The Apprentice's Path: The Alchemist #1

by Stacey Keystone

  Mother never yelled at me as a child, and she certainly didn't start in my adulthood. But she had other ways to punish me, and this was it. Her care for me when she worried always felt much worse than any punishment. I had made the people in my care worry and see me as weak, what could be worse?

  But, considering my current state, it was fair.

  Digging down intermittently into the rashers of bacon and the pancakes, generously slathered with butter and jam, I started to feel full quite quickly. In my usual state, dealing with all this food wouldn't be too hard, but in my current state, I couldn't eat another bite after two pancakes and four rashers of bacon. Mother, who just sat silently in front of me, after serving the table, putting the food in front of me, and even pouring the tea and milk into my cup, then said something for the first time.

  "Don't get up until you eat everything."

  Mother had never forced us to eat, considering that children will naturally eat as much as they need, and forcing them will distort their natural appetite. Of course, we didn't get dessert if we didn't eat the veggies, but we didn't have to eat the damn veggies. I usually ate the veggies, unless it was peas. I hate green peas. They're mushy and tasteless, and when you bite into them, you feel like a bomb of icky stuff exploded in your mouth.

  But, maybe because I'm not a child, this time, she was dead serious. I looked at the plate without appetite. Maybe I could eat more pancakes if I just didn't add jam or butter, I decided. But, as I was about to take a bite of a pancake under mother's watchful eye, the doorbell rang.

  "Are you expecting somebody?" I asked, quickly heading to the door. Mother rushed ahead of me.

  "Nobody should see you in this state," she said. She had a point, so I stayed hidden behind the door as she opened it.

  I couldn't see who was there, but I could see mother's expression. Shock. Disbelief. Anger.

  "You!" she almost screamed. "It was you who put my daughter in trouble! You're the reason she returned looking like a zombie!"

  "Like a zombie?" I heard the question and immediately recognized the voice. It was grandpa. What was he doing here, this early? I had sent him a letter, but if he was here today, he must have taken the next day's morning train to Crow Hill.

  I stepped from behind the door, trying to grab mother's arm so she wouldn't physically attack grandpa. She glared at me but stepped back a bit.

  "I created the situation myself," I said, trying to soothe her. "And I invited him to get help dealing with the situation."

  "You invited him?" mother asked, now directing her fury at me. "Into my home?"

  "Into our home," I said. "If you really feel I don't have any rights to this home, as the host, I will have to find him another place. And go there with him."

  The threat seemed to work, although the look mother gave me very much indicated the conversation was not over. She stepped aside, letting grandpa, who had uttered nothing other than the first question.

  He looked at me, and, as he assessed my skeletal face, his gaze going down to my hands and body, his eyes filled with worry.

  "Good Heavens, Dana, what happened to you? You were fine just three weeks ago. And where did you disappear? I spent the entire week looking for you -- and then I got that letter..."

  It was the first time he called me by my first name. I guess that meant some kind of progress.

  "I'm OK, Gramps," I said, as he put down his baggage by the door. Unlike me, he looked well, clean-shaven and neat. The advantages of traveling first-class. And with baggage.

  "You are certainly not OK, young lady. Now, go back to the kitchen and finish your breakfast," mother, who had been observing my interaction with grandpa, hadn't forgotten about her earlier order. I sighed and headed towards the kitchen.

  "I'm having breakfast," I told grandpa. "I guess you had breakfast on the train, but you can at least have some tea."

  Mother humphed but didn't say anything, as she followed both of us to the kitchen. As angry as she was, she still didn't let me pour the tea, serving grandpa herself. Black, no milk, no sugar. It wasn't how he usually took it, but he took the cup without complaining. Mother was certainly not going to allow him to be too choosy.

  I looked back at the pancake. With mother seating in front of me, daring me with her gaze, I couldn't really complain. Especially after I had invited the father she had cut all relationship with by faking her death to her home. So I dug into the plate, still avoiding the butter and jam, methodically eating one after the other. I mixed it a bit with the bacon, eating a rasher between each pancake.

  They both observed silently as I dug into the plate, my mother glaring at grandpa every now and then, and him shooting looks of amazed wonder at her. Almost as if he hadn't believed me when I told him she was alive.

  "Where is father?" I asked mother, as I could see grandpa listening intently.

  "In his shop. He felt like he needed to clear his head."

  Typical. Father wasn't very quick to anger, but when he was, he buried himself in work, calming himself, to then methodically and calmly deal with the problem.

  I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. I certainly had a lot of things to explain to my parents. I had ashamed them thoroughly. To be weak, and not able to defend oneself, was bad enough. As the eldest child and head of the family, though, I shouldn't have allowed that. Of course, the head of the family title was something I had assumed for myself, but it's not like anybody else wanted it.

  "And the boys? Are they in school?"

  "Yes. It's still school season, you know. Unlike certain people, they go to school like they're supposed to."

  I knew mother was just blowing off steam. She didn't mean I should have kept going to university in my state. Rather, she'd have preferred I just went to classes and didn't get into this state. So I just nodded.

  "I'd rather avoid the boys seeing me like that. But I guess there really isn't a way to hide that I'm here. How should I tell them this?"

  "You haven't even told me what happened yet," mother observed.

  It was really hard to know where to start, so I decided to start from the end.

  "I went through an undirected Initiation."

  My mother stared at me in shock. Then she looked at grandpa, who had read my letter and thus knew what had happened.

  "Did you tell him before me?" she asked when she saw grandpa's lack of reaction.

  "I briefly explained in a letter," I admitted. "But he knows no more. You see, I had sworn an oath of secrecy. But, considering what they have done, I'll consider they broke the deal first. So this is what happened. It all started with me looking for an internship."

  They both listened intently, without interrupting. Now, more than ever, I could see the similarity between father and daughter. They both furrowed the brows when they heard I was paid in cash. At the mention of the cover story, mother looked accusingly at grandpa, who looked at me. As they sighed in the same places in the story, shaking their head in unison, it almost felt like they were teaming up against me.

  "Signing up for such a dodgy job," mother said "is even stupider than trusting this man. As bad as he is, at least he has a few principles."

  "Lady Luck must have accompanied you," grandpa agreed, "as it certainly wasn't your brains that saved you. Covering a bomb with your body? Burning it with magical fire you can barely invoke, much less manage?"

  Their joint disapproval was really hard to face since they were right. So I stared into the plate, eating the food left there. I hadn't eaten while telling them the story. As I finished, I looked for an excuse to get out.

  "I have been traveling for a week in second class," I said "and haven't bathed or showered. Now that I've had this delicious food, I need to clean. And mother, could I borrow some of your clothes? The clothes I came in are completely unusable."

  "I'll make the bath for you," mother said, standing up. "And I'll get you some of my clothes, although you'll need to wear a dress."

  "That's OK," I said. Anything was better
than the filthy, fire damaged clothes I'd been wearing for a week. "And, when you're done, could you prepare a room for grandpa? He doesn't need much more than a mattress to sleep on."

  Grandpa, who was used to sleeping on a huge bed with a duck feather mattress and a mahogany frame, raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He could see that I couldn't get anything more out of the mother.

  24

  After leaving her daughter splashing around in the bathtub, Claire Bedwen went back to her daughter's guest. He stayed, as he had been told, in the kitchen, sipping from the cup of tea she had served him. She resisted the urge to kick him out and wash everything after him. Preferably, with bleach.

  But he was her daughter's guest, and as much as she resented her father for what had happened, she knew he always placed the family first. In his own way. And he did seem to consider Dana his family; the concern for her state and the patient attention he gave her showed that. The way he allowed her really informal speech, bordering on rude sometimes, was something he'd never allowed to his children. But he had softened up to his granddaughter.

  When she came in, he put the cup and the saucer aside, staring at her intently, interlacing his fingers.

  "So she really is your daughter," he said. "A daughter of your heart."

  Figures. This man had always been suspicious on the border of paranoia. Of course he did a blood test.

  "You did a blood test, didn't you?" she asked what was more of a rhetorical question than a real one. "But I see you didn't tell her."

  "She really seemed to believe that," he said, taking something out of his coat's inner pocket. It was a photo. A photo of the family. "Of course, I knew she wasn't. You just had that miscarriage. I thought you had adopted her, but then I saw her birth certificate. The one where she was born after your marriage. How old was she by then?"

  "Three months." There was no point in denying her father's conjectures. And she had to tell him, otherwise, he could share some of his suspicions with Dana while trying to dig for more.

  He nodded.

  "So. Your husband must have brought her as just a newborn. To smuggle a man and a baby to the Kalmar Republic then wasn't too hard, but it still took a long time, at least two months. Even assuming he arrived at Ashford a month before you married, that would have been a lightning-fast engagement."

  "We met a week before we married."

  He raised his eyebrows, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers.

  "In a week," he said, slowly. "You married a stranger with a small baby in a week, after you dragged your feet with your fiancee for so long that you miscarried on your sixth month still unmarried."

  "Andy was the wrong guy for me. I thought you never liked him, anyway." She said, sitting down in front of him. She touched the teapot. It was warm; he must have made himself another batch of tea. She poured herself another cup and added three teaspoons of sugar for good measure.

  "And I didn't," he admitted. "But you were pregnant, and I thought allowing the wedding was the right call. And then, a week before the supposed wedding, you miscarried, disappeared for a week, boarded the train, and died in a robbery."

  "The miscarriage... It wasn't spontaneous," she told him what she had learned when she went into hiding after losing her baby. "Your enemies had destroyed my family. I needed to leave everything, to recover. I needed time to forgive you. And that's when I met Dana and her father. She charmed me from the beginning; she wasn't a substitute for the son I had just lost, but she had this big smile. And she always looked so intently, with her huge dark eyes. Her father was an illegal immigrant, a man running away from danger. Marrying him ensured his citizenship. Giving him my name meant she would get my surname and anybody who was looking for them wouldn't find them. And as for faking the birth certificate... My heart belonged to her as soon as I saw her. I was already her mother. Going through a formal adoption would have been hard since we'd have to prove her birth mother was dead. And they could have taken her away from us."

  "It's highly unlikely they would have taken a child away from her biological father, even if the mother wasn't present," he then stopped and furrowed his eyebrows. Standing up straight, unlocking his fingers, he said slowly, drumming his knuckles on the table. "Unless she wasn't his daughter, either."

  She didn't respond to the unstated question. She could never lie convincingly to her father, and there was no point in trying now.

  "So you married a kidnapper, gave him your surname, and faked the kidnapped child's birth certificate, becoming his co-conspirator. After which you had faked your death, to hide from me, because you knew I wouldn't approve." The disapproval in his voice was really hard to bear, coming from this man.

  "You don't understand. Dana's my baby. And Sean is not a kidnapper. Her parents are dead."

  "And you trust his word for that?" he asked. "A kidnapper's word?"

  "He told me who her parents are. And they are absolutely, positively, dead. And before you ask, I know he said the truth. The likeness was striking, even then. Now, she's just a copy of her mother."

  She then went quiet, with the feeling of already having said too much. Her father hadn't been one of the best students in the Inquisition College and a great lawyer for nothing. His ability to untangle stories and guess critical missing factoids was uncanny.

  "Knowing he had a child that wasn't his, you could have just taken her from him."

  "I wouldn't. He was genuinely attached to her; he already was her father. And he took such good care of her. How could I take him away from her?"

  He nodded as if confirming his thoughts.

  "And if you thought he had kidnapped her, you wouldn't have minded that. No, there was a reason you believed him. And you're my daughter, so you wouldn't have trusted him. So you somehow verified his story, and it checked out. For her parent's names and portraits to be available to you, they must have been either noblemen or very remarkable people. So, Dana's parents were Yllamese nobles, who died twenty-two years ago and had brought the rage of the emperor so much even their infant daughter was in danger. And the Yllamese don't tend to murder infants that much unless they are imperial princes. And your husband was a significant enough person in the court to know ancient Yllamese."

  He paused, gathering all pieces of the puzzle in one. She could see him getting close to the truth.

  "So there is only one candidate for her mother," he said. "The Royal Princess Farah. And her father is obviously General el-Araki. The tragic love story that appeared in all newspapers back then. The general who resisted the emperor's order to divorce his wife, the emperor's half-sister. Who led the Arak rebellion, fought desperately and died bravely. Their photos were even printed in some newspapers, despite the expense. And now that I think about it, Dana carries a remarkable resemblance to them."

  Her heart sunk, feeling that all the security she had gained for her daughter, hiding in this remote area, where no foreigners or Inquisitors ever came, was being lost with every word he was saying.

  "Please, Father," she begged him, "don't tell anybody. Promise you won't."

  "Why would I put my granddaughter in danger?" he asked. "As much as I would like to use this knowledge to make you let me into your life, I won't. Dana will eventually learn the truth, and I wouldn't want her to hear I had blackmailed you."

  "Don't tell her this. Not for my sake. You know her. If she learns the truth, she'll be quite upset. And she'll come up with some ludicrous plan to avenge her blood parents. She has a very strong sense of duty."

  "Oh, I know. That's the reason I like her so much. Even after seeing the results of the blood test -- her resolve to avenge the Bedwens was so genuine, it was hard not to get charmed."

  Of all the things, it made sense that her father would be charmed by that part of her daughter. In some ways, Dana Bedwen was more similar to him than to her -- and that certainly wasn't a compliment.

  "As for the mattress on the floor -- was that a serious offer?" he then asked.

  "Oh, y
es. We don't have a guest bedroom. We usually use Dana's bedroom for guests -- but she needs it more than you. You could always stay in a pension. There's a very nice one..."

  "Forget it. I'm taking the mattress," he said. "I'm not staying in a pension."

  It was hard not to get asleep in the bath, but I managed. After scrubbing my body and my scalp (it's a miracle I didn't get any lice on the train), I went back to bed, with my hair still wet. Mother wouldn't approve -- but not sleeping in the bath was my limit. After the heavy breakfast, I felt quite drowsy -- and the tiredness from a week-long train ride didn't help much.

  When I woke up, the house was full of noises. My brothers had returned from school and were behaving in their usual monkey ways. I felt quite proud. I had taught them most of the tricks -- from throwing rocks to sliding down banisters to tackling each other. Without me, they'd have been good boys. And that's social suicide in Crow Hill. But thanks to my thoughtful guidance, Sam and Billie, the only two light arall in Crow Hill, managed to survive school without getting picked. Hopefully, they had trained Mikey, who was just starting elementary school. I was going to use this time to make sure Mikey also knew how to punch a bully. And make him a custom knuckleduster.

  While I had avoided my brothers seeing me at my worst, directly after the trip, I couldn't avoid them while living in the same house, so I would have to show myself to them. If they'd been dark, I'd probably had gone to a pension or something. The fall in status of being weak could mean they'd lose their respect for me. But, with them being light, my problem would be an excess of compassion. And them crying for me.

  It was as bad as I had feared. After explaining in the vaguest of terms that I had a disease, "No, it's cured"; "I just need to recover"; "Don't worry, Big Sis is not dying" (that was for Mikey), I could see my family's Inquisition roots as Sam and Billie bombarded me with question. Grandpa looked very proud of the grandsons preserving the family legacy.

  At dinner, it was even worse. Mother just glared at me, daring me not to finish the delicious but huge serving she'd served me. Even Mikey felt like he needed to feed me, putting the juiciest bits of meat on my plate. It was the most humiliating experience I'd ever gone through.