“What was it like, the carnival you were in?” Rief asked, and Alec began telling tales of the entertainers, remembering more as he told more, so that his stories lasted well past sunset. “Bethany, you take first watch, I’ll take second, and Rief can have the last,” he suggested after several seconds of silence around the dying fire embers.
“Alec, it’s time to rise,” Rief told him the next morning. They ate left over deer haunch, then resumed walking, following the switchbacks of the trail as it descended steeply into a valley. Alec noted the still-evident signs of the branches that had been cut and trimmed two summers earlier to widen the trail, and at one point mid-day he remembered his panic when they passed the location where Jonso the clown had disappeared.
That evening they reached the treacherous location where the road was missing as a result of the earthquake that had struck Richard’s carnival. They camped atop the ridge that night, took a full day to find suitable game paths they could descend with Walnut just to reach the bottom of the mountain, and then the fourth day since leaving Riverside they resumed traveling over the road.
“Look out there,” Rief said from the lead when she reached the top of the ridge. On the western horizon the view was not another large ridge that they would have to cross; instead it was a lesser ridge, and foot hills beyond. They hurried down the slope, and continued to travel well into dusk in order to reach the top of the smaller, last ridge they would surmount in the Pale Mountains.
The next day they started down the gentlest slope they had faced yet, and then followed the road among the foothills. They passed a cabin late in the afternoon, empty and clearly deserted, but not burnt and ransacked as if by lacertii. “How do you interpret this?” Bethany asked.
“I would guess a settler wasn’t attacked, but found out that Riverside had been, and decided to flee,” Alec guessed. “Why don’t we spend the night here, under a roof for a change? We won’t have anything like this out on the plains.
“I wish we had Alder or Shaiss to give us some light,” he said as they put Walnut in the shed behind the house.
“Alec, Allisma wrote in her letter that Alder was killed in the battle with the lacertii,” Bethany said softly.
Alec’s hands froze in the middle of latching the gate. He stood with eyes unfocused, trying to remember the confusing events of the battle. Had he ever seen Alder, he wondered? He had tried so hard to save all his friends.
“Alec?” Bethany called gently.
He wiped his cheek hastily. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I think I’ll go take a walk,” he said abruptly, and headed out the door. He left the homestead behind as he loped among the scattered trees and abandoned fields, until the house was no longer in sight. He sat down with his back against a tree trunk, and thought about Alder. The light ingenaire had been a boy with a good sense of humor, and had taken to life with the cavalry from the time Alec had asked him to go on the first trip to Bondell. He wondered how he had missed him out on the battlefield. He wondered how he had found anyone among the chaos of the battle, but once he found one of his friends, he thought he’d have found them all.
Looking up, he saw a plume of smoke rising from the cabin into the darkening night sky, and he walked slowly back, stopping in the kitchen garden that was going wild to pull up some small carrots and potatoes. He gave the roots to Bethany, and dressed a rabbit he had shot earlier in the day, giving them the start of a hardy stew, cooked in a pot they found. That night they slept in bunks, with little talk as Alec’s melancholy mood infected them all.
The next morning they ate left over stew, packed some useful items from the cabin onto Walnut, and set out again, walking west with the sun behind them. They passed another cabin that appeared to still be occupied, though they saw no one around. By mid-morning the foothills were turning into swales and undulating ground, so they could see further ahead towards the horizon, and saw a man leading a horse back and forth, pulling a plow across a field.
“Ho, visitors!” the man called, and Alec led Walnut and his companions over to the farmer.
“Who are you and where are you from?” the man called, taking off his hat as he walked over to the edge of the plowed ground.
“I’m Alec, this is Rief, and this is Bethany,” Alec spoke up. “We’ve been on a pilgrimage to a holy place in the mountains, and now we’re returning.”
“You made it out alive? The lacertii didn’t eat you up?” the man asked.
“We didn’t see a one,” Alec replied. “We came through the ruins of Riverside, but never faced any problems.”
“You’ll have a long, dry way to go across the grasslands,” the man said. “Do you have enough water bags with you?” he asked, looking at Walnut’s cargo.
“We’ve got better than water bags,” Alec said proudly. “Bethany is a water ingenaire.”
The man looked at her with a skeptical eye. “That’s mighty handy,” he said laconically. “Would you like to visit with my family and have a bite of supper?” he asked as he motioned west to a distant homestead.
Alec looked at the girls, who nodded. “We’d like that very much,” he replied.
“My name is Abram, by the way,” the farmer told them. “You go on over to the house and tell my wife I’ll be there as soon as the horse and I can unhitch and get back to the barn. Her name’s Sara.”
With a set of waves the three ingenaire started walking again, and reached the farmstead in five minutes. “Ma, there’s visitors,” a child called from a tree branch over their heads, and a woman looked out a door seconds later.
“Well gracious, who’d have known?” the woman said. “How are all of you?” she asked in a friendly tone.
“We’re well,” Bethany said. She stepped forward and held the woman’s hand. “Your husband, Abram, invited us to join you for supper. He said he’d be here after he unhitches the horse.”
“Tomas, get your brothers and sisters in here. Tell them to clean up, we’ve got company,” Sara said. “Come in and clean yourselves up if you need to,” she walked back into the house. Rief and Bethany walked in, while Alec tied Walnut to a tree.
“Mom, Tomas said we’ve got visitors,” a voice called. “Hey, there’s a horse. Hey, there’s a visitor!” Alec saw a teenage boy come limping towards him.
“Hi, I’m Sandy,” the boy said as he arrived at Alec’s side.
“Hello, Sandy, I’m Alec,” he replied.
“Tarnum, Sara says to come in if you want any food,” Rief called.
“I thought you said your name is Alec,” Sandy commented.
“Rief calls me that,” Alec said as they walked in together, “but most folks call me Alec.”
The family consisted of the two parents and six children. Supper was a large roast, two loaves of bread, and vegetables from the family’s garden.
The conversation during the meal confirmed the decline in the local population. “Three years ago there were a score of families less than a half-day walk away,” Abram told them. “But after the road to Riverside wiped out and then the city disappeared, people began going back to the Dominion. There’s no more than eight or nine families still around. Now we have to go back to Sandyforks to sell and trade, instead of Riverside. A couple of men will take a wagon of everyone’s goods in the fall to get sugar, horse shoes, and the like.”
After dinner, Bethany spoke up. “We are healers, and before we go, we’d like to offer to treat you all, as a way to thank you for your generous hospitality.”
Sara accepted the offer immediately. “The children could use some help with little things. Tomas has a bad tooth, I know.”
The three healers turned the front porch into their clinic, and saw each child. Alec let the two girls practice their new skills for diagnosing and making short term remedies for colds or infections, but he lent his greater powers to help improve the health of those who needed it. Sandy was the oldest and last of the children to arrive. Rief and Bethany addressed some herbs to put on his acne, while Alec tho
ughtfully examined the withered right leg. The leg was completely missing an adductor longus muscle.
“Sandy, I think I can heal your leg,” Alec told the boy.
“It’s as good as it can be Alec,” the teen responded in a regretful tone.
“No, I think we can make it as good as the left leg. Bethany, Rief, will you please place your hands on my shoulder and pray for healing powers?” he asked.
He stretched the leg out flat, and began to give Sandy a sense of peace and tranquility, lulling him into a light sleep so that he wouldn’t feel the dramatic changes in his leg. Alec then began to shift the existing muscles closer to the places they belonged, stretching them and guiding them.
“This will be the hard part,” he told his friends. “Creating a new muscle will take much more energy than altering an existing one.” He found the site on the leg bone where the muscle was supposed to be attached, and started there, building the connecting tissues, then the muscle material itself, while he heard the faint drone of praying whispered behind him. He worked up to the pelvis, where he began the steps needed to connect the muscle at the upper end. With the construction of the muscle material complete, he began to tighten and strengthen it, then attended to each of the surrounding muscles, reorienting them to work with the new adductor longus.
At last, Alec felt that the job was done, and he rose back up to a standing position. He turned to Rief and Bethany. “Thank you. I felt your support.”
“Alec, that was wonderful to see. Are you going to teach us how to do that?” Rief asked. “I feel so good about being able to fix these teas and salves, but then I see what you can do, and it seems like a whole different level of power!” her eyes were gleaming.
Alec turned and shook Sandy awake. “How does your leg feel?” he asked.
“Different,” was his one word answer. He bent the leg several times. “It feels crowded, like there’s something else in there.” He sat up, and took Alec’s offered hand to help him stand up. He shifted his weight back and forth, and took his first tentative step. He took another step and another, a slight limp still evident. “It feels much better and stronger,” he concluded, a smile on his face.
Abram came around the corner of the house just then. “I’ve got to get the horse back out to the field,” he told them. “It’s been a pleasure to see some friendly new faces, especially a couple of such pretty ones.”
“Dad! They fixed my leg! Look!” Sandy told his father and walked over to his father with his smoother gait.
Abram watched the boy, then looked at the healers. “How in the world did you do that?” the father asked.
“We are healer ingenairii,” Alec answered. “It is our gift.”
“Good lord! You really are ingenairii? You seemed like just regular people to me! I thought you were pulling my leg in the field,” Abram said with surprise. “Sara! Sara!” he called.
As the mother came out, Alec walked over by the father and examined him closely. He saw that Abram’s heart was perilously close to failing, likely to do so in a sudden and fatal event. Taking Bethany’s hand, he led her over to Abram, and with her prayers behind him, poured his powers into Abram’s chest, improving the heart’s efficiency. The man wouldn’t notice anything dramatic, but he wouldn’t die soon, and he’d have more energy in his everyday activities, Alec knew.
“Thank you!” Sara said, as she hugged each of the women. “Sandy will be able to do so much more,” she paused, and a tear came to her eye. “He’ll have a much better life now.”
Alec looked at Sara, and examined her too. He felt another chill in his heart. “Would you excuse us for a moment?” he asked, and motioned his two friends over. “Would both of you examine Sara and tell me what you see?” he suggested.
Both girls stepped back over to the knot of family members and stood there for a moment, then returned to Alec with somber faces. “She has breast cancer, doesn’t she?” Rief asked softly. The other two nodded in agreement.
“You can heal that though, can’t you. healer?” Rief asked.
“I can,” he agreed. “But since she’s a married woman, and since her husband is here, and since there are two female healers here, I’d rather not be the one to place my hand there to give her healing powers,” he explained with a serious expression. “I’ve used other ingenairii’s powers before, but I’ve never sent power through an ingenaire. I think that working with another healer ingenaire like you two, we could make it work.”
They both looked at him with inscrutable expressions. Because of her ingenaire background and her knowledge of Alec’s extraordinary accomplishments in the past, Bethany understood what he was suggesting about the transference of powers, but for Rief it was all a foreign concept. “You think you could send your powers through us to do what you want it to?” she asked skeptically.
“Because you’re healers, I think that the right energies will travel through you and maintain its integrity so that it carries out the purpose we want it to,” he said.
“So one of us would place our hand on the lady in a place you don’t want to touch, and you would place your hand on us to send your power through us?” Rief repeated, and Alec nodded. “And where on our body will you need to place your hand?” she asked. Bethany immediately arched an eyebrow at the question.
Alec grinned. “I believe that if I put my hand on your shoulder, it will suffice,” he answered. “If I’m wrong, and I have to put it somewhere else,” he paused, “we can talk about it.”
“This is all assuming that Sara will allow us to do this,” Bethany pointed out. “Now that they know we’re ingenairii, they may not trust us as well.”
“Why wouldn’t they trust us?” Rief asked in surprise. “We’ve just done a great thing for them, and are offering more.”
Alec remembered Inga’s words to him in Goldenfields long ago, when he had first begun to discover his ingenaire abilities, and she had warned him that people in the world did not trust the ingenairii. “We’re different from other people,” he said. “Think about the sorceress in Michian. Did people want to be friends with her?” He saw her slight shudder in reaction. “It’s similar, but it’s not. People are afraid of what they don’t understand.
“Bethany, go talk to Sara, and explain what we think and would like to do to help her,” Alec said.
“Yes, it needs to be a woman that opens the discussion, I agree,” Bethany said, and she left to go over to the family.
Minutes later she was back. “Sara has agreed to do this. If her husband wasn’t still around, I think you could have done this yourself, Alec. She’s a practical lady.”
“She has to be practical, living with six children out here,” Rief pointed out.
“Bethany, since you’ve got experience with the powers, let’s begin with you, and then if Sara doesn’t object, Rief, we’ll work through you as well,” Alec planned.
“Let’s go inside so the children don’t get involved,” Sara suggested, as Abram looked on grim-faced. They all walked in and entered a tiny bedroom, where the parents apparently had their only hope of privacy.
Sara lay down, and Bethany gingerly reached under her blouse, profusely apologizing the whole time. Alec then slid his hand onto Bethany’s shoulder. “Will I feel anything?” Sara asked.
“You shouldn’t feel anything but perhaps a tingle,” Alec assured her. “Are you ready?” he asked, and watched her tightly nod her head.
“Bethany, just exercise your health vision, and pray for healing, and let my powers flow through you,” he said.
She nodded, and Alec let his powers flow gently into her shoulder, then by sensing its resistance, he guided it to flow down her arm and into Sara. Bethany’s body initially resisted the power, letting it flow tentatively, then began to adapt to the power, allowing it to flow more smoothly as her own energy adopted characteristics of the healing power. Alec’s spiritual powers remotely sensed the wonder Bethany felt, and the concentration she focused on trying to understand and learn.
Alec sensed the progress they were making, and stopped the flow of his energy just before the last of the tumors were killed. “Why’d you stop?” Bethany asked in surprise, turning her head to look into Alec’s eyes.
“I thought we’d let Rief experience this too,” Alec said.
“Then shouldn’t you take your hand out of my blouse?” Bethany asked as she removed her own hand from Sara.
Alec jerked his hand up quickly, and blushed, then grew more embarrassed at his own over-reaction.
Bethany and Rief exchanged places. “With your permission?” Rief asked Sara, who nodded calmly, allowing the former slave girl to gently position her hand. Alec’s hand tentatively slid along Rief’s collarbone to its position.
“Just use your healing vision, and pray for healing,” Alec instructed her too, and he began to release his powers into her shoulder. They flowed more smoothly through Rief initially, due to her unfamiliarity with the use of the power. Her body did not resist the power, but did not seem as prepared to adapt to it, passively letting it flow into Sara, where Alec finished the task of killing the last of the dangerous cells that resided in her flesh.
Against the Empire: The Dominion and Michian Page 31
