by C. G. Garcia
CHAPTER NINE
Allison regarded Aidric’s serene expression when he spoke of Seni with a sense of wonder. There was no doubt that he was every bit as devoted to his god as her stepfather was, if not more so, and yet, he didn’t show the same severity that her father did, the fanaticism. There was only a sense of peace around him, and total devotion to the god he called Seni as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“You’re really devoted to your god,” Allison said, pulling her hands from his and wiping away all the stray tears on her face. “Is that why the king seemed insulted and furious when I told him that I didn’t know who Seni was?”
Aidric nodded. “Though, it isn’t just Lamia who is devoted. All kingdoms to the ends of the world devote their lives to Seni, for it is He whom we truly serve. As for the king, the anger he showed is a bit more complicated than a matter of your ignorance. His Majesty has lost much to the will of Seni, more than he cares to admit, and the thought of someone from our world that was spared the burden of devotion, of absolute obedience, by her ignorance infuriated him. That’s why he softened when he learned that you came from a different world, but regrettably, the story of his woes is a long one. Maybe someday I’ll tell it to you, but for now it is better left unsaid.”
“Of course—I didn’t mean to—it’s none of my business—” Allison stammered, feeling her pulse speed up with renewed anxiety. She hadn’t considered that it might be taboo or even against the law to ask personal questions about the king.
“You don’t have to look so worried, milady,” Aidric said gently. “You may ask me anything.”
“It’s because I have no idea why you’re being so, well, so nice to me,” she blurted, his assurances making her feel even more agitated. “You, yourself, said that I was dangerous, that everyone was scared of what I might do. Unless that prophecy spells everything out about my life up until now, you don’t even know what kind of person I am. Yet here you are patiently answering my probably inappropriate questions instead of demanding answers. Even when I tried to escape, you were nothing but gentle to me when I expected punishment.”
“Have you been hurt so deeply in the past that you are surprised to find a little kindness in others?” he cut in with a frown.
Allison suddenly found her hands very interesting. “I’m just confused,” she insisted, her voice tight with tension.
She could feel Aidric staring at her almost like a physical touch, making her desperately want to dive under the blankets to hide like a frightened child. She hated being scrutinized. It reminded her too much of… Allison sucked in a sharp breath. No! She refused to allow her mind to go there!
It’s not the same. It’s not the same!
“I sense a darkness in you,” Aidric abruptly said, making her nearly jump out of her skin, “something that has been stirring in your soul for a long while…”
Allison drew in a deep breath in an effort to calm her racing heart. “You’re—very observant,” she said, attempting to keep her voice light, but the slight tremors in her voice ruined the effect, “but I’d rather not talk about it right now.”
She was relieved when he didn’t press.
Instead, Aidric suggested cheerfully, “Shall we speak about your homeland, this Earth—or was it California?”
“Both,” Allison replied, this time managing to smile a little when he actually pronounced California right unlike the king. “Like you call your world simply ‘Seni’s World,’ we call ours Earth. I’m actually from a place called the ‘United States’—I guess it would be the equivalent of a kingdom here but ruled differently. It’s broken up into fifty sections and the section, or ‘state,’ I live in is called California. There’s so much to tell. Is there anything in particular that you would like to know about Earth?”
“So much I don’t know where to begin,” Aidric said eagerly. “Does anyone else in your world have golden hair as you do?”
She chuckled. “Yes, millions probably, but we call it ‘blonde.’”
“A rather harsh name for such beautiful locks,” he commented, fingering a strand of her hair.
Allison blushed furiously. She never seemed to be able to handle compliments gracefully. They always made her feel ashamed, a result of years of her stepfather punishing her for the “sins” of all her supposed instances of pride and vanity.
“And what about your own hair?” she asked quickly, eager to steer the subject off herself. “I’ve never seen anyone as young as you look with white hair.”
“Truly?” Aidric said with interest. “The hue of my hair is as common here on both the youth and the ancient as the grass underfoot. It’s little wonder why you looked at me so strangely. We must appear as foreign to you as you do to us.”
“Not everyone,” Allison said. “Just you.”
“How so?”
“Besides their clothes, the others look like the people of my world,” she explained. “Only you are visibly different with the colors of your hair and eyes. I’ve never seen anyone with eyes your shade of pale-violet.”
“Indeed, not many people possess them here, either,” he said with amusement. “I guess I’m just one who is full of oddities.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—” she stuttered, her cheeks coloring once again in embarrassment.
“Of course you didn’t,” he said with a brisk laugh. “I was merely teasing you. Forgive me. Sometimes even the Mage-general can forget his manners.”
Before she could respond, the amusement suddenly left Aidric’s eyes, and they became distant, as if he was deep in thought. Before she could ask him what was wrong, the warmth flooded back into his eyes, and he regarded her with a bemused expression.
“Don’t look so alarmed, milady,” he said. “I was only listening to King Diryan’s Seneschal, Lord Ion. He has summoned me to the Council Room, no doubt to discuss you. Unfortunately, I must leave you now. Feel free to wander about my chambers as you please while I’m away, but I’m afraid that you cannot leave my suite just yet.” He looked troubled as he explained all of this to her. “I know that it sounds as if you are a prisoner here, but trust me when I say that it’s for your own safety as well as ours.”
“I understand,” Allison assured him.
She was startled when he took one of her hands and lifted to his lips, planting a light kiss onto the back of it.
“I’ll not be long,” he promised as he released her hand. “We have many more conversations to engage in that I’ll be eagerly awaiting. There is so much about your world that I wish to know, as I’m certain you have many questions about mine. I should have better answers as to your status here as well. Until then, please make yourself comfortable in my absence. If you are hungry, the servants have left food in the sitting room. There are also countless books there that you may want to explore. Many of them contain the histories of Lamia and her surrounding kingdoms. I trust that you will find them of great interest. Now, I must excuse myself. A long Council meeting demands my attention.”
He smiled wryly and added, “And this was supposed to be my day off!”
Allison shyly returned the smile. Aidric gave her a slight bow before he turned on his heel and briskly left the room. Only when she heard a door bang shut in the distance did she slip from beneath the mass of warm blankets, standing unsteadily in just her socks on the marble floor. Her knees felt as wobbly as cooked spaghetti, not a good prognosis since she also felt a little dizzy.
Now that Aidric was no longer there to capture all her attention, Allison was able to assess her surroundings more thoroughly. A strange device against the far wall immediately caught her eye as she gazed about the room. A large and narrow, rectangular-shaped hole had been carved into the wall starting about a foot from the floor and ending about a foot from the ceiling. Inside, a glass tube as wide as her arm ran horizontally in the very center of the rectangle, marked with numerous equally distanced black notches from top to bottom, two of them thicker and more prominent than all the rest.
&nbs
p; On closer inspection, she saw what appeared to be a small amount of dark sand the color of powdered cocoa falling down the tube to settle at the bottom, falling from a hole where the top of the tube met the granite wall. The depth of the sand at the bottom of the tube had already accumulated a little higher than the nineteenth mark.
It could only be a clock. There was just no other logical explanation for it. With a little imagination, it even vaguely resembled an hourglass, though this clock obviously would not need to be flipped over every hour, which brought up a pressing question. There were a lot more marks than twenty-four, so how did they manage to tell time on it? For that matter, how did it work? Was magic used? Allison certainly didn’t see any electrical outlets anywhere in the room! She would have to remember to ask Aidric about it later.
Thinking about electrical outlets made her suddenly wonder what illuminated the room. Without windows, it obviously was not sunlight. She looked above her and gasped in surprise. A glass lantern hung suspended in the air without the aid of any ceiling fixtures—more magic, no doubt—but that was not what had her gaping up at it like a fool. The flame which the lantern housed was green
She had not seen a green flame since her physics class in high school when they had stuck wires dipped in different chemicals into the flames of their Bunsen burners, though the result had looked nothing like these flames. The green flames seemed to pulse with energy, creating an uncanny illusion that the flames were some kind of heart.
Allison suddenly had a powerful urge to get out of the room.
Can this day get any more messed up? she thought dazedly as she hurried out of the bedroom, down a hall, and then into a high-ceilinged chamber almost four times the size of the bedroom. Her eyes widened as she drank in the elegance of what could only be the sitting room Aidric had spoken of earlier. However, “sitting room” hardly seemed fitting words to describe such a place.
As it was in the bedroom, the floor consisted of polished marble, but that’s where the resemblance ended and the grandeur began. Four identical, intricately carved marble columns stood at each of the four corners of the room. Delicate swirls were painstakingly carved into the marble in complicated, symmetrical patterns that resembled oceanic waves, beginning from the top of the column to the very bottom. Amid the many swirls, what appeared to be gold was embedded in concert with the patterns. On closer inspection, Allison found that it was indeed gold.
Two smaller columns stood on either side of what was probably the front door to his—apartment? Suite? She vaguely remembered Aidric saying that he was a “court” mage. Did that mean he lived in the king’s palace? She filed that question away as one of the thousands she would probably end up wanting to ask Aidric when he returned.
Two creatures that greatly resembled lions, except for the folded wings on their backs and their tall, pointed ears, protruded from either side of each column where it met with the ceiling. They were both terrifying and beautiful to behold. What impressed Allison the most was the fact that they were carved entirely out of solid gold with two jewels that were possibly emeralds as eyes.
In wonder, her eyes drifted from the magnificence of the golden sculptures to the colorful array of jewels embedded into two sets of sapphire-blue curtains that hung over two small, but wide, windows. At last! The curtains appeared to consist of the same material as Aidric’s cape and breeches.
Jeez, Allison thought amazingly, do these people have an obsession with gold and precious stones? They seem to be everywhere!
Furniture-wise, the room was pretty bare. Only a couple of rather plush, but comfortable-looking couches lined the walls on either side of the front door. Two huge, cushioned chairs that matched the couches rested on either side of the two windows.
—and a perfect spot for them. One could sit and gaze out of the windows and dream—NO! she scolded herself firmly. You’re not going to think about your dreams and what might have been. That life’s over now, and you should be concentrating on coping with this new one. You did it before when Mom and you finally escaped that asshole, and you damn well can do it again!
Before she could work herself up into a panic attack, Allison quickly turned away from the windows and forced herself to once again focus her attention on her inspection of the room. As Aidric had promised, rows upon rows of bookshelves lined two of the walls, their presence adding a “homey” feeling to an otherwise museum-like atmosphere.
She walked over to the set of bookshelves along the eastern wall and began to scan its contents. Not surprisingly, given how she had ended up being able to understand and speak the Lamian language, she found that she could read the strange symbols on the spines of the books. Most of them were labeled as spellbooks of various types, and something in her subconscious mind told her that she should leave those particular books alone until Aidric offered to show them to her.
The others were histories of what she guessed were past Lamian battles, politics, and other related events. A few volumes contained what she assessed by their titles to be local myths and legends. Eagerly, she pulled the thickest of these folklore books off the shelf and began to thumb through it in hopes of finding a section which explained the Prophecy of the Golden Mage. She really knew nothing much about their prophecy, just that she was supposedly a powerful mage that appeared from another world, identified by the color of her hair. Aidric had been frustratingly vague when explaining the details of the prophecy, though purposely, she was not certain. Maybe one of the books in his collection would explain it to her more thoroughly.
To her utter disappointment, within a few seconds of flipping through the pages of the book, she found that the book was not written in the same language Zenas had given her. Pages upon pages of strange rune-like symbols lay before her, reminding her of the first time she had seen Arabic words. Irritably, she shelved the book and pulled out another. It, too, was written in that strange language as the first. She wanted to scream in frustration after a five-minute search through the rest of the folklore books turned up nothing that was readable.
“Why in the hell did they write the titles on the spine in one language when the book was written in another?” she muttered angrily under her breath.
On a hunch, she selected a book on the history of Lamia and opened it to the first page. Sure enough, this book was written in the strange symbols of the Lamian language she knew and could read thanks to Zenas’s gift. Allison suspected that the rest of the history books were written in the Lamian language as well.
Strange, she thought suspiciously. I’ll have to remember to ask Aidric about them later. I’m sure there’s a special reason why only those particular books are written in a different language.
Suddenly, the rather insistent growling of her stomach interrupted her thoughts. Only then did she realize just how hungry she was.
God, I’m starving. Kat and I never got around to eating lunch. I have no way of knowing how long I’ve been here since I was probably unconscious for more than half the time I’ve been in this crazy world. Aidric said there was food around here somewhere…
She scanned the room again, trying to ignore the stab of pain in her heart that remembering her sister caused her, and spotted the dining table on the other side of one of the couches. As Aidric had promised, a variety of foods covered the table, some recognizable and others not.
Allison selected what she hoped was an apple, an orange, and a small loaf of bread, deciding against trying any of the meats or cheeses no matter how appetizing they seemed because she had no way of knowing from what animal they had come from. She didn’t want to find out later that she had eaten the meat of a dog or a cat! She also decided to pass on the fruits and vegetables she didn’t recognize. Kat had always said she was a finicky eater.
Her smile was bittersweet as she remembered a time when her sister and she had been in elementary school, and her stepfather had threatened her with a beating if she didn’t eat her Brussels sprouts.
“The good lord has given you food
when others are starving,” he had lectured sternly when she had complained that she did not like them, “so you should appreciate it and clean your plate unless you want a severe penance tonight!”
It had been the first time her mother had prepared them, and she had always loathed trying anything new ever since she’d had a bad experience the first time she had tasted sour cream. Resigning herself for a beating later on, Allison had sat picking at her meal until Katherine slyly scooped up every sprout on her plate when neither of their parents were looking and shoved them into the front of her shirt along with her own helping. Miraculously, that had been one of the few times she had escaped a beating.
No! Allison scolded, giving her head a shake. I won’t think about her.
With her meal and the book of Lamian history tucked securely under her arm, she moved over to one of the huge chairs beside the window. She resisted the urge to draw the curtains back, not sure if she was ready to see what lay beyond just yet, and settled herself comfortably within the soft cushions to eat and read.
Within a few minutes, Allison was totally oblivious to the world around her as the fascinating history of Lamia quickly unfolded before her eyes.
CHAPTER TEN
Allison was so engrossed in her book when Aidric finally returned a few hours later that she didn’t even hear him enter the suite, much less sense his presence, as he approached her chair. When he abruptly spoke her name, she cried out in surprise and dropped the book onto the floor. It fell in an unceremonious heap at Aidric’s feet. As Allison blushed furiously in embarrassment and tried to calm her racing heart, Aidric chuckled and bent down to retrieve the book.
I wish I could stop being so jumpy, she thought irritably. Aidric must think that I’m afraid of my own shadow! Instantly she reproached herself. There I go again. Why should I care what he thinks of me, anyway? I’ve never really cared what people thought of me before, so why should I start caring now?