FRIENDS, ALLIES, AND A NEW HOME
Los Angeles, California — June 1983
The sun was low when the band gathered at the rehearsal space for the first time since the hospital, since the airport, since all of it. The room felt both familiar and strange, a place that had always belonged to them, now carrying the weight of everything that had happened in it and outside it. The air still smelled faintly of sawdust, old amplifiers, and the citrus cleaner the landlord used every Monday. Instruments rested in their usual places. Cables coiled in the corners. On the battered coffee table, Nathan had left a box of donuts, because Nathan always found a way to make things feel like something other than a crisis.
Everyone was healed by now, or close enough: Ricky moving without wincing, Erik without the sling, Connor without the pallor that had followed him out of Cedars-Sinai. Jace moved carefully as he walked in, still thinner than usual, still the most recently broken of them. But his eyes were clear, and the amulet lay warm and quiet against his chest, and when he stepped into the center of the room it held him the way it always had.
Ricky slung his arm over Erik's shoulder. "Feels weird being here...since, you know?"
"Feels weird being here without a neck brace," Erik muttered.
Connor smiled, softer than the others. "Feels good to be back."
Sidney stood near the studio door, hands in his pockets, watching them settle. "All right," he said. "Training begins soon. Your amulets are active, bonded, and dangerous without discipline." His eyes moved over each of them, resting longest on Jace. "But before we do that... you have guests."
Ricky raised a hand. "Is it donuts? Because Nathan already brought donuts, and I don't know if my heart can handle another emotional food moment."
Nathan kicked his shin lightly. "Be quiet."
Sidney moved to the studio door and opened it.
"You'll remember them," he said. "One of you will know the voice."
Officer Hartman walked in, broad-shouldered, kind-eyed, wearing civilian clothes. Beside him stood his daughter, a shy seventeen-year-old with long blonde hair and her father's steady look, though her hands were not steady at all.
Connor lit up immediately. "Officer Hartman!"
Ricky waved. "Hey! The guy who kept us from losing our minds at the airport!"
Erik gave a respectful nod.
Jace stood still. He was frowning slightly, trying to place something, not the face but something behind it. When Hartman spoke, the recognition arrived without warning.
"I'm glad," Hartman said quietly, "that you took my advice and fought back to life, son."
Jace's breath stopped. The voice. That voice, grounded and steady and unhurried, talking him through the terror before takeoff while everything in his body had been trying to quit.
"It was you," Jace said. "You were the one talking to me. Before the plane."
Hartman nodded, eyes shining. "I wasn't about to let you give up."
Jace was quiet. Then he looked at the girl beside him.
She looked terrified to be seen, twisting her fingers together with both hands. Jace softened immediately.
"Hi," he said. "What's your name?"
She swallowed. "S-Stephanie."
He offered his hand. She didn't take it. She stepped forward and wrapped both arms around him. Her voice came out in pieces: "When I found out what happened, I prayed every night that you would get better. Every night. I cried so hard. I just... I wanted you to live. I wanted the band to be okay. I wanted you guys to come back to Canada someday."
Jace held her carefully, his ribs still full of opinions, and touched her hair with patient steadiness.
"Thank you for asking God to help me, Stephanie," he said quietly. "He listens. And He answered your prayer. I'm standing here because of people like you."
She sobbed into his chest. He brushed a few tears from her cheek with his thumb and looked at her evenly.
"Hey," he said. "No more crying. I'm going to be better than ever."
The band looked away in four different directions. Nathan sniffed once and pretended he hadn't. Erik found the ceiling suddenly fascinating. Ricky wiped his eyes and announced, with complete dignity, that there was dust in here.
When Stephanie finally stepped back, Hartman squeezed her shoulder and looked at the band.
"I want you all to know... I've decided to leave the police department."
That landed like a dropped amp.
Ricky sputtered. "Whoa, wait, WHAT? Why?"
Hartman smiled. "Because I already spoke with John Kavanaugh. I asked about joining Battle Cry's security team."
Nathan's jaw dropped. "You're kidding."
"No," Hartman said, with the straightforward calm of a man who had made up his mind long before this room. "I want to protect all of you. That's where I need to be."
Jace felt something release in his chest that he hadn't known was wound tight.
Sidney stepped forward. "His work visa is pending. Once it clears, Officer Hartman will be with us on the road."
The band erupted. Erik lifted Hartman off the ground in a hug that the man accepted with surprising composure. Ricky announced he was personally writing a song called "Mountie of the Year" until Nathan shoved him. Connor shook Hartman's hand and held it, his face saying things words would have fumbled.
Jace stepped forward and shook Hartman's hand.
"When all this settles," Jace said, "we need to sit down with a beer and argue about which country has the most annoying drivers."
Hartman laughed. "Deal."
Hartman held up a hand once the noise settled. "Before we go," he said, "there's one more thing." He glanced at Stephanie, who was already fighting a smile.
"You left something behind in Pincher Creek," Hartman said.
Jace went still, searching for the memory and coming up short. He remembered running. He remembered the cold, the bar, the whiskey burning going down. Everything after that arrived in fragments, if it arrived at all. A blank stretch where a motorcycle should have been.
"I don't..." Jace started.
"Come on outside," Hartman said. "Both of you."
As they walked out, Stephanie fell into step beside Jace, practically vibrating. "I waxed it myself," she said. "All day yesterday. My dad helped with the parts, but I did the shine."
"Waxed what?" Jace asked.
They stepped out into the lot, and there it was, parked beside Hartman's rental truck: his motorcycle, scratched here and there but otherwise gleaming, chrome catching the last of the daylight.
Jace stopped walking.
"You went back for it," he said quietly.
"Couldn't leave it sitting behind that tavern," Hartman said. "Took some doing to track down the parts that got damaged. Wasn't hard work, though. Wanted to do it."
Jace crossed to the bike and ran a hand over the tank, over the same scratches he didn't remember putting there.
"Check the saddlebag," Stephanie said, unable to hold it in any longer.
He opened it. Two Battle Cry albums sat inside, waiting to be signed, and beneath them, a small beaded bracelet, clearly handmade, uneven in the way things are when someone makes them with more care than skill.
"I made that part myself," Stephanie said, suddenly shy again. "You don't have to wear it or anything. I just wanted you to have something. From before all of this."
Jace looked at it for a long moment, then slid it onto his wrist.
"I'm wearing it," he said. "Thank you, Stephanie."
When he and Stephanie finally left, the rehearsal space settled into a warmth that had nothing to do with the lighting.
Jace exhaled. "That felt strange. And good."
Ricky elbowed him. "You mean the part where you hugged a teenage girl like some kind of supernatural rock angel?"
"Shut up," Jace muttered, grinning slightly despite himself.
The quiet didn't last. Connor stepped forward, arms folded, his face carrying the expression it wore when he had been patient for as long as he intended to be.
"Jace," he said. "We all talked. And we're not letting you carry that guilt anymore."
Jace stiffened. "What?"
"You heard him," Erik said.
"Seriously," Ricky added. "We don't blame you. Not for Canada. Not for running. Not for any of it."
Nathan nodded. "We just need you to never disappear on us again."
Jace looked down. "I know. And I'm sorry. I was so angry about losing Celia... about what happened to us, what it cost us both, what Sidney had to do. I wasn't thinking straight. I still hurt. I probably will for a long time. But I know it won't last forever."
Connor's voice came down from serious to something closer to true.
"There's someone out there for you, Jace."
Jace raised an eyebrow.
"Oh? You've seen her?"
"No," Connor admitted. "But I know she exists. I feel that much."
Jace stared at him.
"You're already trying to meddle in my love life?"
Connor's expression shifted sharply.
."That is not what I..."
Ricky burst out laughing.
Erik shook his head slowly. "Here we go."
Nathan closed his eyes with the air of a man accepting something inevitable.
And for the first time in weeks, Jace laughed, a real one. Warm and honest and entirely alive.
The rehearsal space had barely returned to calm when Sidney moved to the far wall, the one that had always seemed off somehow, its surface wrong in a way that was hard to name: the plaster too smooth, the wall too still, like a held breath. He had installed it before the blowup with Jace, before any of them had known what was coming, except Sidney, who had known, and had made sure it was ready.
"Today," he said, turning to face them, "we begin your true training. And before that... you will see the land you are meant to protect."
He gestured at the wall. Set into the plaster at eye level were five runes, each one roughly hand-sized, each a different color: an opaline white that shifted like the inside of a shell, a deep green, a clear blue, a red like an ember, a silver that held darkness in its shine.
"Each rune corresponds to a county," he said. "You will learn all of them. The colors match your amulets. Touch the rune, the portal opens." He paused. "The white is Harmonytis. That is where we go today."
He pressed two fingers to the opaline rune.
The wall opened.
Not onto anything visible. Not with light or landscape or a glimpse of what waited. The portal was dark: a rectangle of absolute nothing cut into the plaster, like the world had simply stopped at its edge. The air pressure shifted slightly. That was all.
Sidney looked back at them once, expression giving nothing away, and stepped through.
He was gone.
The five of them stood in front of the open dark and said nothing.
Ricky leaned slightly toward it. "So we just... walk into the void."
"Apparently," Nathan said.
"Right," Ricky said. He didn't move.
Connor studied the dark opening with his arms folded. "I'll point out that Sidney just walked into a black rectangle in the wall and we have no way of knowing what's on the other side."
"We have the word of a man who has kept secrets for thirty years," Nathan said.
"That's not as reassuring as you think it is," Ricky said.
Erik looked at Jace. Jace was already looking at the portal. Something in his expression had settled, not calm exactly but resolved, like a man who has stopped waiting for permission. The white amulet was warm at his throat.
He walked through. No announcement. No hesitation. One moment he was there and then he wasn't, and the four of them stared at the dark opening where he'd been.
"Okay," Erik said. He followed.
The lavender sky was the first thing, and it stopped him as nothing had stopped him since the night the amulet woke. He had known Aelin was different. Standing here, he understood he had known nothing. The color above him was lavender, genuinely and deeply lavender, a sky that had never learned to be blue and had no apology for it. He stood very still and looked up at it.
Then the air reached him. He had lived in cities his whole life: L.A., Reno, on the road between them. This was not that. Salt from the sea, clean and direct. Grass nearby, and flowers he couldn't name, and something green and growing underneath all of it. No weight to it. No residue.
He exhaled slowly and looked down. White stone cobblestones, smooth and close-fitted, shimmering faintly in the light, the shimmer in the stone itself, not on it. Black lines ran through them at intervals, flush and deliberate, marking directions with the confidence of something that had been there for centuries.
He had been born here. He had no memory of that. But his feet on this stone felt like a word his body already knew.
Erik came through two paces behind him, reading the space the way he read every place: entry points, sightlines, what could hold and what could break.
Ricky came through next and just stood there a moment, head tipped back, breathing like a man who'd forgotten what air could feel like. "This is real," he said quietly. Not a question.
Nathan came through and went very still, cataloguing without meaning to: the stone, the black lines running through it, two materials he'd never encountered and couldn't yet explain.
Connor came through last, breath already held, because the sky was one thing and the voices underneath it were another, and both arrived at once. Through the bond, Jace was a familiar anchor in all of it.
Two women waited near the castle gate, poised, watchful, wearing the composed warmth of people who had spent their lives in service to something larger than themselves. The taller one spoke first, addressing Jace directly.
"Fáilte abhaile, a Chaomhnóir. Tá Aelin ag fán ar do theacht."
Welcome home, Guardian. Aelin has been waiting for your return.
Jace heard it and something happened that he had no explanation for: the language landed in his mind not as foreign sound but as meaning, whole and immediate, as though a door he hadn't known was closed had simply opened. He answered before he consciously chose to.
"Go raibh máith agat. Tá mé sa bhaile."
Thank you. I am home.
The two women exchanged a glance, brief, bright, the look of people who had been told something would happen and had waited a long time to see it. The rest of the band stared at Jace as though he had just grown a second head.
"That was Aelinian," Sidney said quietly, from behind them. "It was always going to come back to him. The language belongs to his birthright as much as the land does."
"He just spoke a language none of us have ever heard," Ricky said. "In complete sentences."
"Yes," Sidney said.
Ricky looked at Jace. Jace looked faintly stunned himself.
The taller one, a willowy brown-haired and fair-skinned woman named Yara, let the moment land before she continued.
"Prime Minister Slotskya is waiting," she said, in English now, her tone formal but not cold. "She has been waiting for this day longer than most."
They were escorted through the castle to a hall that had hosted every manner of occasion without developing a preference for any of them. High ceilings, old stone, the Veil's lavender light filtering through tall windows. Tapestries on the walls. A long table arranged for a working meeting, not a ceremony, which told Jace something about the woman they were about to meet.
Galena Slotskya walked in as though the room had been waiting for her, which, in most practical senses, it had. She was composed without being cold, precise without being rigid, and she carried herself with the ease of someone who had nothing left to prove. She welcomed them in Aelinian first, a formal greeting that carried the weight of centuries of tradition, then shifted to English without breaking stride.
"Welcome to Aelin," she said, and the simplicity of it landed with more weight than a speech would have. "All of you. We have been waiting for this day for a very long time."
Her eyes moved through the room as she spoke, taking each of them in with the brief thoroughness of someone who reads people quickly and files what she finds. When she reached Nathan, her gaze held a half-second longer than the others, not enough to break her composure, not enough that anyone but a careful observer would notice, and then moved on with the discipline of a woman who has registered something and chosen, for now, to set it aside.
Nathan, for his part, looked at her once and then found the flooring of the hall extremely interesting.
Connor noticed. He said nothing. The corner of his mouth moved.
"I will assist you in preparing for your coronation," Galena continued, addressing all five of them. "Your aides will help you with etiquette, clothing, and custom. You will each meet with representatives from your counties. But first, today, you will see the island." She paused. "All of it. Sidney set the date of your arrival some time ago. Every county has been expecting you."
She instructed Yara and Daria to see to the Brotherhood's chambers. "Rest briefly. Change if you need to. You leave for the tour in an hour."
Erik entered his first. He paused inside the doorway, took in the tapestries, the proportions of the room, the deep wood and the faint smell of history, and then walked to the window and looked out at the land below for a long time without saying anything.
Ricky's room stopped him mid-step. He threw his arms wide, turned a full circle, and announced: "It's bigger on the inside!?" The aides exchanged a glance. Jace, Nathan, and Connor dissolved. "Like Dr. Who," Ricky confirmed, to himself, still turning. The aides had clearly never heard of Dr. Who, which didn't slow him down at all.
Nathan was led to a chamber with a view east toward the sea and a worktable beside the window that looked like it had been used by minds before him. He stood at the table and ran one hand across the surface, reading the grain of the wood.
Connor moved through his room quietly, pausing at the maps and tapestries. One showed the island in an older form: different borders, different names. He stood in front of it for a long time.
Jace was led last, up winding stairs to the Royal Residence.
A guard stood at the top. When he saw Jace, he removed his hat and bowed his head.
"Your Highness," he said. "Welcome home."
The words did something Jace hadn't expected. He had braced for ceremony. He had not braced for sincerity. He stood, the guard's steady eyes on him, and then nodded once and said, "Thank you," and meant it more than he'd meant most things lately.
Yara opened the door.
Sunlight through stained glass spread across marble floors in shifting colors. The room smelled of polished wood, dried herbs, and something older that had no name. It smelled like it had been waiting. On the marble island in the kitchen stood a wooden box, and on the box, an envelope addressed in a hand that predated him:
Jason Beannú Elias.
He stood there briefly before he opened it.
"From the day you were born, Jason, it was known you would be the Guardian. This legacy is yours now. Listen to Sidney. Train. Learn this land. Learn your family. Let this book be your guide. He will never fail those who trust in Him. -- Seamus Greene"
Inside the box was a Bible. Old, not antique-old but ancient-old, the leather worn to a softness that spoke of centuries of hands. The script inside shimmered faintly in Aelinian. He could read it. He opened the Bible to the first book, Genesis, and ran his fingers along the first line, feeling the texture of letters written by someone who had great faith. The Guardian Amulet pulsed once, warmly, against his chest. Jace smiled, remembering everything his parents had taught him and his brother about God; about his Son and the story of his sacrifice and resurrection. Jace believed it, and while his own faith was definitely not rock solid all the time, he still felt the truth of the message.
He sat down on the edge of a chair, holding the book in both hands and did not try to think about what any of it meant yet. He just let it be real. He turned to several books in that Bible, reading passages out loud in Aelinian. He was reading the book of John in the New Testament, the part where Jesus talks to Nicodemus about being born again. Quietly, he read the chapter out loud, reading the words as if he'd known how to say them. When he came to the 16th verse of the chapter, he heard a voice speaking with him in Aelinian.
"Mar bhí grá Dé don domhan chomh mór sin gur thug sé uaidh a aon Mhac, ionas nach gcaillfí an té a chreideas ann ach go mbeadh an bheatha shíoraí aige." (For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.)
Jace looked up to see Sidney standing in the doorway, smiling.
"That is my father's gift to you," he said, "That book meant a great deal to him. I think he wanted you to have it for a multitude of reasons, with the strongest one a remembrance of who truly has your back even more than anyone else.
"I'm not sure I'm worthy of it," Jace said quietly, "By profession, we're not exactly a Godly bunch, you know?"
"You don't have to be perfect to know God," Sidney said, "You just have to understand what his Son did and why."
Jace looked at the Bible again and nodded. He would make time to look at the Bible more. He could feel a warmth in his soul as he closed its cover.
"Come on, Guardian," Sidney urged, "Your people are waiting."
They assembled in the castle courtyard. Jace and Sidney were already there, with Sidney waiting with the ease of a man who had planned this day for years. Yara and Daria stood nearby with two additional guides. A line of horses waited at the far end of the courtyard.
"This day has been anticipated for quite some time," Sidney said. "What you will see today is not Aelin on an ordinary day. It is Aelin welcoming its Brotherhood for the first time."
He let that land.
"Try to take it in," he said. "That's all I ask."
They rode out of Harmonytis together, through streets where people had come out to see them, not a crowd pushed into a spectacle, but a community turning out to witness something it had been told to expect and had almost stopped believing in. Hands lifted. Some people bowed. Children sat on shoulders. The white stone buildings along the road caught the afternoon light and the black-lined cobblestones ran straight beneath the horses' hooves.
Jace rode in front and didn't speak much. He didn't need to.
They crossed into Ainmhithe first: open country, grassy fields rolling for what looked like miles, the air carrying something warm and fresh in the county seat of Miles. Black banners with silver borders hung from every building in the county seat, Ricky's color, unmistakable. People lined the road here too, and when Ricky rode through the town on a horse that had decided it liked him rather more than expected, the welcome from the crowd was loud and genuine. A woman near the front held out a handmade stuffed black cat, which Ricky took with both hands, excitedly thanking her, and the crowd laughed with him. They rode toward the main stables of the county. This was the heart of the county, wide and wild, air smelling of grass and hay and open land. Horses in the paddocks lifted their heads when the Brotherhood passed. Ricky lasted approximately four minutes before he veered off the road toward the nearest fence. Nobody stopped him. The horse on the other side regarded him with calm intelligence. Ricky put out his hand. The horse pressed its nose into it.
"I live here now," Ricky said, to the room at large.
It was during the ride through Neart's county seat of Svaardelheim, while the official welcome was still unfolding around them, that Erik's attention was caught by something that had nothing to do with the proceedings.
A woman stood outside a bakery at the edge of the main road, watching the procession with the unhurried calm of someone who had been there the whole time and was in no hurry to leave. When Erik rode past, she stepped forward and held out a white rose and a small loaf of Challa bread in a woven basket. The rose was freshly cut, petals still intact, and he could smell the wonderful scent of the bread. It made his stomach growl.
"For the Warrior," she said, "Both for your table."
Simply. Not a formality, not a performance. Just... offered.
Erik reined in his horse. He was a man who had been given weapons, responsibilities, territory, and the weight of a sworn role he was still learning to carry. No one had ever given him something like this. Something with no purpose except to be beautiful and to be given.
He took it with considerably more care than he'd given to anything in recent memory.
Her name was Rebekah. She didn't rush him, didn't fill the silence, didn't seem to need anything from the moment except to offer the rose and have it accepted. She had the quality of someone who understood that large things moved at their own pace, and was entirely content with that.
The procession had moved on without him. He hadn't noticed for longer than he should have.
He found reasons to return to her bakery after that. She seemed to notice. Neither of them said anything about it yet.
Draíocht came with a change in atmosphere: sharper air, the mountains pressing closer, the stone darker everywhere. The quarry road was visible from the main track, and the black stone came up from the earth in great scored blocks, stacked in precise formations that had their own geometry. Nathan rode past them slowly. He said nothing. But he looked at them the way he looked at everything that interested him deeply: like he was already taking them apart in his mind to understand what they were made of.
They turned south and entered Léirstinach, Connor's county. Léirstinach was alive in a way that made the other counties' welcomes seem, by comparison, like clearing of throats. The village green of the county seat was strung with lanterns that would ignite at dusk, and the afternoon air was already thick with music, not performed for them, not staged for the occasion, but woven into the activity of the place the way it was in communities where music had never stopped being necessary. Flowers covered every wall, arch, and doorway. The county's green-and-living smell was amplified tenfold by the sheer density of bloom, and the people responsible for all of it were still at work, adding to arrangements that were already extraordinary.
Connor felt Léirstinach before he saw it properly. The voices here were different from the other counties: creative, layered, saturated with something that felt like sustained attention and care. He rode in quietly, let the band spread into the festival around him, and then he saw her.
She was working near the far edge of the green, apart from the main crowd but not separate from the event, as someone works when they are responsible for everything around them and do not require an audience to do it well. Her hands moved through flowers and stems with the unhurried certainty of someone who had done this work ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. The wreath taking shape between her hands was finely worked, each bloom placed in deliberate sequence, color and texture working together.
She had seen him the moment he rode in and had not stopped working. Connor dismounted and walked toward her. She finished the wreath she was working on, set it complete into the basket beside her, and picked up new materials without breaking rhythm.
"You're the Visionary," she said. She was looking at her work.
"I am," he said, "Connor Braydee."
She glanced up, smiling. She gave him a long level look that took him in completely and returned to the flowers as she said, "Indira Saatva. Master Gardener of Léirstinach."
She gestured slightly toward the archways, the walls, the blooms covering every surface in sight. "The flowers you've been riding through since you crossed the county line... I'm responsible for those."
"All of them?" Connor said.
"All of them."
It was not a boast. She clearly said it because she believed it to be true, and Connor was too focused on her to consider anything about flowers.
He watched her work. The wreaths taking shape in her basket were large and full, designed to be worn, placed over the head and rested around the shoulders, like the flower leis he had seen in photographs of Hawai'i. Each one was deliberate in its arrangement, the blooms not random but considered.
"Those are for us," he said, having already felt the sentiment from Indira as she worked.
"A welcoming tradition in Léirstinach," she said. "One for each of you."
She did not look up.
"I made yours first."
He looked at the finished one sitting at the top of the basket.
She completed the wreath she was working on, set it down, and stood. She picked up the first wreath and brought it to him without ceremony, lifting it over his head and letting it settle around his shoulders. The flowers were warm from the sun and the fragrance hit him without warning, clean and green and living, nothing like the months of Los Angeles and exhaust and hotel hallways he'd been breathing through. He stood still without meaning to. Indira straightened the wreath, her hand accidentally brushing against Connor's neck.
The emerald amulet flickered. Not a pulse or the single bright flare he had felt before when his powers moved without warning. This was something else entirely: a flutter, rapid and unsteady, the green light at his collar shivering in a quick sequence of small flickers, like a flame in a sudden draft. It lasted two seconds, perhaps three, and then steadied and went quiet.
Connor stood very still.
Indira was watching the amulet with an expression that was curious rather than startled, her head tilted slightly to one side.
"Does it do that often?" she asked.
"No," Connor said, confusion entering his eyes as he looked at the emerald amulet. He had a reasonable sense of what had just happened. He was not ready to say it aloud. She looked at him, a measuring look, neither unkind nor especially soft, and then turned back to her basket.
"It is wonderful to finally meet you, Visionary," she said. "Your Brotherhood is waiting and I have four more wreaths to deliver. I hope I shall see you again soon."
He stepped back to let her pass. As she moved away, she turned to him and said, "You should come back when there isn't a festival. The gardens are better without the crowds."
Connor watched her walk toward the rest of the band, where she kindly gave them their own wreaths. Connor fingered the area of his neck her hand had touched, and he smiled.
Nathan's awareness of Galena Slotskya did not take shape on the tour. It accumulated in the weeks that followed, in the margins their duty created between them.
It was the way she ran a meeting, not by volume or force of personality but by precision, every statement placed where it would do the most work, every question asked at exactly the right point; her willingness to tell the Brotherhood plainly when something was not going to work, without apology and without softening the edges. It was the way she listened, which was more thorough than most people's speaking.
Nathan was someone who had spent his entire life in rooms where he was the most intelligent person present and had learned, early, to be quiet about it. Galena was someone who had spent her entire life building something designed to outlast her, and had learned to be ruthlessly clear. Their methods differed. They arrived at the same conclusions with some regularity, and when they didn't, the disagreement was always worth having.
The first time they worked side by side, a complicated territorial matter in Draíocht, mineral rights, three overlapping county agreements going back eighty years, Nathan pulled up a chair without being invited and spread his notes across her table. She glanced at them, corrected one of his assumptions without comment, and kept writing. He looked at the correction. She was right. He made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite surprise, and they kept working.
Four hours. Nathan missed dinner. He didn't notice until Sidney came looking for him.
He thought about her on the ride back. About the correction made without fanfare. About the fact that she had simply moved on. He looked out the window at the dark fields of Draíocht and admitted to himself, quietly, that he was in trouble.
He said nothing about it to the others. Connor already knew. He always knew.
The weeks folded into a rhythm. Mornings in Aelin, afternoons back at the rehearsal space or on the road, the two lives running in parallel without quite colliding yet. And on one of those mornings, Sidney gathered them on the wide field of Ainmhithe, grass bending in a gentle wind, the sky pale and clear. A few citizens had gathered along the ridge to watch, but Sidney's attention was entirely on the Brotherhood.
"Today," he said, "you begin learning control. Each of you has a primary ability that surfaced first and strongest. We start there. We start with the Guardian."
Jace felt the familiar low shimmer along his fingers.
"That would be me," he said.
"Your empathy is the most immediate power you have," Sidney said. "You sense what the people around you feel, and you absorb it as your own. That is both gift and liability. Today you learn to direct it and to release it with intention."
He had the others stand in a loose circle.
"First: sense each of them separately. Not the crowd, not the land. Your four brothers. One at a time."
Jace breathed in and let the world narrow.
Erik: coiled anticipation, tightly held. Irritation underneath, at being watched, probably. Ricky: bright, restless, barely contained. Nathan: surface calm, heat beneath, like a furnace with the door closed. Connor: a quiet storm. Sharp and alert and aware of everything in the field, including Jace sensing him.
"Good," Sidney said. "Now project. Choose a single feeling and send it outward, small, controlled. Let them sense something from you intentionally."
The frustration of being watched while doing something difficult surged up immediately. It escaped before Jace had the shape of it.
Ricky stumbled backward with a yelp.
"Hey... what... that's... I don't know what that was but I didn't like it!"
"Too much," Sidney said, with the calm of a man who had expected this. "Connor, Nathan, are you steady?"
Connor had gone white. He was managing it, teeth set, hands flat against his sides. Nathan had his hand pressed to his sternum, reading the shift. Jace pulled the emotion back inward and held it there, breathing through the effort.
"Again," Sidney said. "Smaller."
He tried curiosity. Ricky blinked. "Oh, that's... huh. That's interesting actually." He tried amusement. Erik looked briefly confused, then mildly annoyed at being amused involuntarily. Connor unclenched slightly.
The work was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with muscles. By midday Jace had improved enough to project and retract with something approaching intention, though the edge cases could still catch him: too much emotional input, too much pressure, and the line between inside and outside dissolved.
The edge case that afternoon involved a courtier who had come to deliver a message to Sidney and arrived during a moment when Jace, distracted, let a thread of warmth and interest drift outward without meaning to. The woman paused mid-stride. Then she set the message down on a nearby post and walked directly toward Jace with the expression of someone acting on a decision they hadn't consciously made. Her eyes had a certain flavor of desire in them, and Jace saw it, but wasn’t quick enough to stop what happened next. The courtier suddenly jumped onto Jace, sending him tumbling over the stone wall, kissing him hard enough to make his amber-gold eyes grow wide in shock. She was getting a little handsy, too. Way too handsy.
After a yelp, Jace cried out, “Sid...Sidney! A little help here!”
It took Sidney approximately four seconds to intervene, grabbing the courtier’s arm and pulling her off of Jace quickly. Jace scrambled to his feet and sprinted back up the small hill he’d been at before the courtier showed up and stood with both hands up like a man backing away from something hot. Sidney took the message from the courtier and told her to tell Galena he received the message. Confused now, the courtier looked between Sidney, the message, and then at Jace. She said nothing and simply turned to walk back to the Castle of Elders. Sidney walked back up the hill to Jace, who still had his hands up.
"I didn't mean..."
"I know you didn't," Sidney replied, "That is precisely the point. You cannot be careless with this. Not for a moment. Not with anyone."
"She just walked right..."
"She had no choice in the matter. You understand what that means."
Jace was quiet.
"Yeah," he said. "I do. I could hurt someone... without even touching them."
“Yes.”
He was more careful after that.
Connor went next. The voices here had been pressing since they arrived: people's thoughts, the animals in the fields, the land itself humming at frequencies he couldn't quite name. Not painful, not at its worst, but constant, and the effort of managing it already visible on his face when Sidney called him.
"Clairvoyance is your primary gift and your primary problem," Sidney said. "Today you begin learning to close the doors without locking them. Open means everything floods in. Locked means you lose the ability entirely. The work is finding the space between."
"Close the doors," Connor said, attempting a flat tone. "Sure."
"One voice at a time. Isolate. Begin with the simplest: a horse at the edge of the field."
The horse shifted its weight. Connor found it. One thread in a roar of threads. He held it.
"Good. Now set it aside without losing it. Move to the next."
This was harder. Setting something aside while staying aware of it required a kind of doubled attention that made his temples throb. He managed a bird. Then a man standing at the ridge. Then Ricky, who happened to be composing a shopping list in his head with a level of detail that was frankly impressive.
"Now begin closing the doors," Sidney said.
The first attempt put Connor flat on the grass. The surge came first: every voice at once, overwhelming the filter before he could build it, and then his body stopped cooperating. Ricky was beside him before the echo faded. "Connor!"
"He is all right," Sidney said. "That will happen. It will happen more than once."
It did happen more than once. By the end of the afternoon, Connor had pushed himself past four different thresholds he hadn't known he had, been sick once behind the supply shed, and managed, for approximately eleven minutes, to hold the doors at a controlled halfway position that let in sensation without flooding. Eleven minutes felt, in that moment, like a significant achievement.
"Eleven minutes is genuinely impressive given what the baseline looks like," Nathan said. Connor chose to accept that in the spirit it was probably intended.
Erik's training was rocks. Then wooden beams. Then steel.
"Strength without control," Sidney said, "is demolition. We are not training demolition."
Erik's first strike was precise. His second was considerably less precise, and a crate somewhere behind him that had been minding its own business ceased to exist.
"Flow," Sidney said. "Don't explode."
"Flow," Erik repeated, with the expression of a man receiving instructions in a language he doesn't quite speak.
He learned, though. The work was adjustment, not more effort but different effort, a constant recalibration between what he could do and what the situation required. By afternoon he was bending steel rods with enough precision that he could have been a machine. When a misjudged strike sent a weighted dummy spinning into a stack of logs, he swore quietly and reset.
"You... okay?" Ricky asked from a safe distance.
"Fine," Erik said. He was already picking up the dummy.
By day's end he could shatter stone without spray. Restraint, it turned out, was a different kind of strength than he'd been using.
Nathan's element was fire, and fire was the one that behaved least like a problem to be solved and most like a living thing with opinions.
"Fire responds to emotion," Sidney said. "Your control of it is not separate from your state of mind. They are the same thing."
Nathan spent the first hour discovering which of his emotional states corresponded to which degrees of combustion. Impatience, it turned out, made things considerably hotter than necessary. Curiosity was better. Deep focus, the kind he used when working through a complex problem, produced a flame so steady and controllable it barely flickered. This interested him more than anything else in the training session, and he started thinking of the fire not as something external he was directing but as an extension of his own cognitive process. Treat it like thinking. Like calculation.
"You're smiling," Ricky observed from a careful distance.
"I'm working," Nathan said.
"You're doing both," Ricky said. "It's unsettling."
By late afternoon, Nathan could run three separate flames across moving targets without losing any of them. One escaped briefly and scorched a training dummy, and he corrected it before Sidney had to say anything. He was already learning when to anticipate the failure rather than react to it.
Ricky went last, and the field, which had been restored to some approximation of order over the course of the day, was about to have opinions about that.
"Teleportation first," Sidney said. "Stay within the chalk circle. One jump at a time. Focus and intention."
Ricky vanished and reappeared five feet to the right. Then on top of a training dummy. Then immediately beside Erik, who had very deliberately positioned himself at what he considered a safe distance.
"HEY!"
Sidney clapped once, sharply.
"Stop. Notice the disturbance around each jump. You can feel it. The people around you can feel it. That disturbance is what we are learning to control."
Ricky stood still and paid attention to the after echo of the last jump.
"Oh," he said, after a moment, "Oh, that's... yeah. I can feel that."
"Good. Now do it smaller."
Shapeshifting came next, and it came with consequences. A hawk that landed three feet off target. A fox that collided with the corner of a supply crate. A wolf, large, momentarily disoriented, that startled three of the watching citizens into retreating up the ridge before Ricky got his footing and shifted back, hands on his knees, laughing.
"I feel like I've aged ten years," he said, when Sidney finally called time.
"You haven't," Sidney said. "You've only started."
Ricky flopped onto his back in the grass and stared at the sky. "Comforting. Truly."
The sun had gone horizontal, painting everything gold and amber. They sat together in the grass without anyone suggesting it, just the five of them, tired and filthy and present, the way they'd been after every long rehearsal since the beginning.
Connor flexed his fingers. "We haven't talked about the band."
"We've been a little busy," Ricky said, from the grass.
"We can't ignore it," Connor said. "Our powers are real now and they are active. We're not going back to performing like none of this happened."
"We don't want to stop," Nathan said. "That's not the question. The question is how."
Jace nodded. "Exactly. The music isn't separate from this. It never was. We find a way to keep it."
"Little hints," Ricky said, sitting up. "Subtle things in the show. Things the audience can feel without knowing what they're feeling. We don't explain it. We just do it."
Erik rubbed his jaw. "If it's controlled, it works. If it's not, it's a liability."
"Which is why we train," Sidney said. He had been standing a few yards back, listening. "Powers and performance are not incompatible. But both must be disciplined."
They sat with that.
"So," Ricky said. "We're guardians of an ancient cloaked island kingdom." He paused. "And also a band."
"And also a band," Jace confirmed.
Ricky considered this. "I feel like that should be the bio."
"It should not be the bio," Nathan said.
"It really should," Ricky said.
Jace lay back in the grass beside him, looking up at the sky turning dark above Ainmhithe. The Guardian Amulet was warm against his chest. Somewhere out past the cliffs, the Atlantic moved in its ancient rhythms, indifferent to any of this.
He was tired. He was present. He was, against what should have been considerable odds, content.
Tomorrow there would be more. There was always more.
But tonight the grass was cool and his brothers were around him, which was comforting and necessary.