I must be mad . . .

Past decisions and a dreamed of future come together in Dakki's decision to do something she can't explain.

I must be mad.

I had come into the Otkaste lands armed with an ambassadorship and reputation that promised an easy stay.  Politically, Thundria and Otkaste stood on better ground than either side had ever envisioned, meaning that the Thundarian heir was immune to traditional animosity between the two cultures.  And since my arrival, I had charmed, enchanted, and bewildered.  Bewildered especially, as no one could quite figure out why I was there. 

Third right turning and down the stairs . . .

It had been a gut feeling.  Even though I had committed to teaching classes at the Academy, play dates with my niece, advocacy before the Council for several worthy causes, and time finally for my husband, a week of anxious days and sleepless nights dragged my attention away from everything I had built a life around.  Unable to focus during a meeting with my brother and his advisors, I heard cultured lecturing outside in the hall.  Rising from my seat and looking out the door, I saw that an Otkaste stood arguing with a guard, explaining with finest academic condescension why the opening of the new amphitheater in Killian merited Imperial attention.  Instinct pulled me deeper into the conversation, not any innate love for blood-sport spectacle, opulent and special effect laden theater, nor appreciation for Otkaste cultural achievement.  But before I knew for certain why, I found that I had agreed to open the theater myself.

Blast, another dead end.  Retrace my steps . . . how about down the stairs and then the third right turning?

Instinct has come to play a far larger part in my life than I ever desired.  I had lived my own life and found harmony in pursuing my own endeavors.  Doing so, I worked my own way to the top of the Academy and to the highest echelon of the bororeia, married my childhood sweetheart, and became heir to the largest, most powerful empire in the known world.  I had set my own goals, chased them, and won what I had dreamed of as a child.  Planning had lead me to rebuild the glory of Thundria, to build a golden future for myself, and to start the rehabilitation of the Thundeir family.

I wish that I had brought a torch . . .

But there are some things that just feel right, and they make no sense, neither empirically nor logically, but have such a hold on you that you know that if you ignore it, you’ll regret it.  I’ve felt that way before.  I felt it before I asked Seeker to marry me, before I snuck into the bororeia quarters as a student, before I accepted the heir-ship.  None of those were sensical beforehand: I was half blood, not good enough for the son of one of the greatest families in Paravel, a student days away from dropping out, and the second daughter of a man who never wanted any of his children to touch the throne.  I now can’t picture myself without those choices.  And I can’t picture myself without the guilt from the times I ignored those feelings.  So, now I was running through the bowels of an Otkaste prison, looking to save a man who I would have gladly killed five years ago, with a truly harebrained idea of how to rescue him.  Believe me, the guilt and sleepless nights are that bad. 

Now I know that I’ve made it to the man’s cell: it’s the only one with lights and guards.  The Otkaste live so far up in the mountains and um . . . deter trespassers so thoroughly that the state has taken most of the cells for document and food storage rather than for prisoners.  But, as the ceiling drips, documents and food are susceptible to damp, whereas people manage to be useful even after a soaking.  It would be bad enough if the Otkaste had planned merely to leave this man here.

But no.  He was too sensational a man to leave moldering in a cell.  The state elders planned that he would inaugurate the new amphitheater.  To his misfortune, he belonged to the Alliance, from his standard issue ray gun to the captain stripes on his shirtsleeves.  As the Alliance had come offering treaty and trade, then taken our hospitality as an invitation to conquer our empire, once he was in the amphitheater, no soul would be able to stand up for him against the bloodlust. 

I only realized as I slowed that I had been running.  Straightening myself, brushing back my hair from my face, and returning my crest back to my chest, I did my best military stalk toward the guards. 

“Gentlemen.”  I greeted them with a curt nod.  “I will be talking with the prisoner.  You may go.  Leave the keys.  I will return them to you when I am finished.”

The guards exchanged slack-jawed stares.  They had their orders, and a strong fear of their lieutenant’s temper.  But I was heir to the throne of Paravel, second in the empire to only the king himself.  They were trying to communicate their mental calculations of how many lashes they would earn from their lieutenant for disobedience without offending me.  “But -- my lady . . . we were told --”

“I wish to interrogate him concerning his presence here.  To determine the threat that the Alliance may be to us even now.  Your superiors have seen my orders, and clearance.  I have their permission, and your new orders are to leave the prisoner with me.”  I had been over-playing my hand, as I had no orders and had purposefully avoided every member of the prison authority as I came down here.  I then played the card of the world-weary benevolent protectress.  “What I do, I do for Thundria, for the whole empire, but that doesn’t mean that I must be proud.”  For my final play, I planned a display of vulnerability, and hanging my head, I said in the voice belonging to the confessional,   “Gentlemen, I cannot endure the idea that someone else might witness what I’ve got to do.” 

I didn’t look up as they walked past, merely holding out my hand for the keys.  Once they were passed, I let my head rock back with a silent sight of relief.  I had started to smile a tiny bit as putting key to lock, when one of them called to me:  “Lady, what if he hurts you?”

Then I truly smiled.  “I am the Lady Kai,”  I assured them.  “I’d like to see him try.”  Then I turned the key, and opening the door, left their sight.  I turned and closed the door with a decisive slam to encourage them on their way. 

“Good luck, my lady,” one called.  I only let out my breath when I no longer heard their footsteps.  I turned again to face the prisoner. 

He stood back against the wall farthest from me, hands clenched, back straight, and eyes focused on me.  “Have you come to kill me?”  He asked me very slowly and in a loud voice usually reserved for idiots and foreigners;  he hadn’t understood a word that I had said to the guards, as we had spoken only in Thundarian, and so far as I knew, no member of the Alliance had ever bothered to learn our language.

“No.”  I replied in English.  “They are planning to do that anyway.  There was no need for me to come here in the middle of the night to do that.”  He gritted his teeth, and made no response. 

“In fact,” I had to take a breath in order to get the next part out. “I’m here to do the opposite of kill you:  I’m offering you a way out.”  I stared at him, hoping to gauge his reaction, then searching for any hint of response.  Still nothing.  He didn’t absorb a word I said. 

Okay.  We Kai are nothing if not flexible and we Thundarians are nothing if not incredibly stubborn.  So I tried again.  “What is your name?”  Still silence.  “Come on,” I wheedled.  “In your movies, captured soldiers can say their name, rank, and serial number.  Surely you can tell me a name.  Something to call you.”  I wait a beat, and say contemplatively, “Or I could just call you Joe.  Seems that was the name used by many of the soldiers in those movies.”

I think that I have been very clever, purposefully misrepresenting G.I. Joe as the common name of Alliance soldiers.  Maybe his silence comes because he hasn’t seen the old movies; he looked younger than me. I hoped that he would at least correct me, and I allowed a friendly-ish smile to my lips.  I qualify with “-ish” only because I only wanted to imply familiarity without assuming it.

Familiarity is no where on his face.  “John Thoma.  Captain.  4100899732256.” 

“John.  Good.”  I push my hair out of my face again.  “Did you understand what I just said?  That I’m here to get you out?”  The silence has really become irritating.  “I know that you can speak.  Do you understand?”

He takes his own deep breath.  “You say that you want to help me escape.”  He locks his eyes to mine.  “But, I don’t believe that the Silver Maiden has any intention to do well by an Alliance man.”  I wince.  I hadn’t thought that my reputation had been that pervasive.  I know that not many young women have silver hair, and even fewer have matching eyes.  But I hadn’t honestly thought of that as a stumbling block, my reputation, merely a tool to use with my own people.

“I didn’t expect that you’d recognize me.”  I admitted.  But a reunion or duel or whatever this was turning out to be wasn’t what I had on my mind.  “And now that you have, and know who I am, then you know that I can make good on whatever I promise you.  I’ve got the power, and I never break my word.  I am earnest.  I can get you out.”  I sat down on the floor, making myself less a threat and invoking humility, but still keeping my eyes on his.

“My first posting was the Battle of Paravel.  I know that you keep your word.  You promised to reclaim the city and purge it of every enemy, if I’m remembering correctly.”  He refused to sit down.  “I was posted as a private and left as a sergeant, three days later, shipped off wounded, luckiest of my platoon.”  He glared.  “So many died.  Because you kept your word.”  He pulled down the collar of his shirt, showing a mass of scar tissue on his right shoulder.  “So, Silver Maiden, kill me now and spare me your complex plan that’ll make someone else kill me.”

I curse, purely in Thundarian, about boneheadedness and stubbornness, though I’m not certain whose boneheadedness and stubbornness I’m abusing.  Shifting back to English, I try to convince John to believe me. 

“Killing you here will fix absolutely nothing.  And letting them kill you tomorrow will be even worse.  They’ll take the day of abusing you until your sunset execution to whip up greater frenzy against the Alliance.  And against anyone who wasn’t on the right side during the war.” 

I rise to my feet again, my fingers clenching in and out of fists.  “That damn war you people started has left divisions miles wide.  Some people managed to get away and fight you all on the battlefield.  Others, were trapped under your, your regime, and watched insurrectionists die.  Horribly, of course.  And among both parties, there were people who thought we should make peace and become vassals, others who said that we should pack up and find a new country, and finally others who were determined to reclaim Thundria at any cost.  Those divisions don’t just evaporate.  We’ve spent the past five years trying to patch our people back together.

“Yes, I have many reasons to want all Alliance dead, or at least out of my hair.  And stepping back and letting the Otkaste do what they will would get you out of my hair.   But if I forgive you, and let you free,” I have to pummel down my own astonishment of what my instincts over the past weeks have brought me to.  “then maybe that’s one more patch, easing the war.  If I can value something higher than our battle lines, who knows what’ll follow next.  What the Otkaste plan to do to you tomorrow, it has no dignity, no honor, not for them.  The worst crime a Thundarian can commit is to take another’s life.  That’s the basis of our society.”  I hold up a hand to pause any possible reference to our behavior in the war.  “Society, I said.  The war isn’t society.  It was just a trying to get by.  To deal with peace, we need more than that, higher goals for ourselves than survival.  So, even though I can get rid of you by stepping back, if I step in now, I’m that much closer to leaving the war behind and rebuilding  . . . us.

“So, it’s not about you, if that’s what’s been concerning you.  It’s about making my people better, healing a hurt, and thus saving myself a lot of talking to people who aren’t ready to hear it.  If you can’t believe that I’d have great concern for an Alliance life, that’s pretty much right.  But a life on whole, that I’ll defend.  That I’ll stand behind, letting everyone see the strength of my conviction.  And that’s why I want to get you out.  You’ve wound up on my side of a fight.”

He looked troubled.  He rubbed his chin, bowed his head, only looked at me sideways.  “You really want to help me?  Keep me alive?  You won’t let me out, and then call them back down on my head?”

“Yes, Yes, and No.  I’m on the level.  I will help you.”  I wait until he meets my eyes, forcing every shred of belief into my reply.  “You have my word.”

John Thoma sighed heavily and slumped against the wall.  “Okay.  Get me out.”

---------

I had a plan.  If his cell was empty, then the hunt would begin.  There needed to be someone locked away.  So I’d take his place. 

Now it’s not as stupid a plan as it seems.  If I take his place, then he must take mine.  Then as me, he returns to Paravel, presents my crest and the letter I have folded onto the back of the pendant to my brother, and then he’s free.  As for me, I’d hold his place, let him get far away, reveal who the prisoner really was, and then do all the patching and healing I’d been boasting about to John.  In theory, it sounded like a really good plan.

But reality and I are frequently in disagreement as to how closely it ought to mirror theory.  John had been found, lost in the mountains, by a band of Otkaste rather than by bororeia.  Bororeia have just as much reason to seek vengeance from the Alliance, but they have a council that they have to report and answer to.  The band that found John had no such accountability applied to them; as such, I began to suspect that the reason John hadn’t sat was because that would have required bending, and his ribs were not in favor of that at the moment.  Any other hurts I figured that I could hide with his disguise, but I worried about the ribs going unattended and possibly impeding his escape.

In return for that goose egg, fate gave us a wondrous boon:  John had been flying with his crew to a negotiation with my brother in Paravel, when engine trouble grounded their bird in one of the rare valleys in these mountains.  His exploring the territory of the king he would soon treat with had turned into being lost in the mountains, and then being captured by one of the sects of Thundarian society that disapproved of any interaction with Alliance that didn’t involve some form of violence.  The boon wasn’t that he had been caught, but rather than his ship’s most likely course would be to alert Paravel as to what had happened.  The crew would most likely make contact as intended and request Malakai’s help in finding Captain Thoma again.  It would be one less hurdle to cross if Paravel already knew that John was separate, and would make my brother glad to have him walk right into his palace.  My brother always appreciated a reprieve from having to send his own patrols into Otkaste territory.

As to the disguises, those relied on a skill that I would really rather forget, but persisted in sticking around, luckily for us.  Long story short, during the war I had made a bargain with the higher powers for the ability to end that damn thing.  By higher powers I mean things like gods, or demons, or what have you.  Whatever they were, I got those nagging gut feelings more often, and got the ability to manipulate the being of things.  Think of it as magic, but with much more science and tangible stuff behind it.  But regardless, that talent would transform myself into John and John into me for a while. 

I don’t know which shocked John more, that I was going to take his place, or that I was “magicking” him to look like.  His credulity nigh on perforated when he seemed to appear before himself. 

Anyhow, there was much confusion and disbelief, from both sides, as I hadn’t really expected my talent to work so thoroughly since I had been trying to starve it since the end of the war.  But we made it through all that, and I laid out the plan for John as to how to leave.  I gave him the keys, told him to lock me in and then return the keys to the guard.  I made him repeat to me the path out of the prison, then the path to my rooms in the nearby governor’s house.  He practiced his imitation of the Lady Kai, walking like a woman, and the excuses that should let him enter and leave the stables with my mount.  I did my best to coach him in riding Eaylah, since he’d never had the opportunity to ride an eagle before.  I had made sure to tell Eaylah my plan and convince her to take John to Paravel and protect him on the way.  I would have cursed heartily and vindictively if the stubbornness of that over-brained bird would have blown up the whole plan.

I wasn’t certain that John had everything down when I coaxed him to lock the door, but he needed to return the keys to the same guards that I had borrowed them from.  He left armed with my appearance and reputation, strutting in a cocksure manner that I found totally inappropriate.  But after his steps had faded out, my strained sense heard no sounds of a fight, or any exclamations about an escaped prisoner.  In fact, I heard nothing except the slow, wretched drip of the damp until the guards returned to their post.  Then I knew that I had been successful when all they gave me was a scowl.

---------

I’ve said that reality and I don’t always get on, haven’t I?  Well, after sunrise, reality proved to be a real b***h.  John hadn’t made it out of the city.  As I was walked into the amphitheater, the governor introduced John under my name, assuring him that the christening of the arena would make him glad that he had been persuaded not to leave last night.

I couldn’t risk revealing our identities then, as I feared I’d look like John’ victim rather than his rescuer.  That certainly wouldn’t help either of us, really.  Just think, my reputation as the Lady Kai would have fallen to shreds if one, banged up Alliance captain had so thoroughly overcome me.

So I took John’ place.  And I kept our secret.

And I’d like to skip over most all that happened that day.

-------

“You must’ve been mad.  No,” Malakai fished for the best word, “insane.  Yes, insane.  I should announce it to the world, because everyone’s going to know if you keep going like that.”

“Fine.  You go announce.  I’ll stay here.”  I burrowed my face into my pillow, enjoying the feel of the weave on my face.  A nice haze clung in the corners of my mind, making the pillow’s texture more relevant than the sundry aches that my body occasionally complained of.

Malakai chuckled.  He settled deeper into his chair, showing no intention of moving.  “Shouldn’t you be seeing to the Alliance delegation?”  

Malakai smiled indulgently.  “I think that they actually approve of my being here instead.  My English is so rusty that I talk myself in circles, so that no one is quite sure what I’m saying.  Besides, you’re a person of interest for them.  Captain Thoma for one is very concerned as to your condition.” 

We sat in silence for a while, he contemplating some wrinkles of state, I debating the merits of rolling over versus staying put.  As I had decided that rolling was too much effort, he had decided that he needed to talk more.

“The Otkaste are mortified.  They have been sending letters and messengers promising that had you given any sign, they would have cut everything short.  They sure have a way with words don’t they?”  He shook his head.  “So, the Otkaste are humbled, the Alliance grateful, and you are hurt.  Sounds ridiculous.  I can’t really believe that you did that.”

“But I won’t deny that it was harebrained beyond belief.  But what else do you have an heir for?  The Alliance is grateful, ready to talk, in a way that they haven’t been for years.  Did Thoma tell you he was stationed in Paravel?  He almost kicked me out of his cell when I walked in.  That’s one man well thought of by the Alliance who’s on our side for life now.  And the Otkaste?  I think I humbled them in my dedication to world peace, being willing to protect an Alliance man with my life.  They would have opposed any agreement you came up with with Thoma and we only just convinced them that we half-bloods and half-breeds can have a place in this new world we’re creating.  Now, big brother, you’ve got political capital to work with.”

A smile crossed his face.  “I had wondered how much of all that you had planned beforehand, and how much came by, oh, happy chance, would one call it?”

“Aughhh, happy Mom’s left shoe.  Nothing happy.  Pointy, achy, ouchy, nasty, owwy, yes.  Owwy chance.  Better saying, really.”

He chuckled again.  He has always had a low opinion of my maturity.  He has said that I can act a good show, but when I get hurt, I turn back into the whiny three-year-old I actually am.  Makes me glad I have a big brother. 

Malakai also has a horrible habit of fidgeting when he’s working up to something.  Squeak, rustle rustle, thump-ump-bump.  The chair he’s sitting in will need repaired after he’s done with it.

“Dakki.”

“Sleeping.  Go fidget somewhere else.”

“Dakki, I need to ask you something.”

“Yes, and it’s going to be horrible.  I can tell by how your chair is clogging around the floor.  Ask me when my skin doesn’t have holes in it.”

“Dakki, please.”

Damn the man.  He’s convinced it’s serious.  I’ve got a feeling that I know what Mal’s going to say.  I’m not looking forward to answering his question;  I haven’t even found the answer for myself, yet.

“All right, Mal.  You’ve got me.  What’s on your mind?”

“How did you know to go to Killian?”  I have no answer.

“Was it the goddess?”  Probably, I guess.

“I’m worried, Dakki.  I’m worried that she will make you into a crazy woman.  That she has plans for you, plans for more than we ever dreamed of.  I’m worried that maybe it wasn’t the goddess; maybe it was just something set on using you.  I don’t know how we can explain what happened to the Alliance, or the Otkaste, or anyone else for that matter, and still have Dakki, you know what I mean?  You did something no one should be able to do.  And you can so easily do it again, because, hell, who could stop you?  People already worry about you, the Old Families especially; they say you’re just another Thundeir demagogue in a soldier’s clothes, that it’s only a matter of time before you will overthrow the government and hand us all over to the Kai, or the Otkaste, or whatever bogeyman has their imagination at the moment.”

“Mal, you know I’d never do that.”

“Dakki, that’s what I’m saying: I know that you wouldn’t, but I don’t know that this thing that lets you do amazing things wouldn’t.  Maybe the goddess will do something terrible through you.  Maybe it wasn’t the goddess at all.  Maybe something has a stranglehold on you, and we’ll never know it.  It has me worried, Dakki.  I was hoping you’d understand it.  Dakki, can you tell me what’s going on?”

“No, Mal.  No, I can’t.”

He frowned.  His chair didn’t dance anymore.  “Then it’s going to be interesting explaining it to the Alliance, the Otkaste, and everyone else.”

He has a great bedside manner, does my big brother.  Guess that’s why he’s king.

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Author's Note

Input on most everything welcome, especially exposition. Is it sufficient to support the story? Is the exposition too weighty, and makes segments drag?