Jeswyne gasped loudly. She stood up, compelled by the inexplicable hallucination, and ran in the direction John Mark had directed. The brush was thick, and she stumbled into the stream before she knew she had reached it. Her rich, golden sleeveless robe was covered in slime and filth she saw, as she stood up and shook the water off her arms. A thicket of ferns was hanging over the brook bank, directly in front of her, and she saw the prominent red spots on the leaves.
She yanked the ferns out of the ground, pulling and pulling ‘til she had an armful. She stepped up onto the bank, hitched up her skirt, and started her walk back to the wounded warrior. She squinted, and saw the tree with mottled bark, so she put down her ferns to free her hands for picking the bark loose. Three fingernails broke, and she cried briefly in anger but kept ripping pieces from the tree trunk. With reluctance, she piled the bark pieces inside her clothes to carry them, then refilled her hands with ferns, and found her way back to Alec’s side.
With the botanical medicines piled next to the injured warrior, she ran back to the creek and picked up two stones, then took them back as well. What had been the apparition she had seen, she wondered. Was it one of the dryads she heard about in the southern forests? Had it even been real, or had she just imagined it?
She sat Indian-style, placing the flat stone in her lap, and began to grind bits and pieces of the materials together. Why should she even be treating this person, she asked herself. He may have saved her at the end of the ordeal in the plaza, but he had begun the whole catastrophic string of events when he came out throwing knives at her guards in the first place.
What in the world had happened? They had been surrounded by a wall of demons caught in that brilliant light weapon the warrior had, then the blue flash had erased all sight as it made the air itself glow. She’d shut her eyes, and heard a noise, not loud but somehow able to drown out the demons’ screams. Then the ground was soft instead of hard, she heard silence instead of pandemonium, and when she opened her eyes….
She realized her stone was covered in the mashed plants. Setting it gently aside, she knelt next to the warrior. She saw wounds to his ear, his shoulder and his leg – in both calf and thigh, plus small cuts up and down his arms. She slathered a small portion of the mash across the mangled ear, then studied her next step. She was going to have to disrobe him, she realized with panic. Jeswyne had never seen a nude man before, and she didn’t want to start now. Nonetheless, the dryad had told her to treat him, and she saw that it was necessary to uncover his wounds. The Lady Jeswyne, such was her title, unbuckled Alec’s belt and removed his pants. Blushing, she smeared the medicine on his wounds, noting the many scars that he already carried.
He clearly had been a warrior of note. There was a great deal of blood, which she thought she ought to wash away, so she carried his pants down to the brook and soaked them in the water, then carried the dripping cloth back to Alec, so that she could use it to clean him.
When she returned and knelt down next to him again, his eyes opened, and his hand reached out to grab her wrist. “Let go! Let go! I’m not trying to hurt you,” she struggled to pull away from him.
“Did you take my pants off just to look?” he asked, then released her.
“No! No!” she said indignantly, blushing furiously. “How dare you! The dryad told me to heal your injuries, and I thought I needed to uncover your wounds to treat them.” Her eyes were wandering up into the trees, left, right, briefly at his eyes, and then back upward, as she looked anywhere but at his body.
“What are you treating me with?” he winced as a pain lanced through his head.
“I mixed some ferns with red spots on them and some tree bark that is green and white and brown,” Jeswyne answered.
“Are you a trained healer?” Alec asked. “That’s a good poultice to use for now.”
“No. The dryad told me what to use. He said you would die soon if I didn’t treat you,” she responded quickly.
“Dryad? Who’s Dryad?” Alec didn’t understand.
“It’s a tree spirit. I’ve heard of them before, but never met one, until now,” Jeswyne told Alec.
“My back hurts,” Alec put the dryad identity question aside. “Please remove my shirt, and treat my back.” He fumbled at the buckles on the bandoliers, trying to help her undress him.
“Should I treat your shoulder too?” she asked.
“You can treat any part of me you want to; just know that I’m engaged to be married,” Alec grinned slightly as he closed his eyes.
“You’re a bad man!” Jeswyne said indignantly. “A member of the imperial family isn’t like that!” She pulled one sleeve loose, and Alec rolled onto his side. “Oh, that looks wicked,” she said softly, seeing his back for the first time. He had clearly suffered tremendous harm trying to fight against the demons. She smeared the last of her medicine on it. “Will that make you better?” she asked.
“Yes, I think it will help me heal. I need to rest, and I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help for you the next few days,” Alec answered. “I’m not sure what time it is, but you ought to go gather as much fire wood as you can find, so we’ll have a supply for the night.”
“Someone will come rescue us before then, won’t they?” Jeswyne stood up.
Alec looked at the girl for the first time, trying to sense her character. He noticed the eyes that seemed to glow; they were such a light brown they almost seemed golden. She seemed to squint when she looked in the distance – she was nearsighted. Her face was plain. She was no beauty, but she was the emperor’s niece, he reminded himself. She’d have plenty of suitors when the time came. She seemed to have a steadiness about her, despite all that had happened to her in the past hour or so: dead guards, demons, a change of time, stuck with a bloody, wounded enemy soldier. She was holding up well, not falling into hysterics.
If only she had run in some other direction, away from the demons, he never would have put her in the position she was in – stranded in some unknown era. Fortunately she didn’t know how bad it was. “What’s your name?” Alec asked.
“I am the Lady Jeswyne, daughter of Sergey, the Duke of Tintgavel, niece to Emperor Mikhail of Michian,” she answered, sounding haughty as she revealed her name and title. “My name is not ‘stupid girl,’” she instructed him firmly.
“Lady Jeswyne, thank you for taking care of my wounds,” Alec said. “I apologize for speaking inappropriately back in Oyster Bay; those demons scattered my wits and my manners!
“My name is Alec. I don’t think anyone is going to find us for a long, long time, and we have to prepare for that. You go gather firewood,” he shuddered as a spasm overtook him. “I’ll be here, and we can talk tonight.”
Jeswyne looked at Alec, evaluating the situation, and decided to do as he suggested. She felt she had already stooped below her dignity as a member of the imperial family, but she also realized how little relevance her title bore in her strange, unsettled circumstances. She scouted around in the nearby brush, and discovered that fallen timber was easy to find close to their location. Over the course of several trips, Jeswyne built up a respectable pile next to Alec.
“Help me sit up, and I’ll tell you if I see anything we can eat,” Alec asked.
Jeswyne dutifully helped Alec upright. “That plant over there,” Alec pointed, “has leaves that are edible. And those stalks, the pink ones over there, can be roasted,” he told her. He closed his eyes and dropped his head to rest, and began to gently snore within seconds.
The girl was torn between a feeling of obligation to gather the food and a concern that she was allowing herself to act in a manner below her station. She nonetheless gathered a respectable pile of the foodstuffs Alec had pointed to, then sat down next to him. He had slid back down into a recumbent position, and was lying asleep. She looked at him, thinking about the wounds she had treated. She had put her medication on each wound, without thinking about how it must feel to have all of them cumulatively inflicting pain. And that was o
n top of the effort he had put into his battle in front of the palace; in all her years of watching tournaments and display matches, she had never seen anyone work so effectively with weapons.
The forest was darker now. She realized that the sun was setting, and the background noise of insects and other creatures was changing. She considered how odd it was that someone so strong would suddenly be completely in her care and vulnerable. With the stroke of one of his knives, she could do to him what three demons and numerous soldiers had not, gaining revenge for what he had done to the empire. But now was not the time to try; she was dependent on him for the time being.
She decided to see if Alec could awaken. He seemed to know exactly what to do in these circumstances. He might even be able to tell her what circumstances they were in, a mystery that she couldn’t fathom.
“Alec? Alec,” she said gently, then firmly as she leaned over him and rubbed his shoulder.
“Bethany?” he mumbled in response.
It irritated her. She was a member of the imperial family, and expected to be remembered.
“No, not Bethany. Wake up, Alec,” she said crossly.
He opened his eyes, with no sign of comprehension at first.
“Oh,” he said after a few moments. “Tell me your name again?”
“Jeswyne,” the girl answered, suddenly miserable and feeling her brave resolve crumbling fast.
“That’s right, the Lady Jeswyne. The sun is setting, isn’t it?” he looked around. “Is that why you woke me up?”
She nodded.
“I’ll bet you’ve never started a campfire before, have you?” Alec asked, and spoke again before she could even answer. “Well now you’re going to be the first girl in the imperial family to do this,” and he talked her through the steps of preparing a fire pit and stacking the kindling and wood. She began to strike the flint he had against the steel in one of the knives he had left in his bandolier, until she struck a spark that began to smolder.
Minutes later she had a small fire blazing.
You’re awfully handy to have around,” Alec told her. “For your next trick could you place more of your medicine on my wounds, then help me pull my pants back on? Before it gets dark, run out and get more ferns and bark from the leper bark cottonwood. Then we can make the poultice and settle in for the evening.” He closed his eyes, and grimaced in pain once again.
Jeswyne hitched up her skirt and did as asked one more time, then returned to a sleeping Alec and began mashing the materials together. By the time she had all that accomplished, the sun had set, and she began to smear the paste across his wounds by firelight, awakening him in the process.
“You have very gentle hands,” Alec told her, making her jump in surprise when she heard his voice. “You make a good healer.” She helped him pull his pants on, blushing again as she did so. “With your fair complexion, you turn the most remarkable shades of pink when you blush,” Alec observed. “And it rises all the way to your hair line!”
“You’d blush too if you were doing this for a complete stranger!” she retorted.
“You’re right,” he answered. “I remember the first time I had to apply medicine to wounds on an injured female; it would have been embarrassing, except that it made me so nervous – you see, her husband was standing right behind me, and he was a member of the Goldenfields Guard, armed with a sword!” Alec gave a little gurgle that was his weakest laugh, and pushed himself up into a sitting position.
“Lady Jeswyne, do you know how marvelous that medicine is?” Alec asked. “You know it’s made from two simple plants, just crushed together, yet it manages to stop bleeding, it prevents infection, and it reduces pain. All at the same time! Did you think you could do all that at once?” he smiled at her, and for the first time, as she looked at him in the firelight, she considered that underneath all the dirt and blood, he was a handsome boy, not so much older than she.
“Where are we? How did we get here?” she asked in response.
“And your third question is, how do we go home?” Alec spoke. An animal howled somewhere not too far away. “See that stick?” Alec pointed at a tree branch in the stack of firewood. “Hand it to me,” he told her, and picked up a knife to begin whittling a sharp point on the end of the shaft. He spoke as he whittled.
“When the demons were circling around us, there was something dangerous happening,” Alec began to explain.
“Well, yeah,” Jeswyne surprised herself by voicing her skepticism aloud in a sarcastic tone.
Alec responded to her grin with a lopsided smile of his own. “Well beyond the obvious, the energy that was building between them and me wasn’t something you could see, but it was dangerous too. And when it came to its climax, there was a great explosion, one that must have wiped out the demons, broke glass in the windows nearby, and probably raised a fountain from the waters below the ground.” He paused as he thought speculatively about the stream nearby.
“But we left there just before the explosion, so we didn’t see it,” he told her. “We saw a blue light, and then we left the scene of explosion.” He looked down absent-mindedly at his hands carving the point on the makeshift lance. His left hand was healed! The raw wound he had received from touching the body of Christ had closed over, leaving a clean scar. He flexed the hand studying it in wonder.
“Is that all you know?” Jeswyne asked after a minute.
“What? No. I’m sorry,” Alec answered. He looked up from the hand and stared into her face. “This is something very special,” he said softly
“I am an ingenaire. Do you know what that means?” he asked.
“That is the word you use for wizards,” Jeswyne responded.
“Yes, basically,” Alec agreed. “There are different types of ingenairii. I have a few different skills, and one of them is as a time ingenairii. I can manipulate time.
“But I can’t do it very well. I’ve learned the theory of how to move through time, but I haven’t done it very often, just a couple of times,” he told her. “In our case though, just before the explosion occurred, I was able to use my powers to take us away from the explosion. We didn’t move from the spot we were in, we just changed the date we were here.”
“What date is this?” Jeswyne asked, not completely comprehending.
“I just tried to jump to a date as far from the explosion as possible. My guess is that we came back to a time before people lived in Oyster Bay,” Alec answered. “I don’t know how far back, but as badly as I wanted to get away from there, I would guess we’re as far back in time as I am able to comprehend.”
Chapter 33 – Alec Without Powers
“So when will you take us back there?” Jeswyne asked. “And what will you do with me when we return?” she added a moment later.
“I am injured right now, in ways you can’t see,” Alec answered. “An ingenaire should only use one kind of power at a time. When an ingenaire has the ability to use more than one kind of power, we have to use only one at a time. As I was fighting the demons at the end, I was using two kinds of power at once, and even three powers together when we moved through time. That has crippled my ability to use my energies now.
“There was another battle I was in when I used two powers at once, and it took me a long time to recover,” he told her, not wanting to admit how difficult it had been to be cured, eventually needing the divine assistance of John Mark. He glanced down at his arms. Even in the dark he could see that his marks had grown dull and faded. He was truly powerless now, and he was trapped in a time where there were no friends – only this girl from Michian.
“It’s getting chilly,” Alec noted, feeling the air cooling after the sunset. “Put some more wood on the fire, and then, if you don’t mind, if you want, come over here and sit with me. We can keep each other warm.”
Jeswyne obediently added the fuel to their fire, then carefully sat down by Alec, sitting stiffly next to him. Alec closed his eyes, and tried to imagine how difficult the day had been for her.
“Tell me about your favorite person,” Alec said, wanting to make her feel better. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I am the Lady Jeswyne. I shall, at a proper place and proper time, become engaged to a suitable boy,” she said in formal tones. “You say that you are already engaged? When was that arranged? Who selected your bride for you?” She countered.
She turned her head obliquely. Alec’s eyes were still closed, and a small smile left a trace on his lips. “I was engaged when I was around nineteen or twenty, to a beautiful, charming, talented girl. We went on a trip together, and we stopped to see her parents,” Alec paused, and there was another hint of a smile. “I remember her father gave me permission to marry her, when I hadn’t even been ready to ask!” He chuckled as he remembered how bewildered he had felt when he left Bethany’s father following that conversation. He leaned back against a tree trunk.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to mount a watch tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow will be an important day. I may not wake up, Lady Jeswyne. Sooner or later I will fall asleep and stay asleep for several days. I’m surprised I’ve been conscious at all today – it comes from the problem I was telling you about before – using the two powers. My body has to recover from the damage I’ve done to it through that abuse.
“If I wake up tomorrow, we’ll try to move to a better place. If I sleep all day, you know what to do – gather fire wood, feed yourself, and treat my wounds,” he stopped talking, and began to breath in a deeper, regular pattern that indicated he was asleep.
Quietly, Jeswyne began to cry. She leaned against Alec, and cried over how utterly and completely her life was ruined. Even if nothing attacked them tonight, she was going to be stuck as the nursemaid to an invalid wizard for who-knew-how-long. Her tears flowed freely, soaking a patch of Alec’s tunic, as the Lady Jeswyne cried herself to sleep.
Alec woke when the sun was far overhead. Jeswyne was not with him, and he wondered what day it was. He felt weak, in a way that reminded him of his time in Bondell, when he had first made the mistake of using two powers, and had been feeble until John Mark had miraculously healed him. He had no idea of where he could turn to find a sacred site here, and no one to ask. And no idea what a dryad was.
Preserving the Ingenairii Page 23
