THE MORNING BEFORE, AND WHAT CAME AFTER
LOS ANGELES — AND ELSEWHERE
July 15 through August 8, 1989
It got out.
Not immediately, the Forum announcement had said medical emergency, show postponed, and for the first twelve hours that held. Seventeen thousand people filed out. The PA system said what it said. Nobody who had been inside the backstage that night said anything publicly, and the bands who had been in that room understood without being told that they were not going to be the ones to break it open.
But thirty-odd people had been in that backstage. And not all of them had the same instinct for silence.
The first story appeared three days later in a tabloid that had been tipped by someone who described themselves as a road crew member who had been present for what they called "some kind of supernatural attack" at the July 14 Forum charity event. The details were wrong in several ways and right in the general shape of things: amulets, creatures, a tear in the air, Jace Elias taken. The story ran with a photograph of the Forum exterior and a headline that used the word "KIDNAPPED" in large letters. Battle Cry's management issued no comment.
By the end of that first week, every band that had been in the room had been approached.
Mötley Crüe handled it the way Mötley Crüe handled things they wanted to protect, by presenting a wall of cheerful unavailability. Vince, Nikki, Mick, and Tommy each said some version of "we have no comment at this time" to every outlet that asked, said it pleasantly, and did not elaborate. They had talked to Battle Cry's management before they said anything to anyone, and the position had been agreed on in that conversation. They held it without apparent difficulty. The tabloids stopped asking after a while because Mötley Crüe was genuinely very good at this when they chose to be.
The Go-Gos and the Bangles had expected to be targeted and had prepared accordingly. Both bands issued brief statements through their publicists acknowledging that an incident had occurred at the Forum charity event, expressing support for Jace Elias and Battle Cry, and declining to provide details out of respect for the privacy of those involved. The statements were careful and warm and gave nothing away. The publicists fielded the follow-up calls.
INXS had been back in Australia within the week, the benefit had been the last stop before a break before the next leg, and Michael had gotten them out quickly. It did not help. Australian press picked up the story and the questions followed them home. Michael told a reporter that he had been present and that Jace Elias was someone he was proud to call a friend and that he had nothing further to add. He meant both of those things. He said them once and did not repeat them.
REO Speedwagon was in it because REO Speedwagon had been in that room, same as everyone else. The press didn't need a reason beyond that. Kevin talked to Kavanaugh before he talked to anyone else, and the band landed on the same position as the others: yes, they had been at the Forum that night, yes, an incident had occurred, no further comment pending Jace Elias's recovery. Bryan said nothing publicly. Dave Amato, whose forearm had required four stitches and who had told his wife it was a kitchen accident before she saw the shape of the wound and asked a better question, said nothing publicly either.
Tears for Fears had not spoken publicly and Roland had made it known through his management that he would not be doing so. This was noted by several outlets as conspicuous. Roland did not change his position.
The civilians, the road crew members, the charity raffle winners, several people who had simply been in the wrong corridor at the right moment and found themselves inside an evacuation, were a different matter. The tabloids found them. Some of them talked. The stories that resulted were chaotic and inconsistent and collectively created a picture that was stranger and more accurate than any single account: creatures, amulets glowing, a man floating off the ground, a tear in the air, the musician taken through it. The words "supernatural" and "kidnapping" and "cultlike" appeared in several headlines. Battle Cry's management continued to issue no comment.
What settled the public narrative, temporarily, was Jace Elias. He was not dead, as some accounts had implied. He had been recovered by his band. He was recovering from injuries sustained during the incident. A brief statement from Kavanaugh's office confirmed this and nothing else.
The questions did not stop. They redirected.
Kavanaugh told the Brotherhood what was coming and the Brotherhood told each other. Connor said: we knew this was possible when we did the special. Jace said: I know. And that was, for the moment, all there was to say about it. They were not going to be able to manage this from a cliff on Aelin. They were going to have to decide what came next. That conversation was for when Jace was out of the hospital wing and back on his feet and the Dragon form was in his body and not just in his history.
For now: the story was out. The world knew something had happened. And Bryan Hitt arrived on Aelin on August 9th having kept his mouth shut about every single thing he had seen, which was, given what he had seen, not a small thing.
Training Log — Sidney Greene
August 9, 1989
Bryan Hitt arrived on Aelin today. First outside witness to a formation session in the history of the Brotherhood's training under my supervision.
The Guardian asked him to stay. I concurred with the decision. A man who was in that room at the Forum has earned his place at the cliff.
Full Sacrifice practice scheduled for August 11. Gaelen Bay. First full Dragon emergence attempt, first in eight hundred years. The Dragon ability did not pass with the amulet after Daeron. Five Guardians held the opal between Daeron and Jace. None of them had this. The bloodline brought it back.
I will not hold it longer than I believe is safe for a first run. The Guardian will disagree with my timeline. He will comply anyway.
Dr. Oksana has been briefed. Medical response standing by at the castle.
We are ready.
AELIN
Ainmhithe — The Royal Stables
August 9, 1989
The stables at Ainmhithe were the finest on the island and everyone who had spent time in them knew it, including the horses, who had the quality of animals that understood their own circumstances and had long since made peace with being exceptional.
Ricky had been Governor of Ainmhithe for six years. He had established the royal stables in his second year, had personally selected the breeding stock, had spent more time in these stalls than in his office at the county seat, and was unapologetic about all of it. The Ainmhithe preserve, the great cats, the wolves, the birds of prey, was the formal expression of his governorship. The stables were the personal one. He ran them with the competence of a man who had loved horses his entire life and had eventually been given a county and a budget to do something about it.
Bryan Hitt stepped into the stable yard at half past eight in the morning and stopped.
He was 5'9" and lean, compact rather than imposing, the build of a man who had earned his strength and knew it. Long dark wavy hair past his shoulders, thick and natural, the kind that did what it wanted and had clearly been allowed to. High cheekbones, strong jaw, the Cherokee heritage in his bone structure the same way Jace's Paiute heritage showed in his, not announced, just present, the face carrying its own history. He was wearing a plain flannel shirt and jeans, the simple practical choice of a man who had packed for a place he had never been and had no idea what to expect and had decided that simple was probably right. It was.
He moved through the stable yard the way he moved through most places, no hurry, no performance.
He took in the horses with the unhurried assessment of a man who had been around horses since childhood and knew what he was looking at. The bay gelding in the near paddock. The grey mare at the far end. The chestnut stallion that was watching him from over the stall door with the evaluative quality of an animal that made its own decisions about people.
"That one," Bryan said, not pointing, just inclining his head toward the stallion.
"His name is Brannach," Ricky said. "Named for the lake. He's difficult."
"How difficult," Bryan said.
Ricky considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "He threw me the first time," he said. "Second time he decided I was acceptable. He makes that decision on his own schedule." "He's also fast. Faster than he looks, and he looks fast."
"What does he not like," Bryan said.
"Uncertainty," Ricky said. "He can feel it before you know you're feeling it. If you're not sure what you want, he's not going to help you figure it out."
Bryan looked at the stallion. The stallion looked back, steady, evaluative, not hostile but not offering anything yet. He stood there without moving toward him.
"I'd like to ride him," Bryan said. "If that's alright."
Ricky looked at Jace. Jace looked at Ricky.
"I'll show you where the tack is," Ricky said.
He went to get it, and Bryan followed him into the stable at the appropriate pace of a man in someone else's barn, looking, taking in the setup, not touching anything without invitation. Ricky pulled Brannach's tack and showed Bryan the stallion's preferences without being asked, the way you did with a difficult horse when the person asking seemed like they understood what they were asking for.
Jace came out of the far stable with a grey mare already saddled, not the grey in the paddock, a darker one, the one Jace always took when he was at Ainmhithe, the one that had learned his weight and his way of sitting and had adjusted to both with the tolerant intelligence of an animal that understood its rider. He crossed the yard and stood beside Bryan and the height difference was simply a fact, Jace at 6'4", Bryan at 5'9", seven inches of difference that neither of them acknowledged because neither of them needed to. Bryan looked up. Jace looked down. The look held with the quality of two men who had already decided something about each other and were confirming it.
Bryan was running one hand along the stallion's neck, not assessing, just making contact, letting Brannach take his measure without rushing anything. Brannach's ears tracked Bryan's hand. Then, slowly, his head lowered. Then he pushed into Bryan's palm, not hard, just a definite press, the gesture of a horse that had decided something and was saying so.
Ricky watched this. "He doesn't do that," he said.
"He does now," Bryan said. He kept his hand where it was. "He's not difficult," he said. "He's particular. Those aren't the same thing."
Ricky looked at Jace. Jace looked at Ricky.
He looked at Jace. "You said you were there when Brannach threw Ricky."
"I was," Jace said.
"What happened after?"
"He got back on," Jace said.
Bryan nodded, still watching the horse. "Good," he said.
They rode out at nine o'clock, the three of them, through the Ainmhithe county roads and then onto the open ground that ran between the preserve's eastern boundary and the rolling terrain toward the Irish Channel, where the land opened up into long stretches of grass and packed earth that the island's horses had been running on for eight hundred years. The morning was what August mornings on Aelin were, the sky the soft lavender that belonged to the island in summer, the air carrying the green of the island interior, the distant glitter of Lake Brannach visible to the north.
Bryan rode Brannach the way he did everything, which was with total commitment and no wasted energy. The stallion tested him twice in the first quarter mile, a hard right sidestep, then a sudden deceleration that would have unseated someone who was not paying attention. Bryan stayed through both with the seat of a man who had been competing in rodeo since he was fifteen and had been thrown enough times to understand exactly what a horse felt like when it was thinking about throwing you, which meant he had already adjusted his weight before Brannach had fully committed to either attempt.
After the second failed test, Brannach stopped trying and started running, which was what Brannach actually wanted to do. Bryan let him. Jace watched Bryan on the stallion from fifty yards behind and felt the recognition of watching someone do the thing they were built for, which he understood from the inside.
Ricky rode alongside Jace. "He's good," Ricky said.
"Yeah," Jace said.
"I want to see the lasso."
"He'll get to it," Jace said. "Let him run first."
They ran. The three of them across the open Ainmhithe ground, the island spreading wide around them, the summer morning doing what summer mornings on Aelin did, which was be the best version of itself. Jace on his grey mare, who knew this ground and ran it with the settled ease of a horse that was entirely comfortable in her circumstances. Ricky on Shadow, the black stallion leaning into the run with the loose forward energy that characterized everything Ricky did. Bryan on Brannach, who had stopped testing and started running with the energy of a horse that had found the person it wanted to run with, not just forward motion but something with feeling behind it, the long reaching stride open and willing, Brannach leaning into the bit the way he never did for riders he merely tolerated.
When they pulled up at the high point that overlooked the preserve's eastern tree line and the terrain beyond it, the land rolling down toward the Irish Channel in the far distance, all three of them breathing and the horses blowing, Bryan reached down and patted Brannach's neck. The stallion turned his head back toward Bryan's boot, just turned it, rested his nose there. It was not a thing Brannach did.
"Good horse," Bryan said.
"Don't tell him that," Ricky said. "He'll get ideas."
Bryan looked at the view, the island spreading out below them, the green of it, the sky. He had arrived through a portal the previous evening, stepping from a parking structure in Los Angeles into the Aelin Veil gateway, and the island had done what it always did to first-time visitors, which was arrive so completely that you could not quite believe it had been hidden. That it had been here, right here, while the rest of the world proceeded without knowing.
"What did you think when you first saw it," Jace said.
Bryan was quiet. "My grandmother used to talk about the way land feels when it's been cared for," he said. "When people have been in right relationship with it for a long time. She could feel it through her feet." "I thought about that when I walked through the gateway last night. This land has been cared for. You can feel it."
Jace looked at the view and said nothing, which was the right response, and Bryan understood that it was the right response.
Then Bryan said: "Also the sky is purple."
Jace looked at him.
"I don't mean that as a complaint," Bryan said. "I mean I stepped through a portal in a parking structure in Los Angeles and the sky was purple and I thought... yes. That's right. That's exactly what this place should be."
Jace looked at the lavender sky above the Ainmhithe preserve and then back at Bryan and something in him settled further.
They sat on the horses without talking. Then Bryan said: "You were born here."
"Yeah," Jace said.
"What was it like growing up here?"
"I don't know," Jace said. "I was two or three months old when my family left. I don't remember any of it." He looked at the island below them, the green of it, Lake Brannach catching the light to the north, the castle on the southeastern peninsula just visible from the high ground. "I grew up in Reno. On the Paiute reservation with my father's family. Didn't come back here until I was twenty-five."
Bryan took that in. "So you grew up the same way I did," he said. "More or less."
"More or less," Jace said.
They looked at the view together, two men who had grown up with horses and land and an inheritance that showed in the bone structure and not much else, sitting on a high point above the Ainmhithe preserve on an island that one of them had only recently learned was home.
Then Ricky said: "Now show me the lasso."
Bryan reached back to the saddlebag.
The rope was in Ricky's saddlebag, a sixty-foot soft-lay nylon, the right weight and the right flex, the kind of rope a stable like Ainmhithe kept on hand because Ricky had made sure of it. Bryan shook out the loop as he turned Brannach toward the open ground, the stallion picking up on the shift in posture and stepping into readiness without being asked.
"What am I roping," Bryan said.
"Me," Ricky said.
Jace looked at him.
"I'll shift," Ricky said. "Give him something worth throwing at."
"Ricky..."
"It's fine. I'll be a steer."
"You'll be a..."
But Ricky had already dismounted, handed Shadow's reins to Jace, and walked out onto the open ground fifty yards ahead. He looked back over his shoulder with the grin that meant he had already decided and was not going to be talked out of it.
The shift happened in the smooth way Ricky shifted when he was not in combat and not in a hurry, not the fast violent change of an emergency transformation but the deliberate one, the Sentinel's power moving through him with the ease of something practiced. The onyx amulet blazed briefly at his chest and then he was down on four legs, a full-sized steer, dark roan, horns spread, standing in the Ainmhithe grass and looking back at Bryan with Ricky's specific quality of amusement entirely intact in the animal's eyes.
Bryan stared at the steer for exactly two seconds.
Then he started spinning the loop.
The rope came to life in his hands the way it always came to life, not a tool anymore but an extension, the rotation finding its rhythm immediately, the loop wide and clean, level, the kind of spin that came from thirty years of muscle memory. Brannach moved into the approach as Bryan settled his seat, the stallion reading the shift in balance and stepping forward without a cue, because Brannach was, under the difficult exterior, a horse who understood this work and had been waiting for a rider who knew how to ask for it.
Bryan ran at the steer.
Ricky, the steer, bolted left with the instinct of an animal trying to escape, which was entirely convincing because Ricky had shifted completely and the body's instincts came with the form. The bolt was genuine. The angle was genuine. Bryan adjusted without losing the spin, the rope moving with him, and when the loop released it went exactly where it needed to go, clean over the horns, dropping to the neck, the wrap snapping tight with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this since he was a teenager in Texas and had never stopped.
Brannach stopped hard. The rope went taut.
The steer hit the end of the rope and pulled and Bryan held the wrap and kept his seat and it was exactly what it was, a man and a horse and a rope and an animal that did not want to be caught, the elemental tension of team roping that had nothing to do with rock and roll or amulets or dimensional rifts, that was just the oldest test of human skill against animal will, out here on the grass of an eight-hundred-year-old island on an August morning.
The steer pulled harder. Tossed his head. Dug in. Put on, it had to be said, a fairly convincing performance of an animal that was genuinely outraged about the rope situation and intended to make this known. Bryan held the wrap and waited.
Then the steer sat down.
Ricky sat down in the grass like a dog, which was not what steers did, and looked up at Bryan on the stallion with the expression of a man who was a steer but was also Ricky and found this very funny.
Bryan looked down at the steer sitting in the grass on the end of his rope. He looked at it.
"Huh," he said.
The steer made a sound. Not a bovine sound. Something that was trying very hard to be a bovine sound and was not entirely succeeding because it was also trying to be a laugh.
"Ricky," Jace said.
The steer stood up. Ricky emerged from the shift shaking grass off his shirt, wearing the grin of a man entirely satisfied with himself. "Good throw," he said. "Textbook."
"You sat down," Bryan said.
"I got caught."
"Steers don't sit down when they get caught."
"This one did."
Bryan considered this with the patience of a man who had learned that some situations simply required patience. "Do you do this to everyone," he said, "or is this a special occasion."
Ricky tilted his head. "Little of both."
Bryan looked at him. "I'm going to need a different target next time," he said. "Something that doesn't have opinions about being caught."
"Most steers have opinions about being caught," Ricky said.
"Most steers don't sit down and laugh about it."
"Valid point," Ricky said, entirely unrepentant.
Bryan looked at Jace. "Is he always like this."
"Yep," Jace said.
"Does it get better?"
"Nope," Jace said. "You stop noticing after a while."
"How long does that take?"
Jace thought about it. "Still waiting," he said.
Bryan coiled the rope back with the ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times, shaking his head, and the quality of the head-shake was not quite exasperation and not quite amusement but lived between them exactly the way that Ricky tended to occupy the space between things.
They rode for another hour. Not performing, not demonstrating, just riding, the three of them on the Ainmhithe ground, talking in the way people talked on horseback when the talking was secondary to the movement and the movement was what mattered. Bryan asked about the island. Jace answered. Ricky contributed commentary that was sometimes useful and sometimes entirely beside the point and always worth hearing. The light on the Ainmhithe ground turned from morning-grey to midday-bright around them. The preserve's great cats were visible twice, a distant shape moving through the eastern tree line, and then closer, a pair of the large cats that were not quite panthers watching them from the edge of the tree line with the golden-eyed assessment of predators who had made their own calculation about the riders and found them acceptable.
Bryan watched the cats with the focused stillness of a man who had grown up with animals and understood the quality of being watched by something that had the option to consider you prey and had decided not to.
"They're yours," Bryan said to Ricky.
"The preserve is mine," Ricky said. "They're their own."
"But they know you."
"Yeah," Ricky said. "They know me all the ways."
Bryan was quiet, watching where the cats had been.
They were back at the stables by noon.
Jace had not mentioned the formation since Bryan arrived. Bryan had not asked about it. The morning had been the morning, complete in itself, no weight attached to it. When they handed off the horses to the stable hands and walked back toward the castle road, Jace said: "Tomorrow morning. Early. I'd like you to be there for something."
Bryan looked at him.
"The training I've been doing," Jace said. "With the Brotherhood. Sidney has a session scheduled at Gaelen Bay. I want you to see it."
"What will I be seeing," Bryan said.
Jace was quiet. "Something nobody outside the Brotherhood has seen before," he said. "I want you to see it because you were in that room at the Forum and because I trust what I saw in you that night. And because..." He stopped. Started again. "Because I think you'll understand it. What it means. Why it matters."
Bryan held his gaze. "What time," he said.
"Before dawn," Jace said. "Sidney's preference."
Bryan nodded slowly. "Of course it is," he said.
Jace looked at him.
"Before dawn. On a cliff. Above the ocean." "Sidney sounds like my old rodeo coach."
"What happened to your old rodeo coach?"
"I still do what he tells me," Bryan said. "Twenty years later."
"Then you already know how this works," Jace said.
"Yeah," Bryan said. "I'll be there."
AELIN
Gaelen Bay
August 11, 1989
Dawn reached Gaelen Bay reluctantly, as if the sun itself understood it was not welcome yet.
The bay sat on the southeastern peninsula of Aelin, half a mile from the Castle of Elders, sheltered on three sides by the long curve of the island's southernmost coastline. The cliff above it rose clean and black from the water's edge, its stone worn smooth by centuries of wind and salt. At the cliff's highest point, a naturally flat disk of worn rock where the wind came from two directions simultaneously and met in a stillness that had no business being still, the formation had been planned.
Below, the ocean breathed in slow, deliberate pulses. The water of Gaelen Bay was deep, darker than the open Atlantic, carrying the quality of a sheltered body of water that had never fully committed to being tamed. No waves broke against the base of the cliff. The water simply waited.
They gathered before the light arrived.
Jace was first at the cliff point, as he always was. Barefoot on the worn stone disk, the Guardian Amulet resting against his bare chest, its opaline light already stirring, not blazing, not yet, but alive in it, the way a fire was alive before it was fed. He was looking at the water. He had told Bryan he would not do this, if he let himself look at the water he would start thinking about endings instead of beginnings, but the water was there and the bay was named for Gaelen and Gaelen had stood somewhere near this place and had done this and had come back from it, and that fact was, this morning, what he needed to look at.
Two hundred and one years, Gaelen had held.
Jace closed his eyes. Breathed. Found the center the way Sidney had been teaching him to find it since December, not forcing, not reaching, just allowing the power to settle to its lowest register and sit there, patient, waiting.
He opened his eyes.
Samantha was twenty feet back from the cliff edge, standing with her arms wrapped around herself against the pre-dawn chill. She was watching him with the expression she had when she was managing something, not fear exactly, not the performed version of courage, but the actual version, which looked like stillness. She had been there when he arrived. She had not said anything. She had simply been there, which was what he needed.
Galena stood beside her. Leilani beside Ricky, who had arrived with Erik from the northern path, both of them in the pre-dawn dark with the Brotherhood's specific quality of men who had been through enough together that their physical proximity carried weight. Nathan was already at the north point, rolling his shoulders, the garnet burning warm at his chest. Connor came last, moving to the west point with the quiet deliberateness of the Visionary who had spent eight months learning to direct his power inward rather than outward, whose face this morning carried the expression of a man who had set everything he was seeing aside in order to do this cleanly.
Sidney stood outside the formation's boundary, notebook closed for once, hands at his sides.
And Bryan Hitt stood ten feet behind Sidney.
He had said nothing since they walked down from the castle road in the dark. He had taken his position without being told, far enough back to be outside whatever was going to happen, close enough to see it, and he had been still in the way that Bryan was still, which was the stillness of a man who was paying very close attention.
Jace looked at him once, across the pre-dawn grey of the cliff. Bryan met his eyes. Nodded once. The nod of a man who was ready and was not going to complicate the readiness with words.
Jace nodded back.
He turned to face the bay.
Sidney said, very quietly, into the stillness: "Brotherhood. Cardinal points."
The formation locked.
Connor at west, boots on stone, the emerald burning restrained and watchful. His eyes met Jace's briefly. No warning in them. No prophecy. Only his brother's face, resolved and present.
Nathan at north, shoulders rolled loose, the garnet at full warmth, sweat already at his hairline though the morning was cold.
Erik at east, planted, immovable, hands at his sides, saying nothing because he never needed to say anything, his presence an anchor that had been an anchor in every room for six years.
Ricky at south, closest to the cliff's edge, the onyx heavy at his chest. He looked once at Leilani and then forward, his chin coming up.
Jace at center.
The ocean exhaled.
Sidney said: "Visionary. Begin."
Connor closed his eyes.
The world tightened around the formation, Jace felt it first as pressure behind his eyes, not pain but weight, the weight that eight months of transfers had taught him to recognize as the Visionary power moving toward release. Images tried to surface and dissolved before they could take shape. Connor was refusing to look. Deliberately turning the sight away from what was coming and directing everything inward, toward the center.
Connor's knees buckled.
He fought upright, boots scraping the black stone, his balance threatening, his body fighting the instinct to reach for something solid. Every reflex screaming for grounding. Sidney took one step closer to the boundary.
"Stay with me," Sidney said. "West holds."
Connor dragged in a breath and locked his stance. The Visionary Amulet flared, and its light peeled away in a slow, reverent stream and poured toward the Guardian Amulet.
Jace gasped.
The opal at his chest brightened, colors fracturing briefly into silvers and blues before settling. Connor opened his eyes. For the first time since his Bestowal, the world went utterly quiet behind them.
He exhaled. Long. Shaky. "Done."
Sidney: "Conjurer."
Nathan raised his hands, palms outward. The garnet was burning hot enough now that the air around his fingers shimmered. Fire answered him instinctively and he strangled the reflex down, forcing it away, redirecting.
"I've got you," Jace said. Low. Steady.
Nathan laughed once, sharp, breathless, the laugh that was also fear and also trust, both at once. "I know."
The garnet split its light in a surge of deep crimson and gold. Heat rolled outward in a wave that made the air shimmer and the stone beneath the formation warm by several degrees. Jace cried out as it struck the opal, the Guardian Amulet drinking it in with a hunger that was not comfortable, not painful but enormous, the sensation of the room inside him expanding to accommodate something that had always been too large for ordinary dimensions.
Nathan dropped to one knee when it was done. One hand braced on the stone. The last ember of garnet fire gone.
Sidney: "Warrior."
Erik did not hesitate. The Warrior Amulet answered immediately, its light tearing free with a force that sent cracks spidering through the stone beneath his boots, hairline fractures, the stone receiving the power's departure the way ground received the first shock of something seismic. Strength bled out of him in visible arcs, folding into the blazing opal at Jace's chest.
Jace felt it settle into his bones, into his spine, into the place where his heartbeat had always been strongest. He felt it arrive and understood something about it he had not understood in the transfers at the lower courtyard, that the Warrior's strength, divorced from Erik and given to him, was not just physical force but the quality of Erik himself, the steadiness of it, the refusal to yield. He received that and held it.
Erik exhaled hard. His shoulders sagged. His feet never moved from the eastern point.
Only Ricky remained.
The Sentinel closed his eyes.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the ocean shifted.
The onyx pulsed, not with the sharp decisive energy of Ricky's combat power, but with something older, something that ran deeper than the shape-shifting or the portals or the acrobat's speed. A resonance. As if the amulet were answering something that had been waiting in the bay below since the island was named, since the first Guardian stood at a cliff somewhere on this peninsula and looked at the water and understood what was being asked of him.
The light that left Ricky was different from the others. Threaded with motion and shadow. It flowed last and it sealed something, not just the transfer but the circle itself, the formation made complete.
Jace screamed.
The Guardian Amulet erupted.
Opaline light engulfed him completely, lifting him from the stone, not thrown, not blasted, but claimed, the earth releasing its hold on him with the quality of something completing rather than failing. Colors spun and fractured, the distinct hues of all four amulets swirling in the white, blazing together into something that was none of them and all of them. The pull toward the ocean became irresistible.
Jace's body vanished into the light.
The light plunged.
It dove headlong from the cliff into the waiting water below, crossing the distance between stone and sea in an instant, and the bay closed over it with deceptive gentleness, the surface smoothing, the light gone, the water resuming its slow breathing as if it had swallowed something and intended to keep it.
The cliff went silent.
Nobody moved.
Nathan was on one knee on the stone with his hand braced and his breath coming in controlled intervals, the garnet dark at his chest. Connor was upright but white-faced, his weight forward on his front foot. Erik had not moved from the east point but the cracks in the stone beneath his boots were spreading slowly. Ricky was breathing through his mouth, the onyx completely dark, looking at the place on the water's surface where the light had gone under.
Samantha's hands were knotted so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She had taken one involuntary step forward before stopping herself, the invisible line across her chest stopping her. Her eyes did not leave the water.
Leilani had taken Ricky's hand without crossing to the formation, her arm was extended, his arm extended back, their hands locked together at the formation's boundary.
Galena was watching Nathan with the controlled expression of a woman managing something she was frightened about with the composure of a Prime Minister, which was what she was and which was what this required.
Sidney did not speak. He watched the water with a stillness that mirrored it.
Bryan Hitt stood behind Sidney and did not move and did not look away.
The water darkened.
Subtle at first, a deepening of blue far below the surface, as if a shadow were passing beneath the bay. Then the shadow stopped. And held.
And the ocean drew inward.
The surface of the bay sank several feet all at once, pulled down toward a center that had not existed moments before. The sudden withdrawal of water exposed black stone along the base of the cliff, seaweed clinging and startled, the tideline dropping with the speed of something pulled rather than receding.
The water began to churn.
Not violently. Purposefully.
Waves rolled inward from all sides of the bay, converging on the center where the light had gone under. The collision did not break into spray. It stacked, the water folding over itself, building height, as if lifted from below by something immense waking to its own weight.
The cliffs began to hum.
A subsonic frequency, felt in the chest before it reached the ears. The stone beneath their feet carried it upward through their bones. Samantha pressed her free hand flat against her sternum.
Then the water broke.
Opaline light burned up from beneath the surface, vast, curving shapes moving below, rising, the light tracing the outline of something enormous coming up fast from the deep.
The ocean erupted.
Water exploded upward as something immense surged toward the surface, throwing waves outward in every direction that crashed against the base of the cliff and sent spray thirty feet into the air.
The Guardian Dragon emerged.
Opaline scales caught the growing light of morning, each one refracting it differently, the body of the Dragon not one color but every color that white contained, silver and gold and the faintest rose and the blue of deep water and the luminous quality of the opal itself, alive and moving. The wingspan was enormous. The neck long, the head the shape of something that had been in the world before the island was named, before the Veil was raised, before the first Guardian had stood at any cliff and offered anything.
Golden claws found the cliff stone. Steam rolled from the Dragon's body where the seawater evaporated against scales that carried their own heat.
The Dragon roared.
The sound split the air above the bay and struck the cliffs and came back doubled, the echo of it rolling out across the water and inland toward the castle and further, the sound that had not been heard on Aelin since Daeron's time, eight hundred years of silence broken at last above Gaelen Bay.
Opaline fire burst skyward, streaking upward in a column of prismatic light that fractured at its apex into colors and sparks before fading, the fire of the Guardian that had not been seen in the living memory of anyone standing on this cliff.
The Dragon lowered its head.
Its eyes swept the cliff. Large, luminous, carrying the gold-amber of Jace Elias's eyes but scaled to something that was no longer scaled to human proportion. They moved across the Brotherhood, Nathan still on one knee, Connor white and upright, Erik solid at his point, Ricky watching with his hand still locked in Leilani's. They moved to Sidney. They moved to Galena and to Leilani.
They found Samantha.
Recognition passed across the Dragon's expression, not performed, not metaphoric, but actual recognition, the quality of one person finding another person in a room regardless of what form either of them was wearing. Jace was still there. Behind the scale and the fire and the wingspan and the roar, Jace was still entirely there.
The Dragon lowered its head toward the cliff, an enormous, deliberate movement, the neck arcing downward until the snout was level with the clifftop. Samantha walked forward.
She reached up and put both hands on the smooth curve of the snout, the scales warm under her palms, the heat of the Dragon's body coming through them, the sensation of touching something that was both completely other and completely known.
She kissed the snout.
"You're beautiful," she said. Her voice steady. The tears on her face not contradicting the steadiness. "Every single way I have ever seen you."
The Dragon exhaled, a soft, warm breath that moved Samantha's hair and carried the smell of the deep bay and ozone and something that was simply Jace, underneath everything else, unmistakably Jace.
The Dragon's eye moved.
It found Bryan Hitt, standing ten feet back from the cliff edge, and it held him there, the gold-amber gaze, enormous and patient, carrying Jace's specific quality of waiting for someone to decide what they were going to do.
Bryan looked at the eye. Then he looked at the snout. Then he looked at the eye again.
He walked forward.
He stopped at the edge of the cliff, close enough to reach, and he looked at the Dragon the way he had looked at Brannach that morning in the stable yard, not assessing, not performing, just introducing himself. Letting the thing in front of him take its own measure of him.
Then he reached out.
One hand. Tentative in the way of a man who was not afraid but who understood that some gestures required care, the flat of his palm moving slowly toward the scales of the snout, giving the Dragon every opportunity to move away if it chose to.
The Dragon did not move away.
Bryan's hand made contact with the scales. Warm. Solid. Alive in a way that went through his palm and up his arm and settled somewhere in his chest. He held his hand there, feeling the Dragon breathe, the slow enormous rise and fall of it, the heat coming through the scales and into his skin. Not calm, jaw tight, eyes bright, the hand not on the Dragon's snout closed in a fist at his side. Not from fear. From the effort of containing something that didn't have a container yet.
He looked up at the eye that was looking back at him.
"Jace," he said. Not to the room. To the eye. Because it was Jace. It was unmistakably Jace, the patience in it, the quality of waiting for someone to decide what they were going to do. Bryan had seen that look in a hospital bed four days ago and he was seeing it now in an eye the size of a dinner plate on the face of an ancient dragon two feet from his face on a cliff above the North Atlantic.
He laughed, short, slightly undone, the laugh of a man whose composure had just taken a direct hit.
"Hell of a thing, man," he said. "Hell of a damn thing." He shook his head slowly, still looking at the eye. "Kevin is going to absolutely lose his mind that I got to see this and he didn't. You know that, right? He is genuinely not going to recover from this."
The Dragon laughed.
It was not a sound that had a name in any language Bryan Hitt had ever spoken, not a roar, not a rumble, but something that started in the Dragon's chest and moved through the whole body, warm and resonant and distinctly, unmistakably amused. It rolled out across the bay and came back off the cliffs and everyone on that cliff who had ever heard Jace Elias laugh recognized it immediately for what it was. Connor's mouth curved. Ricky made a sound of pure delight. Nathan, still on one knee on the stone, looked up from his own recovery and his face shifted, the documentation instinct briefly overtaken by something simpler. Erik's face did what it rarely did, which was break into a full smile.
Samantha laughed. Clear and unguarded, her hand still on the Dragon's snout alongside Bryan's.
Bryan looked at the laughing Dragon, at Jace, because it was Jace, it was unmistakably Jace cracking up on a cliff in the North Atlantic at the idea of Kevin Cronin's reaction, and shook his head slowly with the expression of a man who had thrown a lasso at a shapeshifted Sentinel that same morning and had still not arrived at the ceiling of what this island was capable of producing.
"Yeah," he said, to the Dragon, to Jace, to the laugh coming back off the cliffs. "That's what I thought."
The Dragon huffed, warm, amused, entirely present.
Sidney said: "Show me the fire. Skyward."
Opaline flame streaked into the morning sky.
"Good control," Sidney said. He watched the fire's arc with the expression of a man making a technical assessment and finding it satisfactory. "Now the wings."
The wings unfurled.
The downbeat was a thunderclap, a concussive wave of air that knocked Samantha's hair back and made everyone on the cliff step back involuntarily, the physical force of something that had been designed to lift an enormous weight from a standing start. The Dragon lifted from the cliff and rose, circling, ascending, the opaline scales catching the morning sun that was now properly above the horizon, the silhouette of the Guardian Dragon moving against the August sky above Gaelen Bay.
Beautiful. Terrifying. Both entirely and neither one more than the other.
Jace enjoyed it.
The feeling of it was not describable in any language he had been given before this moment. The weight of the Dragon form, not heavy, because in the Dragon form weight was a different concept, weight was what you rode rather than what you carried. The wingspan reading the air the way a drumstick read the head of a drum, finding the resistance, finding the yield, translating force into lift with the physics of something built for exactly this. He circled twice above the bay, above the cliff, above the people on it who were watching him with their faces tipped up.
He could see them from above. All of them.
He could see Bryan Hitt.
Bryan was standing behind Sidney with his face turned up, watching the Dragon circle above Gaelen Bay, and his expression was the expression of a man whose understanding of the possible had been expanded twice in the same month, once on a backstage floor in Los Angeles and once on a cliff above a bay on a cloaked island in the North Atlantic, and who was receiving the second expansion with the same quality of settled attention he brought to everything.
"That's enough," Sidney called up. "Any longer and you'll pay for it."
The Dragon descended, reluctant.
It was the first flight and Sidney was right about the first flight. Jace knew Sidney was right even as part of him wanted another circuit, another minute of the freedom of the air above the bay, the island below him complete and visible and his. Sidney was right. He came down.
"Time to give it back," Sidney said. Gently.
The Dragon closed its eyes.
Four beams of light shot outward from the opal, returning to their bearers, the colors separating and finding their sources, the emerald to Connor and the garnet to Nathan and the sapphire to Erik and the onyx to Ricky. Each one arriving home with a quality: relief, warmth, solidity, motion.
Ricky caught it first. His head came up, the onyx blazing back to life at his chest, and his posture changed, not stronger, exactly, but complete again, the Sentinel returned to himself.
The Dragon rose on the last of the opaline light, enveloped, lifted, the form holding at the apex of the cliff above the bay, silhouetted against the morning.
The light spun.
Contracted.
And drifted inland.
Then the opaline light thinned.
Jace's human form emerged, slick with seawater, limbs slack, the transition from Dragon to man carrying the cost of a first return that had not yet been learned, the body not yet knowing how to manage the coming back.
He fell.
Samantha screamed his name.
Erik was already moving, had been reading the descent, had positioned himself at the edge of the cliff where the Dragon had landed, had calculated the angle and the rate and was exactly where he needed to be. He launched forward and caught Jace mid-fall, the impact driving Erik to his knees on the black stone, both arms locked around Jace, the weight of him sudden and real and cold.
Jace was cold. Too cold.
The seawater, the transition, the Dragon form's body temperature dropping as the human form returned, all of it compounding. Samantha collapsed beside them, her hands on Jace's face, kissing him, saying his name the way she said it when the name was the most important thing available.
"Come back," she said. "Come back right now."
Connor could feel nothing psychically. The bond was there but muffled in a way that was different from the dimensional barrier, not absent, just very quiet, the quality of a consciousness that had gone somewhere large and was finding its way back through the reduction.
Jace convulsed.
The scream tore the air, raw, agonizing, the body reasserting itself with the violence of a return that was not yet fully understood by the machinery doing the returning.
Then he went still.
"Vitals." Dr. Oksana's voice, sharp and immediate, she had come down from the castle road at the first roar and was already kneeling beside Erik, her medical bag open. "Get him off the stone."
They moved.
Bryan watched them carry Jace toward the castle road. His hands were loose at his sides. His breathing was steady.
Sidney walked to him.
"The recovery will take several days," Sidney said. Not explanation. Information.
"How many," Bryan said.
"A week. Perhaps less. The Guardian's healing is accelerated."
Bryan nodded. He looked at the cliff, at the bay below it, at the place where the Dragon had emerged from the water. At the sky where it had flown. At the stone where Erik had caught Jace.
"Does he know what it looked like," Bryan said. "From out here."
Sidney considered this. "Not yet," he said. "He will want to know."
"Yeah," Bryan said. "He will."
Before Bryan left the cliff, he walked to the edge and looked over. The bay below had returned to itself, the water level restored, the surface calm, the deep indigo of a sheltered bay on an August morning that had no evidence in it of what had just happened except for the waterline on the black stone where the bay had pulled down and returned.
He stood there.
Then he put his hand on the cliff stone, the black stone worn smooth by centuries of salt and wind. He did not have a reason for doing it. It just seemed like the right thing to do. His grandmother would have understood that.
He took his hand off the stone and walked back toward the castle road.
AELIN
Castle of Elders — Hospital Wing
August 13, 1989
Dr. Oksana was, as she always was, accurate in her assessment.
Jace woke on the second day. Not the seventh, the second. The Guardian's enhanced healing metabolism doing what Sidney had always said it would do, what Dr. Oksana documented carefully and used to recalibrate the recovery projections going forward. He woke on the second day and attempted to sit up and was informed by Dr. Oksana, with the combination of warmth and authority that was her register, that sitting up was not available to him yet and that the fact of enhanced healing did not mean the enhanced healing was finished.
"You came back from a first Dragon transformation," she said. "The body is still negotiating the terms of that return. You will rest."
"I feel..."
"You feel better than you should, which is exactly how people make poor decisions about recovery," Dr. Oksana said. "Rest."
He rested.
On the third day he could sit up. Samantha was in the chair that she had not left since the cliff, she had been there when he woke the first time, had been there when he woke the second time, was there now. She was reading. She looked up when he moved and assessed him with the quick specific assessment she always brought to these moments.
"Better," she said.
"Better," he agreed.
The Brotherhood came through in their rotations. Connor in the evenings, present and quiet and saying what needed to be said or not saying it. Erik in long quiet stretches. Ricky talking continuously and making him laugh twice, which hurt his ribs, which Ricky apologized for insincerely. Nathan with documentation, he had begun writing the phenomenological account of the Dragon emergence from the observers' perspective, cross-referenced with the transfer mechanics, and was already on page thirty. Nathan was thirty-five. Bryan was thirty-four. The same generation, the same era, and the two of them had found each other in the castle corridor on the first evening with the recognition of men who thought about things the same way, not the same things, but the same way, and had been talking ever since.
"Thirty pages," Jace said.
"Preliminary," Nathan said. "There will be more."
On the fourth day, Bryan Hitt knocked on the hospital wing door.
He came in unhurried and sat in the chair on the other side of the bed from Samantha. He looked at Jace.
"You look better than I expected," Bryan said. "Considering you turned into a dragon and fell off a cliff."
"I didn't fall off the cliff," Jace said. "I descended from a significant height."
"Erik caught you."
"He did."
"From the ground."
"He's fast," Jace said.
Bryan looked at him with the expression of a man deciding whether this was the right moment to say a thing. He decided it was. "You were also flying twenty minutes before that," he said. "So I'm going to go ahead and call it a good day overall."
Jace looked at the ceiling. "Yeah," he said. "It was a good day."
Bryan nodded. He was quiet, the quality of a man with something to say who was deciding how to say it. "I want to tell you what it looked like," he said. "From outside. If you want to hear it."
"Yes," Jace said. "I want to hear it."
Bryan told him.
He told it straight. The light going into the water. The bay pulling down. The hum in the stone. And then the emergence, he described that carefully, finding the right words for something that did not have ready-made words, the scale of it, the colors of the scales in the morning light, the sound of the roar coming back off the cliffs doubled.
"The fire," Bryan said. "When it went up. The colors in it. It wasn't, it wasn't just fire. It was like..." He paused, searching. "You know when you hold a crystal in sunlight and the light comes through it in pieces. Every color that's inside white. That's what the fire looked like."
Jace was quiet. "What did I look like in the air," he said.
"Like something that belonged there," Bryan said simply. "Like the sky was where you were supposed to be."
The room was quiet.
Samantha was looking at Bryan.
"Thank you," Jace said.
Bryan nodded. He sat for a while after that, and they talked about other things, horses, the island, the Ainmhithe preserve. Ricky had mentioned, the previous evening, that when they'd brought Brannach back to his stall after the ride, the horse had turned to watch Bryan go and stood at the stall door until he was out of sight. Ricky had said it like it was a significant data point, which for Ricky and horses it was. At some point Jace said: "Kevin and Bruce and Neal. And Dave."
Bryan looked at him.
"They don't know," Jace said. "What you saw on that cliff."
Bryan was still.
"You are the only person outside this island who has seen the Dragon form," Jace said. "The only one. Not because the others aren't trusted. Because the moment wasn't theirs." "The moment was yours. You earned it."
Bryan said nothing. Then: "Are you telling me to keep it to myself."
Jace looked at him. "I'm telling you," Jace said, "to use that information wisely."
The pause.
Bryan understood exactly what wisely meant in this context. It arrived in his eyes first, then the corner of his mouth.
"Kevin's going to lose his mind," Bryan said.
"Yep," Jace said.
"He's going to ask me to describe it."
"He will."
"And I'm going to describe it," Bryan said, "in just enough detail that he believes me but not enough detail that he's satisfied."
Jace looked at him. One corner of his mouth lifted.
"Bruce and Neal are going to try to get it out of you."
"They're going to fail."
"Dave's going to be more dignified about it."
"Dave's going to wait until Kevin gives up and then ask me quietly when nobody's looking," Bryan said. "And I'm going to tell Dave the same amount I tell Kevin, which is just enough."
Jace was quiet. Then: "You've thought about this."
"I had four days," Bryan said. "My wife Cindi says I think about things too much. I think I think about things exactly the right amount."
"Cindi's probably right," Jace said.
"Cindi's usually right," Bryan agreed. "Don't tell her I said that." "Speaking of Cindi, can I tell her? What I saw on that cliff."
Jace looked at him.
"She's going to know something happened," Bryan said. "She already knows something happened, she's seen the look on my face since I got back and she hasn't pushed, but she knows. And I'd like to tell her the truth."
"Yes," Jace said. "Tell her."
Bryan nodded. "She's going to want to come here."
"She's welcome here."
"I figured." "She won't ride. Had a bad fall a few years back, not real enthusiastic about horses right now. But she'll come." He was quiet, and his expression shifted, something he was deciding whether to say. He said it. "Brannach."
Jace looked at him.
"I'm not going to ask to take him," Bryan said. "That's not, he belongs here. This is where he grew up." "But I'm going to come back and ride him."
"He'll know you," Jace said. "Horses like that don't forget the people they chose."
Bryan was quiet. That landed somewhere. "Yeah," he said. "I know." He let that sit. "I'm going to need a plane ticket."
He sat, turning something over. "The other guys," he said. "Kevin, Bruce, Neal, Dave. When you, when it happens for real. The Sacrifice. Is there any chance they could be there?"
Jace was quiet. "I can't promise that," he said. "I don't know where it's going to happen or when. It depends on Aldus. It depends on circumstances I can't predict." He looked at Bryan. "I know what you're asking. I understand why you're asking it."
"They were in that room," Bryan said. "They fought. They were part of it."
"I know," Jace said. "If it can happen, if the moment allows it, I'll try." "That's the most I can give you."
Bryan nodded. It was enough. He understood the weight of what Jace was carrying toward that moment and he was not going to make it heavier.
He was quiet. Then his expression shifted, the weight of the conversation giving way.
"Kevin," he said, "is going to be absolutely insufferable when he finds out I came here without him."
"Oh, definitely," Jace said.
"He's going to ask me to describe the Dragon and I'm going to give him just enough detail that he believes me and not enough that he's satisfied, and then I'm going to watch him suffer, and it's going to be great."
Jace looked at him. "That's cruel."
"Yes it is," Bryan said pleasantly. And then he laughed, full and unguarded, the laugh of a man who had been through something enormous and could feel the other side of it.
Samantha laughed. The Brotherhood, filtering in and out of the room, recognized it and added their own.
Even Dr. Oksana looked in through the doorway, assessed the situation, and decided that laughter was, in this case, medically acceptable.
Jace looked at the ceiling of the hospital wing and listened to the room laugh and felt the quality of what it was to be in a place that was entirely his, surrounded by people who were entirely his, with the memory of the August sky above Gaelen Bay still in his body and ten months until he married Samantha and the Sacrifice ahead of him and the world exactly as large as it was and no larger and no smaller and exactly enough.
Training Log — Sidney Greene
August 18, 1989
Guardian cleared for return to formation training effective this date.
First Dragon emergence: successful. Duration: three minutes forty seconds of flight. Controlled descent attempted, recovery necessary. Guardian woke on day two rather than day seven as projected. Consistent with accelerated Guardian healing rate. Revising recovery projections accordingly.
The form is real. The power is real. The Guardian held the Dragon and the Dragon held Jace Elias.
Daeron held it. Eight hundred years passed. Now Jace holds it. The bloodline did not forget what the amulet could not carry alone.
What comes next is the Sacrifice itself. Not practice. The genuine article. When the moment arrives, and it will arrive, Aldus will see to that, the Brotherhood will be ready.
They have always been ready. They are more ready now.
The Sacrifice is the objective.
We proceed.