A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Blessings? What are… Oh, father did once mention something – but I wasn't to hear," Asabel said.

"Asabel, please, calm down," Oliver said, more firmly now. "You're terrifying me as well." He could see his own hand shaking. He didn't like the instability that he felt from her. He'd gotten excited by that prospect of power in her, the ability to keep what was happening to him in check – and then as soon as he'd mentioned it, that strength had fled her as quickly as it had come.

Only when she noticed his own hand did she begin to calm. Her breathing was erratic. Her chest was rising and falling at an impossible rate. Oliver wouldn't have been surprised to see her faint.

As if to comfort herself, she did what must have been routine for her now. She felt for the pulse on his wrist, as she had thousands of times before, on all those soldiers that she'd helped.

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"Your pulse has stabilized," she noted, sounding more like a doctor.

"It has," Oliver said. "Your so terrible power did that."

"It did not," Asabel said, sounding almost angry. "I know because I tried. It did not help you, Oliver."

"Something did – something in you," Oliver said.

"It could not," Asabel said. "I am not that. I try to be strong, but I am not that."

"How could it otherwise be? The three times that I've been sick, it was only in meeting with you that it started to deprecate," Oliver said.

"How would that make sense?" Asabel said. "I can cure small wounds, and help rush intoxicants out of a body. It's a weak and feeble power, but it requires that I know that which I am healing. I did not know you."

"I told you your power was of the Gods – or something similar. It is my Blessing that breaks me," Oliver said.

"I do not understand," Asabel said, shaking her head sadly. "Though it does seem that you seem to be feeling better and so suddenly, I dare not claim any credit for it. Now you know the worst of me, it seems unlikely that our Houses can continue to be allies. I will uphold my promises to you, until the day that you decide to enact punishment on me, for what I have committed."

"Asabel…" Oliver said. Somewhere, somehow, it had all spiralled out of control. How could he find the words to say what was right to say, when he himself didn't even know what had happened? What even had happened?

It would be fair to guess that he'd been wrong, but the opposite had been true. He'd been too right. Beyond right. He'd seen too deeply, exposing something that should never have been seen.

"Your House is a righteous one, is it not?" Asabel said, smiling a sad smile. "I am glad that it was you who discovered it, I suppose. I knew it would be found out eventually, but I had dared to hope that I would be able to fulfil my Uncle's dreams before it was. I apologise again, Ser Patrick, for any hopes that I might have offered you – for an image of me that I might have led you into believing.

I suppose this is it, then…"

"I do not want it to be so," Oliver said firmly.

"Nor do I," Asabel said, readopting her royal tone, wielding it as something of a shield. "But it is the way it must be. If you are a Patrick, you should do what is right. I would not feel so terribly about it, if you were the one to turn me in."@@novelbin@@

"Turn you in for what?" Oliver said, more loudly than he had intended to. "For a power that can heal things? Forgive me for speaking out of turn, Princess, but there are far worse powers out there."

"And all of them have been rightly condemned by the Church," Asabel said. "It was a little bird with a broken wing at first. I was too young at the time to realize what I was doing. I cried, seeing it, enough to make me close my eyes to rub them. When I'd opened them again, the bird's wing was healed. I thought it to be a miracle."

"It was."

"It wasn't," Asabel said. "It was the product of something unnatural. Something I learned myself to be the centre of. I have sullied our evening with this… Enough that I cannot ask for forgiveness – but I enjoyed it nonetheless. How terrible that is, no? You, as sick as you are, no doubt struggling every moment you sat with me, and yet I enjoyed it regardless.

To have someone see me as less than a Princess, more of a girl, it brought me comfort. Now what I am leaks to the surface, and you could never look at me with the same eyes again."

"This is madness," Oliver said, shaking his head furiously. "You speak like someone else. Can't you see the lack of sense in what you're saying? So what if the church condemned it? They know not of what they speak. The church can be torn down, with all the rest of it, if that is the finger that they point."

"Even you believe mana to be an evil, Oliver," Asabel told him gently. "They'd call me a witch, or worse. Do not let me drag me down with you. You're far too good a man for that."

"You cannot believe all this nonsense," Oliver said, gripping his cup tightly enough to crack it. "It's foolishness. The church hides from you more than you know. Yours is not mana – and even if it was, perhaps even I could see that mana itself wasn't evil. That there was worth in understanding it."

"I cannot. I should not. Once again, someone changes themselves for my sake. I cannot allow that to happen," Asabel said, she hardly seemed to be listening.

"Asabel!" Oliver said. "Look at me, woman. Do you not see the fever go from my skin? Do you not see that you've put strength in me again."