When we are part of a family, looking out for each other's interests is instinct. When in the course of growing to be an adult does it happen that the family's interests begin to conflict with the ones that bring you what you desire for yourself?

Is it a question of what happens along the way to becoming the woman your mother may have helped you become but whom your father may have wished would never come to take you over? Or is it simpler? Is it just meeting a man who makes you feel every single cell within your body that is feminine and wanting his masculinity?

Is it ever easy to find yourself wanting a man enough to place his interests above those of your family's?

Maybe that is only possible if it remains fleeting, pure. As if it holds the key to all that you could ever desire in the long nights of a woman alone in a double bed.

Perhaps if I am as honest as I would hope to be, I would wonder why I lied when I told Mary Lou that darkening evening that I didn't like Cort. For I knew what she meant even as I denied I liked him. For I liked him in the way that a woman likes a man she doesn't yet know but there is still some part of herself that longs for him in a way that is more basic than she can ever control if she wanted to. Or should my question of myself be: did you realize that the tension between you and Cort was growing? And that you fed off of it?

Over the next week, Cort began showing up in the evenings when I'd be tending the herbs. I had a large expanse that we kept carefully cultivated, with pipes running underground to keep the earth in the beds as moist as they would need to be to support the herbs.

The garden was more than a hobby for me. It provided essential tools and ingredients. And its benevolence had as much to do with the irrigation as it did with how I guarded and protected it.

Of course, in hindsight, I could see much later that Cort's interest in my herb garden was more than it appeared. It was not because he liked getting down into the damp earth to help me groom the beds and feed the plants.

No matter how I wished it, it was not that he wanted to be near me because he was interested in me as a man might be interested in a woman.

It was because he was searching for the magic.

Perhaps more accurately, he knew he'd found the magic; now he was searching for a way to safely gain access to it.

Working in the herb garden had always been a time apart from the ranch for me. When Cort began coming by in the evenings to help me, I swear I now realize I should have seen he was studying me.

He was the kind of man who studies before he makes his move.

Not a thing that moves or breathes escapes his notice and his ability to see the nuances, the rhythms, the anomalies, the vulnerabilities. Whatever can be exploited. Whatever is weak or strong.

He looked for a way in.

He had already found it without realizing the lack of effort it would take.

Even now, if I were asked to close my eyes and concentrate, it would take no effort to see him in the gathering dusk. To see the trowel in his hand, to see the way his fingers prod the earth and the dirt beneath his fingernails.

To see his eyes as they would concentrate. To see the smile upon his face as he listened to me speak about the use of each herb.

To hear the questions he posed. To watch him watch me.

To see a smile that I would have begged to see upon his face always. To see it start slowly. To see the hollow place inside his eyes fill with the reflection of me as he gazed at me.

Magic.

Pure magic.

A gypsy heart; a questing wind.

I used to lay in the dark each night and think on one question: what would I give if he were to have every choice laid out before him and he were to choose me?

What would I give?

I would give myself.

All he'd ever have had to do was take.

At what point did Cort work his way into my spirit's circle, I can well imagine I will be asked at some point. Imagine having to admit that I don't know?

It simply happened.

There came an evening when I looked forward to him joining me in the herb garden because he seemed to bring an odd sort of questing peace along with him. By that, I mean, he seemed as if he had finally figured out the route to his peace. So although he might not have it within the palm of his large hand, he now knew when the time came that he could reach out for it.

We had even stopped sniping and arguing under our breath at each other upon the trail that morning. We had differing approaches; this had caused conflict, until that morning. Instead of struggling against each other, we had worked together.

It felt good.

I can still feel the smile upon my face when we stopped for lunch and we were tethering horses and our hands touched as we were each working our own lead. I smiled. There was a rush within me. I felt some unexpected warmth of spirit.

"What d'ya suppose they're serving us for lunch today?" he asked me. It was obvious he was searching for something to say that seemed safe. He swallowed just before he said it and backed away a half pace.

"Same as always. Semblance of a rough trail picnic the visitors always think is so authentic," I said. I looked away, over toward the brook that had already drawn a few of the visitors. They were rinsing their hands and the backs of their necks from the trail's dust.

"You think we should take them up the west pass today? I rode up it yesterday and saw some tracks. They might like that, you think?"

"Bobcat. I saw the tracks last night. Good idea."

"Rachel..."

"Yeah?"

"Has your family always lived here?"

I glanced up at him. "Not always."

"I had heard..."

"What? What did you hear?"

"Just some talk. About your mother."

"I'm surprised a man like you listens to gossip, Cort. My mother died when I was a child. I'd be shocked if anything about her was of any interest to a man like you."

"You don't really know that much about me, do you though?"

"No. I don't." His body language grew much assertive. This time, it was me backing that half-step away from him. I searched for something to say. I thought perhaps he was looking for a compliment. "But I do know this, Cort. You're not the normal kind of man we get as a ranch hand up here. Not that the hands are the dregs of society but they're usually not quite your temperament, your intelligence, your spirit."

He looked away. Up at the sky. Down at the water. "Everyone's got a past, Rachel. Sometimes you leave it before you're ready. When that happens, you might find yourself trying awful hard to find a way back to it. You'd be surprised what you'd be willing to do, the chances you'd take, the silly possibilities you'd try out."

I pondered this. I wanted to reach out and touch him, understand him, figure out what he meant. Instead, I said, "My family's past is something I sometimes think I'd like to find a way back to. It seems more sure than all this. I don't know that I could explain why that is, but it is."

"Maybe it's just that you miss ever knowing your mama."

"Probably so."

Just then, he turned his head back and looked deep into my eyes. We both simply paused in that moment. I have no idea how long we stood there like that, just looking our fill. He broke the moment with a wry grin, saying, "Well, we sure did find ourselves touching on some different conversation for us, didn't we?"

"We did indeed. And we weren't even arguing with each other."

"Will miracles never cease?"

"Some kind of magic spell, maybe."

"Maybe so."

After lunch, when I cleaned up around the place we'd stopped, making sure nothing we'd brought in would remain there in the desert, he helped for the first time. It was obvious to anyone who could see that he was making a point of helping me; he did not seem in the least shy to be so obvious.

Why this day?

I don't know.

Mary Lou would say something surely had signaled this was coming. But I assure you, I never noticed.

When he came to the garden that evening, a sense overcame me. He was attracted to me. I was attracted to him. We were content with that.

Or so I thought.

The days that followed found us growing closer. Close enough to the point that in the evenings, we did less hard gardening work and more discussion of philosophy and belief systems. He never once asked about magic or mysticism except in relationship to Native American beliefs. We talked of the terrain's uniqueness. We discussed how much the world had changed once electricity flowed in a way that could be easily tapped by humans. He spoke fervently of how scared he felt out in the rest of the world, with all its rushing speed and casual indifference to the individual. He said it was why he preferred the sort of life he'd carved out.

I would never have asked from what he was hiding.

But it was obvious to me that a man with this sharp, inquisitive mind does not set out to end up as a ranch hand arriving for seasonal work in the desert. I had, of course, ample opportunity to witness his leadership and his skill. He seemed destined for a far greater life; yet I never doubted that he didn't yearn for what he found in the life he'd chosen.

I had just dug down under the roots of an anise plant, intending to bring it up and check the nodules before deciding whether to begin dividing the cluster in this section. Damp loam clung to me and I was feeling the sense of the plant's purpose in its woody fiber.

"Familiar with the term El Mundo Malo?" he asked me. He spoke with a lush, enticing tone.

"I have heard talk of it, yes. It's part of a belief system."

"The Bad Reality."

I glanced at him. He was carefully uprooting a particular Cornish lovage that I wanted to dry and put aside for eventual use. There was a return of that aura I'd noticed that first night I'd seen him walking away from me. This time, I wondered if it had anything to do with the plant he held or that he was speaking of this particular belief system, as if he knew something he thought would surprise me for him to know. I didn't mean to stare at him, nor would I have wished to be caught doing it. But I was. In one quiet moment of definitive movement, his eyes rose and locked to mine. This is when I realized that he knew something but he didn't know how far he was willing to go.

I said, "I prefer to believe in the ability to choose."

"Which do you choose?"

"El Mundo Bueno."

"Ah." He glanced away from me, a tiny fraction of a frown that I had come to know was concentration, not disapproval. "The Good Reality."

"That would be the one."

"And you believe you have the power to choose?"

I sat back. "I believe I have the power to stay away from the Bad Reality but I believe sometimes it is a breath away."

"What if I told you I believed I had no choice yet have found myself in El Mundo Malo? I wonder if somehow you can pull me into the Good Reality I can see but cannot seem to return to?"

"Why would you think I'd be able to do that, Cort? How could I affect that?" I looked in his eyes; he looked in mine. I was intrigued; he was suddenly unsure. He backed away from where he'd been heading. He realized it wasn't safe for him yet.

"If you believe, perhaps I should," he said. His smile that he gave me was engaging and sweet. I returned it.

"Belief doesn't work that way, does it?"

"I would like to hope it does... when it brings me what I want, anyway," he said. I chuckled and returned to my work.

What I hoped was some unexpected close encounter with my own guarded belief system was anything but that. If my uncle Billy had been there, he would seen what was behind Cort's question. But I was on my own in this. Somewhere inside me, somewhere quite sure, I knew that one day Cort would reveal himself.

That night, in my bed, I envisioned the moon's full, ripe glory. It was a week away. I could feel the wind rustling, waiting, anticipating. Something was on the way. Something was already here waiting for the wind. I thought for a long time about the fact that a stranger to me, a man with distinct magnetism, had spoken of El Mundo Malo when I had lost some belief that I even wanted to hold it in abeyance.

This had moved beyond the crush stage. This I would be able to say with real certainty if an accounting was ever called for of me. There is always the danger that I would be seduced into seeking El Mundo Malo out. This handsome, virile stranger made me imagine things. Perhaps instead of me helping him, he would be the seducer.

If I were to trace the moment this was set in motion as having been a night I cleansed the wind under the moon's full glow, where will I ever say the step beyond came?

Will I someday shy from admitting that it came on a night of a day that began with me waking up with tears in my eyes? My sense of unease seemed more profound ever since that talk with Cort about the Bad Reality.

I had always believed that I could affect the Good Reality... that I could envision it growing, expanding. That I helped keep it healthy. No one has the ability to control everything. That is not our province. But we seek the harmony among the Sacred Things. We can sense an imbalance and thereby restore what is in our power to affect. But not all things are ours. Some belong to the Goddess.

When something went out of harmony in our lives or in the world that surrounded us, my trances would descend as if unbidden. 

But all the exertion in the world cannot stop what must happen that is bigger than I will ever be. My Uncle Billy's death. My brother Noah's headlong rush into another world.

Once, I had asked the way. The only voice I ever heard was a woman's. I am still not sure whose it was but I believe it was my mother. It wasn't an answer I had received. It was the knowledge full born in one breath from another wandering spirit of how to anchor myself when I was in a trance. Everything I am now flowed from there.

That was when I was a child. My mother had been dead for three years when it happened. After, I lost her again as her spirit wandered.

I had felt her loss those days as if I'd really known her. The truth was, I did not. I know about her. I knew how others viewed her. I saw her shadow in my father's adaptation to a future without her in it.

That morning when I woke, I understood my father's attachment to my mother in visceral way. I wondered if I would have had the will to not tear the world around me into shreds if I'd lost what they had had together.

Perhaps everyone remembers when they finally mature emotionally to a point where they grasp the fullness, the completeness of that kind of love: the kind that brings a richer life, a better you, a resplendent totality of purpose.

Ever since that talk I'd had with Cort about the Bad Reality, we had had an uneasy space between us. I found reason upon reason to not go on the trails when he was there. As my luck would have it, we only had three visitors that week. They were all men; they were regulars. They were brothers living in opposing areas of the country. Every year, every fall, they spent a week at our ranch. They didn't need a lot of taking care of at this point. They came in, they worked the horses with the hands, they knew the trails they wanted to take every morning.

Because of this, my excuses did not have to be of fine merit or withstand my father's scrutiny. And so, I went days that week without ever seeing Cort upon a horse. I would wait until he'd taken the men out and then I would ride in a different direction.

I needed this time during the rise of the moon's fullness. I was restless, uneasy. In the past, it seemed to me, I might have been anticipatory but it had been a good feeling.

This feeling, this anxiety... it was something else so entirely. It was a knowledge that the wind that would come would be different than I had ever encountered.

There was something else about this feeling, though.

It was that deep within me, I sensed a catharsis welling up and waiting only for the crack of a bad wind to rip me open. When it passed, when the currents of air flowed from our valley, would I be ashes? Or would I find El Mundo Bueno was again within my ability to influence?

When I wander, I am not cognizant of where I am but I am fully aware of all around me. It is a state of being aware of the elements, the Four Sacred Things. It is the long view down a tunnel.

In two days, the full moon would greet us yet again.

I wandered; the horse's reins long abandoned. I smelled water waiting for the wind. I felt water; knew it as I hadn't before. Someone was with me. Someone the water waited to cleanse.

While I waited for the wind, the water waited but not for me.

He approached as if walking unafraid.

This was when he should have been unafraid; for when I am in a trance, I have power of which he could not even imagine.

He leaned against a boulder. Hip cocked; arms folded at his chest. Cowboy hat shading eyes that peered into me yet for all he looked, he did not see the wind was ever swirling nearer.

"Come join me," I said to him. He wasn't sure; he thought he knew; he wasn't sure; he was cautious; he wanted to believe he understood who he faced. He did not.

For I was not the Rachel he knew, the woman he'd begun to seduce.

I was deep within a trance.

If this was a seduction, then it was I who seduced him this day.

He looked his fill as I rose from the shallow water. He swallowed deeply. I raised my hand to him. I flicked my fingers. Water droplets splattered down, crashing into a thousand prisms. Still he simply looked.

"Water has brought you back as if from death, hasn't it?" I asked him.

Our eyes met. He seemed to know the magic had transformed this moment. He accepted; he was not interested in understanding. So many are that way. They come seeking not to understand the magic but to learn how to make the magic do their bidding.

Magic can be controlled, but only marginally, by those born to its ways. Only the Goddess really is in control.

He looked into my eyes. He said, "Once I thought I might die of thirst. The cruelest days I'd spent."

"No. Those were simply the days when someone was cruel to you. But you have been almost that cruel to others earlier in your life."

"I have."

"Then come into the water with me. I won't cleanse your sins but I will let you rinse away whatever part of the past I can ease for you."

"Is it true what they say about you?"

"You wish to find out. It's why you came."

"I need your help."

"Come into the water. You're the reason I'm here in this brook. I was waiting for you."

"You knew I was coming?"

"I knew the water beckoned me for a reason."

"I need your help."

"Perhaps you'll get it from me. Or perhaps I will exact too high a price."

He reached first for the buttons that bound his shirt at his wrists. He was wearing a plaid, cotton shirt to protect him from the sun. Under it, a light blue t-shirt of nondescript fabric. His upper torso came into view slowly as the t-shirt rose over his belly, his chest, his face, down his arms.

Weeks of working on the ranch had honed him, if he'd needed it. His muscles worked smoothly, powerfully. They bunched and flowed. There was light hair on his arms. A smattering of lighter hair on his chest. I had expected more and that it would be as dark as the beard that shadowed his face within a few hours of him shaving.

He did not find it necessary to keep my eye as he undressed before me. He shed his clothes as if I was not there. There was an ease he had with his body's rhythms that I envied. How it made me hunger to touch him. To know how he might touch me.

When he walked toward me, nude, the sway of his tender genitals hypnotized me even to the moment he waded into the water. Within an arm's length, he finally dipped low enough into the water that my prurient and respectful gaze lost its object of attention.

"I knew your nipples would be just that color of peach," he said softly. His hand skimmed just below the surface of the water, reaching for me. His thumb slowly circled a puckering breast.

"Tell me about the water," I said softly as I reached for him. He was warmth in the coolness of the water.

The moment I touched him at the seat of his manhood, his eyes darkened. His lids flickered. I drew my hands up his body until they were steady over his heart. I saw what it was that had brought him seeking me. I saw his courage to have done it. I saw confusion, fear, loathing. Unsettled soul, set out of balance with his time and place.

"You don't belong here," I said, putting my lips at his ear. He shivered in my hold. "Let me see more."

"What are you doing to me?" he panted out. I held him tightly then.

"There, there. You want me to know. You want me to understand. The water soothes you... flow with it..."

"Wait..."

"Too late."

My eyes drifted shut. I felt nothing but the serenity of the water and the raging inferno within this man. I saw his thirst. Unquenched. And then rain... divine intervention... saving him.

I saw the wounding of his soul. I witnessed an act of aggression to reclaim it. And then blackness, so dense I could not move beyond it.

Gasping, I fled up to break from the trance. I sought to fly above the water.

The blackness.

It was cold. It was the void.

When I opened my eyes, I was outside the trance but I remembered it all. He stared into me. "You see now," he said. "Can you help me?"

"What is it you want?" I asked him, shaken by what I'd seen.

"I want to return."

"You should not have sought me out. You should accept what is."

I pushed him away from me. I turned and moved into the deeper water, where I could swim without my feet grazing upon the pebbles at the bottom of the streambed. The water was cooler. I floated on my back for a while. My face was warm. The air was still, silent. I felt myself reconciling to the trance.

Here, in the world, I was not anchored to the earth; the wind was an unmoving witness. I wanted to be with him, in this place, in the sun, in the water only as myself, with no succor and guidance from wandering spirits and errant wind.

I was more in his element than mine.

He dove easily under the water, breaking the surface when he rose back up only enough for his mouth to be above the water. His two big hands swept his long hair from his face and then rubbed water away from his eyes. He started swimming before me, slowly circling me. I tread water, watching him. Each circle brought him closer. Closer.

Closer.

Until his trailing hand sent a ripple of his current toward me; it brushed up my chest.

"Why are you here?" I asked him.

"I don't know."

"Would you like to touch me?"

He closed the distance between us by pulling my body slowly within the circle of his loose arms. He kept moving in a circular motion, but now there was neither rhyme nor reason; there was only movement.

It was a spiral in which his body formed the vortex.

He touched me. He explored my contours. I touched him. I explored his arms and his post of a neck and his wide expanse of shoulders. When he put a thigh between mine, it felt like a man's move.

"I won't take you," he said to me. His voice was honey running over my fingers. "Not yet."

I shivered in his hold. "What makes you think I would have let you? Or that I will let you someday?"

"I know women." His chest felt strong. His arms held real power. His thighs excited me. Every movement he made in the water made me come closer to him. "Besides, you told me once that your interest could only be aroused by a man. And, Rachel, your arousal is pretty plain to see to this man."

"If you know women so well, then surely you know I may never offer again."

"Your eyes were almost black."

"What?"

"Before. When I first saw you. All the hazel was gone. They were black."

"Did that scare you?"

"Yes."

"Then you should be trying to please me."

"Your eyes are hazel again."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. They changed back after..."

"After?"

"After whatever it was you were doing to me."

"Oh, that."

"So... are you going to help me?"

"I'll try."

"I can't cry anymore."

"You're tired."

"I want to go home."

Home. "So long to this life?"

"I have come a long way."

"You have a long way to go."

"I am nothing so much as alone."

The water that had beaded up along his brow was warm. I kissed it. I kissed him.

I could not anchor him in this place. But I could and I did make him see that even in a place he longed to leave, he did not have to be alone.

I kissed him.

How did I feel in the days to follow? Someone is bound to ask. Did I know what would happen, is this what would be meant by his question: 'are you going to help me'? I don't know the answer. I don't. I sometimes wish that I did.

By the time I made it back to the stable, my hair was dry. That would have been the evidence for most people that perhaps they should look further into this incident of Cort and I riding back together when we had left separately.

My father took one long gaze over me as I passed him, heading to the main house.

That night at dinner, he spoke not a word throughout the disjointed conversation that Mary Lou and Jed drew me into in order to break the silence. He only spoke after Jed left the table to tend to a hand's request from Marco calling him to come help with a foal's impending arrival.

"About time," Mary Lou said, rising to gather dishes before bringing in dessert. "Poor mare's been edgy all day, hasn't she?"

I looked past the dim off-whiteness of half-curtains over the window that I faced. The moon was one day from its fullest. "This is a good time for her birth."

"Something feels off though, don't you think?"

"Not 'off,' but different. Stronger. Unsettled."

This was when my father spoke. "What does he want from us?"

I looked at him. He seemed older. His eyes had lost a bit of fire. "He's a lost soul, Daddy. He just needs help finding his way back to where he should never have left."

"Not everything is meant to be put right, Rachel."

I went to him. I put my arms around his neck. All these years, my father has been there, overlooked, overshadowed. He was more guardian than anything else. "What would you have me do, Daddy? Every wandering spirit has always been welcome here before. What is your counsel?"

His hands rubbed in over my arms. "Don't give up too much of yourself. Only what you're willing to lose forever when he goes."

In my dreams that night, I saw Cort's life unfold before me. I knew it was a consequence of what he'd allowed me to see of him when I'd touched him during the trance.

I came into the essence of what he was.

He was a man of deep conviction who'd found a bad path in life that began with the loss of his mother. Still, that did not excuse what he became for a time. He became the vilest of men: a man who knew better, down deep, but who did wrong because he was seduced into a life where the strong do more than survive, where they take advantage of the weak.

Then there came a point he reached in his life, where the knowing better began to haunt him and make him worse... this was the critical time. All that flew from there was because he was willing, finally, to listen to his better self.

He had such raw humor about his own failings. As he shared this part of his life, he laughed at himself for his thinking at the time that he would be okay, he would set his life back on the right road if he could just bolt from the man whom he had once thought to be a role model. That, as he soon learned, was not going to work.

I saw a gunfight. I felt his panic. I saw men in uniforms shooting at him. I felt his thirst to survive. I saw wounds that should have killed. I felt water being poured over him as if anointing him.

Oh.

Water.

This was where it first entered his thirsting soul.

Water from a priest. Delivered as last rites. 

His soul began to swim again.

And then it drowned in the priest's blood. Oh. Oh. Oh. He was drowning. What would save him? Oh. His pain so deep it seeped into every pore.

He had a resilient core from which he drew the final strength to face what he'd made of his life. He opted to atone for his sins in the only way he felt was righteous. Everything sped up from there. He fled the bad and embraced a life of protecting the good from the bad. Only a man who had brought evil, who knew its face and ways, could really fight it. He never even tried to outrun his pain. He never could.

I saw his face swim before me. His hair ruffled by hot desert winds.

My breath came as heated and ragged as the wind that rustled and whipped across the plains of red, gravelly desert terrain to find him. If I had been there, would I have comforted him? No, perhaps I would have condemned him.

Outlaw.

Priest.

Man.

Sinner.

Survivor.

A soul with a broken conscious. 

I hope I would have comforted him; that I would have seen the man digging in and seeking to pay his debts. He was only a man who believed he'd never come far enough away from his crimes to live a life that included love and soft peace. I would have liked to have loved him.

I promise I would have.

But I was not there. Not in that time.

As his past unfolded before me, I watched as he was brought to his reckoning with a man. The man who'd first seduced him, his first role model. Like a lover scorned, that man would exact his revenge for Cort having walked away from him only after showing Cort the futility of fighting the evil the man believed still lurked inside Cort. But the man was wrong; the evil was no longer inside Cort. What was inside Cort? I think it was the ability to see evil more clearly for what it was and the desire to defeat it when it crossed his path again. There was also that new life he'd promised himself, which meant he had a further mission when faced with evil: to protect the good from the bad.

My eyes flew open.

Water.

I understood now.

He had thirsted. This was what he had meant. He had not yet been willing to admit the earlier thirst: the thirst for deliverance to a higher purpose in life. No, the only thirst he would allow himself to remember was the physical thirst as he lay chained and waiting for imminent death some part of him thought was his final sin: to die before he could protect the innocent.

And then rain came to save him.

Oh, this was what I'd felt beating sure and true within his heart.

He had prayed for the strength to die with grace but was granted instead the wish to survive to face and learn from this evil.

It was not without further cost. It did make him accept that he was not meant to be a passive witness. He was not meant to do soft, good deeds as a priest tending to a flock of orphans, as he'd hoped before being drug to this place, a town called Redemption. Oh, what a name for the place where Cort faced his future and his past and his present. His God had another purpose for him, one he fought until the woman called forth his passion and drive.

Passion.

Virility.

Long denied. Not quite quenched in that one night with that particular woman. I did not want to see what happened between them, but just as I'd witnessed him with the Italian woman, there I was, staying to witness the act between them. And in so doing, even deep within my dream, I was feeling my own passion for a lover's touch return full bore, with an impact that shook me to my roots.

Swiftly, swiftly. The dénouement of his past: the destruction of evil with the death of that man of evil. Ah, that life was really that neat. You stamp out evil in one place only to find you only stamped out an evil man's life.

The last swirling image of Cort that came in my dream was him, wounded, armed, protecting the good from the bad... and forever altering his life's route. And then blackness, the void.

My eyes snapped open before the void could swallow me.

For long moments, all I could do was lay there, sweating, slowing my breathing as I cast my mind over the images of that dream.

This, then, was the man I'd met and the man who wanted me to help him.

Thinking of him, now in full awareness of the night, my mind reached out to find his. He was dreaming. He was seeing me. He was seeing us together.

I witnessed his dream. It was the third time I'd purposely watched him make love to a woman.

All this time, I'd wanted him to want me as a woman. Now, I knew. He did.

My hand, I realized with a start, was between my thighs. I was wet.

Imagine the want in me? This is the only explanation I will ever be able to offer for reaching out for him again, for letting my mind search for his as it hovered between dreams.

At some point, I rose from my bed. I stood at my window, looking out through opened curtains. I knew he would be out there. I had allowed him to see that I now knew him in full.

When I had touched him in the trance, I'd seen but only the surface. It needed the time away from him to allow myself to go through what I'd found, to see it as a procession. My uncle called it my purposeful dreaming.

I sent my words to Cort, now that he was there, in full consciousness. I saw his body jerk back; still, he looked at me without break as I gazed at him through the window. I walked slowly down the hall. I stood upon the porch, looking across the broad expanse of flat, dull brown land. He turned and walked to the stable.

Inside the stable, horses nickered and shifted about, easy but marking the presence of new beings in their midst. He stood before the stall of the mare who had given birth that evening.

"Why did I come here?" he asked me.

"So that I would help you return."

He turned to look in my eyes, a sharp light there in his. "Is that the only reason?"

"Who can know?"

"You can."

"Because I'm a witch?"

"Yes. Exactly."

"I'm not a seer. I don't read the future. I don't know the will of the spirits, of your God or of my Goddess."

"You know things."

"The difference between us, Cort, is that you pray to your God. My Goddess converses with me. I can influence her. She has given me certain gifts but she has given me responsibility over her Sacred Things and I worship them and protect them."

"Sacred Things?"

"Earth. Water. Wind. Fire."

"You can do things."

"Yes. I can influence. It seems like magic... perhaps it is."

"I heard you. In my head."

"But did you also understand?"

He dropped his head. I touched his shoulder.

"You know everything about me, don't you?" he asked me, hoping I did.

But that is never possible. I said, "You've come to me for the magic. You don't yet know what you're asking of me."

"Teach me."

"Oh, Cort. If only it was that simple."