Gently, Alec led the yielding Jeswyne back two steps, and knelt them both down. He scooped some of the water in his hand. It felt refreshing, and he used it to bathe away the tears that streaked down Jeswyne’s blotchy face. She grew calm as Alec continued to cradle handful after handful of the cool liquid to her face, now on one cheek, now on the other, with some on her forehead and the nape of her neck.
He did not count the number of times he stroked her face with his damp hands, until a moment came when he realized that Jeswyne was breathing calmly, her eyes closed. He placed his arms beneath her and braced himself, then raised her back to an upright position.
She opened her eyes and looked up in his face. “They can’t be revived?” she asked in a calmer, wistful tone.
Alec shook his head, closed his eyes, and leaned down, pulling her head against his shoulder.
“Then take me home so we can begin to fix things up as best we can,” she said with a quiet sigh.
“We will, love,” he agreed quietly, and engaged his powers to start the trip to travel back to Michian in multiple steps.
Instead, John Mark returned them directly to the scene of the ruined wedding, where they heard Anatoli speak.
“You are the next in line of succession. You are the empress. And the demonslayer is correct at least in part, they did set your father’s mind on the course to usurp the throne. They told him constantly that he needed to save the empire by removing Mikhail,” Anatoli confirmed. “We will follow you, especially if he is fighting for you,” he added as he motioned towards Alec.
Alec looked at Jeswyne, startled to hear the Guard commander repeat the comments he had made just before they left in the vain effort to travel through time.
“I’ll fight for her, but occasionally I’ll need your protection from her as well,” Alec said, the words coming out of his mouth without his knowledge. There were slight smiles around the conversation.
Alec felt shock at the manipulation taking place. The trip to the cave had been handled as though it had never taken place. No one but he and Jeswyne were even aware of it, as the conversation flowed on past the interruption that had now never happened.
“Yes, you will,” Jeswyne calmly replied, as Givens escorted two men to the crowd that was standing around the new monarch. “But these guards will be loyal to me first, over you. Don’t forget that.” Alec admired the ease with which she resumed the flow of the conversation after their hiatus in the cave, and he wondered if she had also been manipulated to give the correct answer.
Focusing on the scenario they were not destined to live with, Alec watched as Givens’ two captives were forced to kneel on the ground in the middle of the circle. Alec cautiously used his spiritual powers to judge the honesty of their words as the interrogation was about to commence. He placed a hand on each man’s shoulder as he stood behind them, and sensed the forlorn fear that was within them.
“Ask them questions, and I will tell you if they are answering truthfully or not,” Alec told Jeswyne and Anatoli as he faced them.
“What are your names?” Anatoli asked.
“Rastid,” one said. “Annylev,” replied the other.
“Annylev is lying,” Alec pronounced.
“Arkydy,” the man corrected.
“That is the truth,” Alec affirmed.
“Why were you in the balcony during the wedding?” Anatoli asked.
“We were protecting the sorceress,” Rastid answered. Alec nodded silently to acknowledge the truth.
“Did you know the sorceress was going to unleash a demon at the wedding?” the commander questioned.
“Yes,” Arkydy said. “No,” Rastid answered.
“Rastid is lying,” Alec corrected.
“I knew,” Rastid glumly admitted.
“Who sent you to do this?” Anatoli bore in on the question at hand.
“Mikhail’s agents,” Rastid answered.
“He’s lying,” Alec judged.
“The Scarle clan,” Arkydy offered quickly.
“He’s lying too,” Alec responded again.
“If you lie again, you will answer the rest of our questions under different circumstances. Do you understand?” Anatoli asked, as Jeswyne remained silent by his side.
“A man wearing the colors of the Duchess Bogdana paid us,” Rastid answered fearfully.
Alec nodded in acknowledgement of the truth.
“Jeswyne,” Alec spoke up. “Before you do anything else, can you send a restorer to countermand the order to resume the war? A lot of people will die and we’ll never have trust between our nations again if your armies start to attack.”
“Anatoli, send a messenger right away to countermand the order. Please arrange an armed escort to take me to the palace to confront my aunt and uncle,” she responded to Alec’s request.
Stracha walked up to them at that point. “Those who are going to live are stable now,” she said. There were large dark rings under her eyes. “The priest is virtually healed. Would you like to finish the ceremony?”
Alec looked at her, wondering if she was joking, but Jeswyne replied immediately.
“Yes. Yes, we must not let this event be disrupted. We need to finish this,” she looked determinedly at Alec.
“I’m not objecting,” he held his hands up in front of him.
“It will be good for morale to know that the Demonslayer is officially your husband,” Anatoli added slyly.
“So she should marry me as a matter of state policy?” Alec asked.
“I am a canny one,” Jeswyne said shrewdly, and Alec was glad to see that she was not completely beat down by the horrific situation they faced.
The priest was wild-eyed, but surprisingly sympathetic, and insisted it was only right that they carry the ceremony to its conclusion, especially since there were only a few steps left. Alec stood as directed and performed as instructed, but in the confusion of the circumstances only really felt emotion when the time came to kiss the bride. “I remember when we sat on the beach and kissed for the first time,” Alec told her, trying to put all the pain of the past hours out of mind, and then he kissed her with the same passion they had felt in that first kiss.
“Now,” she said, “would be a good time for your ingenaire travel powers to take us away to some private place.
“But we need to be responsible for a while longer,” she concluded, even as Alec was thinking of where they could go, and he glumly reverted to thinking about the issues at hand.
With several guards in attendance, the new couple walked back towards the palace, and messengers sent out by Anatoli brought more forces to join them along the way, so that it was a sizable group of soldiers who reached the closed gates of the palace.
“I’ll deal with this,” Alec said, and before anyone could react he drew the sword he had borrowed and translocated himself to the inside of the gate.
A handful of soldiers stood inside the gate at ground level, while others were mounted along the walls above them. “Open the gates, and you will be given a chance to plead your case that you are not actively involved in supporting a mutiny,” Alec announced loudly to the startled guards. “If you do not open the gate, you are condemned to be treated as mutineers.”
A man at the top of the nearby wall shot an arrow at Alec in response. Before the arrow could reach him, Alec translocated to a spot behind the man, and he clove his sword downward, slicing deep into his flesh.
“Now is the time to decide whose side you are on,” Alec warned. He translocated himself back to the ground, and began to lift the bar that held the gates shut. A man stepped forward to help him.
“They told me the emperor and all his family were dead,” the man pleaded with Alec as he helped open the gate.
“They told me too,” another man confirmed as he too began to help open the way, and the rest of the ground-level soldiers eagerly opened the way for Jeswyne’s forces to enter the palace.
“Anatoli,” Alec said as the first men entered the gates. “You may want
to do something to identify your forces – make them wear hats or tie a ribbon on their arms – so your men know each other for the next couple of hours in here.”
The guard commander agreed, and soon a drapery was cut into blue strips that were tied on the arms of Jeswyne’s loyal forces, who took Bogdana and Leonyd into custody without a battle in the palace as the forces there hastily switched allegiance to Jeswyne. They were brought to stand before Jeswyne in the throne room.
The erstwhile empress was defiant, and her husband even more so. At first she insisted she believed that everyone had died at the wedding.
“Why weren’t you at the wedding yourself?” Alec asked.
“We wanted to stay at the palace to protect it for Sergey, in case Mikhail tried to usurp the throne during the wedding,” Bogdana lamely explained.
“So you had him murdered?” Anatoli asked, and she refused to answer.
Her husband turned defiant. “We couldn’t allow the Demonslayer to become part of the imperial family; he is a barbarian. We were protecting the interests of Michian.
“If you don’t listen to us, soon he’ll be on the throne, destroying our nation,” Leonyd screamed as he pointed towards the seat where Jeswyne sat with a thunderous scowl on her face. “It’s bad enough we have to listen to his barbarous accent within the palace.”
“I will be the ruler here,” Jeswyne said calmly. “He will be the ruler in the Dominion.
“Take them to the gallows,” she said after taking a deep breath. “We need to settle this now, so it doesn’t fester the way uncle Mikhail and father’s problems did.”
Alec was shocked at the pragmatic decisiveness his new bride showed, but said nothing as he privately agreed, and the two usurpers were taken from the throne room screaming.
“Do we know whether the messenger to the army was successful in preventing further war?” Alec asked. “I'd like to travel there to reassure both armies that there will not be any hostilities.”
Within an hour, both he and Jeswyne had changed into clean clothes suitable for imperial leaders, and were astride restorers. They and a retinue of guards arrived at the army headquarters in Bondell, where no hostilities had yet been launched by General Bronson, who was leery of the new imperial name signed to the inexplicable order to attack. Bronson had taken his time moving forces around slowly, and had welcomed the counter order that had arrived later.
“And so the Demonslayer is now the consort of the Empress of Michian?” Bronson asked. “And the Empress is the Queen of the Dominion?”
“It doesn’t really seem fair that she gets to be a queen, while I’m only a consort,” Alec complained.
“But you get to be my consort,” Jeswyne emphasized, to which Alec wisely chose to say nothing in disagreement, despite the close examination he received from her golden eyes.
They soon crossed the lines to the Dominion forces, where the news that Jeswyne had been elevated to the throne of Michian was greeted with satisfaction. Arrangements were made to lead a restorer across the lines, and to have it shipped back to the palace in Oyster Bay, where it would stand as a means of instant transport for the doubly royal couple.
Over the next several days, Alec and Jeswyne moved back and forth between Michian, the battlefield and Oyster Bay, attending a series of functions and beginning to bring stability and assurance to the Dominion. They agreed that they would need to separate to achieve their many different duties, for a time only meeting for ceremonial functions while they individually traveled as their responsibilities dictated.
A midday encounter came by chance one day when they were alone, and Alec began to delicately touch on the issue of their foiled journey through time. He felt the need to know how much anger still resided in his wife’s heavy heart.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what happened in John Mark’s cave,” he opened the conversation.
“That was such a wonderful place. I wish I hadn’t been there in such terrible circumstances,” Jeswyne answered promptly, confusing Alec with her positive response.
“Even after the time travel failed?” Alec asked in confusion.
“What failed?” Jeswyne promptly asked. “I woke up there and was healed from the demon’s wounds, and we spoke with John Mark and came back here. Was there time travel in there too?”
Alec stood silent momentarily. He realized that Jeswyne apparently had no recollection of their second trip to the cave, the unplanned trip. How could that be, he wondered. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and stepped into another room.
Was Jeswyne’s memory faulty or was his? Had she forgotten the events, or had he only imagined them. Maybe it was possible still to go back in time and prevent the massacre at the wedding, if he hadn’t tried to do so yet. Thinking carefully, he used his time travel powers and projected himself back to the morning of the wedding.
And he wound up again in the entryway of John Mark’s Cave. So he wasn’t crazy; they had tried to change history. Why hadn’t Jeswyne remembered?
“Because you bathed away her pain and her fear,” John Mark told him. “You used the water from this chamber to sooth her and calm her. And the water took away her pain as well as the anger and the fear. It made her calm, and is the beginning of a conversion, Alec.
“You may not go back to change the events that occurred at your wedding. That is still forbidden,” John Mark continued. “So return to your wife and live the good life you have earned.” With that the saint disappeared, and Alec was left alone. Taking a deep breath, he began the series of jumps that took him back to his home in the palace at Michian, where he held his puzzled but pleased young bride in a long, silent hug.
Chapter 59 – Affairs of State
The night finally came when Alec and Jeswyne nervously prepared to go to bed in their Michian palace as a married couple for the first time.
“Oh Alec, we will never have time for a honeymoon, will we? There are two nations that have so many issues we have to take care of,” Jeswyne said wistfully.
Alec was nervously considering how to present a gift to his bride, and her comment triggered a thought.
“Stay right here. I’ll be back,” he spoke quickly, and bolted out the door before she could respond. He walked at a rapid pace through the palace halls to the kitchen, where a startled cook soon found herself filling a large bag with a seemingly random supply of foodstuffs and spices. “Thank you,” Alec told her, and disappeared before her eyes, leaving her to wonder what marriage to a barbarian would be like.
Alec popped into the armory to acquire a set of swords, a bow and quiver of arrows, and a bandolier of knives, and then he returned to Jeswyne’s room with his load of booty.
Jeswyne was sitting on the bed nervously. “Alec, what in the world? Is this some Dominion custom?”
“Come here, my queen and empress,” Alec said, and he enfolded her in a tight hug with his bag of food between them.
“We will have a honeymoon,” he said. And they translocated to the army base in Bondell.
“In the perfect spot,” he told her there and kissed her, then translocated to the beachfront along Oyster Bay.
“Here we can be as happy as we want, for as long as you want,” he added, and then he used his time traveling abilities to take them to a sunny late afternoon on the beach.
“This is the day after we left our beach home. There’s no one here but us. I’ve got enough food for a few days if we add some fish and game and plants from time to time,” he released her from the tight embrace, and dropped the food stuffs to the ground.
“But first,” he pulled a golden wad of cloth out of the bag, “we must attend to some customs.” He swept her suddenly up into his arms, and began to carry her to the simple hut in the trees.
“You told me once that a groom was supposed to pick up his bride and carry her,” Alec said.
“You remember that? I was so surprised and embarrassed that I admitted that was what I thought of,” Jeswyne said, remembering clearl
y the evening they started their return through time.
Alec carried her into the hut. “And this is a Dominion custom. A bride should wrap this cloth around her,” he pulled out the long strip of golden cloth that reminded him of her eyes, “so that it looks like a dress.”
“I don’t know how they wrap it,” Jeswyne protested.
“That’s alright,” Alec assured her. “Because after the bride puts it on, the groom gets to take it off!”
“Oh Alec,” Jeswyne blushed. “Turn around and don’t peek,” she commanded, and Alec nervously listened to the rustle of cloth behind his back.
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