The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [114]
All that remained in their company, the spectators, the members of the court, the attending guards, were overtaken by silence and gorged with fear.
The man spoke to the Queen, his voice echoing and haunting. “Now you see what happens when my life is suddenly threatened. And I’m still uncertain what that was. You have any idea, Your Highness?”
“Don’t shower me with sarcasm,” the Queen shifted uneasily. “You possess a magnificent power. How did you obtain it, may I ask?”
The man was at once impressed with the manner in which she distanced her fears to maintain her dignity. On the other hand, the pedestal upon which she placed her consuming pursuit of power was high enough to account for her dull reaction to her own soldiers’ deaths, high enough to provoke fascination and awe rather than horror at the macabre theatrics that brought their lives to such an end.
Already she wanted to know the secrets behind the power.
The man smiled. “Maybe, given time, I’ll show you.”
***
The Queen ordered the man to be imprisoned. The guards, understandably, were reluctant in carrying out this order, fearing for their lives. When the Queen made it clear that no harm would come to them as long as no harm came to him, they escorted him away, albeit retaining a safe distance. With this, the man was quite cooperative.
He could be captured, he could be imprisoned, but he could not be killed. These, observed the Queen, seemed to be the rules.
So far.
The Queen completed her conquest of the surrounding lands and appointed officials to govern those lands and establish her new order. A greater part of her days, however, were spent in contemplation over this mysterious and powerful, sorcerer-like man.
A greater part of her days, and nights.
There were serious risks involved in keeping him there, for the man’s awesome power posed a conceivably hostile threat to all of Her Majesty’s interests. There was no telling what more he was capable of, no telling what the mounting consequences of holding him at bay might be or what he held up his sleeve.
She saw to it that his stay remain comfortable for a prisoner. His confines were referred to as bed quarters and were no where near the cold, rank dungeons where any rat or disease could give cause to another disastrous episode. He was granted a large degree of privacy, though twenty guards were posted at all hours outside the exterior perimeters of his room. He was provided three meals a day fit for a queen.
It hardly took any time for the Queen to decide what to do with the man. Her mind was set almost as instantly as she put him away: she would let him live and live well, in both confinement and certain observation. Even if it was found within her the stubborn supposition that he could be killed, the Queen wasn’t going to test her limits. She wasn’t about to conspire with a trusted guard to attempt to shoot an arrow through the man when he wasn’t looking. All hell would erupt if the plan was unsuccessful and the man would lose valuable trust in what he’d come to expect of his captors. Especially when the most prominent of his captors was eager to know his secrets.
So when the Queen made her first visit to him inside his bed quarters, the guards stood fast and sure not to let her in on the rumors going around about her seeing him. The consensus was that she was trying to pamper and seduce him into revealing those all-powerful secrets.
And they were right.
And they were afraid.
They dared not speak of her nightly liaisons with the man, nor of what they supposed the two were doing behind closed doors. This was enough to be afraid of, for the Queen would quite possibly have their heads if she became aware of such gossip.
Truth or not.
The