Chapter 12

“Consonants and vowels,” North repeated. He practiced the exercises as she commanded him to speak the sounds out loud. His brain was whirling with words that he had spoken for a lifetime that now had a physical presence before his eyes. She handed him another sheet of paper.

“Spelling lists?” North questioned as he glanced up and down the page. “How am I to master these?”

“Get thee a study partner,” Dame Minogue quipped, tapping the sheet of paper with the long fingernail on her middle finger. “I understand there is a certain maiden who has the qualifications who would be amenable to studying with you.”

“Ahh,” North said, sitting back in his chair. “My new powers of observation and analysis are telling me that the Sisterhood of Subversion have been plotting my trials in the Court of the Crimson King unbeknownst to me, until now that is. Now, the plots reveal themselves when I am firmly enmeshed like an insect on a spiderweb.”

“Subversives – where did you learn this word?” Dame Minogue asked as she sat up straight. When North could not answer, she continued, “You don’t know, do you?”

“No, I do not.” North was taken aback by her observation. She pointed out a puzzle that he had recognized in minute bits and pieces as he spoke to others over the past few days. “Am I afflicted with something?

“Afflicted, no; infused, yes, so I believe,” she said. “Are your reflexes faster these past days?”

“Yes.”

“Are your actions on the practice fields, stronger? More precise?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Are you anticipating what others are going to say before they speak?”

“Yes, now that you mention it. It’s like seeing more moves ahead on a game board.” North was more puzzled, and a tad alarmed. “This is not normal for me.”

“You’ve never been this close to the Anchor of the Gods before,” she said. “For those who are attuned to it, they benefit by being close to it. Were you this quick in school as a boy?”

North gave her a queer look. “I’m quick now? I feel like a dull knife plunging into a fresh carcass. However, there is no comparison because school was the farm, the woods, and various workshops. I am still the Wildman from the far South. My mother is from the wildlands, the Twilla Tribe.”

Dame Minogue sat back from her desk “Fascinating, I cannot remember when we had someone from the True South at the palace, especially one with tribal blood in his veins.” Her face looked troubled. “When Lord Aegis announced he was going southward to seek out candidates, I challenged him to give me his arguments. He said our bloodlines were tired, too closely related to one another after all these generations. Only the South offered fresh bloodlines and specifically, the True South with the peoples of the wildlands. You do realize all the humans in our world came with the Crimson King at the time he came through the gates from the Celestial Way. Only a few individuals have come since.”

North was trying to assimilate her lesson, boggled by the ramifications of what she was implying. He took another tangent. “I’m not surprised that few have come here since the founding. Do you know how difficult it is to find a gate to the Celestial Way from here? No one on the Celestial Way speaks of hidden gates on their worlds, perhaps difficult to access but not hidden.”

“You found it,” she said, pointing her index finger at him.

“Only by tracking backwards the route the Butcher took, which was tricky and dangerously stupid,” North said. “If I hadn’t been thoroughly out of my mind, I would’ve turned back ten times. I must have been insane.”

Dame Minogue smacked the desk with her right hand. “A clever solution. Did you learn anything of the Butcher?”