The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“I guess you think I’m pretty goddamned noble right now, don’t you?” said Sam. “So let me clarify. I don’t think people as evil as he is should get off with just a broken leg and a quick, painless drowning. I think his fine Aryan name should be dragged through the mud—and that he should go to jail for the rest of a long life.”

I guess when you finally uncorked Sam’s bitterness, you found there was a pretty decent jugful there, after all. Sam’s hands still rested on my shoulders. He was watching me with a strange expression as we stood there at the center of the teepee, facing each other beside the fire.

I closed my eyes. I remembered another fire in another man’s castle, and the unquenchable fire that had been created inside me by the touch and smell of that man, the man we’d just discussed and so irrevocably dismissed. A man so filled with hatred that he would try to blow his own brother to bits—the same brother who wound up saving his life, in spite of knowing all that. For all his protestations that he loved me, I wondered if Wolfgang ever really had. I wondered if I’d loved him.

When I opened my eyes, Sam’s silvery eyes were searching me deeply, as if seeking some hidden answer to an unspoken question. I remembered his words up on the mountain that morning: “Ariel, have you any idea just how dangerous this untimely friendship of yours might prove to us both?” Had he known even then? Well, I’d bloody well found out for myself by now, hadn’t I?

“I really did try to warn you,” said Sam. “I didn’t consciously suspect anything until I got to Salt Lake. But when I began to put two and two together from family documents and understand the situation—when I realized the person you’d let me know you were involved with, Wolfgang Hauser, might well be the same man who murdered Theron Vane—I wasn’t really sure what to do. I knew how dangerous it might prove for me: I knew it was me he was after. But I couldn’t believe he’d harm you. I sent you that note to be careful around him. At the same time, you aren’t a little girl anymore, sweetheart. I truly wanted you to do what was best for you.”

“That was awfully bloody magnanimous of you,” I snapped, with more than a little anger and frustration. “You thought it was ‘best for me’ to let me go on making love with someone, to fall in love with someone, who might have destroyed us both?”

Sam flinched as if I’d struck him a physical blow, and I realized how he must have tried to close his eyes to what had actually happened between Wolfgang and me. Finally he took a deep breath and spoke very quietly.

“If you wanted to glut yourself with liquor or some dangerous drug, I’d let you do that too, Ariel. You’re surely responsible for your own decisions and actions. But that isn’t love, and you know it: love isn’t something you want to do with someone.”

“I’m not at all sure I know what love is,” I told him, meaning it. I recalled Dark Bear’s comment that Sam’s father Earnest had believed himself incapable of the feeling. So maybe for the Nez Percé, I’d be a dead person, too.

“I think I know. Shall I tell you?” Sam asked, still watching me.

I felt so empty—but I nodded for him to go on.

“I think love is when you know that a part of you is the person you love, and a part of him or her is inside of you,” Sam said. “You can’t use or manipulate or deceive someone you truly love, because you’d be using or manipulating or lying to yourself. Does that make sense?”

“Are you saying that if Wolfgang lied to me,” I said with no small irony, “he was really only lying to himself?”

“No—it wasn’t necessary for him to deceive himself, was it?” Sam snapped back. “Aren’t you forgetting a little something? You slept with him and lied to him, too.”

I was truly dumbstruck, but I knew it was true. I’d had the most intimate relation one can have, with a man I’d never trusted. A man I’d never opened up with enough, of my own volition, to tell him the complete truth about anything. It was a bitter pill to swallow, that deep inside I’d known what Wolfgang was, all along.

“I’ve long ago given you part of my heart, and part of my soul, Ariel. I’m sure you know that.” Sam smiled mischievously and added, “But there are a few strings attached before I can let you have part of my body.”

“Your … body?” I said, my head throbbing. “But I thought you were … attracted to Bambi.”

“I know you did,” said Sam with a grin. “When I saw that look on your face as I lifted Bettina down beside the waterfall—well, it was the first time I thought there might be real hope for you and me, Wolfgang or no Wolfgang.” He ruffled my hair and said simply, “I love you, hotshot. I guess I always have.”

I admit, I was thunderstruck. I stood there in a daze, not knowing what to do. Was I ready for this?

Oddly enough, Sam had started moving sleeping bags and saddlebags, clearing a space at the center of the teepee, around the little stone fireplace.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“There’s just one string, really,” Sam explained, piling blankets to one side. He stood up and shook back his long hair with impatience.

“How can you expect me to go on loving someone, Ariel,” he asked me, “who doesn’t know how to dance?”

As Dacian had told me, the process was more important than the product.

During this past month that Sam and I had lived our fraternal existence, until we danced, I would never have had the vaguest understanding of the manuscripts we were translating—that all the talk