After a pause the voice replied, “Approach the top of the hill, and keep your hands away from your weapons.” The tone was not friendly.
Alec climbed further, slightly winded, but satisfied that he was close to the end of the climb. He was close to the end of his adventure in Bondell, he hoped. With a victory on the battlefield and the prince restored he could resume his journey to Oyster Bay and carry out the obligations imposed on him in the cave.
The trail led to a stone gate, and when Alec passed through the gate and the narrow passage behind it, he came out into a courtyard, with several men facing him, bows drawn.
“By my lord, it is Alec,” a voice said loudly and incredulously, and Faldor the dwarf, chamberlain to the prince, stepped out in front of the armsmen. “We thought you were dead long ago and disappeared, Alec. What happened to you? Why are you here now? And why do you look such a mess?”
“Faldor, I’m glad to see you alive,” Alec said, advancing to shake his friend’s hand. “When I left the city I went on a pilgrimage, as you know. It was a successful journey, and I am healed and given a mission to carry out. Unfortunately, this invasion has gotten in my way, but I hope we can put an end to it and give the prince his kingdom back.”
“I’ve brought a force of local militia to the battlefield, and they are ready to fight when you bring your men down from this fortress,” Alec explained.
“Let’s go talk to the prince about this,” Faldor said, waving his hand to the guards to allow Alec through.
As they walked through the dim passageway inside the fortress Alec saw two or three Guards he recognized from the training that had been underway when he left Bondell weeks ago. They’d gotten exposed to the reality of battle faster than Alec had expected.
“My prince, I bring an old friend with interesting news,” Faldor announced Alec as they entered the makeshift throne room.
“Alec, our friend from Goldenfields! How good to see you after so long! Reports of your death appear to be amiss,” the prince said kindly despite the gloomy surroundings.
Alec looked at the man, who appeared thin and worn by the troubles of his situation. He smiled warmly as he bowed.
“Alec proposes that we take our troops down from our height to do battle, because he has brought a force of militia loyal to you to join us,” Faldor explained. “We have little left in the way of supplies as it happens, so the move may be providential.”
“They have two warrior ingenairii down there, Faldor,” the Prince interrupted. “Are you forgetting what we saw them do to our men in the palace?”
“Those warriors will trouble you no more, your lordship,” Alec jumped in to the conversation. “I defeated them this morning in a battle of champions. It has severely unnerved the soldiers of Oyster Bay, I suspect. If we go now, the militia will attack from the south as you come down from the north, and we can put an end to this problem. Then it will be back to the city to reclaim your throne.”
“That’s a tall order! You beat the two warrior ingenairii? Alec that seems hard to believe,” the prince replied.
“I am also blessed with the powers of a warrior ingenaire. I was wounded most of the time I was with you before; now I’m healed through a pilgrimage, and I fought the ingenairii from Oyster Bay,” Alec said, explaining as much as possible as quickly as possible. “The ingenairii are dead, the troops from Oyster Bay are shaken, and you have the opportunity to win a battle.”
“Faldor, what do you say?” Prince Mahogam said, turning to his advisor.
“The Guards from Goldenfields, when they learned Alec was missing, lamented his loss for their land. They searched for him, and mourned him. He is a great warrior,” Faldor said. “I believe him.”
“If we do this and lose, we’ll only be a few days better off than if we stay here and starve,” the prince said. “Better to fight our way to the end, than to sit here and die. Alec tell our troops what to do and get them ready.”
Alec took his leave from the Prince’s room and strode down the hallway. “Renda,” he called to the woman who he had seen become one of the first recruits for the Guard set up in Bondell. “What do we have here?”
“We have a few score trained Guard members here, all that survived to stay with the Prince when we retreated from the City,” she replied. “The Goldenfield Guard said that you were the greatest swordsman in the Dominion when you were there,” she added.
“I will be the best swordsman in Bondell today, Renda. Get the troops ready to leave. We’ll go down the trail and fight the battle to show Oyster Bay that this nation will be free,” Alec said. “How quickly can we be ready?”
“We didn’t bring much; it won’t take long to be ready. In half an hour we can be on the move,” she answered with a lopsided grin. “I said all along we could win if they didn’t have those ingenairii!”
Alec watched the men and women in the tattered green and yellow uniforms line up to leave the fortress they had held for weeks. “It’ll be good to have a change of scenery!” Alec heard one man say as they followed him down the path he had just climbed. Looking out over the plain Alec saw the forces from Oyster Bay advancing towards the descending forces, with the militia beginning to leave their safe haven to pursue. All the pieces were moving just as he had hoped they would.
“Place four men with the Prince and if they need to, tell them to carry him out to the countryside,” he instructed the officer behind him. “Let’s try to hustle down the trail quickly.”
Alec tried to judge the speed of the descending Bondell troops versus the arrival of the Oyster Bay forces. He wanted to have time to get most men down and in a defensive perimeter around the foot of the trail before they engaged in battle. Otherwise they would be picked off as they came down the trail.
Minutes later Alec was sure they would get down without molestation from the Oyster Bay forces, because he saw the militia starting to engage the rear of the besieging force. “Those of you who are able to drop your supplies, do so and hurry to battle!” he frantically urged, concerned about what was happening to the untrained militiamen going up against the Oyster Bay army. He slid and ran down the rest of the trail and ran out onto the plain, where the shouts of the encounter were clearly audible.
Alec drew his sword as he approached the invaders’ rear, with a string of others from the fortress following behind him. Alec stopped for a moment to let the others catch up. “Spread out left and right! Form a front! Don’t let them turn the corner on us or get behind us!” he instructed, and then they closed the distance to where the sounds and sights of conflict were filling the Bondell plain.
The rear of the Oyster Bay forces saw them approaching and tried to prepare at the last moment, but were only partially successful. Too many were engaged in the other bloody battle they faced, and the space between the two segments of Bondell forces quickly filled with the death and surrender of the invading soldiers who had come to take control of the country.
Three hours later the few survivors from Oyster Bay were under guard and the Prince of Bondell was addressing his men and women who had fought for him. “You have shown the invaders that our nation will fight them and beat them. I thank you all for the work you have done today; it was not an easy task. We lost many good soldiers here this afternoon,” he continued, while Alec looked somberly at the many bodies that were being lined up. They were men who had left their village to follow him to battle, and they had suffered a horrendous toll. Alec had spent much energy healing everyone at Sixtrees he could, at least preserving their lives if not completely solving their injuries. Now as a result of that healing, many men had followed him here, and had received injuries and death. He sat, now exhausted from the warfare and the post-battle healing, only intermittently hearing the Prince’s exuberant speech.
He felt a shadow fall on him, and Faldor knelt down beside him. “Thank you for leading us to this victory,” Faldor said, placing a hand on Alec’s shoulder. “Not to hurry you, but what do we do next?”
&nb
sp; Alec began to laugh. “Not to hurry me, but let’s get going, eh Faldor?”
“We need to give Prince Mahogan and these soldiers a sense of their mission, or they’ll bog down,” Faldor said. “Do we have enough here to retake the capital?”
“No,” Alec said bluntly. “This isn’t enough to take the city back.
“But it is enough to take the palace back,” he said as Faldor somberly sat back and reacted to Alec’s reply. “And if we retake the palace, I think the city will rise in opposition to the occupying troops from Oyster Bay. Their patrols can be picked off and that will eliminate your problems so that the City is your again. Then it will be a matter of rebuilding your Guards once again. That shouldn’t be too difficult, now that your people have seen what the results are of being unarmed. Why don’t you detail two men to ride right now to Goldenfields to ask the Guard to return more trainers to help prepare your forces?”
“I thought you could do that for us, when you go back home,” Faldor said, looking at Alec. “You’ve been gone for a long time. I remember there was a very pretty ingenaire who was sorry to part from you.”
Alec grew silent as he thought about Bethany. The visit to John Mark’s pool had revealed to him that he would not marry Noranda. That opened the door for him to fully give his heart to the lovely water ingenaire. His affection for her had blossomed on the trip to Bondell, but his commitment to Noranda had left him unable to admit his love to Bethany.
He cleared his throat. “I am under an obligation to carry out other duties before I can go back to Goldenfields,” Alec told Faldor. “It may be a long time before I return there.”
“Are you going to stay here long enough to help us finish our war?” Faldor asked.
“Yes, I will finish what I’ve begun here with you. I’ve still got to let Chaer know that I survived after all,” Alec said with a grin.
Faldor rose to go send a mission to Goldenfields, while Alec bent his head forward to rest for a moment before he began to resume healing among his Sixtrees survivors, and the Prince continued to speak. The next day the force left the plain, bringing its prisoners with it, and embarked on a campaign that ten days later took possession of the palace and let the city populace finish off the occupying forces that were caught scattered throughout the city. Alec, mindful of Anna’s opinion of the patrols in the streets, had known that the city would provide the fire once the prince struck the spark for a rising.
Two days later, when the celebrations and congratulations were over, Alec took a pair of horses and began riding up the coast towards Oyster Bay. He expected to arrive at the city within a fortnight and begin to finally carry out the retribution he had promised to the ghost of a prince.
Chapter 26 – The Road North
Prince Mahogan provided Alec with abundant coins, including Oyster Bay currency taken from the captured officers of the occupying force, and so he slept in taverns and inns along the way as he rode north along the coast, if he happened to finish a day’s ride near a village. After three days he entered the unsettled wilderness that isolated Bondell from the other lands of the Dominion.
During his ride Alec brooded at length about his failure to return to Goldenfields. Word from Faldor’s messengers had probably arrived at Goldenfields by now, and subsequent messengers sent after the capture of the city would arrive soon too. The reappearance of Alec’s name, and then his failure to travel to Goldenfields would be mentioned and noticed in many circles. His departure from Bondell and his destination would not though; Faldor had understood the secrecy Alec wanted for his trip, and told no one else.
Alec had agonized over what letters he should write and send back to Goldenfields via the messengers, and eventually only written two before he slipped out of the liberated Bondell. The briefest one had gone to Natha, telling him to consider setting up an over-land trading route between Goldenfields and Bondell, to ship the southworld goods without passing through or near Oyster Bay. The other had been a note to Colonel Ryder suggesting support for Natha’s shipments, and an admission that he was under a charge that he must obey and leave Goldenfields behind, for several months at least, he was sure. He pledged his love for the Duchy and the Duke, and for his friends, then said no more.
Most of Alec’s agonies rested in the letter he had not sent, though he had tried to write it three times. No note had gone to Bethany. Alec did not know how to put into words the many conflicting emotions he felt in the relationship with Bethany. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he couldn’t tell her that his conflict over his relationship with Noranda had come to an end. He painfully remembered how he had frozen, unable to tell her he loved her when they had parted ways, and knew he had hurt her with his silence.
Now he would have no chance to send a note to her again until her heart was broken by his silence.
When he managed to stop ruminating about the past, he began to worry about the future. He had two daunting goals to meet, and the details of each were unplanned and unknown, leaving a great margin for failure. Failure would destroy his own future; his failure would destroy the Dominion itself, he sensed.
Eight days after leaving the city of Bondell Alec entered the seaside village of Monoline. He’d traveled in rough conditions, and he decided to splurge and stay in an inn. The two inns the town offered were both down at the bayside, and were mostly used by travelers arriving by sea, he noticed as he showed his money to prove that that he would pay for his room. Alec noticed the long looks at his shaggy hair from the burly innkeeper. He’d kept the hair uncut since his return from John Mark’s pool, feeling in some ill-defined manner he was serving some type of penance.
At the evening hour Alec sat quietly at a common table in the open dining room, squeezed in among a group of sailors whose vessel was spending the night in port. The mariners were drinking ale, telling stories that made Alec blush, and challenging one another to contests of increasing physical demands.
Alec could foresee that something was going to go wrong soon. Many times in the past he’d watched the carnival roustabouts go through a similar exercise of ratcheting up their aggression and energy during nights on the trail. “I’ll catch anything you throw at me, my hands are that quick,” one tattooed leader of the sailors boasted loudly.
Alec winced as though he had seen fate tempted in front of him. “Catch this, Chelv!” a man shouted as he stood and threw a long-bladed dirk at the boastful man, whose hands futilely clutched at empty air just before a sickening sound confirmed that the weapon had sunk into the man’s chest.
He gave a frightful moan, then slumped to the floor with his hands around the handle of the blade, and a trickle of blood appearing out of the corner of his mouth. Men began shouting and flailing wildly.
Alec stood and pushed his way over to the injured man. As the man’s friends screamed and struggled to comprehend the situation, Alec reached out with both hands. His left hand grabbed the knife and pulled it free of the flesh, while the other hand covered the wound, and he began praying fervently as he closed his eyes and applied pressure to staunch the bloody seepage that welled up around his palm.
The crowd around him was shouting and jostling and in clamorous motion, but he focused only on the man suddenly under his care. “Lord, heal this man. Show these people your power and love. Let his heart and lungs be made whole again.” He prayed fervently and out loud, and to his amazement, those around him heard him and began to loudly send up their prayers too. “Oh Lord,” “Help him God,” “Heal him, God,” chorused around the tavern dining room, and as they did, Alec felt his prayers grow stronger, and suddenly a tipping in some balance occurred, as Alec sensed the body healing and the wound closing. Blood ceased to pulse beneath his palm, and the heart began to beat strongly on its own.
“Thank you, Lord,” Alec said. “He is healed; He’ll be alright,” he said to his unknown neighbors.
“The boy says he’s okay!”
Hands were suddenly slapping him on the back, and he was violently mo
ved about by the crowd’s tumultuous reaction. “Here, have a cold ale courtesy of the house!” a serving girl with a mug told him as their bodies were pressed together by the celebratory crowd.
Chapter 27 – Disappointment in Goldenfields
Bethany sat in Natha’s garden in the luxurious section of Goldenfields, relaxing in the shady refuge from the first truly hot day of summer. She pulled small showers out of the sky to tend to the plants she was staring at, giving the gardeners something to shake their heads at as they went about tending and weeding the acres of colorful plantings.
Bethany had grown up not far from Oyster Bay. A more northerly climate, tempered by the proximity to the ocean, meant that she’d seldom ever experienced a scorching hot day. The heat that was settling over Goldenfields for the summer was hotter than she was used to, and she wondered how she would manage to make it through the season.
She was lonely, and homeless. She was far from her family, she thought again as she sat in the garden, and after years in ingenaire training, she was distant from her family in many ways. She was in exile from Ingenaire Hill in Oyster Bay, and it would never be the same community she had left. Worst of all, she had come here to be with Alec, and he was gone, disappeared and presumed dead in the wilderness of southern Bondell.
She had a cluster of friends to cling to and empathize with, and they supported one another greatly. But many hours and days passed when she had little to occupy her time, which allowed her to brood over the many unhappy events that had dropped from the sky to disturb the happy course of her life. She’d been a sought after and desired companion on Ingenairii Hill, then she’d seen Alec, heard about him, and spent time with him. He’d managed to be friendly without being patronizing or smothering, and he’d kept her at a slight distance. Then he’d shown up at the Apprentice’s Ball wearing a uniform that made him seem older, stronger, and more handsome than she’d realized. She’d watched him take care of Cassie without taking advantage of the girl, and she knew his heart was genuine. And with that she wanted her heart to be as good as his, and she wanted his heart to desire her.
The Loss of Power: Goldenfields and Bondell Page 32