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Between one sip of wine and the next, she wondered where his beard and
mustaches had gone, but it was only a passing thought, and did not rouse her
from the pleasant languor that suffused her. He looks like Lovi, she thought.
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Somehow, that seemed exactly as it should be.
A brief thought furrowed her brow: Gregorius. But the imaginary flutter of his
clerical garment did not linger. She was here, and so was Lovi. There was no
one else. He rose and pushed back the table, as if it weighed nothing at all.
He let his white cotton tunic fall to the floor. Sunlight reflecting from the
gleaming marble turned the fine hairs on his chest to gold. She raised her
head, and ran slender fingers through them. Her breath came quickly, in little
pants, and her head felt light and empty.
Where had her tunic gone? Lovi drew her to her feet, and caught her small
breasts in his hands, his expression amazed, as if he had not expected them to
be there at all. . . .
What else might he not expect? she wondered briefly when he knelt and loosened
the cord around her waist. She could not see his expression, but his fingers
seemed unsurprised. Wave after wave of warmth
coursed through her, spiced with prickly sparks as if she were made of wool,
and he were stroking her.
His body rippled with smooth muscles as he guided her back against the bench,
and swept her feet from the floor with one arm, raising her knees, pinning her
shoulder with the other arm . . .
At some great distance, as if outside the window, she heard the harsh,
cackling laugh of a magpie, and for a moment her eyes widened, and she saw . .
. Moridunnon. The mage hunched over her with twigs and brambles in his beard,
his eyes alight with an oily red glow, rimmed with shadows of shadows and
swirling darkness that crawled across his wrinkled face . . .
She screeched, and flung herself sideways in a flutter of green, azure, black,
and white feathers. Madly flapping her magpie wings, she careened toward the
refuge of the window's welcoming light. Wings beating, she struggled upward
through air thick as honey, fleeing the brown, long-winged form that rose
below her like a shadow freed from the ground and flying into the air.
The magpie wheeled and the merlin followed, its talons spread for the kill.
Magpie writhed and twisted in midair, and felt the brush of merlin-claws
against its wings. Magpie, tiring, recited in its small mind strange words
that magpie throat could not utter: "
Mondradd in Mon, bora
. . ." and it fluttered to the moss atop the great mound, among the roots of
the sentinel beech trees.
Far off, above the obscuring branches and leaves, she heard a hawk's shrill
cry. She was cold. Her garments lay scattered on top of the yellow, fallen
leaves. Quickly she gathered them and dressed, glancing anxiously upward. "I'm
not up there," said an old, cracked voice. She gasped, and stiffened, but the
old man in his patchwork of skins, his lopsided antlers, made no move toward
her. "Fear not," he said, quite sadly. "The moment is past. The magic is gone,
and I am old and impotent. Your maidenhood is safe from me."
She felt almost sorry for him. She felt almost sorry for herself. Lovi:
illusion or not, the scene had been lovely, the lust heady and compelling,
their mutual desire entirely real. But now he was old and drained, and she was
again neutered by her guise, a boy almost too young to have felt such pangs.
"Was it magic?" she asked. "I mean, was it all illusion? The feast, the
fountains, the Punic road?"
"It seemed real to me," said Moridunnon. "It always does."
As ever, the distinction between reality and illusion was vanishingly small.
Something perceived was something real, unless substantial and tangible
evidence precluded it. Thus there was no way to establish that the Phoenician
road to Ys, with its milestone columns and brazen orbs, had not once existed.
There was equally, short of finding a broken bronze sphere, green with age, or
a chunk of a marble pylon still inscribed with Punic words, no way to confirm
its erstwhile reality.
Pierrette glanced at her fingernails, looking for some trace of a fine golden
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hair plucked from her lover's chest in a moment of abandon, but she saw only
ordinary dirt under them.
"You aren't going to find what you want," he said softly. "The Fortunate
Isles, I mean."
"Maybe not, but I'm still going to try. I have to."
"That's not what I meant. You won't find anything different there than you
might have had here, with me."
"You aren't Minho. This mound is not a magical kingdom. If I find the
Fortunate Isles in the real world, by sailing there, not by using a spell . .
."
"I'm telling you, things won't be as they seem, even if they're 'real.' You
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