The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 762

The country did not finish processing it that day. It took about a week.

One man had walked out of the Grand Convocation as the winner, and the country slowly worked out what the word winner actually meant in this case — because the wager had not been for money, and it had not been for pride.

Every tower in the United State of Magic now belonged to Alexander.

…

It had never happened. Not once in five hundred years, not in the founding, not in any of the six wars the recording glass had settled.

Seven colours. Seven traditions. Seven separate five-century institutions that had spent their entire existence refusing to sit at the same table for longer than an afternoon.

All of them, now, under one name.

And the name was White.

…

There was one other thing that came out of that afternoon, and for a lot of people it was the more interesting story.

Beatrix Hargrove had walked into the betting hall before the first bout and put Regent Group, Ferrowgate, and every White Tower branch on the table.

The book had been paying twenty to one.

By the time the sun went down, every house in the country owed them, and the settlements took nine days to clear, and the number at the end of it was large enough that three newspapers printed it wrong because their editors assumed the figure had a typing error in it.

It was, and remains, the single largest win in the recorded history of the United State of Magic.

…

Here is what nobody outside the country understands about the towers.

Every state in the union has a governor. Every state has its own courts, its own roads, its own taxes. On paper, the towers have no political power whatsoever.

In practice, the tower in state is the church, the university, the hospital, the licensing board and the moral authority, all in one building, and it has been all of those things since before the state had a name.

A governor who quarrels with his tower does not finish his term.

So when one man defeated five archmages and then fifty master-rank magicians in a single afternoon, and walked out holding all seven colours, the political arithmetic did not need to be spoken out loud.

Nobody voted. Nobody signed anything.

Everybody simply understood, that week, who the first man in the United State of Magic now was.

Alexander White.

…

Which is why what he did next made no sense to anyone.

They expected a parade. They expected interviews, a new title, a residence, a portrait commissioned for the hall of the Convocation. There was a firm in New Avalon that had already drafted three versions of a coronation-style investiture ceremony on the assumption that somebody would eventually ask for one.

Instead, Alexander announced that he was going to study.

…

“Study what?” the reporter asked.

“Magic.”

“Grandmaster, you just defeated fifty master-rank magicians.”

“Then this is a good time to find out what they know.”

He kept every grandmaster in post. Blue’s man kept running Blue. Green’s matriarch kept running Green. Brown stayed in her mountain, Yellow stayed in its halls, and the Red survivors kept their seats.

But Yorick was gone. No one knew where he was.

The only thing that changed was the sign over the door.

Every tower in the country was repainted white, and under the white, in small neat letters, each one kept its colour. White Tower — Blue Branch. White Tower — Green Branch.

They taught exactly what they had always taught. They just taught it under one roof now.

…

And then the other changes started, and those were the ones people actually noticed.

Scholarships, first. Then the entrance requirements — the family letters, the sponsor signatures, the fees that had quietly kept the poor out of seven towers for five hundred years — all of it gone inside a month.

“Teaching is open to every child in this country,” Alex said, once, when somebody asked. “That’s it. That’s the whole policy. If they show up, we teach them.”

Half the elders in the union hated it.

The other half noticed that the money paying for all of it came out of Alexander’s own accounts, every month, without anybody having to ask twice — and discovered they could live with their objections.

…

Then he disappeared for a month.

People said he was in the archives. That was the rumour that made sense: seven towers, seven vaults, five hundred years of sealed formula in each of them, and the only man in history with the keys to all seven at once.

It was true, and it was not the whole truth.

Because other people said they had seen him somewhere else entirely — out east, past the Line, in the Dominion of Beasts.

In the beast markets, of all places. Day after day, week after week, moving from market to market, state to state, stopping at every stall and every cage.

Not buying. Touching.

Just walking down the rows, laying one gloved hand on each animal for a second or two, and moving on.

Nobody could work out what he was doing, and nobody ever asked him.

…

Half a year later.

The most sacred tower in the United State of Magic is the oldest one, and it does not belong to a colour. It stands where the union was founded, and its lowest chamber has a formation cut into the floor that predates every tower in the country.

Alexander stood in the middle of it at night with lamps burning in a ring around the walls.

And in front of him sat a fox.

It was very old and it was not large, and it looked at him the way something looks at you when it has been looking at people for longer than your civilisation.

“Ten thousand,” Alex said. “I’ve collected ten thousand beast skills. Every kind in the Dominion, and every kind past it.”

The fox said nothing.

“That was the price. So now you show me the way to the empire.”

…

The fox blinked slowly.

“I knew. You already opened your lost memory,” it said. “Months ago. You used magic to go back into the part of your childhood you couldn’t reach, and you found what was in it.”

“Yes.”

“Then you already know the truth of this world.” Its tail moved once across the stone. “So why are you asking me?”

“Because I want to be sure,” Alex said.

…

He had gone looking for it in the spring, and it had taken Gaia eleven days.

There was a piece of his own life he had never been able to hold. Everything before about seven years old came back as pressure behind the eyes and then nothing — and every time he pushed at it, the headache arrived and the memory did not.

So he had asked her to read every tower’s work on the mind, all seven colours at once, and find him a formula that could open a door his own head was holding shut.

Gaia found one. He used it once, and afterward he sat down on the floor for a long time.

…

“Then do it again,” the fox said. “Here, in this formation. That memory is the road. It is the only road there has ever been, and it goes back to the empire of the Earth.”

Alex looked at the pattern cut into the floor around him.

Then he sat down in the middle of it, crossed his legs, and cast.

The chamber went away.

…

He was seven years old.

He was in a seat too big for him, with a window on his left full of white cloud, and the whole cabin smelled of the leather cleaner they used on the royal aircraft.

“Alexander.”

His mother leaned across and tucked his collar down. She was very beautiful and she wore no jewellery except one thing at her neck, and she was smiling at him.

“We’ll be at your father’s castle soon. Have you missed him?”

“I don’t know,” Alexander said.

His mother had not given him a memento in a falling aircraft.

She had given him a school.

“Who are you,” Alex said to the old fox, “really?”

“I am the guardian of this world,” the fox said. “This small, folded world. I have been here since before it had anybody in it.”

“And the beasts? The ten thousand?”

“A price is a price.” Something that was almost humour moved in its face. “You paid it. So now I keep my side.”

It stood up on four small feet.

“You have taken five crowns here. Every country in this world answers to you now, and that was the condition, and it has been met.” The lamps around the walls began to go out, one after another, from the far end. “It is time you went back to your body. About thirteen years already passed since.”

…

Alex felt himself lifted.

Not by hands. By something underneath him, and then he was moving through a long dark pull with no walls, and everything he had built over fourteen years — the drones, the towers, Beatrix, Feby, Sofina, Sophia, Julia — came loose and went past him and away.

His thinking got quieter, and quieter.

The last thing he had was a voice, very small, somewhere far above.

“Nobody has ever passed this world the way you passed it. Not one. Be proud of that.”

A pause.

“Goodbye, son of Selena.”

…

It was raining.

That was the first thing — cold rain on the back of his neck, and wet gravel under him, and his own hands moving in front of his face.

They were holding a stone. He was turning it over and over on the ground, in a puddle, in the rain, the way a small child plays.

He did not know why his hands were doing that.

Then someone hit him across the face hard enough to knock him sideways.

…

“Are you listening to me?”

A young woman stood over him with her hair stuck to her cheek and her whole body shaking with temper.

“I am the daughter of Duke Havenworth. This marriage was arranged before either of us was born, and I have said it to my father, and I will say it to you.” She was almost crying with the anger of it. “I do not want this. I will not marry an idiot. I don’t care that he is the Tenth Prince of the Empire.”

Somebody came running across the gravel.

A young woman in a plain nanny’s coat went down on her knees in the wet beside him and got her arms around his shoulders.

And the body in her arms burst into tears.

“Nanny,” he heard himself sobbing, “Nanny, it hurts, it hurts—”

…

“Look at him.” Miss Havenworth’s voice went up. “Twenty years old. Twenty. And he sits in the rain playing with stones and crying like a five-year-old. Enough. I have had enough of this.”

“Miss Havenworth, please.” The nanny did not let go of him. “Please stop humiliating him. He can’t help it. He’s already pitiful enough.”

“He’s pitiful? I’m the one being married to him.” She threw her hands out. “Do you know what it’s like to walk through the palace beside that? Do you know what people say? He can’t even use a toilet by himself!”

The nanny closed her eyes.

And in her arms, the crying stopped.

…

It stopped all at once, mid-breath, the way a tap closes.

He lifted his head.

Behind it a pair of eyes that had never once looked at anything, focusing, hardening, coming to a point.

Alexander looked up through the rain at the daughter of Duke Havenworth.

And he was back to Earth.