Against the Empire: The Dominion and Michian Read Free

of his. “Shall we talk?” Ryder asked. “Should we go awake his majesty?”
    Imelda mentally paused at hearing the title used so easily. Alec was Alec for her, a simple name for a complex relationship, but after weeks out in the wilderness with him, she had forgotten the impact of his title when used with respect, especially when used by someone she respected.
    “He probably needs to sleep, but you might put someone in the tent with him. When he overused his ingenaire powers back in Bondell last year, I think he slept for two or three days before he woke up,” Imelda warned, remembering the hours she had sat with Bethany, watching him lie inside a tent, recuperating from overuse of his extraordinary abilities.
    Ryder raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you come with me then, and give a report on what you’ve done and how you got here?” he ordered in a tone that sounded like a polite request. He began to walk away, and Imelda fell in step beside him.
    “ I’ve heard some of the ingenairii tell stories about what happened to your command. I’d like to hear what you can add to it all,” Ryder opened the conversation as they sat down.
    Imelda began to give a professional debriefing, describing the encampment along the river and the destruction of the supply barges that had starved the invading lacertii army in Goldenfields.
    “So you had an idyllic campout in the hills. Then what happened?” Ryder asked.
    “Everything.” Imelda let the single word sum up the compression of events that had been folded into the past few days. “We saved the lacerta Alec wanted to be their leader, then delivered her army to her, then delivered another army to her and sent her home. Then we rode back here and fought to the death.”
    “Did Alec make the right decision about this Rosebay, the renegade lacerta?” Ryder asked. “I gather some of your companions thought this lacerta leader should have been put to death like the rest of the ship crews, or maybe brought back here as a bargaining chip?”
    “Most of us felt, uneasy, at first,” Imelda said with hesitation, reliving her own conflicted view, “but it seemed correct eventually, and it ended up taking several hundred lacertii away from the battle with the Dominion, hopefully on a journey to their home to end this war, so I think his judgment was right.”
    “But you almost died carrying out his plans,” Ryder commented as he leaned forward.
    “That’s not true,” she paused. “I did die,” Imelda corrected her commander, surprised by the implications of the questions that seemed critical of Alec. “But Alec healed me and brought me back to life,” she finished in a softer tone. “And what’s more, going into battle like that wasn’t really his plan; all the professional soldiers wanted to go, while Alec was willing to bypass the battlefield,” she knew as soon as she said it that she was about to be tripped up.
    “How then did the crown-keeper come to be in the middle of the battlefield yesterday? Shouldn’t his guard have kept him out of the conflict?” Ryder switched to the new topic that she saw standing before her.
    “But we thought he had been taken out of the way of the conflict! He was out of the way, until he came back and put himself right among the worst of the bloodshed,” Imelda said emphatically, feeling uneasy because there was truth in the question’s implication that she had failed to protect the Dominion’s ruler. Nathaniel had been the last one to leave him, but they all had left him earlier. She’d listened to Kinsey’s explanation of how the two of them had returned and found her dead body on the hilltop, and Alec had brought them back to an earlier hour in the day through his wild ability to travel in time, providing support that had kept Imelda alive. Then Alec had left to fight his way across the raging battlefield to save various other friends who Kinsey swore she had seen dead before the trip back in time. Finally, Alec had