SOMETHING BLUE
The Bus — Somewhere Between Cincinnati and Indianapolis — August 1987
The show had been good. Not transcendent, not one of those nights that rearranged the atoms of everyone in the building, but good, clean and loud and exactly what Cincinnati needed after a summer of waiting. The kind of show that left the band feeling wrung out in the comfortable way, like a muscle that had been worked properly.
Load-out had taken two hours. It always did.
Samantha had broken down Jace's kit with the same focus she brought to every show, working methodically from cymbals down, cataloguing which heads he'd pushed hard enough to warrant replacing before Indianapolis. The answer, as usual after a show where Jace decided early that the floor tom deserved to be punished, was two. She'd noted it in the case log, packed everything into its cases in the order she'd unpack it, and loaded the trailer with the efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that her hands knew the job without consulting her brain.
Then load-out was done, the bus was moving, and the binder came out.
The Binder
It lived in the overhead compartment above her bunk, wedged between her spare work boots and a rolled-up technical manual for the drum kit she'd been meaning to read for three months. It was thick, an inch and a half of tabbed sections, plastic sleeves, handwritten notes in the margins, and several pages that had been crossed out, reconsidered, and rewritten. The cover was plain. She'd labeled it in block letters with a marker: WEDDING/CORONATION: WORKING NOTES.
She carried it to the small table in the lounge area, cleared a space between Ricky's abandoned guitar picks and what appeared to be half a crossword puzzle in Erik's handwriting, and opened it to the section tabbed COLORS: AELINIAN CEREMONIAL.
Jace dropped onto the couch across from her, still damp from a post-show shower, and watched her spread things out with the expression of a man who was trying to be helpful and genuinely unsure how to begin.
"Tell me what you're working on," he said.
"Colors," she said. "Specifically, which ones are ceremonially appropriate for a High Votaress coronation, which ones are traditionally associated with Aelinian royal weddings, and which ones overlap. Because apparently that's not as straightforward as it sounds."
Jace looked at the page she'd opened to. It was a hand-drawn color grid, referencing notes she'd taken from three different conversations with the Aelinian court historian. Across the top she'd written: Purple = royal/Votaress/birthstone. Gold = Aelinian crown. White/ivory = traditional gown. Garnet red = Draiocht (Nathan/Galena, her favorite + his county). Opal = Guardian. Check with Maeve re: High Votaress specific.
"Opal," Jace said, pointing to the last line.
"Your stone," she confirmed. "Which means it's everywhere in the ceremony regardless. The question is what I wear and what the colors of the ceremony itself are. Those are two different conversations."
Jace nodded. "What does Galena say?"
"Galena says purple and gold for the ceremony itself, white for the wedding gown if I want it, and that anything else is my choice and the court will support it. Which is very gracious and also not especially helpful when you're staring at a color wheel at midnight on a tour bus."
From the bunk corridor, Ricky's voice floated through: "You should do purple."
Samantha and Jace both looked at the corridor.
"Nobody asked you," Jace said.
"Purple is a royal color," Ricky said, appearing in the doorway in a t-shirt and socks, eating an apple. "Very regal. Very queen energy."
"The sky over Aelin is already purple," Samantha said. "If I wear purple I'll disappear into the background."
Ricky considered this seriously. "Fair point." He sat down uninvited at the table. "What about green?"
"Green is Connor's county color," Jace said.
"Ricky."
"I'm just saying purple and gold is classic. Very..."
"If you say 'queen energy' again I'm moving you to the front bunk," Jace said.
Ricky closed his mouth. Then opened it again. "I was going to say dignified."
Connor Has Opinions (They Are Correct and He Knows It)
Connor wandered in twenty minutes later, drawn by the sound of the conversation and the gravitational pull that Samantha's organized chaos tended to exert on anyone nearby. He was still in his post-show clothes, dark hair damp, and he looked at the binder with the expression of a man who had grown up in a household with a mother who read design magazines and had, despite himself, absorbed a great deal of information about color and form.
"What section are you on?" he asked, leaning over to look.
"Colors. Ceremonial fabrics are next."
Connor sat down, pulled the binder toward him slightly, and studied the color grid with an attention that made Ricky immediately suspicious.
"You actually know about this stuff," Ricky said. It was not quite an accusation.
"My mother is Patricia Braydee," Connor said simply, as if that explained everything. "Purple and gold is absolutely right for the ceremony. But for the gown..." He tilted his head slightly. "If you go white you're doing what everyone expects. Which is fine if that's what you want. But ivory with opal embroidery catches the light differently and ties directly to Jace's stone without being obvious about it."
Samantha looked at him. "That's exactly what the court historian said."
"Because it's correct," Connor said, not even slightly humble about it.
"I hate when he does that," Ricky said to Jace.
"He's right though," Jace said.
"I know he's right. That's why I hate it."
Samantha was already writing in the margin of the color page: Ivory + opal embroidery, Connor confirms, also court historian. She underlined it twice.
Erik Has One Opinion (It Is Wrong)
Erik appeared from the front of the bus sometime around midnight, carrying a cup of coffee the size of a small bucket, and surveyed the spread of materials on the table with the calm appraisal of a man who had spent years as High General of Aelin and was not easily intimidated by complexity.
"Wedding stuff?" he said.
"Wedding stuff," Samantha confirmed.
He sat. The color grid got a long look. He looked at the fabric swatches she'd laid out beside it, samples she'd requested from an Aelinian textile maker, small squares of deep ceremonial purple, gold silk, ivory, a rich garnet.
"Red," Erik said, with the confidence of a man issuing a military recommendation. "You should go with red."
There was a silence.
"Red is Galena's color," Connor said carefully. "As in, Galena's county color. As in, Galena's ceremonial color. As in..."
"As in Samantha would be showing up to her own wedding in the Prime Minister's colors," Jace finished.
Erik considered this. "Hm."
"Yeah," Ricky said. "Hm."
"I still think it would look good," Erik said, but with slightly less conviction.
"Erik," Samantha said, in the tone she also used when Jace tried to tell her a drum head was fine when it wasn't, "I love you. We are not doing red."
Erik nodded and drank his coffee.
Nathan Has No Opinions (He Has Data)
Nathan came in last. He'd been in the back lounge working on something that involved several pages of calculations and a notebook that nobody else was allowed to touch. He looked at the table and sat down.
"Flowers," he said. "Have you done flowers yet?"
"That's the next tab," Samantha said.
"Aelinian Guardian Roses are traditional for a Votaress ceremony. They grow best in Léirstinach. The court will have them regardless. But if you want something from outside Aelin, the logistics of keeping them fresh through a portal transit are worth thinking about now rather than three months out."
Samantha wrote that down.
"Also," Nathan added, "Galena wanted me to tell you that the court seamstress has been available since April and is going to need at minimum eight months once you give her the final design. So the window for that decision is getting closer."
"Eight months," Samantha repeated.
"For a gown that has to function as both a wedding dress and a coronation garment. Yes."
The table went quiet as everyone absorbed that.
"You've talked to Galena about this already," Jace said to Nathan.
"Galena talks to me about it periodically," Nathan said. "Because she knows I'll relay information accurately without editorializing."
"Unlike some people," Ricky said.
"I didn't editorialize," Connor said. "I provided expert analysis."
"You said 'because it's correct' with that face you make."
"What face?"
"You know the face."
Kavanaugh
John Kavanaugh boarded the bus at the next fuel stop, which nobody had been expecting at one in the morning, which meant it was something that couldn't wait until Indianapolis. He was carrying his legal pad and a manila folder thick enough that Jace clocked it immediately and straightened slightly on the couch.
"What's in the folder?" Jace said.
"Broadcast requests," Kavanaugh said. He set it on the table, which meant it landed directly on top of Samantha's color grid, which he immediately moved because Kavanaugh was nothing if not situationally aware. "I've been fielding them for three weeks. I waited until I had a complete picture before bringing it to you."
He opened the folder. The top sheet was a summary in his tight, precise handwriting: a list of organizations, contact names, requests made, follow-up status.
The list was long.
"Every major network," Kavanaugh said, "every major wire service, three documentary production companies, two media platforms that didn't exist five years ago, and one individual who identified himself as a 'royal historian' and offered to write the authorized account in exchange for exclusive access. I declined that one without checking with you."
"Good call," Erik said.
"The short version is this," Kavanaugh continued. "The world watched Charles and Diana's wedding with seven hundred and fifty million people. Now it knows that the King of Aelin is engaged to an American woman. There is not a broadcast organization on the planet that doesn't want to be the one in that room."
The bus was quiet. Outside, the highway moved past in the dark.
Samantha had set down her pen. She was looking at the folder with an expression Jace recognized, not fear, but the focused stillness she got when something large had just arrived and she was deciding how to meet it.
"It's not my call," Jace said finally. "Not mine alone. This goes to Galena and the Brotherhood together."
"I know," Kavanaugh said. "I'm not asking for a decision tonight. I'm giving you the complete picture so you're not walking into that conversation blind."
Jace nodded. He looked at the list, then at Samantha. She met his eyes with a look that said: we knew this was coming.
They had known. It had just been easier, in the weeks since Dallas, to focus on the tour and the planning binder and the question of ivory versus white. The world watching was an abstraction until Kavanaugh put a folder on the table.
"Two," Connor said quietly.
Everyone looked at him.
"If anyone broadcasts it, it should be two organizations. One American, one European. That's enough coverage for the world without turning it into a circus."
Nobody argued with that.
"NBC," Nathan said.
"BBC," said Erik.
Kavanaugh wrote both names on his legal pad without comment. He'd clearly been thinking the same thing.
"That's the recommendation we bring to Galena," Jace said. "Two organizations, our terms, our conditions, nothing about coordinates or approach routes or the Veil. They see the castle and the ceremony and the sky. That's what they get."
"And Tom Brokaw," Ricky said.
Several people looked at him.
"What? He's the right guy. You want someone who's going to treat it with the weight it deserves, not make it into a spectacle. Brokaw does that."
Another silence. This one had the texture of a room realizing that Ricky had just made the most sensible point of the evening.
"He's not wrong," Nathan said.
"I'm frequently right," Ricky said. "People underestimate me."
"You suggested purple earlier," Connor said.
"And I still think it's a good color scheme. That's called having an opinion."
After Kavanaugh Left
Kavanaugh took the folder and his legal pad and got off at the next stop to catch a car back. The bus kept moving.
Beer Pong
It started with a folding table, a bag of ping pong balls, and Ricky saying "we should play beer pong."
"Last time we played beer pong," Nathan said, "Erik broke a window."
"That was at someone else's house," Erik said. "I've gotten better."
"You embedded a ping pong ball in a wall," Connor said.
"A window. And I paid for it."
"No powers," Jace said, in the tone he used when he already knew the rule was going to be broken. "We play like normal people. No teleporting the ball, no enhanced reflexes, no elemental anything, no reading the future, no empathic cheating."
"That last one was weirdly specific," Connor noted.
"I can feel when the ball is about to go in," Jace said. "It's distracting."
Erik went first. He picked up the ping pong ball with careful deliberation, lined up the shot, and threw what he genuinely believed was a gentle toss.
The ball hit the back cup so hard it exploded. Beer sprayed in every direction. The ball ricocheted off the far wall and hit Gideon's closed partition door with a sound like a gunshot.
The automatic partition slid open quickly. Gideon looked in the large oval rearview mirror, his eyes on Erik.
"Warrior," he said, in the tone of a man who had survived three combat deployments and was currently reconsidering his life choices, "if that had been my head, we would be having a very different conversation."
"Sorry, Gideon…I'll clean the door," Erik said immediately.
Gideon nodded and the partition slid closed just as quickly.
"Erik," Nathan said, "you're benched."
"I was being GENTLE!"
Ricky's turn. His first shot was perfect. His second was perfect. His third, fourth, and fifth were perfect.
"You're using your reflexes," Jace said.
"I'm just good at this."
"You're supernaturally good at this. That's the problem."
Ricky's sixth shot bounced off the rim. He looked briefly offended, as if the cup had done something personal.
Connor's turn. He picked up the ball, lined up the shot, and his eyes went slightly distant.
"Connor," Jace said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have the face."
"I DON'T HAVE THE FACE!"
Connor threw the ball without looking. It sailed completely over the table, bounced off the couch, and landed in Samantha's water glass.
She fished it out without comment and handed it back.
"See what happens without visions," Connor said. "I'm useless."
Nathan's turn. He was actually good at this, pure skill, no powers. He made his first shot cleanly. Then his second. He was lining up his third when he felt the tickle.
Oh no.
He'd been keeping everything tightly controlled all evening. But a sneeze was involuntary.
"ACHOO."
A sharp gust of wind erupted through the bus lounge. Every cup on the table went over. Several napkins took flight. Ricky's hair flattened sideways. The overhead compartments rattled.
Silence.
The partition opened again. Gideon surveyed the front lounge through the mirror, the airborne napkins, the general devastation. He looked at Nathan and raised an eyebrow.
"Allergies," Nathan said weakly.
Gideon gave him a long look.
"You good now?" Gideon asked.
"Yeah," Nathan answered, "Sorry, man!"
Gideon nodded slowly…closing the partition.
"You're so benched," Jace said.
"But I was WINNING before the sneeze!"
"I don't care. You're out. You're the benchiest bench that ever benched."
Beer pong ended with Erik and Nathan sitting in the corridor looking chastened, Ricky having been disqualified for superhuman accuracy, Connor having been disqualified for having the vision face, and Jace winning by default because everyone else had been removed from the game.
"I'd like it noted," Jace said, "that I won fair and square."
"You were using empathy," Connor said.
"Prove it."
Connor pointed at his own eyes. "I'm literally psychic."
"And yet… you can't prove it," Jace said serenely. "I win!"
Quarters
Quarters was supposed to be the calm one. Just a coin and a cup. Nothing that required running or throwing anything at velocity or atmospheric disturbance.
"This one will be fine," Nathan said, setting up at the dinette table. "It's a quarter. What could go wrong?"
Erik picked up the quarter. He bounced it on the table.
The quarter left a dent in the table surface, ricocheted at a forty-five-degree angle, shot across the bus, and embedded itself in the wall beside the window.
Everyone looked at the quarter trembling in the wall like a tiny throwing star.
"I barely tapped it," Erik said.
"It's IN THE WALL!" Nathan said.
"I KNOW! I SAW!"
The partition opened slowly. Gideon looked at Erik in the mirror, raising an eyebrow at him, then very slowly closed the partition without a word.
Nathan retrieved the quarter, set it on the table, and said nothing.
"He's going to quit," Connor said.
"He's not going to quit," Jace said. "Erik, you're benched."
"Again?!"
"Again. Go sit with Samantha."
Samantha, to her credit, made room on the couch without complaint. Erik sat beside her looking like a very large, very sad man who had been told he couldn't play with the other children.
Ricky went next. Made it. Made it again. Made it seven consecutive times, each shot a perfect arc, until Nathan put his hand over the cup.
"You're too good," Nathan said.
"It's my natural ability!"
"Your natural ability is supernatural. You're benched."
"THIS IS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE SUPER-STRONG AND SUPER-COORDINATED."
"Yes," Nathan agreed pleasantly. "Go sit with Erik."
Ricky went and sat on Erik's other side. The two of them regarded the remaining players with the dignity of men who were simply too powerful for the game.
"We're the best players," Erik said.
"We're too powerful for drinking games," Ricky agreed.
"You're both ridiculous," Nathan said.
Connor picked up the quarter. His eyes went distant.
"Don't," Jace said.
"I wasn't..."
"You had the face."
"I STILL DON'T HAVE THE FACE!"
Connor bounced the quarter with his eyes closed. It missed by two feet, rolled off the table, and disappeared under the couch.
"This is humiliating," Connor said.
"This is what being normal feels like," Nathan told him.
"I hate it."
Jace's turn. He bounced the quarter. Made it. Bounced again. Made it. Three in a row.
"You're using empathy," Connor said.
"You can't use feelings to direct a quarter."
"Okay, fine…you get a look! Like you're listening to something we can't hear."
"Now I have a face too?"
"A look. Different from a face."
"That is the same thing!"
Nathan sneezed.
The quarter on the table flipped into the air and landed in the cup.
Everyone stared.
"Does that count?" Ricky asked from the couch.
"Absolutely not," Jace said.
"Game over," Connor announced, sliding off his seat with the boneless quality of a man who had been drinking steadily for two hours. "I'm declaring a truce. Connor drinks one final drink and goes to bed with whatever dignity he has left."
"You're referring to yourself in the third person," Nathan observed.
"Connor does that when Connor is drunk," Connor slurred as he struggled to remain upright, "Connor is very drunk."
Ricky helped him to his bunk and came back, glanced at the table, at the quarter still sitting in the cup from Nathan's accidental sneeze, and at Nathan.
"So does that count?" he asked again.
"No," everyone said.
The Visionary's Bluff
The binder was closed. The Kavanaugh folder was sitting on the table corner where it would stay until morning. Jace had gotten up to get water and come back with beer instead, which was how these things tended to go on the bus after midnight.
It was Jace's idea. Which should have been everyone's first warning.
"Simple," Jace said. "Classic drinking game. Connor tries to bluff about something. Everyone else tries to figure out if he's lying. If you guess correctly, Connor drinks. If you guess wrong, you drink."
"Except," Nathan pointed out, "Connor can see the future. He literally knows if we're going to guess correctly."
"Which makes it interesting!" Jace said.
Connor grinned. "I'm so winning this."
He was not, in fact, winning this.
Connor held up a coffee cup. "I'm thinking of a number between one and ten. Everyone write down your guesses."
They all scribbled numbers on scraps of paper.
"Seven," Connor announced.
They all held up their papers. Jace: Seven. Erik: Seven. Nathan: Seven. Ricky: Seven.
Connor stared. "How did you ALL get seven?"
"You looked at the future to see what we'd guess," Jace said. "So we all guessed the same thing. Which means you had a vision of everyone guessing seven, so you knew to say seven."
"You're cheating," Connor groaned. "The Guardian is CHEATING!"
"You're literally psychic," Nathan said. "If anyone's cheating, it's you."
"Drink!" everyone chorused.
Connor drank, muttering about causality paradoxes.
"Okay," Connor said. "New strategy. I'm going to tell a story. You guess if it's true or false."
"This should be easy," Ricky said. "We know most of your stories."
"Ah, but this is one you haven't heard." Connor cleared his throat. "When I was sixteen, I accidentally set my orchestra teacher's wig on fire."
Silence.
"That's too specific to be made up," Erik said.
"But it's also too ridiculous to be true," Nathan countered.
Connor's emerald eyes gleamed. He was having a vision right now. Jace could tell by the slightly distant look.
"I think it's true," Jace announced.
Connor blinked back. "It's true!"
Erik, Nathan, and Ricky all groaned and drank.
"Wait," Ricky said. "How did Jace know?"
"Because Connor just had a vision. And if he's having a vision about us guessing, the answer has to be consistent with his future self's memory. Which means it has to be true, because he wouldn't risk lying about something we could verify later."
Everyone stared at Jace.
"That was surprisingly complex reasoning," Nathan said.
"I have my moments. Besides, I've been thinking about Connor's visions a lot," Jace admitted. "Mostly about how to avoid being in them."
By round three Connor was getting frustrated. And drunk. Mostly drunk.
"Okay, NEW rule," he announced. "I'm going to say three statements. Two are true, one is false. Statement one: I can play violin blindfolded. Statement two: I once got stuck in a revolving door for twenty minutes. Statement three: I've seen a vision of this exact moment happening."
Everyone paused.
"Wait," Nathan said slowly. "If statement three is true, then you're having a vision right now about us figuring out which statement is false. But if you saw this moment, you'd already know what we're going to guess."
"Yes," Connor said smugly.
"But if statement three is false," Ricky continued, "that means you're lying about having seen this moment, which means you don't know what we're going to guess."
"Correct."
"So the entire game depends on whether or not you're currently having a vision," Erik said.
"Yes!"
Jace looked at Connor's eyes. That distant quality again.
"He's having a vision," Jace said. "Which means statement three is true. Which means the false statement is either one or two."
"You can play violin blindfolded," Nathan said. "I've seen you do it."
"So the false statement is two," Ricky concluded. "You never got stuck in a revolving door."
Connor's face fell. "How do you keep figuring it out?"
"Drink!" everyone shouted.
Connor drank, then slumped back against the couch. "This game is rigged."
"YOU'RE the one who's psychic," Nathan reminded him.
"Yeah, but you're all USING my psychic-ness against me! That's not fair!"
"Life's not fair," Ricky said cheerfully.
"Okay," Connor said. "Last one. I'm going to make a prediction about the immediate future."
"In exactly ten seconds," he announced, "something surprising is going to happen."
They all waited. Ten seconds passed. Nothing happened.
"You were lying," Nathan said. "Drink."
"Wait for it," Connor said with a mysterious smile.
The bus lurched. Hard.
Gideon's voice came through the intercom, flat and unhurried in the way of a man who had been a Marine drill sergeant and did not consider a pothole to be an emergency: "Huge Pothole. Apologies."
Nathan had fallen into Erik. Ricky teleported reflexively and ended up on the ceiling. Jace grabbed the table. Samantha, who had seen enough of these nights to know when to brace, had already been holding the armrest.
Connor, still sitting calmly, smiled. "Surprising, right?"
"You KNEW there was going to be a pothole?" Erik demanded.
"I'm the Visionary. I know lots of things."
"That's terrifying," Nathan said.
"Also you all drink," Connor added.
"GET ME DOWN!" Ricky yelled from the ceiling.
The Visionary's Bluff was immediately banned. Not because it was dangerous, but because Connor had an unfair advantage and they were tired of drinking. Also because Ricky couldn't figure out how to get down from the ceiling on his own.
Gideon pulled over.
He opened the bus door, looked up at Ricky clinging to the ceiling panels with the expression of a man recalibrating his entire understanding of what his job entailed, and said nothing. He waited. Jace and Erik eventually talked Ricky through reversing the teleport, which, it turned out, required Ricky to stop panicking about it, which took four minutes. When Ricky finally dropped back to the floor in a heap, Gideon nodded once, closed the door, and pulled back onto the highway without comment.
He was never surprised anymore.
The Wind-Down
The band drifted toward their bunks gradually, the way they always did after the energy of a show had finally burned down to something quiet. Connor first, then Nathan. Erik finished his coffee, nodded once at Samantha in a way that meant something like you've got this, and went.
Ricky paused at the corridor entrance.
"For what it's worth," he said, "ivory with opal embroidery is going to be incredible. Connor's right and so is the court historian. You're going to look like you belong there." He said it simply, without the grin he usually used as cover for sincerity, and then he was gone.
Samantha sat with the binder after he left. The color grid. The fabric swatches. The eight months the seamstress needed. The folder Kavanaugh had brought, now sitting on the corner of the table where he'd set it down.
Jace moved from the couch to the seat beside her.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yes," she said. Then: "It's a lot."
"It is," he agreed. He didn't try to make it smaller than it was.
She looked at the folder. "Seven hundred and fifty million people watched Charles and Diana."
"Yeah."
"I'm a drum tech from Oregon."
Jace was quiet. Outside the windows, Indiana was dark and flat and enormous, fields stretching in every direction under a sky full of stars.
"You're the woman I proposed to at Oksana Plantation at ten-thirty p.m. because the amulet showed me you were my wife," he said. "Everything else is details."
She looked at him. Then she closed the binder.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he said.
The bus moved through the Indiana dark. Tomorrow she'd be back on the kit. Both things were true at once. Both had always been true.
The Tonight Show — NBC Studios, Burbank
They came off the Indianapolis leg and straight into Los Angeles. Two nights at the Forum, load-out, four hours on the bus, shower at the hotel, and then a car to NBC Studios in Burbank for a taping the network had been trying to lock in since Dallas.
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
They had all done press before. But this was the broadcast that half of America watched before bed, the show that had been on since before any of them were born, the desk where Carson had interviewed presidents and astronauts and every musician who mattered. Tonight Battle Cry was going to sit on that couch and talk about Aelin on national television for the first time since the announcement.
The backstage area had the controlled chaos of a late-night taping, production assistants with clipboards, a warmup comedian, someone from NBC standards and practices who had sent seventeen memos about what could and could not be discussed. Kavanaugh had responded to sixteen of them. The seventeenth was still being negotiated.
Jace and Connor had stepped outside for air while the others waited in the green room. The alley behind the studio was narrow and poorly lit, the kind of place that smelled like cigarettes and Los Angeles summer.
They'd been out there five minutes when they heard footsteps.
The Alley
David Coverdale came around the corner in a tight black shirt and jeans, his hair magnificent, cigarette already between his fingers. He was in town for a Whitesnake session at a studio two blocks over, which explained the hour and the alley. He gave them a nod and a wry smile.
"Evening, lads," he said. "Big night, eh? Ready for your close-up?"
"We're trying," Connor said.
Coverdale leaned against the brick wall. "I'm thinking after your home nation was revealed you've had rather a lot of people wanting a piece of you. Can't be easy, having that security ripped away."
"It's not," Jace agreed. "We're always watching our backs."
Connor's expression shifted. The amulet at his chest began to glow, a faint pulse of emerald light. Jace felt it a half-second later, his own amulet warming, the bond humming a warning through all five of them simultaneously.
"David," Connor said quietly. "You might want to get back inside."
The air went thick and hot, desert-dry. A low guttural sound came from the deep shadow at the far end of the alley.
"What the bloody hell is that?" Coverdale said.
Then they came out of the dark. Three of them. The Wrought moved with their horrible purposeful gait, bodies fused from something that looked like armor and something that had never been meant to exist. Through the seams of their metallic hide a hellfire glow pulsed like veins of magma. Their eyes burned like charcoal. Their mouths dripped ash. When one opened its jaws the sound it made was a hideous combination of hissing and a woman's shriek, and the obsidian claws at the end of each limb caught the alley light like blades.
"Christ almighty," Coverdale breathed.
Jace and Connor moved together, stepping in front of him.
"Stay behind us, David," Jace said, his voice gone flat and hard.
Coverdale pressed back against the wall.
Jace drew the Macalla, both Echo-Sticks in hand, twirling them in a figure-eight that built a vortex of white opaline light. The first Wrought lunged. He brought the sticks together and a concussive blast of white energy slammed into the creature, throwing it backward across the pavement with a screech of metal on asphalt.
"They were sent to antagonize," Connor said, his eyes tracking all three simultaneously, emerald light from his amulet painting the brick wall. "Aldus is escalating because of Aelin's visibility now."
"Sounds like him," Jace said. "He still wants what he can't have."
The second Wrought charged Connor. He didn't move. He raised one glowing hand and the creature lifted off the pavement, yelping in bewildered fury. With a sharp, controlled gesture the telekinetic force crushed inward. There was a sound that Coverdale would not be able to describe accurately to anyone for years afterward, and black ichorous fluid sprayed against the bricks.
Coverdale ducked. A droplet hit his sleeve. He stared at it.
The third Wrought looked at its destroyed companions, screamed once, and fled back into the dark.
"Always running when it gets difficult," Jace muttered.
Silence returned to the alley, broken only by Coverdale's breathing. He looked from Jace's fading white light to Connor's still-glowing hands to the black pooling on the pavement. He looked at his sleeve.
He slowly took the cigarette from his lips and dropped it. Ground it out with his shoe.
"So," he said quietly. "All of that. The announcement. The Brotherhood. The magic. That's not marketing."
"No," Jace said. "It's not."
Coverdale gave a slow whistle. A smile spread across his face.
"You boys are the real deal, aren't you." It wasn't quite a question.
"We try," Connor said.
Coverdale clapped them both on the shoulder. "Any time you need someone to cover your backs, you call me. Consider me an ally." He winked. "Now let's go inside before any more of those buggers show up. I'm too old for this."
Johnny
The green room had the charged silence of five people who knew they were about to go on television. Nathan reviewing notes he didn't need. Erik with his eyes closed managing adrenaline. Ricky eating a sandwich. Kavanaugh near the door with his legal pad.
"Coverdale says hello," Jace said, sitting down.
"You were outside talking to David Coverdale?" Ricky said.
"We were outside dealing with three Wrought and then talking to David Coverdale," Connor said.
The green room went quiet differently.
"Aldus sent Wrought to The Tonight Show," Nathan said.
"He wants us rattled before we go on air," Connor said. "So we go on air and we're not rattled."
Jace looked at his brothers. Five faces, all steady.
"Let's go talk to Johnny," Ricky said, and finished his sandwich.
The studio was smaller than it looked on television. The audience was warm. They'd been waiting for this, and the energy had the quality of people who were genuinely curious rather than just celebrity-hungry.
They came out to long applause and sat on the couch, Jace in the chair closest to the desk, the others beside him, Ricky on the far end looking like he might vibrate out of his skin.
Johnny Carson leaned forward.
"So," he said, in that Carson way that managed to be both casual and precise, "let's talk about Aelin."
The audience laughed. So did the band. And then it was real.
He asked about the amulets, what it felt like to carry power you hadn't asked for, what Aelin looked like, whether the sky was really that color. He asked about balancing being a rock band with being guardians of a hidden nation. He asked Jace, with genuine curiosity, what it was like to be a king.
"Honestly?" Jace said. "Most days it feels like being responsible for something much larger than yourself. Which is also what being in a band feels like. So maybe I was already trained for it."
Then Carson asked about the amulet bonding.
"I understand," he said carefully, "that the process of receiving the Guardian amulet is… not gentle."
Jace was quiet. "No. It's not. The amulet killed me when it bonded. It stopped my heart. And then it brought me back."
The studio went completely silent.
Then the audience erupted, not applause exactly, more like several hundred people processing something they hadn't expected to hear on a Tuesday night. Ed McMahon turned and stared at Jace with total astonishment. Carson himself sat back slightly, fifty years of broadcast composure showing one hairline fracture of genuine shock.
Ricky, on the far end of the couch, was essentially levitating.
"Every time," he said, to nobody in particular. "Every time he says it out loud I still can't believe it happened."
"How long?" Carson asked, when the room settled, "How long did it leave you…you know, deceased?"
"Long enough," Jace said simply, "But Nathan thought it was two or three minutes."
"But it felt like forever," Nathan added.
Carson nodded. "And yet here you are, Jason."
"And here I am, yes," Jace said.
Later, Carson asked about Aelin's response to going public, whether there would be any media access.
Jace glanced at Nathan, who gave the smallest nod.
"Aelin is handling it carefully," Jace said. "Our Prime Minister has been managing the diplomatic side with the same precision she brings to everything. We're not throwing the doors open. But we have made a decision about limited media access for the royal wedding. Two organizations have been selected. NBC News will be one of them."
The audience reacted. Carson's eyebrows went up. "You're announcing this here."
"Seemed like the right room," Jace said.
Carson smiled. "I won't argue with that. And the second organization?"
"BBC News."
"And Tom Brokaw?" Carson asked.
Ricky made a sound. Jace kept his expression composed. "That conversation is ongoing."
From the couch, very quietly, Ricky said: "It's Brokaw."
The audience laughed. Jace did not look at Ricky.
Thank You Very Little
They played at the end of the show because that was where the music went. Thank You Very Little, the right song for the room, the third top 10 release from Shadowlands, and the soundtrack playing in the background of every person who was having a shitty day.
Samantha had the kit set up in the twenty minutes between the interview and the performance. She moved through it with automatic efficiency, checking heads, checking hardware, checking the hi-hat tension the way she always did because Jace liked it slightly looser on a television stage than a concert stage. She stepped back when it was done and he sat down and hit the snare once and nodded.
"Good," he said. That was all. That was always all.
The cameras came up and Carson introduced them and the opening hit and the studio transformed the way it always did when Battle Cry started playing: the air changed, the room changed, something that had been waiting woke up.
Connor's voice filled the studio. Ricky's lead cut across the top of it. Nathan's keys built underneath. Erik's bass settled into the floor of the whole thing and Jace drove it from behind with the combination of power and precision that had made people stop and stare since they were playing clubs in the early eighties.
They played it clean: no powers, no amulet glow, no Brotherhood anything. Just five musicians on a television stage on a Tuesday night in Burbank. The cameras caught Connor's face during the bridge, and whatever they captured there would become one of the most reproduced photographs of that year.
When it ended the audience was on its feet.
Carson shook their hands. He told them he hoped the tour was everything they needed it to be, and with the quiet sincerity of a man who meant it when he said it, that he would love to have them back.
David Coverdale, watching from the wings, started the applause before anyone else did.
On the way out he fell into step beside Jace.
"For the record," Coverdale said, "I've seen a lot of things in this industry. Tonight was something else."
"The alley or the show?" Jace asked.
Coverdale considered seriously. "Both," he said. "Definitely both."
November 1987
The last show of the leg was in Seattle, which felt appropriate. Pacific Northwest rain on the roof of the venue, the crowd loud enough to shake the floor, and then it was done. Load-out. Bus. The long quiet drive south.
Samantha went home to Salem. Her mother's house, with the cat that was technically Diana's but had always treated Samantha as an equal claimant, and the coffee maker she trusted and the bed that was the right size for one person. She needed three days of that before she could think clearly about anything else.
The band dispersed the way they always did at the end of a leg: Nathan back to Galena, Erik back to Rebekah, Ricky back to Leilani, Connor back to Indira. Jace stayed in Salem, close to Samantha.
The tour would resume in the new year. There were dates confirmed, cities announced, a machine that did not stop just because the people inside it needed to breathe.
But first, something else.
The NBC confirmation had come through three days after The Tonight Show. Tom Brokaw, Ricky had been insufferable about this, had accepted personally. BBC confirmed the same week. Both organizations had signed Kavanaugh's fourteen-page access agreement, which boiled down to: you see what we show you, you broadcast what we approve, and the coordinates of Aelin stay out of every frame.
Galena had read the agreements twice, made four amendments, and signed them with the calm efficiency of a woman who was not going to be rushed by anyone's broadcast schedule.
But NBC and BBC were the wedding. That was 1990. That was years away.
This was something different. Something closer.
Barbara Walters had been waiting patiently since the Dallas announcement, which was not something Barbara Walters did often. She was with ABC. She had a crew. She had a list of questions her producer had described to Kavanaugh as comprehensive, which Kavanaugh understood to mean extensive enough to require negotiation.
The negotiation was almost done.
In January, for the first time in the history of journalism, a news crew from outside Aelin was going to step through a portal and set foot on Aelinian soil. Barbara Walters was going to walk out the other side under a lavender sky and see with her own eyes that everything Battle Cry had announced in Dallas was real.
The world was going to watch her do it.
Aelin had been hidden for eight hundred years. It had survived Aldus, survived wars, survived the slow erosion of the modern world pressing in from every direction. It had kept its secret through seventeen Brotherhoods and more sacrifices than anyone had fully counted.
It was ready for Barbara Walters.
Probably.