Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(53)

“He did,” she assured him. Or at least she thought he did. Then she did as Rune asked, and pushed all the consideration of that aside. “He gave me a new name and adopted me, just as you told him to. He gave me the best of everything he had, including the finest education, just like he promised you he would. I think he even grew to love me in his own way. At least he cherished me, if for no other reason than his god had.”

If they were really changing the past, none of that would have happened without Rune’s intervention. One way or another, it seemed she could not escape her early life being shaped by the Wyr. Something else would have occurred, something similar enough that the universe accepted the altered timeline as true. Perhaps what Rune had really given her was a kinder, gentler beginning, at least as much as he was able. Now that her panic had receded she found that she could be grateful for that.

“He gave you a new name? What did he name you?”

She whispered, “What do you think? None of us understood you at the time, none of us. We only knew that a god had touched our lives, found something of favor in me, and pronounced his decree. None of us really comprehended the things that you said.”

Rune frowned at her. He looked so puzzled, that despite all the uncertainty she faced, she had to smile. “You called me ‘darling,’ ” she said. “Remember? And we thought a god had called me something sacred.”

“Carling,” he breathed.

“What else?” she said.

Of all the shifts that might have occurred, this was not one Rune had seen coming, the possibility that the universe might flex and accommodate the intrusion of his presence into her past to such a profound and intimate extent. Before she had been the one to choose her own name, and while he had been saddened to hear of the demise of Khepri, he had understood it. Now he felt like he had stolen something precious from her, albeit unknowingly, and it sickened him. He sat frozen while Carling looked down at the table. She stroked her hands along the surface of the scroll as if to smooth out a tablecloth, smiling a strange smile that was glasslike in its fragility.

Carling had always had a poise that lay along her skin like a second spell of protection and made her look bulletproof, but now she looked more vulnerable than he had ever seen her. She looked tired, at a loss, even sad. The heavy mass of her hair lay against the graceful nape of her neck in an untidy knot. A few individual strands had escaped. They shone with ruby glints in the early-evening light.

His chest ached again. He rubbed his breastbone. When he spoke, his voice had filled with gravel. “No wonder you hate me sometimes.”

Her head tilted toward him but she didn’t look up. She kept smoothing the invisible tablecloth with those long slender fingers. “I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I wasn’t afraid of you before, but I am now. Change is hard, Rune.”

She didn’t know, he realized. Of course she didn’t. How could she? The sickened feeling increased to the point of actual nausea. He couldn’t look at her as he forced himself to speak. “You chose your own name. Before. I’m so profoundly sorry I disrupted that.”

He sensed rather than saw her quick, sharp look, the inhuman stillness of her rigid body. Then she moved and said softly, “We thought you called me something sacred, but I chose to take it as my name, Rune. I remember that distinctly. You didn’t take away the fact that I made that choice, or that I chose to keep it for all these years.”

At that he was able to breathe again. He touched the smooth skin on the back of her hand. He found every excuse to touch her. He couldn’t stop himself. Before she looked at him with outrage, bewilderment, and now she seemed to welcome it. Or so he told himself.

They sat in silence, absorbing what had happened. After a few moments, he shook his head and growled, “I still want to fight something.”

She nodded as if to herself. “Now there’s a logical reaction,” she murmured. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He wanted to fight something and win, so he could show her there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, that everything would be all right. But he was no longer certain of that himself. She was right, monsters were easy. “You know I can’t leave you now, don’t you? No matter how you might demand it of me. I just can’t.”

Her lovely eyes flashed up to his. She sighed. “I don’t want you to leave,” she admitted. “That was my fear talking earlier. Even though what is happening is strange and frightening, it’s got to be better than coming to a standstill and waiting to die. We might actually find something in all of this mess that will save my life.” She turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his. “Because I do want to live, if for no other reason than to solve this mystery and discover what else life can be. Maybe it will become so strange, it will be interesting.”

“Living is always interesting,” he said. “You just got bored.”

He loved watching her laugh. Every time she laughed, she looked surprised. She said, “I guess I did.”

He nodded, looking at the pearl-hued ovals of her fingernails. With a brutal honesty, Rune acknowledged where he was because he couldn’t afford to do anything else.

He had a thing for her. He had it bad and it gnawed in his gut, a craving he had not yet found a way to satisfy.

Wyr, when they mated, did so for life. There was a line beyond which an irrevocable change occurred. No one fully understood where that line was drawn because, he believed, it was different for everyone. Mating, for a Wyr, came from a complex combination of choice, sex, instinct, actions and emotion.