A chill came over him, and the sense of weariness increased. The rushing sound commenced to rise in pitch rapidly, reaching a painful crescendo, and the bluish light grew rapidly brighter.
A sudden bursting occurred, and all the strange phenomena ended. Alec slumped to the floor beside the bed. He heard many voices speaking loudly around him. His fingers slid off her face, and he let lose his grasp on Noranda’s hand, then opened his eyes. There directly above him was the face of Aristotle, with a look of concern and wonder expressed in his eyes.
“Alec, how are you? Can you hear me?” the old ingenaire asked.
“I hear you,” Alec replied faintly, feeling ready to pass out.
“Are you finished with your ingenaire works?” Aristotle asked, as more faces appeared above his, looking down at Alec with expressions of wonder, fear and concern.
“I am finished for now,” Alec answered. He closed his eyes and passed out.
Chapter 11 – Speaking of Time
Alec awoke in his own bed, back across the river in the ingenairii compound. His head was splitting with a headache of enormous proportions. He felt thirsty, and turned his head to see if there was any water on his desk. He saw his decanter and glass, and with unsteady steps reached the desk to pour himself a drink. He sat back down on his bed, and unsuccessfully tried to recollect what had happened.
After falling back asleep, he awoke again in a gloomier room, feeling stronger but hungry, his headache diminished. His water decanter had been refilled he noticed, and he again drank greedily. His door opened slightly, and Nathaniel peeked in.
“Are you feeling well?” his friend asked.
“I’m hungry,” Alec responded promptly.
“I suppose that’s an answer,” Nathaniel said dryly. “I’ll go get a tray of food for you, and be back in a minute.” He promptly disappeared.
A minute later Rubicon, Nathaniel and Moriah all returned with the tray and jostled into Alec’s cramped room.
“How are you?” Rubicon asked, as Alec took a roll and started eating.
“I’m hungry, thirsty, tired and have a headache,” Alec announced. “Plus I have no idea what happened at the Locksfort compound. Will you tell me while I eat this?”
“I’m not sure anyone knows what happened. There are lots of rumors going around. You did something to Noranda, but nobody knows what, and you’ve been sleeping for three days now,” Rubicon said. “Aristotle is on his way here this evening, now that you’re awake, and he may be able to tell us more.”
“How is Natalie?” Alec asked.
“Who? Oh, you mean Noranda?” Nathaniel replied.
“We aren’t sure,” Rubicon responded.
“Not sure? What does that mean? I cured her didn’t I?” Alec said with puzzlement and some irritation.
“Were you trying to cure her Alec? She’s not back among the healthy, although she’s apparently not dead,” Rubicon said. “I think Ari will be able to give you such answers as we have. As much as anything we want to make sure you’re alright. And we hoped you’d be able to tell us what you did.”
“I feel like I’ll recover,” Alec said, digesting the disquieting answers he heard. “I’ll rest some more and wait until Ari arrives, if that’s alright.”
He lay back down as the others left the room, and wondered what he had done. He knew it was ingenaire energy, he knew it hadn’t been healing in the sense of looking at a direct change in Noranda’s health, but he didn’t know what had happened. Apparently no one understood. He wondered what the Locksforts and Elgin thought about him bursting into Natalie’s room uninvited and leaving unsettling consequences.
As he dozed in and out of consciousness, he heard his door open, and Aristotle and another person arrived in his room. Alec sat up as they entered. They sat in the small room, Ari on the chair and the other man, who looked vaguely familiar, on the edge of the bed.
“Alec it’s marvelous to see you awake. If you feel up to it, I have some questions to ask, and I also want to answer any that you have,” Aristotle told him. “This, by the way,” Ari added, seeing Alec look at the other ingenaire, “is Chester, the Spirit ingenaire who helped greet you at the docks when you arrived in Oyster Bay. I thought he might be able to counsel you if you needed.”
As Chester took Alec’s hand the healer wondered what he would learn that might require counseling. He took a deep breath, and felt the slight tension that told him there were powers being exercised.
“Tell me what you know happened,” Ari asked.
Alec recounted all that he could from the time Aristotle took him to the docks to go to the Locksfort home.
“What exactly did you say to start the enchantment?” Ari asked him as he arrived at the last thing he remembered. “Can you tell us your precise words?”
Alec thought hard. “I just prayed. I think I asked for more time for Natalie. That was all. It was a short prayer.”
“Who did you pray to?” Ari asked, and Alec felt tension in the room over that simple question.
“I prayed to God, maybe Jesus specifically,” Alec told them. “Who else could I pray to?”
“And after that, what do you remember?” Aristotle finished his questions.
“After that, I was paralyzed, and there was a blue light, and people or things were moving around us,” Alec recalled. “I saw that she was about to die, and I couldn’t heal her there right then. It was frustrating, so that all I could pray for was time, and then everything happened.”
Aristotle sat back and was silent for a long time. He looked at Chester with a glance, and the spirit apprentice began to remove his hand from Alec. He paused in mid-motion, and his hand swept back up to Alec’s wrist, then pushed his sleeve towards his elbow. “Look at this!” Chester said in an urgent low voice.
Alec nearly bumped heads with Ari as they all bent their heads to look at his forearm. There, above the Warrior sword mark was a blue hourglass, just below the inside of his elbow. To Alec it almost glowed with the same bright shade of fluorescent blue that had encased him at the Locksforts’ home, and the sands inside the glass seemed to be constantly falling.
“I’ve never seen anything like that; have you?” Chester asked Ari.
“No. Nothing. I’ve never even read anything from the records that describes this type of mark,” Ari replied in a hushed tone.
“What is it, Ari? What does it mean?” Alec asked. He was staring at his own arm, and examining it as if it was some foreign element. The mark fascinated him.
“I’ll answer that in a minute. First, I want to see if you have any other questions. What do you want to know from me?” the elder asked.
“How is Noranda? What did I do? I didn’t even begin to try to heal her, I wasn’t ready to heal her, when suddenly things just happened,” Alec burst out.
“Alec, let me tell you what I think happened when you visited Noranda,” Ari began. “You showed up unexpectedly at her bedside as she lay unconscious and probably just minutes from death. Her fiancé was jealous of you to begin with, and your arrival there at that emotional moment had to be about the last thing he would have wanted.
“I want you to understand the picture around you. These are important facts.”
“When you prayed over Noranda, a brilliant blue light flared around the two of you for several hours. You were both absolutely motionless, frozen in position and surrounded by that light that no one else could penetrate,” Aristotle explained.
“A number of people were called to see this phenomenon…” Ari continued. Alec however did not hear him, lost in a moment of contemplative bewilderment.
“What did you say?” Alec asked, returning from his reverie.
“I said that ingenairii from every house, and several orders of priests, among others, tried to explain and undo whatever was happening around you two. It lasted all night and continued well into the next morning. The light at last gave a huge flare, which blinded everyone, and then diminished to nothing. When that happened,
you slumped to the floor, and then passed out for the past three days,” Ari continued. “You even look a little different this morning, as if you’d aged several months or more all at once.”
“You’re right. That’s what looks different about him,” Chester agreed.
Alec puzzled over his appearance for just a second, then returned to consider the rest of the story Ari had told him. “That sort of sounds like what happened. It did seem like I was frozen in place, and I could sometimes see movements around us. I couldn’t feel a thing, and all I heard was a sound like the rushing of the wind. But what about Noranda?” Alec asked, now growing frantic with concern.
“And Noranda lay on her bed, with the remnant of a slight blue glow, not breathing, but perhaps not dead,” Ari answered. “We do not know what you did to her. I hoped you would know.
“When the situation became clearer, Elgin charged that you had used sorcery, and called to demons for powers to cast a spell over Natalie. He swears he heard you name the names of demons,” Aristotle said in a dangerously level voice.
“That’s ridiculous! I never did any such thing in my life!” Alec virtually shouted in outrage at the accusation.
“I vouch for the truth of his words,” Chester spoke up for the first time since Ari’s story began.
“Chester has been here this evening as an active Spirit ingenaire, testing the honesty of your words and your soul as you have explained yourself,” Ari explained. “It’s nice to have a Spiritual ingenaire provide a useful service from time to time,” he said, drawing a look of surprise and then a smile from Chester.
“What did I do to Noranda?” Alec asked, his primary concern still unanswered.
“I will venture a guess here on the spot of something that has occurred to me, but neither of you may repeat it until I can research the very oldest records of the Ingenairii for some possible clues,” Ari said. “When Merle tested you for your powers, what did the crystal reveal?”
Alec glanced at Chester. “It showed that I had powers to be a healer, already am practicing as one as a matter of fact, and also had the powers to be a warrior and a spiritual ingenaire. And then,” he paused, remembering, “there was something else that Merle did not know.”
“My theory is that you have just practiced the powers of a time ingenaire, and have just established a field of frozen time around Natalie, so that her body will remain as it is indefinitely, until you lift the field,” Aristotle spoke with an unusually hurried speech pattern.
“You said that you prayed for time. You were not able to measure time while you were surrounded by the field, and the things you saw around you ran at an unusual pace of time. You needed time to find a way to heal Noranda, and now you have it. And you have been identified as having an ingenaire power that Merle did not know,” Ari ticked off the points of his hypothesis. “And look at the new mark on your arm – a timepiece.
“I don’t even know what the characteristics of a time ingenaire are. That’s what I will search through the records to find, which will not be easy, because we don’t even know the last time there was a time ingenaire. There’s not even a house or the ruins of a house for them,” Ari continued. “I’ve vaguely heard references to them a long time ago, but nothing that anyone took seriously.”
Alec sat back in his bed and absorbed the stunning theory Ari had offered. Could he have possibly launched a magical action that no one alive could even identify? “How do I undo the power when I’m ready to heal her?”
He prepared himself for the worst when he saw Chester glance at Ari’s face.
“First you’ll have to find her, I’m afraid,” Ari said quietly. “This afternoon her family shipped her body back upriver on its way to Stronghold, where it will be interred in the family mausoleum.”
Chapter 12 – Healing Cassie
Alec scowled at the horrific thought of Noranda being buried alive, at least in a sense. “How do we stop them?”
“Alec, in a perfect world we would say, ‘Stop, you’re making a mistake,’ but given the dynamics at work here, we first have to clear your name of the charge of sorcery before we can do anything else,” Ari told him.
Alec felt his eyes starting to water, and angrily knuckled them. “This is as bad as fighting lacertii,” he muttered.
“Why don’t you go to sleep and rest some more? We’ll get started on taking care of the matters at hand tomorrow. First we’ll ask Elgin if he will submit his charges to verification by a Spirit ingenaire,” Ari plotted. “After a day or two, especially when we report that the Spirit ingenaire has vouched for you, I suspect Elgin will talk about the emotion and stress of the situation and not press his accusations against you. That’ll be too late to retrieve Noranda in the short run, but it will be one big problem out of the way.”
“Tell me Alec,” Ari continued as he started to rise. “How would you heal her if you had the chance right now?”
Alec closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Ari. I don’t know how I’d remove the time condition. I don’t know how I’d heal her. I know I wouldn’t bury her though!” He was stymied, momentarily unable to reach any decisions about how to even consider treating her time condition. At the same time, his mind was racing in response to Ari’s question, beginning to inventory the ingredients he would need to treat the poisoning and physical wounds Noranda suffered. There were gaps in his answers, and he took a deep breath, realizing the size of the challenge he faced.
“Alec, you’re very upset right now, and your judgment is probably not its best. Your test for the Healers House is supposed to be the day after tomorrow. I fear you are not going to be in the best shape to face that. Would you like for me to postpone the test?” Ari asked.
Alec considered that momentarily. “I don’t know, Ari. Aside from Noranda, I feel like I could heal anything in my sleep, but I also feel that I cannot face anything at all right now.”
“Think about it and let me know. We can postpone,” Ari repeated. “Listen, I am going to leave now, but do not doubt that you will be in my prayers and my thoughts. Don’t do anything rash with all that pent up anxiety. Believe it or not, I was young once, and I know how deeply this must hurt you.”
“What I will do to calm a lot of the talk out there about you is spread the report that the blue light was a Healer spell that could not be completed,” Ari told him. “It will be reported as simply an exotic healer action, and nothing more. We don’t need to let people start speculating and coming up with wild rumors, though none could be as wild as the truth may turn out to be. In the meantime, keep your sleeves down.”
Ari waited for any further questions, and when none came, he gently patted Alec’s shoulder and left the room.
“I can help you accept this pain. Your spirit will be better able to accept what has happened,” Chester replied.
Alec wasn’t able to understand what Chester was offering. “Here, let me show you,” the spirit apprentice said. He placed his hand on the side of Alec’s head.
Alec felt his mind’s incoherent thoughts suddenly fall into a place without chaos. “Why did God want to separate her and I?” and he heard an answer in his mind reply, “This was not His plan. Not everything in the short run is what God wants in the long run.”
“Why couldn’t we have been happy together?” Alec’s mind asked, and the answer came back, “God has a plan for her, and he has a plan for you.” “I want to punish and hurt those who have done this to her,” Alec protested, only to be sternly answered, “Do not take that upon yourself, it will be God’s plan.”
“Let me correct this; it is not right nor fair.” “Many things are not fair; God will use you to make those things right that you are suited to carry out.”
Alec felt Chester’s hand pull away. “Alec, you are in a great deal of pain. I hope you will let God’s will comfort you. I have tried to let you know that God has a plan.”
“Was that your voice I heard?” Alec asked.
“No, it is not a human voice nor human wisdo
m. It is what our ingenaire’s power allows us to bring back to the world. You were very compatible with it, I thought,” Chester said.
“I was told I have the power to be a spirit ingenaire, but I wanted to be trained for healing instead,” Alec told him. “Thank you for your treatment,” he added after a moment. “I do feel better knowing what I heard.”
“Please come see me or any of us from the spirit house if we can help further,” Chester said, and he silently slipped out of the room.
Alec drifted off to a sleep filled with a peaceful sorrow, the rage for action having been sucked away by the spiritual experience he had.
The next morning he awoke, and walked down to the cathedral at the start of the day. He knelt in the pew and listened to the chants of the priests, translating the ancient Latin phrases into the comfortable praises for God and supplications to God. As he listened, he prayed. He prayed for a chance to correct the great injustice; and as he did so, a thought came into his mind. He knew there was a great injustice he could correct. If not the injustice he longed to address, it was one that he believed now he could make right, and perhaps thereby balance out some iota of fairness in the world. He felt a sense of peace descend over him as he made up his mind to spend the day providing grace to solve an intractable problem. He listened to another full morning service, then rose and walked back towards the house at the top of the hill.
He felt the usual pop of power being performed somewhere on the hill, and this time he anticipated that it was directed at him. He whirled rapidly and saw two girls walking away quickly as a large splash of water fell to the ground where he had just stood. Full of desire to act, Alec placed his hand on his belt and felt the knife there. He constructed an image of himself holding a knife, embraced the warrior power, and selected his target. One of the girls walking away from him wore an unusual skirt that moved and rustled in an unusual way. Alec realized that it was a series of many pieces of cloth held together by strings and threads. He flung the knife low, and watched it cut through four threads near its top. A moment later a large flap of cloth slipped down, opening a window that gave a direct view of the young lady’s undergarment, a pair of lacy panties.
At the Seat of Power: Goldenfields and the Dominion Page 12