The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 764

The head butler's room smelled of wine and old smoke, and the window seat where a queen used to sit had a boot on it.

Alexander stood in the dark by the wall.

Jericho had been asleep for forty minutes.

Alexander took the needle out of his sleeve.

...

It was a sewing needle. He had lifted it out of the tin on the shelf in Felicia's corner of the room, the one she kept her thread in.

Four hours of cultivation. That was all he had.

He balanced the needle on the back of two fingers, sighted across ten feet of dark room, and put it into the base of Jericho's skull with an underhand flick.

A hand's width left of the spine. One inch up. Depth of a fingernail.

Jericho grunted and turned his face into the pillow.

Alexander took out the second needle and put it into the meat below the left shoulder blade, at the point the Xia texts call the gate of the arm.

Then he crossed the room, drew both needles out, wiped them on the blanket, and left.

...

He got back into the servants' room without a sound, slid in beside Felicia, and let her arm come over him the way it did every night.

She mumbled something into his shoulder and did not wake up.

...

In the morning they went down to the kitchen, the way they went down every morning, and there was less food than there had been the day before.

Six of the staff were in there. The fire was lit and the good bread was already gone.

Alexander took his bowl of whatever was left, and then he said, in the too-loud, slightly flat voice that everybody in that house had stopped hearing years ago:

"Felicia. Felicia, I had a dream."

"Did you." She was scraping the pot out. "That's nice."

"There was an old man in it."

...

He got two of them looking. That was all he needed.

"He said — he said starting now, anybody who tells a lie to me is going to have trouble." Alexander nodded to himself, very pleased. "And the only way to get away from the trouble is to come and tell me the true thing. Then it stops."

Somebody at the far end of the kitchen snorted.

Felicia crouched down in front of him and tidied his collar, the way she did forty times a day.

She had spent ten years with a young man who said out loud whatever went through his head — what he'd eaten, what he'd dreamed, who he liked — and she had never once told him not to.

"That sounds like a good dream," she said.

"Don't you think it's good?"

"I think it's very good."

"It is good!" Alexander laughed, delighted with himself, spoon in his fist. "The old man was good to me."

...

The maid came through the kitchen door four minutes later at a dead run.

"Come quick. Somebody — where's the doctor, who fetches the doctor—" She had both hands in her apron. "It's Mister Jericho. He's awake and he's shouting. He can't see."

The pot stopped scraping.

"He can't see anything at all, and he can't move his arms. Either of them." Her voice went up. "He hasn't been hit, he hasn't fallen, he was fine last night. It just happened."

Somebody said the word before anybody else could stop it.

"That's a curse."

...

By the end of that day it had gone through the house twice and out into the village below it.

Half the staff said it was an illness — drink, a bad chest, the man was fifty and lived on wine. Sensible people said sensible things.

But there had been six people in that kitchen at breakfast, and every one of them had heard a simple young man say, in a too-loud voice, that an old man in a dream had promised trouble for liars.

And the trouble had arrived before the plates were cleared.

You can tell people that is a coincidence. They will nod at you.

They will still not sleep well.

...

In three days there were five more.

A groundsman woke up blind. Then the woman who kept the linen store, and a footman, and one of the two housekeepers, and a stable hand — and two of them found that an arm had stopped belonging to them overnight.

Four doctors came up from the town and one came out from the city at considerable expense.

They found nothing.

No fever. No swelling. No injury, no growth, nothing in the eyes, nothing in the blood. Five people in perfect health who simply could not see, and no physician in the province could offer a single word of explanation.

The cure was in the house by then, though, because that had gone around too.

Tell the truth to the idiot prince.

...

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