“Your Grace, did you hear the news?” cried Lord Healer Ailín hastily, barging into the laboratory where Lady Abbess Cara sat, her eyes fixated on readings from a sub-atomic microscope.
Lady Abbess Cara brushed back a lock of her long black hair that picked that xiao-shir to fall out of her meticulous long braids, “Lord Healer Ailín, what is wrong?”
Ailín bowed, “Your Grace, King Gareth has just declared in open court that you are to marry him in twenty beinors. An order just came through: you are recalled from here to seal your betrothal in the king’s bed.”
“Is it not curious, my friend, that the king should do this without consulting me or even without my awareness of his intent?”
“It is not for me to say, Your Grace.”
Cara’s mind raced, “Ailín, would you ask Lord Knight Liam to accompany me to Hejing? I have need of a man who is both healer and knight, one able to liaison for me here medically while protecting me. Surely his majesty will not deny me a princess-consort’s right to a knight-protector! I would feel safer guarded by one of our own than by a man of the king’s choosing.”
“And your analysis on the new data?”
“Are you able to work on it in my steed?”
“W-yes, of course. I am now here long enough to begin to suffer from the disease.”
Lady Abbess Cara hugged him gratefully, “Make this so for me, please.”
“As always, I am at your service and to the service of our great house.”
“You sent for me?” asked the strong and athletic Lord Knight Healer Liam, kneeling before Lady Abbess Cara in front of the low altitude shuttle prepared for her. At his right thigh hung his Ten-Arian schlager sword, a one-handed civilian sword with a civilized edge carefully weighted to balance perfectly in the palm of its knight.
Curly black hair rippled down the knight’s head, a circlet of Beinarian silver with a single Beinarian star sapphire at its center sparkled regally. A Ten-Arian crimson heraldic cloak draped over Liam’s body as naturally as it did twenty yen-ars ago when Liam took his vows elevating him to knighthood.
Pleased by the sight, Lady Cara raised his chin, compelling him to meet her eyes, “Thank you for honouring my request, lord knight.”
“I am at your service if you will have me.”
“Will you swear to serve me, Lord Knight Liam as my knight-protector?”
“All that I have, all that I am, is yours to command.”
“And if I should command you to my bed against the vows to the king he compels me to take?”
“A vow under compulsion is no vow, Your Grace. The law may call you his wife, Your Grace – but if your heart should fall on another of any house or even me, I vow to enforce the choice of your heart – not the lechery of this tyrant.”
“I thank you. Rise now, lord knight, and serve me as best you may.”
Lord Liam rose ceremoniously, kissing her hand at first, but then kissing her lips, “With this kiss I vow myself to you – from this beinor until death.”
At the kiss, Cara found her breath taken away for a xiao-shir before returning the kiss, “I receive your service – from this beinor until death let our fates be bound together.”
Nineteen beinors later, King Gareth kept his promise. In a small ceremony in the throne room, a priest of The Shemai called a sacerdos conducted the simple wedding of the king and Cara, the choice made specifically to irk Ten-Arian devotion to the Beinarian triple goddess. In a gown of Ten-Arian crimson and with crimson-clad Lord Knight Liam serving as her honour attendant, Cara felt relieved the king chose to sanctify their union with prayers to The Shemai, the Beinarian creator god, instead of her goddesses.
Like most Beinarians, Cara believed the idea of a single, male creator god to be utterly illogical. With the rituals performed, she felt King Gareth drag her to his bed – with a command for Lord Knight Liam to stand guard just beyond the sheer curtains.
Beinor 197 arrived with Princess Cara feeling too ill to rise from her bed in the consort’s spacious apartment. At the far side of the bedroom, Princess Cara installed a personal space for Lord Liam, including a modest but comfortable bed and space for many of his belongings, including some essential medical scanners and tools.
Forty beinors passed. All around Princess Cara, the court buzzed with news of her pregnancy. A festive atmosphere filled the court sharply contrasting against Cara’s own ambivalence. Inside her heart a dark cloud deepened. What was she except for king’s official whore-wife? Isolated in the palace and cut off from every Ten-Arian except for Lord Knight Liam, Cara felt lost and hopeless, trapped into living her life with and for the person she hated most and forbidden from everything and everyone that mattered most to her. Against her better medical judgment as abbess of Ten-Ar, she started to drink, taking advantage of the court’s habit of never volunteering information to the king, not even to gain his favour and patronage.
At shir-or 8.45 Cara obligingly joined the king for the evening meal, Lord Knight Liam noticeably not at her side. Worried, Cara asked a steward to fill her chalice with Nara berry mead, drinking deeply before a second steward filled her plate with the roasted meat of a young male konyn. As she started to eat Liam appeared suddenly behind her, “My liege a word, please?”
Rising, Cara acknowledged the king, “Excuse me, Your Majesty.”
Liam led her to an adjacent antechamber, “Forgive my absence; I received a coded message from the Ten-Arian monastery.”
“What?”
“There’s been accident in Nan-li. They need you there, Your Grace. They command you to go there. We need your medical expertise. More than two hundred lives are at stake!”
“Prepare my shuttle and ask the stewards to discretely pack some clothing and other essentials for me. We leave within the shir-or.”
Fiery plumes filled with red-black smoke rose from the inferno over what looked like a war zone. Sirens filled the air, along with fire controllers and rescuers from across Xi-Nan Fang. In front of them, a twenty-story apartment building in ruins, half of its structure collapsed into an enormous sink hole. Twenty-five zhang 张 from the perimeter set up by law enforcers, ten healers-in-training evaluated injuries at the mobile healing center setup for the purpose, treating minor injuries and moving more serious injuries into waiting ambulances which zipped in and out from the traffic lanes above, each headed for Nan-li Central Healing Center just one li 里 away.
Following the directions of a law enforcer, Lord Knight Liam parked their low attitude shuttle close to the mobile healing center, Lady Abbess Cara already scanning the scene with her computer. Disembarking, she headed for a patient being transferred onto a diagnostic table, “I am Lady Abbess Cara, healer-in-chief of house Ten-Ar.”
A late middle-aged man two hundred eighty-five yen-ars old with dark brown eyes reached up to her, his face, arms, and legs covered in blood, “There was no warning!”
“What happened?”
“A rumble – then smoke – people screaming, running to escape before most of them falling dead in front of me. I-I rushed down the emergency staircases; all the elevators were down! Debris kept hitting me, but I kept running – all the way from the fifteenth floor!”
A healer-in-training handed Cara a dermal re-generator which she gently moved over his wounds, “You are going to be fine. I do not detect any serious injuries – just these cuts and bruises.” With a steady, patient hand she set the regenerator to first disinfect the wounds, and then stop the bleeding with a sealing layer.
“I did not breathe that smoke; I fear my neighbour – nice lady too – was not so lucky!”
“Your eyes are brown – did you work in the mines?” asked Cara, intentionally distracting him from the slight discomfort of the wound sealing pass.
The man shook his head, “No – I am house Croften –
we will not go anywhere near that mine. House Ana runs it! They do not much like we Croften folks. My wife – she was house Skeinera – made beautiful handmade tapestries like our ancestors used to on A672E92 Quintus.”
“Where is she now?”
“I do not know. She headed out for some shopping with our daughter – wanted some more roving from that new konyn breed – you know, the one with the fur that is black at the base and white near the tip? Some special new kind of konyn the breeders developed. I used to raise konynen before I moved to Nan-li for my wife’s job. Gentle, sweet animals! They do not even mind the sheerings three times a yen-ar. Nicest animal on Beinan!” remarked the man.
“Leave your information with my assistant here; we will make sure your wife finds you,” instructed Cara.
“Thank ‘ee,” nodded the man as Cara re-joined Liam waiting for her nearby.
Cara whispered to Liam, “What did you find out?”
“There was a collapse at the mine; some sort of accident sending a shockwave through an area fault-line – right through the center of that apartment building. This far from the mines, no one thought to build for earth-quakes. Nan-li is not exactly near any tectonic plate boundaries,” reported Liam.
“My patient indicated a bilast plume hit the building; killing an unknown number of people.”
“That makes sense; there certainly is enough bilast trapped in the rocks around here. If the miners hit a bilast pocket – “
“Yes, I agree. The effects would be devastating.”
“So,