except that Rune had killed him with one savage blow.
Rune looked at her, his eyes darkened. He said in a low voice, “All I know is that a couple of weeks ago you went swimming in the Adriyel River and when you walked out, you didn’t have just two whip marks on your back. Your whole body was striped with scars.”
She remembered it well. She walked nude out of the water while Niniane and Rune waited on the riverbank. Rune had stared at her with such a fire in his eyes they had glittered like yellow diamonds. His handsome face had become a carved mask, and every muscle in his body had stood in etched relief against the long masculine frame of his bones, as if he had been created by a classical sculptor.
She said, “You’re changing me?”
“I think what we are doing together must somehow be changing something,” he said. “Because I swear to all the gods, Carling, your back was not like this before.”
She stared at him in horror.
She had compared him to a sirocco. She’d had no idea how accurate that was. A sirocco was a hurricane that came out of the Sahara. In Egypt the hot desert wind was called Khamsin. It could reach speeds of up to eighty-five miles an hour. She remembered the howl of the wind at night. It was an immense, unearthly, inhuman sound. It stripped flesh off of bones, literally reshaped the land.
First she thought she would lose her life. Then she became afraid she would lose everything else. Her Power, her sanity. Her dignity.
She had not known there could be anything more to lose, that bits of her past might slough away like flesh peeling from the bones. The change was vaster and more Powerful than anything she had ever experienced, and she had never felt the difference.
She had not known she might be in danger of losing her self.
NINE
“Get away from me.” She shoved him back and leaped out of her chair.
He sprang upright and stepped forward, hand outstretched. He said, “Not while you’re in a panic.”
She spun behind the chair, picked it up and flung it at him. She shouted, “Get the fuck out!”
With a swipe of his arm, he knocked it to one side. Determination stamped his features. “Think a minute, Carling. You’ve just had an episode. Another won’t occur for at least another several hours, perhaps even a day or more. We have time to discuss this and figure out what it means—”
She stared at him in incredulity. She could not remember the last time someone disobeyed a direct order of hers.
“Fine, goddamn you,” she hissed, “I’ll get out.”