THE PRICE OF STANDING TALL
Training Log — Sidney Greene
January 7, 1989
First transfer of the new year. Formation held clean through opening positioning. Cardinal points locked within forty seconds, improvement of approximately twelve seconds over November average. Transfer initiated at the Guardian's signal rather than mine. Duration: thirty-one seconds.
The Guardian held.
Recommend bi-weekly schedule continue through February. Will reassess at six weeks.
Castle of Elders — Harmonytis
January, 1989
The new year tasted different.
Jace had noticed it on the first morning of January, standing on the Royal Residence balcony with coffee and the Atlantic below and the island quiet around him in the way of early morning before anyone else was awake. Something had shifted in the quality of the air, not weather, not temperature, not anything he could have named if asked directly. Something more interior than that. The year had turned and the thing waiting on the other side of the turn was closer than it had been.
He stood with his coffee and looked at the Atlantic and let himself feel it.
The "Rise Up" album had come off its Christmas run platinum and still charting. "There's a Reason for the Season" had ended its number one tenure just before New Year, and "If You'll Have Me" had been at number one for three weeks in December and was now in its long tail of settled success… the kind of song that stops being a chart event and becomes simply a thing that exists in the world, that people carry with them, that you hear coming out of a car window or a shop door and it sounds like it was always there. Kavanaugh reported this phenomenon with the contained satisfaction of a man who had predicted it and was professionally pleased but not professionally surprised.
"It's become a standard," Kavanaugh told Jace on their first call of the year. "In thirty years, I have said that about perhaps eight songs. That is what it is."
Jace had sat with that for a while. The song he had recorded with his eyes closed because he could not open them, because if he had opened them he would have seen Samantha through the glass and not been able to hold the thing he was trying to hold. Now it was a standard. He thought about that and found he had no response large enough to fit it, so he said thank you and went back to his coffee.
The diplomatic world had found its configuration. Aelin was recognized, formally, with embassies and working channels and the machinery of international legitimacy that Nathan had been building toward since April 1988. The United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, Canada. A growing number of smaller nations who had watched the larger ones move first and made their own calculations. France was still holding, which everyone understood, and nobody discussed openly. The UN working group was ongoing, producing the kind of carefully worded documentation that UN working groups produced, which was progress of a flavor even if it tasted slow.
The Brotherhood was in rhythm.
The rhythm was: training three days. Rest and work one day. Training three days. The formation sessions with Sidney were the spine of January, as they had been the spine of December, and they were changing. Not in structure, the cardinal points were still cardinal points, the anchor of feet on ground was still the anchor; the breathing pattern that Sidney had drilled into all of them over eight months of daily work was still the breathing pattern. The change was in quality. In depth. In the way the bond moved between them during a transfer, which was different from the way it moved in ordinary life in ways that were difficult to articulate but impossible to miss.
Connor, sitting with Jace in the common room of the Royal Residence after the January seventh session, said: "It's louder."
"Yes," Jace said.
"During the transfer. The bond is... it has direction. It's not just connection, it's movement. Everything pointing inward."
"Toward center," Jace said.
Connor looked at him. "What does center feel like."
"Heavy," he said. "But not the wrong kind of heavy. Like ballast. The kind of weight that keeps a ship stable rather than the kind that sinks it." He paused. "Daeron's folio said it would feel like that eventually. He said it took him two years to get there."
"We're at nine months," Connor said.
"We're faster than he was," Jace said. Not pride. Just information.
Connor was quiet, looking at the fire in the residence hearth. Outside, the January Atlantic was doing what the January Atlantic did, making everything feel simultaneously remote and exactly where it was supposed to be.
"Can I ask you something," Connor said.
"Yes."
"When the transfer is at full depth, when it's been going for thirty seconds and everyone is locked, do you ever feel like you might not come back from it."
Jace looked at him.
"I don't mean the Sacrifice," Connor said. "I mean just the transfer. The ordinary training transfer."
"No," Jace said. "I never feel like I might not come back." He paused. "I feel like I'm going somewhere I've never been before. But coming back isn't in question."
Connor nodded. He looked at the fire again.
"Good," he said. Just that. Good.
The wedding was sixteen months out in January. Fifteen in February. Galena's machine ran quietly and continuously in the background of everything else, the guest list finalized, the portal schedules for the musical guests being coordinated through Kavanaugh with the logistical complexity of moving dozens of people through the Veil without incident. Samantha and Galena met on Tuesday mornings, a standing appointment that had begun as a practical session and evolved into something more. Two women who both loved the same man in different ways, both fully committed to making the May twelfth ceremony everything it was supposed to be.
Samantha had told Jace about the High Votaress bonding ceremony in December, after Galena's briefing. She had told him factually, without ceremony, in the way she told him important things, sitting across from him at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her eyes direct.
"It's older than the wedding," she said. "Galena said it's the oldest ceremony Aelin has."
"I know," Jace said. "I've read the records."
"She said it deepens rather than changes. What's already there becomes more fully itself."
Jace had looked at her across the kitchen table and thought about what was already there, which was considerable, and had said: "That sounds right."
"Good," she said. "Then we're agreed."
They were agreed. They were always agreed on the things that mattered. This was one of the facts of Jace's life that he held most carefully.
Connor's shard was still present. It would be present until the Votaress bond completed, Alen's word in the Visionary Realm, the thread of what was building between Connor and Indira that could not be forced and could not be rushed and would arrive when it arrived. Connor felt it as a background condition, neither painful nor painless, simply there. He had stopped describing it to Jace directly and started simply acknowledging it when asked. Yes. Still there. Moving.
Indira knew. She had known since the morning after the Visionary Realm session in May, Connor had told her quietly, in her rooms at the castle, the morning light coming through her Léirstinach window. She had listened without interruption and then been quiet and then said: "And when the bond completes, the shard is gone."
"Yes," Connor said.
"And the bond is... what. Permanent."
"The records suggest it deepens over time. It doesn't change in nature."
Another silence. Then Indira had said: "Well. I could think of worse things to be permanently bonded to than you." Said with the dry warmth that was entirely hers, the warmth that had been making Connor laugh since 1985. He had laughed then too. She had watched him laugh with the expression she had when she was deciding something and had made the decision.
They were fine. They were, as they had always been, fine in the way of two people who chose each other deliberately and knew exactly what they were doing.
AELIN
The Lower Courtyard — Castle of Elders
March, 1989
"Again," Sidney said.
Jace reset to center. The Brotherhood reset to cardinal points. The courtyard in March was cold in the way of Aelinian early spring, not the deep cold of winter, but the provisional cold of a season that had not yet committed to warmth. Light came through the high windows at an angle that showed the dust motes in the air and made everything look slightly more substantial than it was.
They had been at it for forty minutes.
The first transfer of the session had run thirty-eight seconds. The second had run forty-four. Sidney had called a five-minute break after the second one, during which Jace had stood at center with his eyes closed and his hands loose at his sides and simply breathed, and the Brotherhood had done the same at their four points, and no one had said anything because nothing needed to be said. The third transfer had run fifty-one seconds, which was the longest any of them had achieved to that point, and when Sidney called it Jace had opened his eyes and looked at the light coming through the windows before he said anything.
What he said was: "Once more."
Sidney looked at him with the assessment he brought to everything, not just reading the request but reading the man making it. Jace was steady. Not depleted. The quality Sidney had been watching for since November, the quality that distinguished holding from accumulating, was fully present.
"Once more," Sidney said.
The formation locked.
Connor at west, feet planted, the emerald amulet burning low and steady at his chest, his attention directed inward along the bond with the precision of eight months of training. Nathan at north, the garnet casting warm light across the stone floor, his breathing at the cadence Sidney had given him in October. Erik at east, Durandach sheathed, his hands at his sides, his weight centered and immovable in the way of a man built to hold things. Ricky at south, loose-limbed but anchored, the onyx dark and steady.
Jace at center.
The transfer began.
What it did not capture, what no approximation had ever fully captured, was the quality of what happened when it ran long enough: past thirty seconds, past forty, into the territory where the Guardian's own power and the Brotherhood's channeled power became something that was neither one nor the other but a third thing entirely.
It was not painful. It was not even uncomfortable in the ordinary sense. It was the feeling of something inside him expanding to accommodate more than it had previously held, not forcing, not stretching in the wrong direction, but opening the way a room opened when the walls were pushed back. He could hold more than he had been able to hold yesterday. More than he would be able to hold tomorrow without this.
Daeron's folio: I cannot tell you what it is to be that and also still yourself. I can tell you that both things are true simultaneously.
Jace was beginning to understand what Daeron meant by still yourself. The expansion was not erasure. He was not becoming something other than himself. He was becoming more fully himself, which was different, which was what the Sacrifice required. Not the annihilation of Jace Elias. The fullest possible expression of Jace Elias, extended to its absolute limit and held there long enough to serve its purpose.
The transfer ran.
Forty seconds.
Fifty.
Sixty.
Sidney's voice, quiet and level: "Hold."
Sixty-five seconds. Seventy.
The bond between all five of them was a living thing at this point, not metaphor, not sensation-by-analogy but actual directional force moving through actual architecture, the Brotherhood's channeling arriving at center with a weight that Jace held the way a load-bearing wall held a ceiling. Not struggling. Present. Receiving.
Seventy-five seconds.
Eighty.
"Release," Sidney said.
Jace let it go.
The formation came down, the channeling ceased, the cardinal points released, the bond settling back into its ordinary ambient register. Jace stood at center with his eyes still closed, feeling the sensation of the power returning to its ordinary volume after the extraordinary one.
He opened his eyes.
Sidney was standing at the edge of the formation with his notepad, writing. He wrote without looking up. The Brotherhood held their positions, watching him. When he finished he looked up at Jace.
"Eighty-two seconds," Sidney said.
The room was quiet.
"Recommend increasing to three sessions per week beginning April," Sidney said. He made another note. He looked at the five of them with the expression of a man who had been working toward an outcome for a long time and could see it on the horizon. Not celebrating. Noting.
"Good," he said.
Coming from Sidney, it was everything.
Training Log — Sidney Greene
March 14, 1989
Transfer duration: 82 seconds. Guardian held through full duration. Brotherhood maintained formation integrity at all cardinal points without correction.
The Guardian held.
Increasing session frequency to three per week beginning April 1. The Sacrifice remains the objective. We are building toward it correctly.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
May, 1989
Kevin Cronin had been carrying the knowledge of Battle Cry's true nature for five years.
He had carried it carefully, the way you carried something that was not yours to put down. Bruce Hall had been carrying it for four years. Neal Doughty for four years. The three of them had developed, over those years, a shared shorthand for the knowledge that required no words, a look exchanged when Battle Cry's name came up in conversation, a quality of attention that the other two would recognize and that no one else in the room would notice.
They had been careful.
Dave Amato had joined in May.
Bryan Hitt had joined in May.
The three of them were now in the position of men who had been very careful about a secret for a very long time and had suddenly acquired two new bandmates who were sharing every rehearsal, every greenroom, every tour bus mile, and who did not know.
Kevin had called Bruce on the second day after the new lineup was official. Bruce had called Neal within the hour. The three of them had talked for forty minutes and arrived at the same conclusion independently: wait. Find the right moment. Don't force it. If Battle Cry was going to be in the same rooms as the new lineup, and they were, the charity concert in July was already on the calendar, then the moment would present itself.
"What if the moment is a bad one," Neal said.
"Define bad," Bruce said.
"What if something happens and there isn't time to prepare them."
Kevin had been quiet. "Then we deal with what happens. The way we always have."
They were practical men. They had been in rock and roll long enough to understand that plans made in May did not always survive contact with July.
Bryan Hitt was thirty-five years old, one quarter Cherokee on his father's side, his paternal grandmother had been half Cherokee, and had been behind a drum kit since he was nine. He had come from Wang Chung, which was a fact he led with cheerfully when it came up and which concealed the deeper truth that Bryan Hitt was a significantly more serious drummer than Wang Chung had required him to be. He was built like a man who spent his weekends on horseback when geography permitted, which he did, as often as possible, and which was something he had been doing since childhood in the same way that music was something he had been doing since childhood, both of them simply part of what he was. He had a quality of settled attention that reminded Kevin, in certain lights, of something he had seen in Jace Elias, the quality of a person who had been inside themselves long enough to know what was there and was not afraid of it.
Dave Amato was thirty-six, from Framingham, Massachusetts, had come from Ted Nugent's band and various other configurations before landing here. He had the adaptability of a man who had been in enough different rooms with enough different musicians to understand that the ability to read a room and move within it was the primary skill, and that all other skills came after. He had been in the room with Kevin and Bruce and Neal for two weeks and already moved with the ease of someone who fit.
Kevin watched them both at their first full rehearsal and thought: these are good men. I hope July is not the moment.
He thought about Jace on a stage in the desert in 1984, the opal blazing, the Wrought creatures coming in from the wings, the oath he had taken afterward, five years of careful knowledge.
He thought: July is going to be the moment.
He had no evidence for this. He simply knew.
AELIN
Daerdon University — Connor's Study
June, 1989
Connor had a window in his study at the university that looked out over the Daerdon waterfront, and on a Tuesday morning in June he was standing at it with a cup of tea that had gone cold while he watched a group of students cross the courtyard below.
He had been teaching this morning. Music theory, which was not technically his discipline but which he had been asked to cover for a colleague who was in Neart for the month, and which he had agreed to because the students who showed up for music theory at seven-thirty in the morning were the kind of students he found easy to like, the ones who wanted to understand why something worked rather than simply that it worked.
There was a boy in the third row who reminded Connor of himself at that age. Not in appearance, Connor had been dark-eyed and already too tall at sixteen, and this boy was compact and fair. But in the quality of attention. The way he listened with his whole body. The way he wrote things down not as transcription but as thought, his pen moving in the margin alongside the primary note.
Connor had noticed him in October. He had kept noticing him. He had not said anything about it because there was nothing to say that would not have been presumptuous, and Connor did not presume. He watched and he waited and he taught music theory at seven-thirty on Tuesday mornings.
Nathan appeared in the doorway.
"The tea is cold," Nathan said.
"I know."
"There is a pot in the common room that is not cold."
"I know."
Nathan came into the study and sat in the chair across from the desk with the ease of a man who spent considerable time in this room and was not required to perform the social ritual of asking permission. He had a folder, of course he had a folder, Nathan always had a folder, which he set on the desk without opening.
"The concert," Connor said.
"Yes."
Connor turned from the window. "School music programs."
"Forty-seven programs," Nathan said. "Across eleven districts. The funding will be sufficient to operate all forty-seven for one full academic year, with a reasonable probability of renewal through the foundation matching grant structure I've set up." He paused. "I spent some time this morning thinking about what it would have meant to not have had a piano at eight."
Connor looked at him.
"I had access to a piano at eight," Nathan said. "A very good one. My parents understood what I was and they found a piano and they found a teacher who could work at the pace I required and they did not question any of it." He looked at the folder without opening it. "I did not think, at eight, about whether that access was something other children also had. I thought about the piano." He was quiet. "I think about it now."
"I had the violin at six," Connor said. "Before the amulet, before anything else. My mother put it in my hands." He looked at the window. The students had crossed the courtyard and gone inside, and the space was empty now except for the morning light. "There's a boy in my Tuesday seven-thirty class who has something. I don't know what yet. But something."
"The one in the third row," Nathan said.
Connor looked at him.
"I've attended two of your Tuesday seven-thirties," Nathan said, with perfect composure. "For observational purposes."
"You could have told me."
"I was observing."
Connor let it go, because this was Nathan and the fond exasperation was old enough to have stopped needing a name. "His name is Cillian," Connor said. "He's from Draiocht County. His father works in the fishing industry."
"I know," Nathan said. "I looked him up after the second session." He opened the folder. "I'm considering whether the university scholarship fund should be expanded to include students who demonstrate aptitude in performance disciplines rather than limiting it to STEM fields."
Connor said nothing.
"It is relevant data," Nathan said.
"Nathan."
"Yes."
"The concert."
"Yes. July fourteenth." He turned a page. "Seven bands. The logistics are handled. Kavanaugh has the media side. Dan Hartman has security. Sidney will be present."
"Good." Connor paused. "I want to talk to Belinda Carlisle after the show, if there's time. The Go-Gos have been doing music education work with kids in Los Angeles for two years and I want to understand their model."
"I'll have Kavanaugh schedule it."
"Not scheduled. Just... if there's time. After."
Nathan looked at him. "Understood," he said. He made a note anyway. Connor did not object. Nathan making notes was like breathing, it was simply what happened.
Outside the window, the Daerdon waterfront caught the June light off the Atlantic and threw it back in pieces. The island was, as it always was, very much itself. Summer coming. Training three times a week. The Sacrifice getting closer with every session. The concert in three weeks.
Training Log — Sidney Greene
June 28, 1989
Transfer duration this session: 114 seconds. Personal record. Guardian held through full duration without hesitation at any point.
Formation integrity: complete. All five cardinal points maintained without correction for the full duration. The bond architecture during sustained transfer has reached a quality I would characterize as mature. It is no longer being constructed in real time. It is being inhabited.
The Guardian is ready.
I have been saying for some months that he was building toward readiness. I am now saying he is there.
The Sacrifice requires a moment of need commensurate with the power required. We will not force the moment. We will be ready when it comes.
Recommend maintaining current schedule through July. Reassess in August.
AELIN
Royal Residence
Early July, 1989
Samantha was in the kitchen when Jace came in from the morning training session.
She looked at him the way she looked at him after the transfers now, an assessment, quick and practiced, checking the quality of his steadiness as she might have checked the tuning of a drum before a show. Looking for something off. She rarely found it anymore.
"How long," she said.
"Hundred and fourteen seconds."
She was quiet. Then: "Sit down. There's breakfast."
He sat. She put a plate in front of him, eggs, bread, something with fruit, the fuel that Nathan had specified for post-transfer recovery and which Samantha had memorized without comment and prepared without fuss. Practical love expressed in eggs and bread.
He ate. She sat across from him with her own coffee, not hovering, not performing concern, simply present.
"Eleven months," he said.
"Ten months and twelve days," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm counting," she said. Simply. Without apology.
He reached across the table and took her hand. She turned her hand over and held his.
Outside, July Aelin was doing what July Aelin did, the Atlantic bright and enormous, the island green and settled, the castle on its peninsula solid and permanent in the morning light. The concert was in two weeks. The training would continue. The Sacrifice was closer than it had ever been.
He held Samantha's hand and ate his breakfast and let the morning be exactly what it was.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The Forum — Backstage
July 14, 1989
The Forum was the arena in Los Angeles, seventeen thousand seats, the venue the Lakers called home and that every major act coming through the city played when they were playing somewhere worth playing. Its backstage ran the length of the building's interior perimeter: multiple green rooms, production corridors, catering spread across three stations, instrument staging areas the size of small warehouses. It was built for scale. Seven bands of this combined stature required exactly that.
Tonight all of that space was in use, and it was a great deal of space.
The charity was called Music in the Classroom, and the benefit was their third annual event. The previous two had featured four bands each. This year's organizers had been ambitious, seven bands, all proceeds to forty-seven school music programs across eleven Los Angeles districts, with a foundation matching grant structure that Nathan had spent six weeks constructing and which would sustain all forty-seven programs through the following academic year.
The bill was: Battle Cry. REO Speedwagon. Motley Crue. INXS. The Go-Gos. The Bangles. Tears for Fears.
The backstage area at six o'clock in the evening had the quality of organized chaos that preceded all multi-band events, crew running cable, monitors being checked, catering tables set up along one wall, instrument cases open and closed in various states, the low-grade energy of many professional musicians in close proximity, all of them managing their own preparation while sharing space. It was a warm energy. Not competitive. This was a charitable event and everyone on the bill had chosen to be there, and the choosing was evident.
Battle Cry arrived with Gideon and the Hartman security detail at six-fifteen. Sidney was with them, he had been with them at every public event since the Barbara Walters special, without discussion, the way a fixed point was always in the same place. He moved through the backstage with the quiet efficiency of a man assessing a space.
The room they walked into was not the room it would have been in 1987.
The Barbara Walters special had aired in April 1988, fifteen months ago. Fifteen months was long enough for the news coverage to have run its full course: the initial wave of it, the follow-up features, the magazine pieces, the AP wire stories that had been picked up by papers in every city in the English-speaking world and a great many beyond it. The evening news. The editorial columns. The morning programs. The world did not have the internet in 1989. What it had was newspapers and network television and cable news and word of mouth operating at the speed of a world that was paying very close attention to a single story, and every person who had seen the Barbara Walters program, which was to say, a significant portion of the adult population of the Western world, had had fifteen months to sit with what they had learned.
Everyone in this backstage knew who Battle Cry was. Had known for over a year. Some of them had watched the special multiple times. All of them had questions. A charity backstage in Los Angeles, seven bands, the summer of 1989, was the first time most of these people were going to be in the same room as the actual answer.
The Go-Gos were already set up along the north wall when Battle Cry arrived. Belinda Carlisle came across the room before Jace and Connor had fully oriented to the space, not running, but moving with the directness of a woman who had been waiting fifteen months for this opportunity and was not going to waste it on approach.
"I watched the special three times," she said to Connor, without preamble, because fifteen months of thinking about something was its own introduction. "The part about the Conservatory at Léirstinach, I have a foundation, music education, kids in East LA, and I have been wanting to ask you about the model since April of last year." She stopped. Reconsidered. "I'm leading with the professional stuff because the personal stuff is..." "You were extraordinary on that program. What you said about the letters."
"After the show," Connor said. "I want to understand your model."
"After the show," Belinda said, with the satisfaction of a woman who had been right that this conversation was going to happen.
Jane Wiedlin had been watching this from behind Belinda's shoulder. She looked at Ricky. "The portal demonstration in the special," she said. "Is it... can you just do that anywhere?"
"More or less," Ricky said.
"Show me," Jane said.
Ricky opened a portal to the corridor twenty feet away, which he could see through the door, held it open for three seconds,exposing a trash receptecale on the other end of it, and then closed it. Jane Wiedlin stared at the space where it had been. Then she emitted an adorable squeak of excitement as she quickly said,"Okay! Okay! I need a minute!"
Ricky laughed and told her to take her time.
Susanna Hoffs and the Bangles arrived at six-thirty with the slightly windswept quality of people who had been stuck in LA traffic and were philosophical about it. Susanna had done her research over fifteen months with the thoroughness of someone who found the subject genuinely compelling. She found Ricky within two minutes.
"The shapeshifting," she said. "The special showed the panther. What else can you shift to?"
Ricky considered the room, its size, the number of people in it, and the various reactions different animals would produce. "Anything," he said. "The panther is what I use in combat. Other contexts get other choices."
Susanna looked at him with the focused curiosity of someone who had been thinking about this for a long time. "I have approximately forty follow-up questions," she said.
"I have about forty minutes before we have to be at the stage," Ricky said. "Go ahead."
The rest of the Bangles had their own questions and distributed them accordingly, Debbi Peterson finding Erik and asking about the Warrior's ring with the directness of one drummer identifying another person who was interesting, Vicki Peterson asking Nathan about the university at Daerdon with the interest of someone who cared about education and had read the AP wire stories carefully, Michael Steele gravitating toward Connor with questions about the Visionary realm that were more philosophical than technical. The Go-Gos had been in the room for thirty minutes already and had already covered significant ground, Charlotte Caffey had been talking to Nathan about music theory and Aelinian compositional traditions for twenty minutes, Kathy Valentine had found Jace and was asking about the Guardian power's relationship to music, whether the drumming and the opal were actually connected or just circumstantially linked.
"Connected," Jace said. "The rhythm focuses it. I don't fully understand the mechanism. Nathan has theories."
"Nathan has a forty-seven page document," Kathy said.
"He usually does," Jace said. Kathy chuckled at this, knowing well according to reports just how insanely intelligent Nathan Dallenger really was.
Roland Orzabal arrived with Curt Smith at six-forty. Roland had read everything, not just watched the special but found the AP wire coverage, the magazine features, the academic papers that had begun appearing in anthropology and political science journals about the Aelinian revelation. He was a man who paid very close attention to the intersection of the psychological and the creative, and what Battle Cry had revealed fifteen months ago was the intersection of those things at a scale he had not previously encountered. He found Connor within five minutes of arriving and did not bother with the usual approach.
"The part of the special where you described the Visionary powers," Roland said. "Specifically the empathy, carrying other people's emotional states involuntarily. I've been thinking about that for a year." "I wrote a song once about the weight of other people's pain becoming indistinguishable from your own. I thought I was writing metaphor."
Connor looked at him. "You were writing something true from the outside in," he said. "The metaphor was accurate. It just didn't have the mechanism behind it yet."
"The precognition," he said then. "The special mentioned it briefly. Prophecy. Do you know... I mean, do you know how this ends? For Aelin. For Aldus."
"I know some of it," Connor said carefully. "Not all of it. Prophecy is... it gives you the shape of things, not the texture. You know what is coming without knowing exactly how the coming feels."
"Shout is about that," Roland said. "Knowing something is wrong and not being able to stop it with words alone. Having to feel your way through it." He looked at Connor with the eyes of a man who had been in rooms with a great many people and recognized something in this one that he did not often recognize. "We should talk later. At length."
"Yes," Connor said. "At length."
Curt Smith, standing behind Roland, caught Nathan's eye across the room. Curt had his own questions, different from Roland's, running on a different track entirely. Curt was interested in the practical: the island's governance structure, the relationship between the five governors and the High King, how decisions got made when five men with supernatural powers and strong opinions disagreed. He made his way to Nathan directly. Nathan answered at full length. Curt listened with the attentiveness of someone filing things away.
INXS arrived at six-fifty. Michael Hutchence walked in first and had the five amulets located within about four seconds. "Michael Hutchence," he said to Jace.
"Jace Elias," Jace said.
"I know. I watched the special twice." Michael had the quality of a man who did not waste time performing things that were already established. "I'm Australian. We don't do well with the idea of people being oppressed for eight hundred years by someone who thinks he owns something he doesn't own. I just want you to know that's where I'm coming from."
Jace looked at him.
"I appreciate that," he said honestly.
"How old is the island actually?" Michael asked. "The special said the Veil went up in 1155."
"The island's been inhabited for about three thousand years," Jace said. "The Veil is eight hundred. Different things. But Aelin is actually quite ancient."
Michael absorbed this with the expression of a man updating a mental model. "I want to hear more about that. Not necessarily tonight."
"Come to Aelin sometime," Jace warmly enthused, "The full version takes longer than a backstage conversation. Besides, you need to try an Aelinian Fish Fry. You’ll swear it’s better than home."
Michael smiled with the quality of a man who had just been given something he was going to take seriously.
"I'll hold you to that," he said with a nod.
Jon Farriss drifted over within five minutes, Jon had questions about the drums, about the quality of the performance in the Rise Up video, about what it was like to play with the opal running at full intensity during a live show. He and Jace fell into the conversation that two drummers fell into when they found each other, which had its own gravity and its own language. Jon had been playing since childhood. Jace had been playing since childhood. They understood each other before they had finished the second exchange.
Tommy Lee found them. "There are three drummers in this conversation," he said. "This is either the best conversation at the party or the most dangerous."
"Both," Jon said.
"Obviously," Jace said.
Tommy had been friends with Jace since 1981, eight years, which was long enough to have watched each other grow up in the way that rock and roll made people grow up, which was fast and sideways and occasionally catastrophic. Mötley Crüe had been the ones who introduced Battle Cry to the finer points of debauchery when Battle Cry was young and new to all of it, and the debt ran in both directions by now in the way of people who had been through enough together that the accounting had long since stopped mattering. The familiarity showed in the way Tommy dropped into the conversation without ceremony, leaning briefly on Jace's shoulder, saying something about the ride cymbal work on Don't Make Me Laugh that was precise enough to be a genuine observation and specific enough that Jace knew Tommy had listened carefully.
"Six times," Tommy said, when Jace asked. "You are violent on that track. I mean it as the highest possible compliment."
REO Speedwagon and Motley Crue arrived within ten minutes of each other at seven o'clock. The common area was now at full population.
Kevin Cronin came directly to the Brotherhood, the movement of a man who had been carrying a secret for five years and was now in the room where it lived. He shook hands with all five of them with the warmth of that long history. Then he brought Dave Amato and Bryan Hitt forward.
Dave had watched the special. He had also watched the news coverage for the following six weeks and had formed opinions about the UN working group and the diplomatic recognition process that reflected the adaptability of a man who took new information seriously. He had been in REO for two months and had been watching Kevin and Bruce and Neal exchange looks whenever Battle Cry came up in conversation. The looks were the kind that told you there was a conversation that had not yet included you.
Dave had been patient about it because he understood that some things arrived on their own schedule.
He shook Jace's hand and placed a hand on his shoulder firmly, saying, "I watched the special, Jason. I had a lot of questions after. I figured Kevin would fill in the rest eventually."
Kevin looked at him.
"I was going to," he said.
"I know," Dave said. "No rush."
Bryan Hitt had watched the special and had been having a version of the same experience, new band, two months in, three bandmates who clearly knew things. He had a different relationship to the knowledge than Dave did, because Bryan had watched the special through the experience of the drums. Jace at the kit in the Rise Up footage that the special had used. The quality of someone playing with something running through them that was more than technique.
He put out his hand and Jace took it.
The mutual recognition was immediate. Two drummers, yes. But also the other thing, the thing that was underneath that, two men who had been inside themselves long enough to know what was there, who recognized the same quality looking back at them.
"Wang Chung needed a better drummer," Jace said. "You were the better drummer, man."
Bryan looked at him an d chuckles slightly, "Wang Chung needed a lot of things, actually… I was only able to help with one of them."
He said it without heat, without complaint, the observation of a man who had spent two years in the wrong room and knew it and had moved on.
"I hear you’re a lot of Paiute," he said.
"My father was Paiute," Jace said, “Mom was Aelinian.”
The nod. Slow. The confirmation of something suspected.
"Raised around horses?" Bryan asked.
"Since I was five. Rodeo every summer until I was eighteen."
Bryan looked at him, unmistakable excitement springing into his blue-gray eyes.
"You know what I find interesting about rodeo," he said. "You spend all that time learning to stay on something that is trying to remove you. And then you get good at it and everyone acts surprised."
He paused.
"That seems relevant to your situation."
Jace looked at him.
"I'm just saying," Bryan said. "You've been doing this longer than you think."
Tommy, monitoring this from three feet away with the rapt attention he gave to everything he found excellent, said, "There's a cowboy situation happening and no one told me. I'm very invested in this cowboy situation."
Vince Neil appeared. "What cowboy situation."
"Jace and the new REO drummer."
Vince looked at both of them.
"This is one of the most unexpected things I've encountered tonight and I once found a very large iguana on our tour bus once."
Bryan looked at Vince with the expression of a man filing a piece of information. He grinned and asked Vince, "How large?”
"Large," Vince said, "Opinions about personal space."
"Right," Bryan said. He looked at Jace. "I think I understand your band's security concerns better now."
Jace laughed. Not the polite one. The one that came from somewhere honest.
Meanwhile: Nikki Sixx had found Nathan. Nikki had watched the special and had thoughts about the Conjurer power, the four elements, the creation from natural matter, and had questions that were more specific than they looked, questions that came from a man who had spent his adult life constructing things from available materials, not buildings but songs, and who found the resonance between Nathan's kind of construction and his own kind of construction genuinely interesting. Nathan was engaged within the first two minutes.
Mick Mars had found Erik. Mick was a guitarist and Erik was a bassist but what they were talking about was not music, it was the Warrior's ring, the lightning, the ground-shake, the mechanics of channeling that kind of force through a weapon. Mick had questions from the perspective of a man who had been studying technique his entire life and understood that technique was technique regardless of the domain. Erik answered them directly, which was how Erik answered everything.
Belinda Carlisle had not finished her conversation with Connor. They had migrated to a corner of the common area and were talking with the focused ease of two people who had found a shared frequency and were running on it.
The fans who had won backstage passes through the charity raffle were distributing themselves through the room with the careful, almost reverent quality of people who had a limited amount of time in a room they had never expected to be in, trying to be in all of it simultaneously. Two of them had ended up near Jace and Tommy and Bryan and were listening to the drummer conversation with the expression of people who understood about a third of it technically and were entirely happy with that ratio.
Three male fans were near the east wall. They had been there for twenty minutes. They were not going to leave.
Jace was standing with Tommy on his right and Bryan on his left. The conversation had moved from outdoor venues and monitor mixes to kit setup preferences to the challenge of playing in an arena when the delay from the PA was long enough to fight your internal tempo, which was a problem that all three of them had solved in different ways and were interested in each other's solutions.
The show was in thirty minutes.
And the Veil-thread moved.