He gave her a thoughtful look but refrained from pursuing that train of thought. “So if you believed what happened was real, that could potentially have the power to physically change you, correct?” he asked. She nodded. He said, “Maybe it would have the power to change me too. I cannot shake the conviction that this has all felt very real when I’ve gone through it. It’s important to remember this does happen to both of us. It’s just that, for me, the events are occurring in a more linear fashion.”
“You haven’t experienced anything physically traumatic in one of the episodes either, like I have,” she murmured.
“Then there’s the second possibility,” he said. “And there’s no point in dancing around it. We might have changed the actual past, and the key to finding that out is to see if we’ve influenced something outside of ourselves.”
She searched his face. “You think you might have actually gone back in time?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The crossover passages and Other lands have already shown us that time slips. Theoretically, time is also supposed to slow down the faster one travels. Time isn’t a completely uniform phenomenon, and we know the universe must self-correct so that paradoxes cannot happen. Maybe we’re experiencing a slippage so far out of sync, I’m experiencing it as a trip back to the past.”
Paradoxes cannot happen. The universe self-corrects. It flexes, like a breathing entity, absorbing and adjusting to anomalies. It had an automatic built-in defense mechanism. It was generally believed that no one could topple history, not even the gods. If the universe could not accommodate an event, it could not happen. Rivers of events would shift only so much to accommodate change.
“You seem remarkably calm about it all,” she said. She wasn’t calm. Maybe she hadn’t been calm since he had showed up on her doorstep. You should be careful who you invite into your home . . .
He gave her a small smile. “I’m just being clinical right now.”
“You’re good at it.” He really was an excellent investigator. She sat back in her seat and looked up at the ceiling. “And at the moment, I’m not.”
He said gently, “I know it’s scary. Thank the gods all I’ve done so far is stop to talk to a child one afternoon, and prevent someone from beating you much worse than he already had. If I had done more, the repercussions could be much worse.”
He didn’t realize the profound effect he had on her.
She closed her eyes. She thought of all the many times she had looked up at the sky, hoping against hope to see the impossible happen again, and see the strange winged lion-god fly back into her life. All of the nights she had looked at the stars, wishing upon wish to see him one more time. Whether those times had happened in history or they had happened all in her mind, they had in fact happened.
And they hadn’t before he had come to the island and met her child-self. If she and Rune were actually changing the past, something else had occurred, something other than what she now remembered, something similar enough that the flow of time had flexed to accommodate the difference.
Had she once looked at the stars in some original past, and wished for something else so passionately? It was almost impossible to imagine wishing for anything as much as she had wished to see him, one more time.
She murmured, “The knife.”
There was a pause. He said, “Yes, the knife. I told Akil to bury it in a distinctive place, somewhere that I knew would survive the test of time.”
“So aside from consulting with Dr. Telemar, we need to find out if the knife is where Akil was supposed to put it.”
“Yes,” Rune said. Something was in his voice. She couldn’t identify it. She brought her head up to look at him. He was studying her, his brows contracted. He said, “Suspend dis-belief for a moment. Forget about asking why or how. What happened after I left? I made Akil swear to look after you.”
“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?”