At the Seat of Power: Goldenfields and the Dominion

by Jeffrey Quyle

  Chapter 4 – Moriah’s Candle

  “Alec, hello. I guess Rubicon was right about you being a fast worker,” she smiled at him as the brush rhythmically stroked through her straight long auburn tresses.

  Alec took two steps back from the door, completely unnerved. “I’m sorry, Moriah,” he said. “I don’t know where my luggage is and I wanted to unpack it, so I started checking rooms to see where I was assigned. My apologies, Moriah, for interrupting. I’ll just go keep looking now,” he said and he backed down the hall. Alec knew that his knock on her door did indeed look contrived after Rubicon’s jests this morning, and that he was not going to recover his dignity in any fashion from his predicament.

  “Oh, Alec!” Moriah started laughing. “You’re priceless! Don’t worry, I’m not going to bite you. As a matter of fact I believe you completely because I saw the porter place your bags in the room next door at sunset. We’re going to be neighbors; all your things are right there,” she said, pointing to the door fifteen feet from her own.

  “If you need anything, let me know. Like if you need a recipe for blue bellies,” she said, looking at the fish he was still carrying, “let me know. Not that I’ll have one, since I don’t think there’s any way known to man to make them edible. What are you doing with them anyway?”

  “The fishermen at the village told me the same thing but I don’t want to eat them. I want to harvest their glands; I think that when dried out and ground up, they can be used to help heal lung problems,” Alec said.

  Alec had never seen a person’s jaw drop before, but he would swear forever that Moriah demonstrated it right there. She looked at him quizzically. “Blue belly glands as medicine? Can I watch you harvest them?” she asked, apparently skeptical about his plan.

  That was the one thing Alec would not have expected her to say at that moment. “Well sure, let me unpack some things, and we’ll get going. Can you bring a candle or lantern? I don’t know where they’re kept,” he asked, and walked down to the door that led to his own room.

  He walked inside, and by the dim light from the hallway he could see his bags sitting atop the standard bed, next to the standard desk and chair. He opened one bag and reached in, pulling out his Guard sword, which he put down to keep searching. Feeling around inside, he pulled out his medical kit, and a sharp knife to dissect the fish.

  The room brightened, and Moriah was in the doorway with a candle in hand. She was looking at the sword, and stepped over to pick it up and look at it, as might be expected of a warrior ingenaire.

  “What a wonderful instrument!” she said. She set the candle down on the desk and pulled the sword out of the scabbard, examining the steel closely. She held it carefully in her right hand and tried a thrust and a parry move. Then she put it back in the scabbard.

  “Very nice metal work. It felt a little awkward, but I’m sure it suits you well,” she said.

  “It does, especially since I’m left-handed,” Alec said, standing to take the blade and handle it himself. He lost himself for a long minute in the pleasure of the weight and balance of the finely honed blade that was designed just for him.

  He turned to put it away, and saw Moriah smiling at him. “It would suit a left hand much better. You look very good with it. That was enough to convince me that your scar really is a dueling scar,” she said putting a finger to his cheek. “Were you fighting over a lady’s love?”

  Alec couldn’t decide at first how to answer. Moriah noticed his hesitation. “Actually, it was given to me by a lady who didn’t like the fact that she thought I did love the wrong woman in the wrong way,” he said softly.

  “It’s a beautiful blade, good enough to serve in an honor guard,” Moriah said to change the awkward subject.

  “Shall we take care of these fish?” Alec said, brandishing his knife.

  “Alec, why don’t we do this outside, so your room won’t smell like fish blood for the next week?” Moriah suggested. “It’s totally up to you, of course.”

  Alec couldn’t find any argument against the suggestion; in fact, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come up with that notion himself.

  By the light of Moriah’s candle they walked out into the woods near the house, and laid the fish on the ground. Alec saw exactly where he wanted to cut each one to harvest the small bit of flesh he sought, and it took only a few seconds with each fish to cut out the glands he wanted. “That’s all you need?” Moriah asked.

  “That’s all we need from these fish. I’d say I need about two dozen more fish to have enough to make a full treatment,” Alec said.

  “And what exactly will you do with these fish guts, I mean fish glands?” Moriah asked.

  “I will dry them, then soak them in broth of brothersfoot leaves, then let them dry again. After that I just have to grind them as finely as possible and bake them afterwards, then take the powder up to an orphanage in Frame, where there’s a little girl with chronic lung problems, who will die before the end of winter without this,” Alec said, looking down at the handful of soft material he held. “As a matter of fact, she’s a freckled red-head, about nine or ten years old, and a nice girl who deserves more than living in an orphanage and dying young from a disease.”

  They started walking silently back towards the house, as Moriah glanced out of the corner of her eye at the inscrutable new apprentice. “Maybe you’re not what Ruby made you out to be after all,” Moriah said as they walked down the hallway. “Here, you keep the candle so you can see to unpack. I’ve got another one in my room. Good night, Alec, and thanks for taking care of red-heads,” she said with a smile, and shut her door.

  Alec stood in the hallway for a moment, then smiled and walked back to his own room. He placed the fish parts carefully on the windowsill so they could dry, than unpacked his belongings. Most of his desk he used for the medical materials he had, while his clothes went into the closet, his dress uniform from the Guard, the anonymous gift delivered by his Guard friend Ellison, he carefully shook out, then refolded, and set up on the highest shelf in the closet.

  His packing complete, Alec sat on the bed, blew out the candle, and lay down for a good night’s sleep after a long, exhausting day. As he lay there he faintly heard coming through the wall the soft sound of Moriah gently singing a lullaby, and with that in his ears, Alec fell asleep in his new home.

  Chapter 5 – A Visit to the Palace

  The next morning Alec awoke early. He washed briefly in the common wetroom down the hallway, then went upstairs to the balcony, where Rubicon was waiting for him. “Good morning Alec. Did you sleep well last night?” the teacher asked.

  “Very well, thank you,” Alec said with a smile. “How did you sleep?”

  “Pretty well too, once the racket outside from a couple of flirting kids ended,” Rubicon said with a smile. “Enough of that. Here’s what I want you to know Alec. We know that you can draw power as a warrior ingenaire, and you’re reasonably reliable at this point in bringing it to this world with you. You need to develop the ability to latch onto it instantaneously, and that will come through some boring but simple repetitive exercises and oversight.”

  “That’s one of the four points we’re going to work on – first, you’ve got to be able to unleash the power quickly. The second is to use your power efficiently. There are times when you should be able to draw your power out for extended periods of time for use. Although it doesn’t really happen in our age, the battlefield is an example of that. You might need to stay energized for hours on end in order to survive all the violence occurring in a battle.

  “The third point is using the appropriate energy. This is very similar to the second one, efficiency, but a little different. If you match the amount of power you use precisely to the amount you need, that’s efficient and appropriate. But sometimes it’s not just the amount of power, but as you’ll learn, the type of power, the type of weapon. You’ll learn how to alter your image to emphasize certain skills for certain occasions.”

&n
bsp; “The final point will be learning how to be flexible in your use of energy. Our good ingenairii can actually fluctuate the amount of energy they control without shutting it off, so they can use a little for a long time, boost it up to a significant level as needed, then reduce it back down to the small thread of power again, alternating rapidly and frequently, and adjust it to the type of battle they’re in to boot.”

  “Alec, if we can teach you to do all that effectively in just two months, I’ll have earned a medal. We may not get it all done, but everything we can teach you will make you that much better as a warrior,” Rubicon concluded. “Those are the general themes I want you to focus on. I think that knowing that in advance should help you to focus your attention on your studies.

  “Let’s begin today’s efforts with just reaching and distributing your power more quickly. I’d like for you to be able to just blink your eyes and have your body ready to go. You can do that, but you need to practice. So today I want you to try to draw the power each time I say go, and when you have it, say ‘now’. We’ll keep track of it and I’ll bet we see an improvement in your time. Go back to just calling up your sword level image, the low energy level this time. When I say go, begin. ‘Go!’”

  Several seconds later, Alec shouted out “Now!” as he frantically wove his way into the power realm and then back out. “You would have been dead several times over in a real crisis,” you know,” Rubicon told him. “But for now you did fine. Alec spent half the morning repeating over and over the simple exercise with Rubicon. He’d go between the barriers to the energy realm, recreate the image and capture the power, then return to the real world.

  They stopped some time after sunrise to eat breakfast. During the meal they were then joined by the other apprentice in Rubicon’s house, Nathaniel. Rubicon asked Nathaniel to take over the training of Alec for the remainder of the morning, as had apparently been pre-arranged, then left.

  Three or four years older than Alec, Nathaniel was a very quiet man, who made little conversation. He answered Alec’s questions politely but perfunctorily, and focused on Alec’s exercises. Yet Alec had a feeling that behind his reserve Nathaniel was thinking a great deal, and he wondered what topics would make him open up. At one point he suggested Alec change his habit. “You close your eyes while you seek the power, and that will be a dangerous habit for several reasons, as I’m sure will be obvious to you if you think about it. It’s better to quit it now and learn to find the power while alert to the world around you, especially when you’re a warrior. For a spirit or fire ingenaire, closing eyes may not make a difference, but if you’re in a dangerous place, or if you don’t want to tip people off to what you’re doing, it doesn’t suit a warrior.”

  Alec couldn’t argue with his logic, and resolved to try finding his power with his eyes open. He found the practice to be very hard and slow. With his eyes closed he had started to achieve his strength faster and faster, but now he felt like he was starting all over, especially because he took so long to find his spot between the barriers when so many things could distract him.

  By lunchtime he had only achieved his goal a few times. Rubicon came to the balcony entrance. “Gentlemen that will be enough for today. Thank you Nathaniel for your help, and I’ll expect you again tomorrow. Alec, your lunch appointment is here.”

  Alec followed Rubicon to a small room next to the kitchen, where Aristotle was already seated.

  “Hello Alec, I understand from Rubicon that you have shown him extraordinary strength in achieving ingenaire powers,” Ari greeted him.

  “Alec, I was telling Aristotle that from what I saw yesterday, you have enormous potential. Most warriors, when they call upon their power reach enough energy to fight two or three men at a time. You can easily bring enough for five or six at a time it appears to me, and when you reached for your maximum ability, I think you were up at the level of fighting a dozen men or so all at once,” Rubicon told him appreciatively.

  Although he tried not to, Alec grinned at that.

  “Enough of swelling your head with praise. What has your first day been like in Oyster Bay? What interests you most?” Ari asked.

  “I hardly know yet. I’d like to learn where I could practice swordsmanship, and where I could purchase a practice sword, I wonder why we don’t communicate with the fishing village next to us, and I would like to know what it would take to re-establish the house of the healing ingenairii? Plus, I want to know if I can go to Frame sometime to tend to a dying girl in an orphanage?” Alec rattled through the list of things he had thought of already while at Oyster Bay.

  Rubicon started laughing. “Sword practice for a warrior ingenaire sounds crazy to me, but we can arrange it, and I’d tell you to go to the pawn shops between the docks and the army barracks to buy a practice sword. All the rest I’ll leave to you, Air.”

  Ari looked at him thoughtfully. “I think at the appropriate time you can legitimately re-establish the healing house, in fact, I have already had some research done on that, so let’s not talk about it any further for now. When the day comes that you pass the healers’ test, you may have a four-day pass to go to Frame. And as for the fishing village, what would you like for us to do?”

  “Well, we could buy fish from them, and perhaps send some metal apprentices to practice working on their ships and homes. Those seem like reasonable things to me. I was down there last night, and they did not have any good feelings towards us as their neighbors who ignore them,” Alec told him.

  “Frankly, I suppose we do ignore them; honestly, we’re terrible neighbors for folks on all sides of us – the fishermen shouldn’t feel slighted because they’re treated as badly as everyone else, but I doubt they know that or care. We’re an insular group here, self-satisfied and smug, and even if we didn’t think so highly of ourselves, the rest of the world tends to shy away from us when we do engage with them. I tell you what we can do; we are going to host the Apprentice’s Ball in our grand hall in a few weeks time. I will direct the cooks to prepare a number of fish dishes for that event, and you may tell your fishermen what fish is required by the chef. We’ll buy their catch from your friends. You will have a list of fish the cooks need in a couple of days. Will that help for now?”

  “Yes, I think it would. I’ll need to go back there anyway. Some of their fish provide the ingredients I need for the cure for the little girl’s chest cough,” Alec said

  Rubicon had looked in amazement at Ari when he had agreed that the healing house could be re-established. He listened thoughtfully to the discussion about the fishing village.

  “Now, what else is there you would like to know?” Ari asked.

  “How long will the other apprentices play pranks on me?”

  “It depends on how fun you are,” Aristotle responded gently. “If you get angry and make a spectacle, they’ll go at it all the harder for as long as they can. When Rubicon was an apprentice, one of his fellow newcomers was tormented for three months because he seemed so self-important, right Ruby?”

  “Fallion’s still self-important, and still fun to tease,” the warrior answered with grim satisfaction.

  The name rang a faint bell in Alec’s memory, which he couldn’t place. Shaking his head, Alec decided to move on. “I still don’t know what I don’t know to even know what to ask,” Alec said with a smile.

  “There’s true wisdom,” Rubicon said.

  “Alec, in that case, I want you to listen, because I want to be able to rely on you, just as I rely on Rubicon and a few others. There are portentous times approaching, and you are in a position to be deeply involved in protecting the interests of our people and our values. I told you yesterday, I think God has a plan for you, or rather you are an important part of the plan God has for all of us. It’s your responsibility to try to do all that you can to live up to his hopes for you and your own potential to deliver good into an often times naughty world,” Ari said, with no smile on his face.

  Alec felt a chill run down his spine at
the words.

  “You and I know the lacertii are alive in the Pale Mountains. I believe that there is an evil power that is using them for its purposes; they are not an evil people in themselves, but they are being driven to do us harm. I think that in the next few months we will see three things attempted by that evil power to weaken the Dominion, so that the evil may reign over all of us. One of those things will be an effort to kill Duke Toulon of Goldenfields. Another will be to kill the King, and empty the throne. And especially if both those are accomplished, but probably even if they are not, the lacertii will invade our lands. And like a dark cloud on the horizon, I fear there is even more, and more monstrous, unpleasantry beyond those things.”

  “How do you know these things?” Alec asked. He could not imagine such a string of terrible actions falling upon society.

  “I have studied many ancient texts and prophecies, and some histories from the last lacertii wars. There are signs that appear unmistakable to me. Some things I am trying to put to the test right now by carefully asking our own prophecy ingenairii questions,” Ari went on. “But they are such tenuous responses that one has to be careful to pick the right question. Beyond that, when one looks at the strengths we have, and those that are most vulnerable, some targets seem likely.

  “I am working to build the strength we need to win this battle. Right now I am building it here in Oyster Bay. But we also must have strength in Goldenfields, to fight with and for the Duke. When your training is done here, I will rely on you and Merle as the heart of our strength in Goldenfields, especially you.

  “I told you God has a plan. I think that having you to protect the Duke, and to fight for the Duke, in Goldenfields, is a big part of that plan. The lacertii attack will come at Goldenfields first, because it is the largest and strongest duchy in the Dominion, and if it can be broken, the others will fall apart. Plus, the Duke is clearly destined to be the next ruler of the Dominion, until the new king arises, and if he is killed, there will be no hope for a strong king to replace the failing weak man who sits on the throne now.