Alec grinned, then waited a minute for the girls to continue on their way, unaware of the work he had done. He walked to where his knife was embedded in a tree trunk. He retrieved the knife and picked up the length of cloth that lay on the ground, then whistled as he climbed up the hill to Rubicon’s house.
When he got there he went to the balcony. Moriah was sitting there with the breakfast tray. She stood when she saw him. “I know you’re upset this morning. Would you like me to leave?” she asked gently.
He laid the strip of cloth on the table and picked up a piece of fruit.
“What is this?” she asked as she picked up the many pieces of colored materials, beginning to come apart as the threads between them came unraveled. “This looks like a piece of very pretty and expensive fabric. Where did you find it?”
Alec told her the story of what had happened. Moriah burst out laughing. “Oh Alec! That girl is going to want to have your head on a platter when she figures out what happened! But I’d say you won this round. You’re sure it was a blond girl?”
“That was the first thing I noticed, the curly blond hair that ran down her back,” Alec responded. “The last thing I noticed was that she wore blue panties,” he grinned. “Which seems appropriate for a water ingenaire.”
“Do you have any plans today?” Alec asked his friend, deciding to move on to another topic.
“No, nothing I can’t change,” she answered as she eyed him curiously.
“Will you spend the day with me? I need someone; I need a friend and a helper,” he told her, looking directly into her eyes.
She saw something in his expression that frightened her even as it compelled her. “Tell me what I can do to help,” Moriah said quietly.
“Something was taken, and I feel like I must do something to compensate,” Alec said. “I don’t know if that’s some mixed up healer concept, or a commandment from the Lord, but I feel it strongly. There is a girl in the fisher village whose life is terrible because her legs are misshapen. I feel I must heal her today, and somehow that may atone slightly for the harm done to Noranda,” Alec said.
“You didn’t do the harm to Noranda, Alec. Someone else stabbed her. But if you think you can do something that you must do, I will help you,” Moriah told him.
“Let’s go down there right now and start. This will take at least all day,” Alec said, leading his uncertain friend off the balcony, he stopped in his room to leave his piece of Bethany’s skirt as an unconventional trophy, then proceeded, with Moriah alongside.
They walked down the hill to the village, which was empty of people as the morning chores took them off in all directions.
“Cassie?” Alec asked at the door to the hut.
“Alec? Are you back to see me?” the girl asked. “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t be back.”
Alec and Moriah entered the hut. “Good morning Cassie. This is Moriah,” he made introductions briefly. “I’m sorry I’ve been gone longer than I expected, but some things happened. Have you been applying the medicines I gave you?”
The girl cheerfully replied that she had followed his directions. “Good. I think we want to start healing you even more today,” Alec told her. “And to do that, I need to take you up to our ingenairii house. Would that be okay with you?”
“Alec, if you think that’s best, I’ll trust you,” the girl said.
“In that case, I’m going to carry you on my back,” Alec said. “I want you to put your arms around my neck and hold on tight when I stand,” he said as he knelt down with his back to her. “Moriah, please pick up all the medicines I left here. We may still need those.”
He felt Cassie’s arms ring around his neck and her hands lock together. He stood and she rose up into the air with a squeal of delight. “Hold on tight,” he warned her, and they began the long climb up the hillside.
When they finally reached Rubicon’s house, Alec took Cassie into an empty room and let her lay on a bed there. “We’ll be right back,” he told her and stepped out into the hall with Moriah.
“What are you going to do, Alec?” Moriah asked him.
“I am going to use the four strengths of a healer to fix her legs, and possibly treat the other smaller things too, if I have power enough left. I studied those old texts from the healers of the past, and now I understand; when I was at the cathedral today, it all made sense. The old papers talked about the compassion that comes from pain,” he said, thinking of Noranda. “I know what to do,” he softly muttered, rambling as he tried to put words to the concepts he had absorbed in recent days.
“Go in and administer the medicines you carried up. Cassie knows what to do with them. Tell her I need to spend about a half hour preparing some things and then I will be in to treat her a little more. Don’t tell her I’m working on her legs; I don’t want her to get too agitated,” Alec said.
Alec went to his work room and began fixing three concoctions. One was to administer to Cassie to give her body nutrients and minerals it could use for growing new flesh and bone. One was to rub on the outside of her legs, while the third was to sedate her so she would sleep through his work.
When he returned to see Cassie, she was lying comfortably on the bed. Alec suspected it was the most comfortable surface she’d ever had to sleep on. He told Moriah to begin massaging the salve into Cassie legs, while he gave her the sedative, and then the other medication.
He watched as she grew sleepy and groggy, then fell soundly asleep.
“Okay Moriah, I am going to call upon my healer powers to treat each leg. I will treat each one, in different spots, one location at a time. It will take a long time to do this. I know that I am going to grow tired after a while, and when I do, I will ask you to give me your strength. I want you to call upon your power, then put you hand on my arm and let me use your powers to help finish this job. I’ve done something like this before, so you don’t have to worry. In the meantime, if you’d like to go get our lunch and some water and bring those things down here, it will help us sustain ourselves during this.”
Moriah silently nodded, then sat on the bed beside Cassie and watched Alec begin.
Alec momentarily thought about Noranda, and the powers he would have to use to heal her when the chance came. The four powers of a healing ingenaire would have to be as perfectly melded together then as they had been when the ancient healers had practiced and written of their actions. He hoped that he would be able to bring those four tools together at the right time for Noranda, and right now for Cassie, and achieve healing as he intended.
The determined ingenaire used his health vision to look at Cassie’s hips and her thighs and her calves. He’d have to start with the muscles in her hips, he decided, to loosen them up so that the rest of the legs would be able to move as they were lengthened. He placed his hands on her hips, and called upon his ingenaire powers in a way he’d never done before; he imagined the image of himself as a healer, with the caduceus imprinted upon his forearm and the knowledge about healing imprinted on his brain, and absorbed the energy, then took it and channeled it into Cassie’s body, lengthening and reshaping the tendons and muscles that gave the hips control over the thighs. He felt the shape improve, and saw inside that they were relaxing into a position appropriate for their intended function.
Alec stopped, and reached down. He took the weak legs that hung uselessly below Cassie’s waist, and without the tension from the misshapen hips, he straightened the legs out. He stopped for a few moments to rest, and realized that Moriah had left the room.
He gathered himself back to the present, and next selected the left thigh, and again placed both hands around it. He let the energy flow from his hands into Cassie’s leg, bringing energy and minerals and blood together and growing the leg bone longer by a short amount, then switching focus and growing the muscle and flesh and veins to match the new longer thigh, then repeating the process, little by little, as his fingers gently ran up and down her thigh constantly.
“Alec, it
’s time to have some lunch. You can take a break,” Moriah told him in a quavering voice. “Is it alright to interrupt?”
He opened his eyes, exhausted from the task. Looking down he saw that the left appendage was already twelve inches longer than the right. “Yes, it’s fine to interrupt for a few seconds, but no longer than that,” he replied as he studied Cassie’s slumbering form. He turned around to eat some food, and saw that he had visitors, Rubicon, and Aristotle, and some others who Rubicon had introduced him to, Genia and Peter and Portia, were watching his labor.
“Alec, are you sure you can do this?” Aristotle asked him.
Alec took a piece of fruit. “I have to do this. I have to make a life better,” he said.
Alec ate a few more bites in silence, then returned to working on Cassie. He moved over to her right thigh and began the same long tedious process of matching bone to flesh in growth. He moved down to her right calf and repeated the process, adding more inches of growth. He began to softly chant prayers as he worked, and drew strength from the words of praise. He called softly, “Moriah,” and felt her hand on the back of his shoulder, and then he took the power she offered and mixed it in with his own diminishing strength as he worked on the left calf.
He felt a closeness to Moriah he hadn’t felt when he’d taken the other ingenaire’s power at the riverside camp, perhaps because he better understood what he was handling, perhaps because he and she trusted each other, maybe because so much of his own power was also mingling with hers, or perhaps it was a holy rite that they shared solemnly and joyfully. He worked his way through the rest of the process of the left calf, until he was sure it was done. He then began to repeat the whole course of strengthening each portion of her newly shaped legs, giving them consistency of strength throughout.
Alec leaned forward so that he was almost lying on top of the girl and placed both hands on her head. He said a final prayer of thanks and benediction, and sent a surge of power into Cassie to unify and tie together all the works being performed on her.
There was a glimmer from her body in the nearly dark room, and then sudden darkness.
Alec gave a sigh of relief. The job was done, and the work was good; he felt it. “Thank you, Lord,” he said, before he collapsed into unconsciousness, filled for the second time in a row with an unexpected feeling of peace unlike any he’d experienced before.
Chapter 13 – Cassie’s Second Birth
Alec awakened late the next morning, the sun already shining brightly. With his first conscious thought he knew immediately that he needed to go see Cassie. He pulled on a loose robe and started to walk down the hall, surprised at how feeble he felt. Not only was his body weak, but his stomach was queasy and he suffered from a headache.
When he looked into Cassie’s room she was sitting up in bed, with Moriah handing her fruit slices for breakfast. Cassie saw Alec and started to cry. Moriah instantly began to cry as well. Seeing the two women cry, Alec began to cry too.
“Alec. You did it! It worked! Everything is fine. Cassie, show him,’ Moriah said, pulling the sheets off the bed.
Cassie continued to sob, but slowly lifted each leg into the air bending the knees and twisting the ankle in a perfect performance of their intended use.
“You are amazing. Yesterday you gave me life, just as much as my mother did all those years ago,” Cassie sobbed as her tears began to diminish.
“Oh Alec, I’ve never seen an ingenaire do anything so wonderful,” Moriah said. “And when you used my power, it was like we were physically united, I felt so close to you. I mean that; it was beautiful, and it’s done something so wonderful.” Alec came over to the bed. He leaned over and hugged Cassie tightly, holding on as minutes passed. “Cassie, you gave me something I needed too,” he told her. “I was sinking into a well of pain and suffering, and you gave me a way to rise out of it. Thank you. I hope you take these legs and put them to use to serve the God who used us to heal them,” he said. He felt a warm surge through his body as he spoke the words. He parted from Cassie and looked at her, sure that she too had felt the unbidden blessing which now felt like a statement of destiny.
Alec turned and hugged Moriah. “Thank you for not questioning, and for doing everything that was needed,” he whispered. He reached out and held each girl’s hand. “Yesterday we did something that was more than just power; it was holy.”
Moriah was looking down at Alec’s hand, and reached with her free had to push his sleeve away from his wrist. There on his blank forearm was the caduceus, the mark of the healer, a red snake and a blue one twined around a golden staff. She looked up at his face, and he grinned, but said nothing.
“How did you feel afterwards?” he asked as they broke the clinch.
“I wasn’t as exhausted as you; I didn’t pass out,” she told him. “But I was tired. I’ve only been awake this past hour.
“You had quite an audience in here watching you. There were at least three quarters of the council jammed together in this little room. Three of them carried you away to your room and put you to bed. Several of them stayed here and examined Cassie’s legs like they were legs of lambs for sale at the butcher’s shop – no woman should ever have to have so many men groping her like that at once, Cassie,” Moriah said with mock indignity.
“We’ll change her name to Agnes, agnes dei, lamb of God,” Alec punned.
The two women looked at him scornfully.
“So after you were gone and the Council members left, I staggered next door to my own room and fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bed,” Moriah brought her story to a conclusion. “I woke up this morning and heard Cassie crying. There was this tray of food outside her door, so I brought it in and convinced her she wasn’t having a dream. I was telling her what happened, when you showed up.”
“Alec, I woke up and I had legs! That happened every night of my life when I dreamed. I’ve always wanted to have legs. But this morning I woke up and the legs were still there, and I didn’t know if I couldn’t wake from my dream or what had happened, until Moriah came in and explained everything to me,” Cassie said with warm eyes.
“Aside from the legs, how is everything else?” Alec said jokingly.
“My sores are gone, my head doesn’t itch, and I feel better, if that’s what you mean,” Cassie said
“That’s what I meant,” he said.
“Now, the big question,” Alec began.
“Yes!” Cassie answered, laughing. “Whatever you want from me, the answer to you will always be ‘yes!’”
“Oh Cassie, don’t ever let a man know he can control you,” Moriah said with a laugh.
“Enough,” Alec cut through their banter. “Cassie, would you like to try to walk?”
She started to cry again. “Oh Alec,” the girl sobbed, “This is so much a perfect dream.”
Moriah got on one side and Alec on the other, and with arms draped around both their shoulders, Cassie placed her feet on the ground and stood up for the first time. They moved slowly through the hallway and out to the balcony, taking ginger steps. When they got to the balcony, Rubicon and Nathaniel were sitting there. Seeing Cassie, they pulled a chair out for her and she sat down.
“That was so wonderful,” she gushed. “I can hardly wait to do that all on my own.”
“Alec, how are you this morning?” Rubicon asked. “After your extraordinary performance yesterday and your work before that, I didn’t know if you’d need a day to recover or a week or a fortnight. I’m sure this young lady’s legs are the talk of the hill this morning, with all the people who saw you perform.”
“I feel a little poorly,” Alec replied and he catalogued his ills. “But I’ve felt worse after other efforts at ingenaire works. Yesterday was such a good thing! And you know, it took a long, slow steady drain on power that I think was more like what we were practicing this week, plus I had Moriah here to lend a hand.”
“Well, easy as you make it sound, it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen up he
re on Ingenairii Hill. It ranks up there almost with what you did to Noranda. It sure beats what the water apprentices did to the fire house my first year on the Hill! That was my top story until now,” he laughed. “I suppose we just didn’t realize what we were missing by not having a Healers House.
“As far as your physical state, well, that’s just ‘mark hangover’ as we call it. When a person breaks through that energy threshold of achieving their mark, everyone suffers some consequences. Yours sounds typical. We just don’t have many who live through the experience more than once,” Rubicon explained.
“I imagine the ingenairii here take a lot of things for granted that are quite miraculous,” Alec said.
“Cassie, what are you going to do after you learn to walk?” Nathaniel asked.
“I’ll walk everywhere I can,” she replied to a round of laughter. “I haven’t made any plans. Well, you know; I haven’t had time to make plans! I still can’t believe this is happening to me,” Cassie said after the laughter died down, and she giggled again with a slightly hysterical note in her voice.
“Alec, if you think you can, you need to prepare yourself as best you are able to go to the ingenaire’s council this noon to have your test as a healer,” Rubicon said, changing the subject. “If you’d like to delay the test, no one will deny your request.”
“What more can there be to test?” Moriah asked indignantly. She reached over to Alec and pulled his sleeve up to show the new mark to Rubicon.
“That’s up to the Council to say,” Rubicon said simply as he studied the sign on Alec’s skin. “There’s no real way of knowing how they’ll react to trying to do something none of them even considered a possibility a week ago. But many of them were here yesterday, and all will have heard about this young lady by the time of the conclave. Not to mention the issue of what Alec did at the Locksforts’, even if no one knows what he did.”
At the Seat of Power: Goldenfields and the Dominion Page 13
