Elcome deflated before his eyes, and without another word left the building. Alec took a deep breath, then exhaled. He wasn’t sure that the battle with Elcome was over, but at least for now he’d be able to assess the materials they had and the suppliers they used.
Alec decided to go see Merle, to talk about ingenaire issues, including questions about how to train Cassie to bring out her energies as a healer ingenaire. When Alec arrived at the door to Merle’s quarters, he was shown in by Roland, and quizzed by several apprentices about the many others moving into his home with him. He assured them that they all were welcome to visit, and asked if Merle was available.
Roland returned and took Alec back to Merle’s room, from which two other apprentices departed as Alec arrived. “Well Alec, you’re really stirring things up, aren’t you?” Merle greeted him.
“It depends what you’re talking about,” Alec said cautiously.
“I’m talking about the flock of young rebels you’ve invited into your home,” Merle said.
“I simply wanted to allow some other apprentices to stay at our house to keep Bethany and Cassie company while I was out, and make life a little better for folks who were displaced from their homes,” Alec said. “But as things developed, it all changed.”
“I think it’s a good idea, Alec, but it has stirred up some real concerns among the ingenairii who want to go back to Oyster Bay. I can’t imagine that they have any leverage against you here, but if you help to split your house guests apart from those who plan to return, they will want revenge in some fashion,” Merle warned.
“And when I’m proved right, they’ll hopefully know they’ve got some place to come back to for safety from the usurpers, if they’re able to leave,” Alec retorted.
“But the main reason I came was to find out about Cassie, and what your test showed,” Alec continued.
“Well, she has ingenaire powers, and they’re healer powers, though they’ll be rather weak. She hasn’t utilized them yet. The test results were unusual in some senses, but I can’t really describe how,” Merle answered.
“I think I may have actually given her some of my powers when I revived her from an accident,” Alec told Merle. “I would like to train her, but I know very little about how to train someone to touch their ingenaire powers.”
“Yes, you’ll find it difficult Alec. You’re such a natural talent that you needed virtually no training, and you had no experience with the things we can try to help her learn to find her powers,” Merle explained, and they spent the next hour talking about lessons Alec could try to help Cassie’s education.
“Merle, when I gave Cassie my powers, did I lessen my own abilities?” Alec asked as their session drew towards a close.
“Alec, I have no way of knowing. No one in the modern era has ever been able to create ingenairii by giving them powers. I think I told you as much when you were here the first time. And for that matter, no one here has heard of an ingenaire who can take another ingenaire’s powers, as you’ve done,” Merle considered out loud. “Ask one of those who you took powers from if you’ve weakened them. My suspicion is that the transfer has had no impact on the donor.”
Alec thanked Merle for the advice and left to go have lunch with the colonel.
“Well Alec, what news do you have for me from the past couple of days?” Ryder asked as they sat down to lunch before he was due to meet with Duke Toulon and Noah Rastall.
“Plenty of news, not all of it pleasant,” Alec replied, and he proceeded to run through his list of issues affecting Natha’s ships, the ingenairii’ desire to return to Oyster Bay, and Elcome’s dissatisfaction with the changes underway in the Guard.
“So what remedies do you have in mind?” Ryder asked.
“I’ve opened my own home to many young ingenairii, and in the event that the leaders return to Oyster Bay, I believe that twenty or more will stay here with us and support you. This afternoon I’m going to start giving swordsmanship lesson to our ingenairii. Either they’ll be able to fight with us or defend themselves, or be useful in more than one way. It’ll bring them to the palace more and make them and the Guard familiar with each other, at the very least,” Alec told him.
“Of course, the yard will be a mess, since we’re going to try to build those stables as fast as possible. I think I found a metal smith with Stronghold experience who will work right here in a new smithy we’re going to build, and that will allow us to arm all our new recruits with the highest quality swords as quickly as possible,” Alec said. “Imelda is going shopping for steeds in the east and northeast villages starting in a couple of days, and I’m starting to send recruiters out across the duchy.”
“Alec, can you do it all? That’s more than I would have done myself back before all these troubles started,” the colonel asked.
“It all needs to be done. There’s so much we need to do to be ready for the wars. It’s like with Natha’s ships; I’d like to be able to put soldiers or ingenairii on them to offer protection, but we don’t have enough men ready yet. I’d like to have more time to perform healing, or even to teach Cassie about her healing powers, but I don’t have enough time to do those things.”
“I suspect Rastall will be intrigued by your notion of having forces posted on Natha’s trading vessels,” Ryder said. “The trader creates a great deal of wealth for our merchants and farmers by selling their goods abroad.”
“It’s simply a matter of finding our people who are available. We could start sending some of our Guards along, but that will leave us low on men here, nearly as low as we were when the palace was attacked, and we won’t have enough to adequately give every ship protection, at least until I find out how best I can use the ingenairii,” Alec said.
“And I suppose if we’re too obvious about it, that may justify more attacks on Natha by the junta in Oyster Bay and their allies,” Ryder mused.
Alec left the lunch and crossed the yard, where he heard and saw the demolition of the small warehouse taking place to make room for the new stables. He saw the ingenairii standing outside the armory, and headed to see them.
“Is everyone ready for this?” he asked with a grin. “Where’s Cassie?”
“Here I am, Alec,” her voice came from the back of the group.
“Good. Everyone, follow me,” and he led them into the armory equipment room. “Liam,” he called to a young officer who was in the armory, “do you have some time to help us?”
He instructed Liam to help him fit pads on all the ingenairii, and to try to find practice blades that were suitable for each of them. They all went back out to the armory, where Alec began discussing and demonstrating some fundamentals of swordsmanship, then he and Liam split them into two groups and began giving each ingenaire some specific instruction, and observed them exercising.
“A few of you did very well, and obviously have handled blades before. Many of you have also obviously not ever had any fencing experience,” he told them at the end of the exercise period. “I’ll expect to see all of you back here every day from now on at the same time, and we’ll start giving you all instruction so that you will be able to wield swords before the winter passes.”
With that, everyone left the armory with Alec, walking over to see the demolition of the warehouse, where several parolees from the jail were working with Guard recruits to dismantle the small structure. “What’s this going to be, Alec?” one apprentice Alec still didn’t know asked.
“We’re going to demolish this warehouse, then excavate this site around it, and build a new stables and a smithy, so that we can have a cavalry unit with the Guard,” Alec explained.
“Are you using any ingenairii?” the apprentice asked.
“No,” Alec answered, slightly puzzled. “How could we?”
“I’m an earth apprentice, and Streed there is a stone apprentice. We could help excavate and construct this building a lot faster and build it faster and stronger than you’ll do otherwise. We do these things all the time in
our houses; it’s how we earn our pay.”
“Let’s talk about that tonight after dinner. You’ve made me feel very good all of the sudden!” Alec told the earth apprentice with a laugh.
“Cassie, let’s go now,” Alec looked at his ward. “The rest of you I’ll see this evening. Thank you all for coming.”
Cassie and Alec went to Alec’s office, where Mortis was seated at the front desk. “I see you got the jailers to cooperate,” Alec said.
“We did, and as it turns out, we got some very honest crooks,” Mortis said shaking his head. “Look at this,” he urged as he pulled a large and obviously heavy leather bag out of his desk and laid it on the top. He tipped it slowly and gold and silver coins came cascading out in a rapid stream.
“It’s a lot of money,” Alec said, unable to tally it all. “What does it have to do with your honest crooks?”
“They turned it in to us after they found it hidden in the walls of the warehouse. It was back in the corner where Elcome’s desk sat,” Mortis said with a grim face.
Alec stood there and considered that. “What records do we have of his expenditures? Do we have a ledger we can look at?” He thought about all the times Elcome had seemed to be his friend, but pled a lack of funds while Alec paid for needed supplies from his own pocket. The quartermaster had obviously figured out how to acquire money very effectively. Alec puzzled over how wrong he had been in his judgment of Elcome as someone to trust; he checked himself from sliding too far into self-recrimination, and focused on the report he was receiving.
“There’s no such paperwork in his desk. I checked,” Mortis said. “We do have records from the palace of how much he drew down every fortnight, but no idea what he spent it on.”
“When he left he didn’t know how quickly we planned to tear the warehouse down, did he? He may not even have known it was coming down, I suppose,” Alec commented. “You and I can talk about this later. Cassie and I are going to the palace to work on some ingenaire activities, and I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“Where are we going in the palace?” Cassie asked. “Back to Merle’s quarters?”
“No,” Alec told her as they started climbing stairs. “I’ve got a special room up here that I thought would be private enough for us to be uninterrupted.”
He unlocked the door to the room Rastall had shown him and led Cassie in. “This is a lovely room, Alec,” Cassie said as she walked around, looking at the furnishing, while Alec moved some chairs out of the way to make a large open area on the floor.
He instructed her to lie down, then laid beside her. “Cassie, close your eyes and relax. Breathe deeply, hold your breath, and exhale slowly,” he told her, as he spread the blanket over her. “Now think back to the night you were on the beach and I healed you. Stay relaxed, remember how close we were that night. Remember how you said you felt like a piece of me had been left inside of you? Can you find that piece within you?”
“Yes, Alec, I sense where it is,” she replied quietly.
“Good, very good. Remember that place, but for the moment, think about how your spirit was above you watching the activities below. Can you remember that feeling of your spirit moving around in this world, and how you could control its movement away from your body?” he asked.
Slowly Alec walked Cassie through establishing the notion of the barriers and then taking her spirit to the place where his kernel of power was, and her consciousness bringing those latent powers with her to the place between the barriers.
“Cassie, I’m going to join you there now, and when I do, I’m going to help you pull those powers into your own spirit. Merle and I have talked about this, and we don’t know how it will feel for you exactly, because this is slightly different from helping someone find their own latent ability. But I will be there with you and will help you embrace this power. That’s all we need to do today is bring your powers and your spirit together, and then we can work tomorrow on making sure the union is secure and how to proceed onward,” he told her.
Alec took Cassie’s hand in his, found his own spiritual barriers, and began traveling between them to find Cassie’s soul. He detected the brightness of Cassie, seeing it for the first time but recognizing the purity of the soul as distinctly hers, and joined her. He saw that cradled against her was a different entity, one that was masculine and murkier, and he knew it was what he had left of his own powers within her.
Alec moved around Cassie, examining and exploring and trying to understand what he saw and how to integrate the two together.
“Cassie?” he asked consciously, coming back to the real world to talk to her. “Cassie, did you feel my presence there with you between the barriers?”
“Um. Yes, Alec, you were right there with me, and you perfectly matched the little bit I carry with me,” she said.
“Alright, then let’s go back, and I’m going to try to find ways to help you pull that little bit within you. When we are together, try to imagine ways to open yourself up to me so that I can come into your spirit,” Alec told her.
They each returned to the space within the barriers, and Alec rejoined Cassie. He let his spirit completely envelop hers, and pressed against her, pulling that separate nugget of his own powers out so that it too surrounded her, then began gently probing, trying to find ways to incorporate and meld the two together. He felt himself suddenly being drawn into an opening in her spirit, a place where she allowed him to come in. He felt her embrace him, and suddenly their very thoughts began to mix with one another’s, as they joined. He understood the long loneliness she had felt and the painful injury of a mother who didn’t show love to her, and he sensed her tremendous wish to be loved.
He suddenly felt himself reliving an experience from her youth, sensing the world from her point of view as her mother absently placed a plate of biscuits beside the young lame girl then left the home in the evening, a smile on her face as she left without saying a word to the lonely Cassie. Cassie yearned for someone to tell her they loved her, or to spend time with her, but the mother simply came in late at night and left early the next morning without a word.
Alec tried with all his might to re-focus on bringing that diffuse ingenaire potential ability into her, and lodge it firmly in Cassie’s essence, even as he continually saw and felt her thoughts and memories, and sensed her spirit moving among his own dreams and concerns as well. Suddenly he sensed what she was approaching within him and he panicked.
He felt a more than paternal fondness for Cassie, and had tried to keep it hidden because he didn’t want to take advantage of her susceptibility to his power over her. He knew he could at any time take advantage of the affection and gratitude she felt towards him, and he had resisted doing so, even though he was very aware of her beauty and charm. Alec didn’t want Cassie to see those parts of his soul that housed his physical attraction to her, his desire to possess her. He didn’t want her to be repulsed by the notion that he was driven by such base desires, especially when he acted so hard to publicly maintain his real attraction to Noranda, while enjoying his flirtation and more with Bethany. He wasn’t proud of his philandering spirit, his unpure heart. Yet he knew that at this moment, as she approached those thoughts, he had no way to stop her from seeing his hidden desire unless he disengaged from her completely.
But he couldn’t withdraw now or he would fail to activate her ingenaire powers, and fail to give her access to the energies she had within her possession. Alec grew melancholy at the notion that she would see the stains on his soul. Never thereafter would they be able to have the same friendship they had enjoyed before, he was sure.
Despite his dismay, he focused on the process of letting his powers take root within Cassie; he began to weave together Cassie and the luminescent potential power, drawing tendrils of the power throughout her soul, leaving fine threads that were in contact with every aspect of Cassie he could find. When all the elements of the untapped power were disbursed within her, Alec continued to follow his instincts
and began to gently squeeze her, causing the two elements to break the surface tension between them, so that they began to lose their distinctive characteristics and merged together, indistinguishable one from the other. There no longer existed that glowing nugget of Alec’s powers separate from Cassie; there was only Cassie now.
He sensed that the integration was complete, and began to withdraw, feeling tendrils of Cassie’s consciousness slipping out of him; feeling her presence in those parts of his soul wickedly intensified his desire for her. Alec completed the separation, lingered for a moment, and studied Cassie, whose soul was subtly different following the absorption of his powers, and he wondered fleetingly if that change in her soul was good or not, whether the tradeoff of healing powers for less purity was best.
Alec returned to the opulent palace room, and opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then turned his head to see Cassie. Her eyes opened, she turned to look at him for a moment, then rolled over on the floor, her back turned to him.
Chapter 10 – Girl Talk
After a long silence, Alec spoke. “Cassie, I’m sorry you saw the hidden parts in my soul. I didn’t even think about, I didn’t realize something like that would be part of the process. Please don’t hate me.”
There was another long silence. “Alec, if I were to hate you, it would be because you’ve kept such feelings so hidden from me,” he heard Cassie say as she continued to face the wall. “Did you feel me enter that part of your heart? Did you know what I was finding out about your feelings for me?”
“Yes,” Alec said quietly. “I would have hidden that if I could, but I needed to finish giving you your powers, or else the job would have been unfinished. You went in there, and I couldn’t stop you without stopping the whole process. Maybe I should have…”
The Loss of Power: Goldenfields and Bondell Page 12
