"The Summoning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgen Shelby)

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“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.”

“Yeare 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’mnot 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 Nylanйfer 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.”