She drew an audible breath. "You asked me to trust you, to accept this little trip of ours without posing too many questions, and I agreed to that. But I didn't agree to stop thinking, Richard."

Merlin heard something in her voice he'd never heard before, not hostility but something very close, and he found it both disturbing and painful. For all her occasional arguments and minor defiances through the years, Serena had never been in any way antagonistic toward him. Was it only because of Roxanne's bitter words, or did the very atmosphere of Atlantis kindle suspicion in everyone exposed to it?

He turned his head slowly and looked at her. She was clearly as tense as she sounded, as tense as he felt himself, and he knew he had to tread carefully. "I never asked you to stop thinking," he said quietly.

"Then don't ask me not to think about all this."

"Think what you like, Serena. But be careful in drawing conclusions. Remember your own analogy? This place is like a jigsaw puzzle; we won't know what the picture is until we have all the pieces assembled."

After a long moment she looked away from his steady gaze. Her features were still a bit strained, but her eyes were not so much wary now as uneasy. "The sun's going down. We… aren't going to transport up into the mountains to get away from the Curtain, are we?"

"To understand this place, we should experience as much as possible. Even the Curtain. And until we see one of the wizards here transport, it's one ability we won't be using. They may not believe they can fly any more than the powerless people of this time believe they can."

"Then I have a suggestion," she said. "Before the sun goes down, maybe you should conjure up a couple of guns."

Merlin shook his head reluctantly. "Cheating with coffee or blankets is one thing; we can't bring devices from our time into this world, even to protect ourselves. The risk of changing the future is too great."

She didn't argue with him; she didn't even seem surprised by what he said. She simply looked at him and said, "In that case I think I'll go and find myself a couple of really big, heavy sticks."

"That might be a very good idea," he conceded.

She felt hideously uncomfortable, Serena decided. The sense of being in an alien place seemed multiplied at night, with the unfamiliar night sounds and the queer faint shudders of the earth beneath her body. She noticed the latter only when she lay down to sleep, those almost imperceptible pulses in the ground that were even more frightening than the earlier earthquake because they were continuous reminders of instability. And the Curtain.

When she had sat near the fire with Merlin just after dark, both of them gazing up at the luminescent mist thickening in the air above the air above the valley and nearly hiding the full moon just on the wane, Serena had managed to feel a bit detached, marveling as the visible spillover of wizards' energies took on a life of its own. But with every passing hour, as the sky darkened to a peculiar blood red and seemed to pulse with energy, she felt more uncomfortable, lethargic and weak, until finally she bade Merlin a quiet good night and went to join the sleeping Roxanne in the larger of the two lean-to's.

She would have preferred to remain with him, to talk about what they had so far learned about Atlantis, but Merlin had made it clear he had no intention of speculating until they had more information. At least that was what he said. Serena knew it wasn't that simple. She didn't have to read his mind to know that he was deeply disturbed by what information they had already, and he had withdrawn from her again, retreating behind his remote mask to keep distance between them.

The truth, Serena thought, was that he didn't want to discuss some of what they'd learned because it cut too dose to them and to the tension between them.

Neither of them had actually mentioned what Roxanne had said regarding male and female wizards- that they apparently never engaged in sex together-but Serena couldn't stop thinking about it… no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power. Even when there was no force? When it was not merely sex, but lovemaking? Were there no wizards capable of trusting each other enough to mate?

That question troubled Serena more than all the others, causing her to consider her relationship with Merlin in an entirely different light. She knew no wizards other than him in their time; if she had known others, would she have seen the same male/female segregation in their society? Was it considered normal even in their time? And was her relationship with Merlin so tense and tentative now for that very reason-because an unthreatening girl child had become a woman he could never trust?

Was the "boundary" he had told her they mustn't cross an uncompromising and ancient line born out of hate and suspicion, created to divide not Master and Apprentice, but male and female wizards?

The questions and thoughts followed Serena into a shallow, restless sleep, the last sight to meet her eyes that of Merlin sitting by the fire, his face turned upward as he studied the shifting, glistening Curtain. When she woke abruptly, the fire had burned out, Merlin was not visible-probably sleeping in his own lean-to-and Roxanne lay stiffly beside her.

Serena's instincts told her more than her clouded senses, and she put a gentle hand on the younger woman's rigid arm. "It's all right," she murmured. "Cry if you need to. Grieve. Get mad about it. Then you can really begin to heal."

Roxanne did cry, almost silently but with such intensity that her slender body shuddered beneath the force of her pain and grief and rage. Serena didn't attempt to soothe or stop her; she merely provided a willing shoulder and compassionate silence.

Exhausted at last, Roxanne slept, but Serena lay awake for a long time. She realized she was listening tensely to the unfamiliar night sounds of Atlantis, that being reminded of what had happened to Roxanne had made her nervous and more than a little frightened- enough so that sleep was not going to come easily. Packs composed of some of the village men hunted most nights, Roxanne had told her, hopeful of finding a careless female wizard who had strayed too far from Sanctuary and had gotten caught by the night and the Curtain.

It was all because the male wizards had, long ago, created the fiction that by possessing a female wizard sexually, a powerless man could acquire some of her power.

"Never mind that it isn't true," Roxanne had said bitterly. "The males made it seem true by gifting an occasional rapist with a little bit of power-not enough to hurt the males, of course. They still do it sometimes, still reward the rape of a female wizard. So we're all vulnerable at night."

"But the rapists have to live in the daytime, too," Serena had protested. "If a woman is raped, can't she go after them later, when she can use her powers?"

"If she survives." Roxanne's voice was bleak. "Most don't. So even though any of the wizards in Sanctuary would destroy the rapists without hesitation, there's usually no way of knowing the guilty men. And we can't destroy them all…"

Serena gazed across their darkened camp, thinking, acutely aware that her body was far weaker than she was accustomed to, that the Curtain had drained her strength even though she hadn't attempted to use her powers. Despite the large branch that she had earlier found and put nearby for defense, the truth was that she was hideously vulnerable to anyone or anything that might attack her.

All her life Serena had been carelessly certain of her strength, her power; it had formed the core of her self-confidence and presence. She had felt vulnerable emotionally, but never physically, and her sense of helplessness now was as alien as this place.