Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Read Free

trim of his cape.
    “Good luck in the fencing circle tonight, son,” Macallister
called over his shoulder as he rode away.
    “I’m not entering the contest!” Elias called after him, but
Macallister was already out of ear shot, plumes of dust rising in his wake. Elias
swung his foil after the rancher. “Father, why are you so polite to Macallister?
You don’t like the greedy son-of-a-crow any more than I do.”
    “Granted, but there is nothing to be gained from responding
to rudeness in kind, or from antagonizing a man like Roderick Macallister. Despite
all of his failings, and like it or not, he is a powerful man. He’s accustomed
to getting what he wants.”
    “But he won’t get our distillery. We won’t sell. Not ever. Why
can’t he see that?”
    Padraic managed the effect of a shrug with the roll of an
eyebrow. “He doesn’t want to see it, and so he doesn’t. He covets the riches
mass producing whiskey here will bring, and the notoriety. We have the best
water and so the best whiskey, and that rankles Macallister. He’s the
wealthiest man in thirty leagues, but for all that, the spirit that’s named
after this region is perfected here on Duana land, and he doesn’t have his hand
in it.”
    Elias knew his father had the truth of it. The subterranean limestone
basin on the Duana land supplied them with water free from mineral impurities. As
a result, the whiskey distilled from it had a crisp, clean and singular flavor.
The distillery Macallister owned in town at the grist mill couldn’t compete,
and that the rancher could not abide.
    Macallister had worked for some time on developing a new
knoll-whiskey recipe, but to no avail. Rumor had it that the rancher had even
attempted rituals to purify the water of Knoll Creek. Elias watched as
Macallister shrank into a black dot on the prairie and grew thoughtful. “Is it
true what folk say? Is he a wizard?”
    Padraic humphed. “Macallister is a rich man with too much
time on his hands. Most of his knowledge of the arcane ends at parlor tricks. Yet,
out here in the more rural duchies, that is enough to grant one some notoriety.
Folk in these parts only exposure to the arcane is what they’ve read in
dime-store novels. Most wizards of note don’t saunter about demonstrating their
power at dinner parties and drinking holes for the sole purpose of impressing
others.”
    “Which is exactly what he was trying to do by dropping that
little tidbit about attending the Summit Arcana, as if the entire county didn’t
already know.”
    Padraic grunted his assent and followed his son’s gaze,
watching as Macallister vanished into the horizon, where a copse of trees met
the undulating long grass at the edge of the prairie. “Yet, much harm has been
known to come from a great fool with a little knowledge.”
    Padraic looked off into the distance as if he saw something
beyond the horizon both captivating and troubling. Elias had long ago grown accustomed
to this habit of his father’s— the thousand league gaze as he had begun
to think of it—and as such did not interrupt him. Lately, however, it seemed
that the thousand league gaze crept upon Padraic Duana often.
    Elias waited silently as the sun began to dip, shadows
lengthening into late afternoon and splashing the summer sky with hues of red
and purple.
    After the moment passed, Padraic walked to the outer wall of
the rickhouse, sat down, and patted a spot of ground beside him. “Sit a moment,
Elias. We should stretch so that we don’t cramp up. What were we talking
about?”
    “Macallister and his questionable powers.”
    “My old schoolfellow has power in plenty—the kind you carry
in your coin purse. That, and his name.”
    Elias had to concede his father’s point yet again. Aside
from the success of his ranch, Macallister descended from the old gentry that
first settled the southlands under the allowance of House Ogressa, who had been
awarded this duchy in time beyond reckoning. As if that hadn’t