Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(36)

He nodded, playing with her fingers as he listened. He was pleased to note that as her intellect took over, the pain in her eyes eased. It had not gone away, but it was better.

She said, “I can’t do what Dragos does and access both types of magic, of course, because I am not Wyr. I can only practice spell magic, and I cannot even come close to creating the kind of reality you described. The best illusions I could create would be suggestions, sleights of hand, things you would see out of the corner of your eye that might attract you or make you want to turn away. Or I could build on something that already existed.”

He stirred. “What do you mean?”

“Take my cottage. I could make it seem derelict and abandoned. The illusion would dissipate the moment you decided to walk up to it and explore. Or I could send a dream to you, but it really would be a dream, and any number of things might interrupt or change it. For example, you could disbelieve what was happening. People break out of dreams all the time. Or your alarm might go off and wake you up.”

He frowned. “The way you describe it, anything you could do would take a great deal of work to set up.”

“It does take a lot of work, yes.” She pulled one of her hands out from underneath his to gesture. “It couldn’t just happen when you’re talking about spell magic. That would be like saying the Power flare could enter a computer code on a security door, and then walk into a bank vault, pick the right safe-deposit box, choose the right key off a key ring and insert it into the box’s lock, pick the right file out of a pile in the box, put it all back in place and go to a notary public to get the papers in the file notarized. There are too many sophisticated steps that would need to be taken, including some high-level interaction with the person you wished to practice the illusion on.”

He took her glass of wine and drank the contents. She reached for the nearby open bottle, refilled the glass and offered it to him. He said, “So what you are saying is that what happened had to be a different kind of magic.”

Her brow cleared. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe it was still some kind of an illusion or shared hallucination, but it wasn’t any kind of spell magic my mind could have accidentally produced because I—how did you so poetically put it?—cracked out.”

He gave a ghost of a chuckle. “All right, now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. He drank half the wine and nudged the glass over to her.

She picked up the glass and drank, then regarded him over the rim curiously. “How did it feel?”

He shrugged. “It didn’t feel like an illusion. It felt as real as you and me sitting here. When I walked onto the sand, it felt like a kind of crossover passage only . . .”

She leaned forward as his voice trailed away. “Only what?”

His frowning gaze met hers. “Only it was bent somehow.”

She waited but he didn’t offer more. She said, “I don’t understand.”

He shook his head, a sharp, impatient gesture. “I don’t either. But if it was a crossover, why could I walk it and not Rhoswen? She can make other crossovers. And if it was a crossover, how could it just appear and disappear? All the other passages I’ve seen are a fixed part of the landscape.”

Carling’s forehead wrinkled again the way it did when she was perplexed. “You both can make other crossovers. So it stands to reason, if you could make this one and she couldn’t, it had to do with the differences between you.”

“You mean I could make the crossover because of my Wyr attributes.”

“Yes, although I don’t know exactly what those are, other than you turn into a truly stunning gryphon.”

He refused to let the compliment sidetrack him, even as the eagle part of his nature preened. He held out his hand for the wineglass, and she gave it to him. He drank from the place where her lips had rested. He thought she was too preoccupied to notice.

“Let’s just say I have an affinity for crossover passages and between places,” he said.

“Do you?” she breathed. “I wonder what would have happened if you had been holding Rhoswen’s hand.”

Even though Rhoswen could traverse normal crossovers, her inability to follow Rune earlier was akin to how dead-heads, or people with no Power, were unable to cross over to Other lands on their own. They needed to be brought over by someone with enough Power to make the crossing, and the only way to do that was through physical touch. When someone with no Power walked the path of a crossover, they simply followed the ravine or break in the landscape where the crossover was located, just as Rhoswen had walked into Carling’s bedroom instead of stepping into the desert scene with Rune.

He considered Carling’s question then shook his head. “It might be a good thing we weren’t. We probably wouldn’t have been touching when the scene disappeared—or I disappeared from the scene—and then what would have happened to her? Would she have come out of it too, or would she have been trapped there, like dead-heads are trapped in Other lands if they don’t have someone to bring them back?”

They exchanged a sober look.

“So, what do we know?” Carling said. “If what happened was an illusion, it could not have come from my spell magic.”

“Somehow it still has to be an integral part of you,” Rune said. “The scene was a very intimate and important part of your past.”