AFTER - May–December 1990 — Aelin and Beyond
WEEK ONE
Nobody knocked on the door of the Royal Residence for seven days.
This was not an accident. The castle staff, who had collectively decided at some point on the morning of May 13th that their job description did not include approaching the Royal Residence until there was clear and unambiguous evidence that its occupants were dressed and oriented toward the outside world, maintained this position with impressive coordination. Yara and Daria ran the daily operations of the castle from the administrative wing. Colin and Leo handled what needed handling. The Brotherhood, by unspoken agreement, gave the residence a wide perimeter. Nobody said anything about any of this. They simply did it, with the Aelinian understanding that a Guardian's wedding week was not a thing you interrupted.
Inside, the curtains were mostly drawn.
Jace and Samantha had discussed a honeymoon in the early weeks of their engagement, the mainland, perhaps. The Hawaiian islands, where they had been happy before. Europe. New Zealand had come up, and several places in Asia that neither of them had seen. They had made no firm plans, partly because the wedding itself had required most of the available planning energy and partly because every time they sat down to discuss it they ended up somewhere other than the discussion. The informal conclusion they eventually arrived at was that the first week would be what it was going to be, and the world could wait for it.
The world waited.
What the week was, was this: the two of them in the residence with the Atlantic outside the windows and the lavender sky pressing against the glass and nowhere to be. They made love in the morning and in the afternoon and at whatever hour the night found them still awake, and between those times they bathed together in the deep Aelinian stone tub that had been installed in the Guardian's residence four generations ago by a Guardian who apparently had strong opinions about bathing, and they cuddled in the large bed with the curtains filtering the island light to something warm and diffuse, and they attempted on three separate occasions to watch something, a film, an Aelinian television program, a nature documentary about the Atlantic that Samantha had requested because she was genuinely curious about the marine life off the western cliffs, and not once did they make it to the end of anything.
They cooked. This required negotiation.
The first morning, Jace had proposed breakfast and Samantha had agreed and they had both walked into the kitchen in the state they had been in since the wedding night, which was to say without any clothing whatsoever, and the breakfast had been going well until Samantha decided bacon was required and the first strip hit the pan.
"That is," Jace said, from a safe distance, watching her navigate the situation with the focused attention of a woman who had made a decision and intended to see it through, "a very committed position you're taking."
"The bacon is happening," Samantha said.
"I support the bacon," Jace said. "I am supporting it from over here."
She managed the bacon. There were consequences, minor, temporary, not serious enough to require Dr. Oksana and not serious enough to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the rest of the morning. They agreed, going forward, that frying anything in the current domestic arrangement required at minimum an apron, and possibly more forethought than either of them had been applying to the question of clothing generally. This agreement lasted approximately one additional day before being quietly set aside.
By the end of the week, they were deeply, entirely happy in the way of two people who have been given a contained stretch of time with no obligations and have used every hour of it for exactly what they wanted to use it for. When Jace finally opened the curtains on the morning of the eighth day and stood at the window looking at the lavender sky and the Atlantic and the distant line of the Neart cliffs, Samantha came to stand beside him, and he put his arm around her and they looked at the island together.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," she said pleasantly. "But let's go anyway."
WEEK TWO
They spent the second week traveling Aelin.
Not the island that Jace knew from seven years of ruling it, not the Great Hall and the administrative corridors and the Brotherhood's regular paths between the castle and the county seats and the training grounds. The other island. The one that existed in the places nobody had reason to go, in the parts of each county that had been left largely to themselves because they did not require governance or maintenance or attention, because they were simply beautiful and Aelin had learned, over nine centuries, that some things were best left alone.
Connor had been to most of these places. He had been wandering since his first year on the island, drawn by the Visionary's curiosity toward anything that seemed to carry a story. He had left Jace handwritten notes, actual paper, actual ink, the way Connor communicated things he considered important, with descriptions and rough maps and the occasional observation that read less like directions and more like the beginning of a poem. Jace had read them at the time and filed them away and never quite gotten to any of them. Now he had the time and the reason and the woman beside him who looked at everything with the frank, open attention of someone encountering it for the first time with no agenda.
They went to the sea caves on the northern coast of Ainmhithe first, the ones that could only be reached at low tide, walking the exposed shelf of black rock below the cliffs, the Atlantic retreating just far enough to let you through. Inside, the caves opened into cathedral spaces where the water had carved the stone over thousands of years into shapes that had no name, and the light came in through the entrance in shafts that caught the mist and turned it to something between fog and color. Samantha stood in the largest chamber and turned slowly and said nothing for a long time, which was the correct response.
They went to the high meadows of central Léirstinach, above the valley farms, where the grass grew to the height of a man's knee and moved in the Atlantic wind in long, synchronized waves and the Guardian Roses grew wild in clusters that nobody had planted, that had simply always been there. They lay in the grass for most of an afternoon. The sky was the lavender of a clear Aelinian day in late May, deep and present, and the only sounds were the wind and the distant Atlantic and occasionally one of the great cats from the Ainmhithe preserve who had apparently decided to extend its territory and was moving through the meadow grass with the complete indifference to their presence that great cats maintained as a matter of principle.
They went to a place in Draíocht County that Connor's notes described only as the glass pool, a natural formation in the limestone hills where groundwater had collected in a basin so still and so clear that the lavender sky above it was perfectly reflected in the surface, so that standing at the edge you appeared to be looking down into sky rather than water. Jace had read the description and thought Connor was being poetic. He had been wrong.
They went to the Neart coast at dawn, to a cliff face where the Atlantic hit the rock at an angle that made the spray rise forty feet in the air and catch the first light of morning, and they stood at the edge of it with the wind coming off the water and the spray reaching them and the whole Atlantic laid out below and Samantha took his hand and held it and he understood, as he had been understanding in accumulating pieces since the wedding, that the island he had been living on for seven years was not entirely the island he had been on. Part of it had been waiting for this. For her. For the version of it that you saw when someone who loved it was standing beside you.
WEEK THREE — RENO
On the first Sunday of June, Jace crossed to the far wall of the Royal Residence's lower corridor and pressed the sequence of runes Sidney had installed there years ago at his request, the portal to Tobin's basement, built in and waiting, one of several fixed points Sidney had established between Aelin and the mainland in the years since the Brotherhood's world had gotten complicated enough to require them. The runes glowed briefly under his hand and the portal opened.
He and Samantha stepped through into Tobin's basement.
They had not called ahead.
This had been Jace's idea, and Samantha had agreed to it immediately. They came through the portal at eleven in the morning, Reno time, a Sunday, Tobin's day off, the basement quiet, and stood in the familiar space with its workbench and its storage and the sound of the house above them.
Footsteps on the stairs. Tobin came down with a basket of laundry and a cup of coffee and found his brother and his new sister-in-law standing in the middle of his basement grinning at him.
Tobin's coffee went one direction. The laundry went another.
"WHAT," Tobin said.
From upstairs, Christina's voice: "Tobin? What happened?"
"COME DOWN HERE," Tobin said, still staring at them.
Christina came down the stairs, looked at Jace and Samantha, and put both hands over her mouth. Then she started laughing, which Jace took as the welcome it was, and he hugged her properly while Tobin recovered his coffee from the floor and his dignity from wherever it had landed.
"You could have called," Tobin said.
"We could have," Jace agreed.
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Because you wanted to do exactly what you just did."
"Yes," Jace said, very comfortably.
Tobin looked at Samantha. "You're encouraging this."
"Enthusiastically," Samantha said.
Tobin shook his head with the expression of a man who had spent his entire life being the steady reasonable older brother and was beginning to suspect that the addition of Samantha to the family was going to make this harder rather than easier.
Then the ceiling above them produced a sound that was the combination of small feet moving very fast and very purposefully toward a staircase, and Tae came down first, five years old and entirely committed to the descent, and hit the basement floor and looked at the two people standing in it and launched himself at Jace with the complete physical confidence of a small child who had never once in his life considered that an adult might not be ready to receive him at full velocity.
Jace went down. There was no other outcome. He caught Tae on the way and took the impact and they ended up on the basement floor together, Tae immediately climbing him with the purposeful efficiency of a child who regarded adults as terrain, and Anaya came down the stairs more carefully and found her uncle already on the ground and decided this was an acceptable state of affairs and joined them.
Samantha was laughing. Tobin was laughing. Christina had her hand over her heart with the expression of a woman watching something she had been hoping to see for a long time.
Eventually Jace sat up, Anaya in one arm, Tae in the other, both children talking simultaneously about things that had happened since he last visited, each one certain their information was the more urgent. He listened to both of them with the complete attention that children required and received, asking questions at the right intervals, his expression the expression of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
Tae noticed Samantha.
He looked at her with the frank assessment of a five-year-old conducting a full evaluation. Then he climbed down from Jace and crossed to her with the directness that small children and kings had in common and held up his arms.
She picked him up.
He hugged her, the full child hug, arms around the neck, the complete commitment of it, and then he pulled back just far enough to look at her face, and he said: "I'm glad you're here, Aunt Sam."
Samantha Wallace Elias, who had been a drum tech and a fencing champion and a former gymnast and was now the High Votaress of Aelin and the queen of an island kingdom and a woman who had navigated seven years of the most complicated relationship in the history of rock and roll with complete composure, was finished.
Jace watched it happen from the floor. He said nothing. He simply watched his wife hold his nephew and understood, as he understood most things that mattered, that this was one of those moments that did not require commentary.
THE CONSTRUCTION SITES
Monday morning, Jace went to work with his brother.
Tobin's current project was a residential development in the south end, twelve houses, foundation work mostly complete, framing underway on six of them. Jace showed up in Tobin's truck at seven in the morning in jeans and a flannel shirt with his hair back and his Guardian Amulet inside the shirt where it belonged, looking approximately like what he was, which was a man who had grown up around construction and knew how to be on a job site without being in the way.
The crew knew who he was.
The crew had known for some time, because Tobin's brother was not a secret in Reno and because the last few years had made Battle Cry and the Brotherhood of Aelin somewhat difficult to be unaware of. They received him the way a construction crew received a man who showed up looking like he intended to work rather than observe, with the welcome of people who respect the absence of pretension, and then, once the initial handshakes were done, with the comprehensive and enthusiastic attention of men who had approximately a thousand questions about a Guardian's honeymoon and were not going to waste the opportunity.
"So," said a man named Darrell, who was operating the framing nailer and had apparently been elected spokesperson, "how does a Guardian honeymoon work, exactly?"
"Like a regular honeymoon," Jace said.
"Right," Darrell said. "But with, what, weather control? Does that come into it?"
"No," Jace said.
"Seems like a waste," said another man from somewhere behind a stack of lumber.
"What about the portals?" said a third. "Like, can you just portal to anywhere in the world for dinner and portal back?"
"Yes," Jace said, "but that's..."
"So you could have dinner in Paris," Darrell said, "and then portal to a beach in Tahiti, and then portal back to your island, all in one night."
"Technically..."
"And you stayed on the island," said the man behind the lumber, with the tone of a man processing a significant disappointment on someone else's behalf.
"For the first two weeks, yes," Jace said.
Quiet settled over the job site that carried the quality of several men reconsidering everything they had assumed about Guardian priorities.
"Okay," Darrell said finally. "Respect."
Tobin, from the far end of the framing, was not even attempting to keep a straight face. Jace was in genuine, helpless stitches by nine o'clock, and stayed that way for most of the morning, because the crew had more questions and each one was more elaborately hypothetical than the last and none of them were hostile, just the frank, absurd, completely well-meaning speculation of men who had decided that the Guardian of Aelin was a person they liked and were going to treat accordingly.
He worked alongside them through the morning. He was useful. Tobin watched his brother move through the site with the ease of a man who had grown up in this world and had never lost the muscle memory of it, and felt, not for the first time, that the distance between Jason Elias who had grown up in Reno and the High King of Aelin who was currently helping Darrell level a header was not nearly as large as most people assumed. The man had always been the same man. The crown had not changed him. It had simply given him more to carry.
SAMANTHA AND THE WOMEN
While Jace was on the site, Samantha was with Maeva.
Maeva's house was the house where things were learned. This had always been true, it was the house where the family gathered when something needed to be understood, where the old knowledge lived in the kitchen and the garden and the way Maeva moved through both of them. Lila was there. Christina came after dropping the children at school. Several of Jace's cousins arrived through the morning in the easy way of people who had been told something was happening and intended to be part of it.
Samantha had been welcomed into this family at the ceremony. She was being welcomed into it now in the different, more lasting way, the kitchen-table way, the way that actually stuck.
She learned the cousins. Their names, their histories, the family stories that went back to Thomas and Katherine and before, the texture of the Elias family that you could not get from the outside looking in and that nobody was going to hand you in a ceremony. She sat with them and listened and laughed and asked the right questions and said the wrong thing once or twice and was corrected with the warm directness of women who had decided she was family and were therefore not going to handle her carefully.
Lila showed her photographs. There were a great many of them, the boys growing up, Thomas and Katherine young and then not as young, the Nevada landscape in the background of everything, the light of a high desert summer that was different from any other light. Samantha looked at Katherine in the photographs and saw Jace in her, the line of the jaw, the directness of the eyes, the quality of attention in the face that Jace carried and that she had always thought was simply his. She looked at Thomas and saw where the rest of him came from, the height, the bone structure, the quality of stillness that Jace had in repose, the Northern Paiute man from Nevada who had charmed an Aelinian Intelligence operative right out of her assignment and married her in Reno and followed her to an island he had never heard of and decided it was home.
It was Katherine's attention first. Everything else was Thomas's. He had come by all of it honestly.
In the afternoon, when the cousins had drifted out and it was Maeva and Lila and Samantha in the kitchen, Maeva put a cast iron pan on the stove and looked at Samantha with the expression of a woman who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it.
"I am going to show you something," Maeva said. "Something I have never shown anyone else."
She set down her coffee and gave Maeva her full attention.
"Katherine used to make a breakfast scramble," Maeva said, beginning to move through the kitchen with the unhurried efficiency of a woman who had been cooking in this space for decades. "From the time the boys were small until she was too weak to stand at the stove. Tobin can make it. He knows the recipe. But he has never been able to make it taste the way his mother made it."
"Jace told me," Samantha said quietly. "He said he's never tried. He said he knew he couldn't do it well enough."
Maeva nodded, a small, private nod, the nod of a woman who understood exactly what that meant about the man who said it.
"Katherine grew up on Aelin," Maeva said. "She was Aelinian Intelligence. She came to Reno on assignment and met Thomas there." She paused, a woman who had known Katherine and Thomas both and remembered them clearly. "Thomas was Northern Paiute. Born here in Nevada. He was not from the island. He knew nothing about it until Katherine took him there after they married. But he was a good man and he loved her, and when she brought him to Aelin he took one look at the island and decided to stay." "Tobin and Jason were both born there. Then they came back here, back to Nevada, so Jason could grow up a normal boy before any of it came down on him. Thomas and Katherine decided that together. They knew what he was from the beginning."
She went to the cabinet and reached to the back of the highest shelf and produced a small jar. "Katherine brought her cooking with her when they came back. The way you bring everything that is simply part of who you are. She used this."
The jar contained dried herbs, small, dark green, with a quality to the fragrance that Samantha could smell from across the kitchen. Something savory and deep and slightly sweet underneath, the way certain herbs carried their flavor before they were even used.
"Blasta," Maeva said. The word landed with the weight of something old. "Irish. It means savory. It grows on Aelin. It grows in other places too, but what the Aelin plant produces is different. And what the Aelin plant produces when it is dried here, in Nevada, under the Nevada sun instead of the Aelinian sun through the Veil..." she paused, holding the jar toward Samantha, "is different again."
Samantha took the jar. She opened it and breathed in, and the fragrance was something she had no reference point for, not any herb she knew from the mainland, not any spice from any kitchen she had worked in. It was its own thing entirely.
"Katherine knew this," Maeva said. "She discovered it, or she worked it out, the way a good cook works things out by paying attention. The Nevada sun changes the herb. It dries it differently than the Aelinian sun does. The flavor it produces in eggs and vegetables and meat is..." she paused, and for Maeva, who was not a woman prone to reaching for words, the pause was significant, "...it is very good."
Lila, from the table, said: "It makes you want to levitate."
"It makes you want to levitate," Maeva confirmed, without irony.
She showed Samantha. All of it, the quantities, the timing, the order of the vegetables and the meat, the exact moment the herb went in and how much and why not more. She was precise the way Aelinian women were precise about the things they considered worth precision. Samantha paid attention the way she paid attention to everything that mattered, which was completely.
When the scramble was done, Maeva put a forkful in front of her.
Samantha tasted it. She sat very still.
"That," she said, "is the best thing I have ever eaten."
"Yes," Maeva said simply.
"Jace grew up eating this."
"Until Katherine could no longer stand at the stove."
The weight of that settled in the kitchen and Samantha let it settle without rushing past it. Then she looked at Maeva and said: "Will you teach me exactly how she did it? Every detail?"
"That," Maeva said, "is why you are here."
She gave Samantha four small jars of the dried herb at the end of the afternoon. The label on the lid said Blasta. On the bottom of each jar, in Maeva's careful handwriting, it said: Tribal Blasta.
"How much to use?" Samantha asked.
"I will show you," Maeva said. "Enough to make it just like his mama made it. Not more. Not less. Exactly that."
Samantha drove back to Tobin's house that evening with the four jars wrapped carefully in her bag and the recipe in her memory and the knowledge that she was carrying something that had belonged to Katherine Elias and that Katherine Elias had never had the chance to pass on herself.
She intended to use it well.
CHRISTMAS MORNING, 1990
The castle kitchen had been Samantha's domain since five o'clock in the morning.
She had been planning this for six months. The jars of Tribal Blasta had been sitting in the back of the kitchen cabinet, where she could see them from wherever she stood in the room, since June. She had practiced the scramble three times in private, once to make sure she had the quantities right, once to make sure the timing was right, once because she wanted to make it without thinking about it, the way Katherine had made it, the way you made things that had become part of you. All three times it had come out exactly right. All three times she had eaten it alone at the kitchen counter and thought about a woman in a Nevada kitchen who had brought Aelin with her and never told anyone.
The Christmas morning feast was going to be considerable. Rebekah had arrived at four-thirty with two large baskets, the biscuits she had made in her Neart bakery the day before, wrapped in cloth and still carrying the warmth of the oven, and the bacon, which had come from Ricky's county in Ainmhithe and which was cured in the Aelinian manner and which was, by general agreement across all five counties, the best bacon produced on the island. Galena had the potato cakes underway at the second stove, the cast iron pan producing the sound of something going well. The spiced Aelinian apricot juice from the Harmonytis orchards was chilling, the deep amber of it catching the kitchen light in a way that made it look more festive than juice had any right to look.
The Brotherhood arrived in the kitchen by degrees, as they arrived everywhere, Ricky first, because Ricky's internal clock had always run early and he was constitutionally incapable of sleeping through the smell of bacon. Nathan second, drawn by the sensory intelligence of a man whose relationship with chemistry extended naturally to the kitchen. Then Erik, because where Nathan went Erik was rarely far behind on mornings that involved food. Then Connor, who came in already talking to Indira on the phone, finishing a sentence in the doorway, his expression the warm and distracted expression of a man who was here and also somewhere else simultaneously in the way of people who were very happy.
Jace came in last. He had been awake since four, Samantha had felt him rise and had told him firmly to go back to sleep, which he had done in the technical sense of lying in the bed without actually sleeping until she gave up and told him he could come to the kitchen. He arrived in the doorway in his flannel pants and his Guardian Amulet and bare feet and looked at the state of the kitchen, all of it, the biscuits and the bacon and Galena's potato cakes and the apricot juice and Samantha at the main stove with the cast iron pan, and his expression was the expression of a man who suspected something significant was happening and did not yet know what it was.
"Sit down," Samantha said, without turning from the stove. "All of you."
They sat. The long kitchen table, the one that had fed Brotherhood members for nine centuries, filled up with the comfortable chaos of people who knew each other completely and did not require any arrangement more formal than proximity. Rebekah and Leilani and Indira found seats. Yara and Daria came in from the corridor. The castle aides, Colin and Leo, appeared in the doorway with the slightly uncertain expression of people who had been told to come to the kitchen for Christmas breakfast and were not entirely sure of the protocol. Sidney Greene came in last, took in the room, found a chair at the end of the table with the practiced ease of a man who knew how to position himself in any space, and waited.
The scramble came off the stove.
Samantha served it herself, moving around the table with the pan and the serving spoon, the fragrance of the Tribal Blasta rising from it in the warm kitchen air, filling the space with something that had no reference point for anyone in the room except the woman making it and the four small jars in the back of the cabinet.
She put the plates in front of Jace, Connor, and Erik first. Then she set the pan down and stood back slightly, watching.
All three men picked up their forks at approximately the same moment.
All three men took a forkful.
All three men tasted it.
And all three men went completely still.
The kitchen went quiet.
Jace was the first to move. He set his fork down very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands are not entirely under your control, and he looked at Samantha. His mouth opened. Something started that was not quite a sentence, the beginning of a question, the shape of a word, and then stopped. He tried again. Got partway through it. Stopped again. His expression was doing several things simultaneously, none of which he appeared to have any management over.
"How did you..." he started.
He stopped.
"Is this..." he started.
He stopped again.
He stood up, walked around the table to where she was standing, picked her up, and kissed her. Then he spun her, once, the full rotation, both of them laughing, before he set her back down and stood holding her face in both hands and looking at her with everything he was feeling written plainly across his face and not a single word needing to be said.
At the table, Connor and Erik had their own responses.
"Holy shit," Connor said.
"Holy shit," Erik said, which was significant because Erik Hahn said holy shit approximately four times a year and always meant it.
Connor pointed at the pan with his fork. "Samantha. This scramble is incredible. What is in this?"
Erik was looking at his plate with the focused expression of a man conducting a serious sensory assessment. "There is a flavor in here," he said, with the careful precision of someone choosing words that matched the experience, "that makes the eggs sing in my mouth."
The table considered this.
"The eggs sing," Ricky said.
"The eggs sing," Erik confirmed, entirely straight.
"Everyone," Connor said, looking around the table with the expression of a man who had seen many things coming and was very satisfied to see this one arriving exactly as anticipated, "is going to lose their minds."
Everyone lost their minds. The biscuits and the bacon from Ainmhithe and Galena's potato cakes were extraordinary in their own right, and the spiced apricot juice was cold and bright and carried the sweetness of Aelinian fruit that had no equivalent anywhere outside the Veil, but the scramble was the center of the table and the center of the conversation and the thing that made Sidney Greene, who had been eating food on this island for seven years and had eaten food in a great many other places before that, set down his fork and look across the table at Samantha with the expression of a man arriving at a verdict.
"Mrs. Elias," Sidney said.
"Sidney," she said.
"This is the finest breakfast I have ever eaten on this island."
"High praise," Nathan said, from beside him.
"Accurate praise," Sidney said, in the same tone Erik had used in the chapel, and went back to his plate.
When the table had finished and the plates were being cleared, Jace came back to Samantha at the counter and looked at her with the question he had not been able to form earlier. She was ready for it.
"How did you do it?" he asked.
She went to the cabinet and took out one of the small jars. She held it toward him. He looked at it, the label on the lid, the smaller label on the bottom in Maeva's handwriting, and his expression shifted as he read it.
"Blasta," he said.
"Maeva taught me," Samantha said. "She knew what your mother was doing. She always knew." She opened the jar and held it toward him and he breathed it in and something moved across his face that was quiet and private and entirely his. "Your mother was Aelinian Intelligence. She came to Reno on assignment, met your father, married him here, and then brought him to Aelin. When your parents came back to Nevada to raise you, to give you a normal childhood before all of it, she brought her cooking with her. The herbs she grew up with. And she figured out what the Nevada sun did to the Blasta and she used it. She was cooking Aelinian in that kitchen the whole time. She just never said so. She didn't need to."
Jace looked at the jar.
He shook his head slowly. The amazement on his face was genuine and complete, not just at the herb, not just at the scramble, but at Katherine Elias in her Nevada kitchen, cooking the way she had always cooked, with the herbs she had grown up with on Aelin, brought back with her when the family returned to Reno to give him a normal childhood. She had been stationed in Nevada before she met Thomas. She knew the Nevada sun. She had worked out what it did to the Blasta and had folded that knowledge into her cooking the way she folded everything she knew into whatever she was doing, quietly and without drawing attention to it. A woman who ran intelligence operations did not announce her methods. She simply produced the result and moved on.
He had eaten it his whole childhood without knowing what it was or where it came from. The taste of home. The taste of his mother's kitchen. Aelin in it the whole time, and the Nevada sun she had learned to use, and the knowledge of a woman who had been both places and understood what each of them produced.
"She figured out the Nevada sun on her own," he said quietly. It was not a question.
"She did," Samantha said. "She never mentioned it to anyone. She simply used it."
He looked at her with the full warmth of a man who understood precisely what she had given him and where she had gotten it.
"Maeva chose you," he said.
"She did," Samantha said.
"Good," he said simply. And pulled her close.
She had been keeping the Nevada-dried Tribal Blasta separate from the Aelinian-dried version since June, two jars of each, the difference in color slight but present, the difference in fragrance more significant. She had been experimenting with both on other dishes, carefully and with the methodical patience of someone who understood that this was not a thing to rush. The Nevada version on roasted vegetables. The Aelinian version in a slow-cooked fish dish that had made Nathan stop mid-conversation and demand to know what he was eating. Both versions together in a marinade that she had tried once and that Ricky had eaten standing at the counter at midnight without heating it up and without apparent regret.
Katherine Elias had known what she had. Samantha intended to find out everything else it could do.
NEW ZEALAND
The talk show was called Sunday Morning with the Clarkes, a family program, warm and broad in its appeal, the kind of show that had been running for fifteen years on the strength of two hosts who genuinely liked people and were good at making them comfortable.
Battle Cry had agreed to the appearance partly because the show had reached out through proper channels and the hosts had been respectful and pointed in what they were asking for, and partly because the band had philanthropic connections they wanted to establish in New Zealand and the appearance was a useful door. They flew in on a Thursday, spent two days meeting with several charitable organizations in Auckland that were doing work the Brotherhood wanted to support, and arrived at the studio on Sunday morning in the easy, professional mode of a band that had been doing this for years.
The studio audience was perhaps three hundred people, families, mostly, the demographic the show served. Children in the front sections. The hosts, a husband and wife named David and Marie Clarke, were everything their reputation suggested: warm, prepared, genuinely curious, not performing their interest in the band but actually carrying it.
The interview had been going well for twenty minutes.
They had covered the music, the new album, the touring schedule, and the philanthropic work that had been expanding steadily since Aelin was revealed. They had covered some of the lighter aspects of the Brotherhood's public life, the ones that were available to a family audience. David Clarke had asked Jace about the wedding and received a response that made Marie Clarke put her hand over her heart and made the studio audience produce the warm, collective sound of people who were genuinely pleased for someone they did not know. The band was comfortable. The room was warm.
Then Connor went still.
It was not the stillness of a man collecting a thought or waiting for a question to finish. It was absolute, the complete cessation of movement, mid-sentence, mid-breath, the kind of stillness that registered as wrong before the brain had processed why. The sharp gasp that followed was audible across every part of the studio. Not a soft sound. The involuntary gasp of a man from whom something had been taken without warning.
Jace felt it before he heard it. The bond between the Brotherhood members carried information that did not require sound, a disturbance, a wrongness, something arriving through the amulet connection that had no precedent in seven years of wearing the Guardian Amulet. He turned to Connor immediately. Erik, on Connor's other side, was already turning.
Connor's amulet was glowing green. That was normal, the emerald stone responded to the Visionary's power in the green register that was Connor's and no one else's. What was not normal was Connor's eyes.
They had gone orange-red.
Not the green of his amulet. Not any color that belonged to Connor Braydee or to anything the Guardian's bond produced. A hot, burning orange-red, the color of something on fire from the inside, and it was wrong in the way that things were wrong when something external was operating through a vessel it had no right to be in.
And then Connor's face changed.
Not the structure of it, it was still his jaw, his brow, his mouth, every feature the Brotherhood knew as well as their own. But the expressions moving across it were not his. The contempt that pulled at his mouth was not Connor's contempt. The cold satisfaction settling into the lines of his face was not anything Connor Braydee had ever felt or worn. The cruelty in it, ancient, certain, the cruelty of something that had been practicing it for nearly a thousand years, had never belonged to that face before this moment and was wrong on it in a way that was its own horror. Aldus's emotional register, Aldus's inner life, expressed through Connor's face as completely as a hand moving inside a glove.
The studio audience went audibly uneasy. Parents pulling children closer. The low, frightened sounds of three hundred people watching something they did not have language for.
Connor's hands curled. Not fully to fists, the curl of hands trying to resist something, fingers pulling inward, the contraction of a man fighting a force closing around him. And then the flames came.
Not green energy. Not anything Connor's amulet produced. Actual fire, orange-gold, erupting from his palms in the way fire erupted from nothing when something very old and very powerful decided it wanted fire. It burned his hands immediately, Jace could see it happening, could see the blisters forming on Connor's palms as the flames he could not control ate the skin they were rising from. Connor was shaking. The entirety of him shaking, the way a man shook when every part of his body was in conflict with itself.
He stood slowly.
The studio had gone to a different kind of silence, the held breath of three hundred people who understood that something was catastrophically wrong and had not yet processed what.
Then Connor spoke.
The voice that came out of him was not his voice.
It was old. It carried the quality of age that very old things carried, not weakness, but density, the weight of centuries compressed into sound. It was cold where Connor's voice was warm. It was certain in the way of something that had never been told no often enough to doubt itself. And as it spoke, Connor's face continued to move with expressions that were not his… lip curling with contempt on certain words, the eyes narrowing with the satisfaction of something being said that had been held back for a long time and was now being released.
"You laugh," it said. "You love. You fight, and you mourn. But I am always watching. I will be waiting. For the sins of the Brotherhood against me will be punished. Blood will spill, Guardian." Connor's face wore the expression of a predator that has made its point and knows it. "That is my only will now."
Connor's nose began to bleed during the third sentence. Heavy and immediate, the kind that came from pressure rather than impact, from something inside being subjected to force it was not designed to withstand. The blood reached his chin. It dropped to his shirt, to the carpet beneath him.
The audience broke.
The children screamed first, many of them, the high involuntary sound of small people seeing blood on a man's face on a Sunday morning family program that was supposed to be safe. The adults followed… not all of them, but many, the audible distress of three hundred people who had come to watch a television interview and were watching something else entirely. Marie Clarke, one hand gripping the arm of her chair, made a sound that was not professional and was not managed… the involuntary cry of a woman who had been holding composure and lost it in the moment the blood began to fall.
Then Aldus released him.
Connor dropped.
Erik was already moving. He had been moving since the blood spilled to the carpet, the Warrior's instinct, the body reacting before the mind caught up, and he caught Connor before he hit the floor, going down with him, taking the weight, lowering him to the carpet. He did not step back. He stayed down, on the floor with Connor, one hand on his chest feeling the shallow rise and fall of his breathing, the other on his shoulder, holding him with the careful strength of a man who understood exactly how much force he was managing and was applying precisely enough of it. He spoke to him in a low, steady voice, Connor's name, first, then: stay with me, I've got you, you're on the floor, I've got you, the Warrior's voice, the one that did not waver, talking his brother back from wherever Aldus had taken him.
Jace was on the floor with them in the same moment. Not standing above it directing, down on the carpet, his hands on Connor, pushing through the Guardian bond with everything he had, trying to feel him. What came back was weak. Connor's presence in the bond, which had always been vivid and distinct and unmistakably his, was faint in a way it had never been in seven years of the amulet connection. Not gone, present, but thin, like a signal from a very great distance. Jace pushed more. Held the connection open. Refused to let it close.
"Connor," he said. "Stay with me."
Connor's eyes did not open. The orange-red was gone. The green amulet glowed faintly at his chest, the stone registering what had been done to its bearer. His face, finally, was his own again, slack with unconsciousness, the Aldus expressions gone, nothing left on it but the damage and the blood and the face of a man who had been through something his body was not built to survive.
Sidney came through the studio door at a run. He had been watching from the production area and had covered the distance faster than a man his age should have been able to cover it, because Sidney Greene in a crisis was not the same as Sidney Greene in a training session. Behind him, David Clarke was on his headset calling for an ambulance, his professional composure holding by the discipline of a man who understood that someone in the room needed to keep functioning and had decided it was going to be him. The studio floor crew was managing the audience, three hundred people, many of them in tears, the children still audible, the parents gathering them and moving toward the exits as the staff directed them with the controlled urgency of people doing their jobs in a situation their jobs had not prepared them for.
Samantha was on the set in seconds, kneeling beside Connor on the other side from Erik, her hands going to his face, checking his airway, her drum tech's competence converting instantly to something more urgent.
"We need an ambulance," she said to the room, clearly and without panic, the voice of a woman who had decided what was needed and was stating it. "Now!"
David Clarke said something into his headset.
The show cut to commercial.
In the break, the audience was being managed toward the exits by studio staff who were doing their best against the difficulty of three hundred frightened people in an enclosed space. The Brotherhood had closed around Connor on the floor, Jace's hand on his shoulder, Ricky crouched at his feet, Nathan with his garnet amulet flaring as he ran his own assessment of what had happened. The blood was still coming. Samantha had a cloth pressed to Connor's face. His breathing was shallow but present.
The ambulance came in eleven minutes.
Connor was taken out on a stretcher, his blistered hands wrapped in the paramedics' dressings, the Brotherhood moving with him to the studio doors and stopping there, they could not all go, and they knew it, and the stopping was one of the harder things any of them had done that day. Jace watched the ambulance doors close with the expression of a man exercising restraint.
He turned back to the studio.
The cameras were still off. The audience was mostly gone. David and Marie Clarke were standing together near the set with the shell-shocked composure of people who had been doing live television for fifteen years and had never once been remotely prepared for anything like this.
"Is he going to be all right?" Marie Clarke asked.
"I don't know yet," Jace said. He said it without softening it. "But we're going to find out."
Connor did not wake for four days.
The hospital in Auckland was good, thorough, competent, staffed by people who took their work seriously and who were managing the additional complexity of having an internationally known figure in one of their rooms with the press building outside and the Brotherhood of Aelin occupying the waiting area. Dr. Oksana flew in from Aelin on the first day and took a position at the edge of Connor's care team that was not officially sanctioned and was not challenged, because Nancy Oksana was the kind of physician who made it immediately clear that the discussion about whether she was going to be involved was not a discussion that was going to go the way anyone who tried to have it expected.
The blisters on Connor's hands were treated and dressed. Nancy examined them with the thoroughness of a physician who understood that these injuries had not been produced by any ordinary burn mechanism and that the treatment therefore needed to account for what they actually were. The welts on Connor's chest, his back, his neck, his legs, the physical evidence of whatever Aldus had done to hold him, the heat damage that looked exactly like the marks left by hands pressing a man down into a surface, were documented and dressed. They would heal. Nancy stated this with the precision of a physician who had made the assessment and was stating the conclusion and was not interested in hedging it. The hands would heal. Connor would play again.
Indira was reached by pager within the hour of the ambulance leaving the studio.
The code was Jace's, the sequence that meant emergency, real emergency, not administrative urgency but the kind that required her on a plane. She found a landline and called the hospital number included in the page and got Nathan, who told her in three sentences what had happened and where Connor was. She was at the airport in Léirstinach within the hour and on a flight to New Zealand before the day was out.
She went to Connor's room. She sat beside him. She took his wrapped hand in both of hers, carefully, with the awareness of a woman touching something that had been hurt.
She did not leave.
Outside the hospital, the world was processing what it had seen.
The footage existed, Sunday Morning with the Clarkes was a broadcast program and the cameras had been running throughout. The network released it to the wire services within hours of the broadcast being cut, and by Monday morning it had run on every major television news program in New Zealand and Australia. By Tuesday it had been picked up internationally, the United States, the United Kingdom, Western Europe. Most of the world saw it within forty-eight hours of the original broadcast.
Most of the world had a significant response.
The fan response came first, immediate, enormous, the combination of fear and love and helplessness that large numbers of people felt when something they cared about was threatened and there was nothing concrete they could do about it. The hospital switchboard was overwhelmed within the first day, calls coming in from across New Zealand and Australia, people trying to ask after Connor Braydee, to leave messages, to say something into a telephone because saying nothing was worse. The hospital dedicated two staff members to managing the calls. Cards and flowers began arriving by the second day. By the third they required a dedicated room.
The children's letters and drawings came from across New Zealand, from primary school classrooms and kitchen tables and living rooms, small hands with crayons and pencils and whatever art supplies a child had available after watching something frightening on the television on a Sunday morning. Drawings of Connor, some immediately recognizable and some impressionistic in the way of children's art but all of them clearly meant.
Letters in the careful block print of children still learning to write: "I hope you feel better soon. I was scared but my mum said you would be okay. You are my favorite. I drew you a picture."
The cards, letters, and drawings came from Australia too, and Tasmania, the people Down Under responding to what had happened in their part of the world with the warmth of people who took it personally and intended to say so.
Adult letters followed. Flowers from Auckland florists and Sydney florists. Gifts. Handwritten notes from people who had watched the broadcast and needed to respond to it somehow and had chosen a pen and paper. Messages of support, of anger at what had been done to him, of prayer from people who prayed and of something that functioned as prayer from people who did not.
The political response organized more slowly but came. Allies who had been cautiously supportive since Aelin's exposure became significantly less cautious. Several heads of state issued formal statements. The New Zealand Prime Minister spoke publicly about what had occurred on a New Zealand broadcast, on a Sunday morning, in front of New Zealand families and their children, and what that required of the international community in response.
The religious response was its own thing. Several televangelists with large audiences went on air to offer prayers for Connor Braydee and for the Brotherhood. Not all of them agreed on the theology of what they were watching. Most agreed it required prayer. One prominent televangelist delivered a forty-minute sermon on the nature of evil and on what it meant that evil had spoken, in a man's voice, through a man's body, on a family television program on a Sunday morning, and that millions of people had watched it and could not pretend it was anything other than what it was.
The newspaper editorials and the television commentators ran the range from sober to alarmed. Several major outlets ran extended pieces on the question the possession raised, the question the footage made unavoidable: was this the beginning of a war? Not a metaphorical war. Not a political conflict. An actual war, between five men carrying ancient power and a thousand-year-old sorcerer who had just demonstrated he could reach them anywhere in the world, at any time, through a live television broadcast, in front of their families and three hundred strangers.
One editorial, published in a paper that had been covering the Brotherhood since the Tonight Show appearance, stated it plainly: the Brotherhood of Aelin must be considered genuinely endangered. The world had an obligation to protect them. It could not specify how. But the statement was made, and it was read, and it was not wrong.
The band read it in the waiting room.
Nathan set the paper down carefully. Then he said: "They mean it."
"They do," Jace said.
"It doesn't help," Ricky said. Not bitterly, just accurately, the Sentinel's clear-eyed assessment of the situation.
"No," Jace said. "It doesn't. But it's not nothing."
He sat with that. All of them did.
"He used Connor to speak to me," Jace said, quietly. "Specifically, to me. He wanted me to hear it in a room full of people. He wanted me to watch my brother being used as a vessel and be unable to stop it." His voice was level. Controlled in the way of a man who had made a decision about how he was going to carry the thing he was carrying. "That is what he is now. Not a warlord looking for territory. Not a sorcerer playing a long game. He is specifically, personally focused on us. On me."
Nobody disagreed.
"Then we need to be ready," Sidney said, from his chair at the end of the row. He said it the way Sidney said most things, plainly, without elaboration. "When he wakes up, we'll know more. And then we figure out what ready looks like."
WHEN CONNOR WOKE
On the fourth day, Connor opened his eyes.
Indira was there. She had been there every time he had been close to the surface in the preceding days, the nurses had noted it, the way his vitals shifted slightly when she was in the room versus when she was not, and they had noted it without commenting on it because it was not the kind of thing that fit neatly into a medical chart and they were pragmatic people. She was there when he came back, and the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was her face.
He said her name. Just that, her name, the first word, the thing his mind went to first when it came back from wherever the possession had taken him. She pressed his hand carefully between both of hers and said: "I'm here. I'm right here."
The Brotherhood was in the room within minutes. Nancy had them arranged in as she arranged people in small medical spaces, Jace and Indira close, the others where they could see and be seen without crowding the patient, and Connor looked at each of them in turn with the expression of a man running an inventory and confirming that all the pieces were present.
"I remember everything," he said. His voice was rough from four days of disuse and the trauma of what had been done to his body. He said it before anyone asked, because he knew they needed to know it and he did not want them to be careful with him about it. "I was conscious the whole time. I want you to know that so we can talk about it."
He told them what it felt like to be held, not physically held, not in any way he had a reference point for from seven years of carrying the Visionary's power, but held in the way of something very powerful pressing him down from the inside, pinning him against himself, using his body as a container for something that had no right to be in it. He had felt every word Aldus spoke through him. He had felt the burning in his hands as the fire that was not his fire erupted from his palms. He had felt his entire body in flames, not the external burn of the blisters and the welts but something deeper, the heat of the possession itself, Aldus using his nervous system as a conduit for power that was not calibrated for a human body.
He had wanted to scream. He had not been able to scream. His voice was being used and there was nothing left for screaming.
The room was completely silent.
"The welts," Nathan said carefully. "On your chest and back."
"He was holding me down," Connor said. "I don't know how else to describe it. Like hands pressing me down onto a floor I couldn't see. The heat from wherever he was came through whatever he was doing to hold me." He paused. "He didn't care if it killed me. I could feel that. It wasn't incidental, he was aware of the possibility and he didn't care."
"Then why didn't he push further?" Erik asked. The Warrior's question, the tactical one.
"Because the message was the point," Connor said. "He got the message out. That was what he wanted." He looked at his wrapped hands on the blanket. "And he wanted Jace to watch it happen."
He looked up at Jace.
"I could see into his mind," Connor said. "When he was in me, it wasn't complete, it wasn't like reading him, but there were things that came through. Things he was feeling while he was doing it." "He plans to target us. Everywhere. Every venue, every appearance, every public event. He knows where we go. He's been watching. He will come at us wherever we are and he will use whatever he can reach to do it, venues, crowds, people, us. He doesn't care about collateral."
"The fans," Ricky said.
"Everyone," Connor said. "He doesn't care who gets hurt. He didn't care about three hundred people in that studio."
The weight of it settled in the room.
"And Jace." Connor's voice shifted, the Visionary delivering the worst of what he had seen, holding it steady because they needed to know it and he was the one who had seen it. "He plans to kill you. Over and over. For as long as the Guardian Amulet will sustain you. He knows the amulet prevents permanent death. He has reframed it. He doesn't see it as an obstacle anymore." "He sees it as an opportunity. He can kill you and you come back and he can kill you again. He intends to do this for as long as it takes for the amulet to finally let you go."
The silence that followed was a different quality than the one before it.
Connor looked at his hands. The wrapped bandages. His hands, the hands that played violin, that played guitar, that had never once in seven years of carrying the Visionary's power produced anything but green energy until Aldus had used them to burn themselves.
"I need to strengthen my mind," he said. Quietly. Not asking, stating. "Whatever he found to get in, I need to close it. Build walls he can't breach." He paused. "I don't know if I would survive another one. I don't think I would. So that goes on the list. At the top of it."
Nobody argued with him. The Brotherhood knew what they had watched in that studio and they understood exactly what Connor was telling them about how close it had come.
Samantha sat down next to Jace. She found his hand and held it, both of hers around his, and she looked straight ahead at the middle distance with the expression of a woman who was trying not to cry and was not entirely succeeding. She had known the danger. She had known it when she said yes in Atlanta and she had known it at the altar in the Great Chapel and she had known it every day between. Knowing it and hearing it stated this plainly in a hospital room in Auckland with Connor's wrapped hands on the blanket were two different things.
Jace felt her hand in his. He felt the fear in her that came through the amulet bond, not the overwhelming flood of the chapel, but something precise and targeted, the fear of a woman who loved a man she had just been told was going to be killed repeatedly by something ancient and merciless. He held her hand back.
Then he looked up.
The rage was present. It had been present since the studio, the clean rage of the Guardian responding to a violation of his brother, the High King responding to a declaration of war made on live television in front of three hundred people. He had been carrying it with the controlled precision of a man who knew that rage without direction was not useful and had been waiting for the direction.
He had it now.
"We will not back down," he said.
He said it to the room. Not loudly, the level, certain voice of a man making a statement he did not expect to be debated.
"Do you understand me? All of you." His eyes moved around the room, his brothers, Indira, Samantha, Sidney, Nancy at the edge of the space. "We are more powerful together than Aldus could ever be alone. We are the most powerful Brotherhood to exist. What he did to Connor was a violation. It was an act of war. And we are going to answer it."
He looked at his brothers, each of them, held each gaze.
"We train," he said. "Harder than we have trained. Smarter. We push beyond what we currently know, every ability, every limit we think we have, everything we have not yet explored about what these amulets can do in the hands of these five men. We find out what we are actually capable of. And we do not stop until we know."
He had been still since the second sentence, the expression on his face the expression of a man hearing exactly what he had known was coming and had been preparing for since the moment the ambulance doors had closed. He knew what this meant. He knew what it was going to require, of the band, of each of them individually, of him. He met Jace's eyes and what passed between them was the understanding of a trainer and the man he had trained, both of them clear-eyed about the size of what they were about to do.
"We do not allow fear to take control," Jace said. "We do not hide. We do not back down from what we are." He paused. "We are the Brotherhood of Aelin. And we will move forward."
The room held it.
Connor, from the bed, said nothing. He looked at his brother with the expression of a man who was satisfied with what he saw.
He closed his eyes.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Then let's get to work."
He was not cleared to travel for several more days, and in those days Indira brought him the letters.
They came in batches, the hospital staff had been collecting them as they arrived, sorting them by origin, stacking them in the room that had been set aside for the volume of it. The adult letters and cards from New Zealand and Australia and Tasmania. The flowers and the gifts. And then, in their own pile, set carefully apart, the children.
Connor sat up in the bed with Indira beside him and opened them one by one.
Some of them made him laugh, the frank assessments of young children who described exactly what they had seen on the television with the unfiltered directness of people who had not yet learned to soften difficult things, followed by the equally direct declaration that they hoped he felt better now. Some were quiet and careful, the older children who had understood more and were reaching toward something they did not quite have language for yet.
Some of them made him cry.
He did not try to prevent it. The Visionary had been carrying very large things for a long time and had learned how to hold them. But a drawing from a girl named Sophie, seven years old, who had drawn him with his green amulet glowing and written underneath in careful letters You are safe now, he held that one for a long time and did not pretend it had not reached him entirely.
"Every single one," he said to Indira, when he had been through most of the pile. His voice was still rough but steady. "I'm going to answer every single one."
"I know," Indira said.
"That's going to be a lot of letters."
"I know," she said. "I'll help you get it done."
She said it with the complete certainty of a woman who had made a decision and was stating it, not offering it.
"Okay," he said. And picked up the next letter.
He kept that promise. It took months. Indira kept hers alongside it.
THE EMERGENCY SESSION
Connor was cleared to travel back to Aelin eight days after the possession.
Dr. Oksana made this determination with the same precision she brought to all her determinations, which was to say that she had waited until she was certain and then stated the conclusion without qualification. The hands were healing. The welts were healing. Connor was weak in the way of a man whose body had been through something it was not designed for, but he was present and coherent and the weakness was the kind that yielded to time rather than the kind that did not.
Indira flew back with him.
The Aelinian Congress called the emergency session two days after Connor's return.
It was the largest gathering of the Congress since the session that had formally recognized Samantha Wallace as High Votaress, and that session had been called on three days' notice, which had been considered extraordinary at the time. This one had been called on forty-eight hours' notice and every seat was filled, the representatives from all five counties present, the gallery sections of the Congress Hall occupied by castle staff and county officials who had come to Harmonytis for this because they needed to be in the room.
The Prime Minister opened the session. Galena Dallenger at her lectern was the version of Galena that the Congress knew from the hard sessions, composed, prepared, her voice carrying the weight of a woman who had looked at the information available and had arrived at conclusions she was not pleased to have arrived at. She stated what had happened in New Zealand in the precise language of the official record. She presented the medical assessment. She presented the threat assessment, which had been prepared by Erik in his capacity as High General and which was thorough in the way that Erik's assessments were always thorough and blunt in the way that Erik's assessments were also always blunt.
Then Samantha spoke.
As High Votaress she had a formal role in the session, not merely supportive, not merely present beside the High King, but a voice of the Guardian's household in the Congress's proceedings. She spoke briefly and directly, in the manner she had been developing since the role was new to her, and what she said was that the Brotherhood had already determined their course of action and that the Congress's role was to support that course of action with everything the island had available to support it.
She sat down.
Jace stood.
The Congress of Aelin looked at their High King, the man most of them had known since he was twenty-five years old and new to the crown, the man they had watched grow into the role over seven years, the man who was standing in front of them now with the Guardian Amulet at his chest and the weight of what had just happened to his brother visible in the set of his shoulders and the absolute steadiness of his expression.
He told them what he had told the hospital room. The same substance, the formal version, they would train, they would prepare, they would explore the full extent of what the Brotherhood was capable of. They would not withdraw. They would not hide. They would not allow the island to live in fear of Aldus while its Brotherhood stood still.
The Congress heard him.
And then the Congress spoke.
What followed was not a debate in the ordinary sense. There was genuine fear in the hall, the representatives of almost a million Aelinian citizens, people who loved the island and the Brotherhood that protected it, looking at what Aldus had done to Connor Braydee on a television program in New Zealand and understanding what it meant for the men they had sworn their political lives to serve. Several representatives spoke with the emotional directness of Aelinian political culture, which did not require the performance of composure when composure was not what was being felt. There were tears in the hall. There were voices that broke and continued anyway.
The plea came from the floor, not from leadership, not from the Prime Minister, but from a representative of a small farming community in Neart who had served in the Congress for twenty years and who stood and said, in the plain language of a man who was a farmer before he was a politician, that he was frightened. That his people were frightened. That the thought of the island without the Brotherhood was not a thought he could hold without it becoming something close to unbearable. And that he was asking, he was asking, not as a representative but as an Aelinian, as a person who had watched Jace Elias rule this island with everything he had for seven years, he was asking them to please consider whether the music needed to stop for a while. Whether the public appearances needed to stop. Whether the exposure needed to stop. Until something more could be done to secure the places they had to be and protect the people who came to see them.
He sat down.
The hall was quiet.
Jace looked at his brothers. The look that passed between the five of them was the look of men who had already known this was coming and had talked about it in the hospital room and on the flight back and in the days since Connor's return, who had argued it and sat with it and arrived, together, at the place where they had to arrive.
The music would stop. For now.
Not permanently. Not as a surrender. As a tactical decision made by men who understood that protecting the people who came to their shows was not separate from protecting the island, it was the same obligation, the same vow, the same thing the amulets asked of them.
They would sequester on Aelin.
They would train.
They would find out what the most powerful Brotherhood in nine centuries was actually capable of.
And when the time came, when they were ready, when the security could be established, when the answer to Aldus was something more than courage and defiance, they would come back.
Jace told the Congress this.
The session ended.
Outside the Congress Hall, in the corridor that led back toward the castle's main wing, the five of them walked together in the quiet of a building that had just made a significant decision. The amulets were steady. The island was around them, the lavender sky through the high windows, the Atlantic audible if you listened, the quality of Aelin on a December evening, cold and clear and present.
Jace walked in the middle of them, where the Guardian walked, where he had always walked. His brothers on his left. On his right, Samantha's hand found his.
He held it.
"Okay," he said, to the corridor, to the island, to the men walking beside him who had been his brothers since before he understood what that word meant in this context. "Let's get to work."
The Brotherhood of Aelin walked forward into what was coming.
As they always had. As they always would.