CHAPTER 827: POWER THAT IS EARNED (PART TWO)

The fire in the hearth hissed and crackled, filling the room with warmth, a soft, golden glow and the faintest scent of woodsmoke as Ashlynn considered how to respond to Isabell. Thankfully, the older woman gave her the space to consider her words carefully, sitting back and nibbling on her apple tart while Ashlynn thought about how to explain something that was completely outside the other woman’s experience.

"Vampires believe that they are born with a purpose, to wield death in order to protect life," Ashlynn began slowly. "They serve as a check on power, preventing whole peoples from vanishing or the dominance of any one group at the expense of all others."

"That doesn’t sound very different from the teaching of the Church that those who are born to power are born to its burdens," Isabell said softly. "The power that your Lady Nyrielle wields transcends death and so the burden she bears must be even greater than the power of a king. But that still doesn’t make her power something that she earned."

"I don’t know if a vampire’s power is ’earned’ or not," Ashlynn said carefully. "They certainly pay a price for it. But I’m not talking about vampires to suggest that they earn their power, only to say that they believe that their existence has a purpose. But witches, we don’t believe that there’s a grand purpose behind our power. We don’t believe that we were born with it in order to fulfil some grand role or destiny the way vampires do," Ashlynn explained.

Here, she was repeating words she’d heard from Amahle at the beginning of her training, but she wasn’t just parroting the words. In the past half year, she’d come to understand a great deal more about her own connection to the world and her ability to harness the power of the world and bend it to her will. Now, she felt like her relationship with the world was very, very different from Nyrielle’s relationship with the Void and the Abyss that lay beyond death.

"Let me use a different analogy," Ashlynn said as she looked at the simple black tunic and skirt that Isabell wore for this evening. Or, more accurately, at the intricate set of knots that hung from the belt at Isabell’s waist, serving as a badge of rank that anyone in the large cities of Gaal would recognize. "In Blackwell City, you wear the knots of a Master Engineer. How did you earn those knots?"

"Studying," Isabell said instantly as she recalled long hours spent poring over tomes filled with mathematical formulas and engineering rules. "There were exams. And I needed the confirmation of other masters that I was worthy of the title," she said with an oddly rueful expression.

The Illustrious Company of Engineers in Blackwell City refused to acknowledge her master’s knots when she returned from the Emerald Kingdom because they had been bestowed on her by royal decree. It had been meant as a favor from the newly crowned king who recognized her skills so that she didn’t need to seek out patrons among the older masters to receive recognition he felt was already earned. In the Emerald Kingdom, where her reputation as the Engineer of Destruction had spread far and wide, no one questioned her right to wear those knots.

When she returned home, however, the guild had taken it as a sign that she couldn’t earn the qualifications of a master without somehow earning the favor of the royal court and there had been some unsavory rumors about what she had done to earn that decree for a number of years.

In the end, she’d gone back through the process of taking exams, then completing tasks for three different master engineers to prove her skills met the grade of a master. Two of the three had been reasonable, but one of them kept sending her back to the drawing table for revision after revision of a mutli-gear waterwheel until she could account for the adjustments that would be needed over more than ten years of wear and tear on components.

It had been a ridiculous task when any sensible engineer would have replaced parts as they introduced instability from wear and tear, but she had refused to buckle under the intense pressure of the white haired and stoop shouldered master and in the end, she’d received a surprising bit of advice from him.

"Your customers may not always be wealthy enough or skilled enough to maintain what you build," he said when she finally completed her revisions to his satisfaction. "A farmer may not be able to replace a gear in a lean year, and even if he is able to replace a worn part in a year where he harvests a bumper crop, he may not have the luxury of time to replace it because he must process much more grain."

"You need to think beyond the math to the circumstances of the man who uses what you have designed and built," the old master said. "Then and only then can you consider yourself a master who can be relied upon by not just your customer, but the whole of the community you serve."

It had been a powerful lesson that changed her view of the old man, and she had to admit that when she received her master’s knots for the second time, they felt much more ’earned’ than they did when she received them by royal decree.

"There was a lot of hard work to earn those knots," Isabell said as her mind returned to the current conversation. "It wasn’t all easy, but looking back, I’m glad for the challenges that tempered me before I could wield the power and authority of a master, and I’ve tried to take the same approach with aspiring masters who come to me for an endorsement of their craft."

"And that’s what witchcraft is like," Ashlynn said with a wide smile. "Every witch in the coven is tested, both by the witch who grew their seed of witchcraft and by the world itself. We all face our tests and trials in order to receive the power we wield."

"Even you?" Isabell asked with a raised brow. "I thought that you were different from the witches of your coven. Didn’t this whole mess with Owain Lothian begin because you’d been marked from birth for the power you carry?"