EPILOGUE

THE CONQUEROR

The lair had no dawn.

It had no lavender sky, no Atlantic pressing against cliffs, no light that shifted with the hour or softened with the season. It had stone and dark and the quality of a place that had been inhabited by something old for a very long time, the walls saturated with centuries of it, the air carrying the density of spaces where great power had been exercised without restraint and without witness for longer than most nations had existed. The creatures that served him moved through the outer passages in their own silence, obedient and purposeless without his direction, waiting the way things waited when waiting was the only instruction they had been given.

Aldus did not require their presence tonight.

He sat alone in the deep chamber, in the high-backed chair that had been his for six centuries, and he watched the fire in the stone hearth and he turned the New Zealand broadcast over in his mind the way a man turned a weapon over in his hands, examining it, assessing it, finding satisfaction in the weight and the edge of it.

It had worked.

That was the first and most important thing. He had used the Visionary as a vessel and the message had arrived precisely where he intended it to arrive, in the ears, the eyes, and the gut of Jason Elias, who had been on the floor of that studio with his hands on his brother and his power pushing through the Guardian bond and getting back almost nothing. He had felt that. He had been in Braydee when the Guardian dropped to the floor and he had felt the desperation in the bond's signal, the thinness of what came back when the Guardian pushed through it, and that sensation had been worth considerably more than the pain and the effort of the possession itself.

He wanted Jason Elias to understand what was coming. Not as a possibility, as a certainty. He wanted him to spend every day between now and the moment they met again carrying the full weight of what had been promised. He had found, over the centuries, that certain kinds of suffering were most effective when the recipient had time to contemplate them in advance.

He thought about the Visionary.

Connor Braydee.

He had been watching Braydee since the Sorienne business, since the night the boy had been taken and had proceeded, in the manner of prey that still had teeth, to kill the woman who took him. Aldus had felt that from a distance and had said what it required to be said: fascinating, the prey still has teeth. He had meant it then. He meant it more now. The Visionary was the most formidable mind he had encountered in nine centuries of encountering Brotherhood Visionaries, and Braydee was still young, which meant the ceiling of what he was capable of was not yet visible. That was the part Aldus sat with when he sat with it honestly, not the gap he had found in the man's defenses, not the satisfaction of the possession, but the fact that the Visionary had been used and had survived it and would spend everything he had learning not to be used again. The walls Braydee was going to build in the coming months would be formidable. They would be built by the most powerful Visionary that had ever carried the emerald amulet, driven by the knowledge of what it felt like to be breached.

He would find another gap. He always found another gap.

But he was not dismissing the Visionary. He had never been able to dismiss Connor Braydee, and the possession had not changed that, if anything, it had sharpened his respect into something that carried, underneath it, an edge he did not entirely like the feeling of.

He moved on to the others.

The Warrior. Erik Hahn, 6'6" of German and Scandinavian blood carrying the sapphire amulet and the Durandach, the lightning-channeling sword, the ground-shaking ring. When Aldus looked at Hahn he saw a soldier. Not with dismissal, with recognition. He had been a soldier before he was a sorcerer, before he was a king, before the centuries of accumulated power had changed the fundamental architecture of what he was. He had understood war from the ground up, from the mud and the blade and the calculus of two forces meeting and one of them not walking away. He recognized that understanding in Erik Hahn the way you recognized something in another person that you had carried yourself for a very long time. The Warrior was the Brotherhood member he respected most cleanly, without the complications that attended his feelings about the others. A soldier. A very dangerous soldier. He was accounting for him accordingly.

The Conjurer. Nathan Dallenger, and the elements.

This was the one that produced a targeted frustration Aldus had been carrying for years. His own power was elemental at its root, fire most fluently, ice, water in its colder expressions. He had spent decades, centuries, attempting to extend his command beyond those fluencies and had always arrived at the same ceiling: a smattering of additional capacity, never the full range, never the seamless four-element command that the Conjurer's amulet bestowed. He had wanted it for a thousand years. He had not achieved it. And Nathan Dallenger, thirty-six years old, carried all four elements with creative intelligence and a technical precision that exceeded anything Aldus had managed to produce in a millennium of effort. The elements obeyed the Conjurer as they had never fully obeyed him. He was aware that this was not because Dallenger was inherently more powerful, it was the amulet, always the amulet, the Brotherhood's advantage that he had been trying to neutralize for nine and a half centuries. But knowing the source of the gap did not make the gap less infuriating.

The Sentinel. Ricky Strathan, portals, shapeshifting, agility, speed. The chaos of him. He was the Brotherhood member that complicated every plan most reliably, the variable that kept introducing itself at inconvenient angles. He accounted for Strathan the way a strategist accounted for unpredictability, not by eliminating it, because unpredictability by definition resisted elimination, but by building plans that could absorb it. He had learned, over the years, that the Sentinel's greatest strength was also his limitation: the man went where the moment took him, and that made him devastating in the field and manageable in the planning stage, because you could map the territory even if you could not map the man.

And then there was Jason Elias.

He stopped turning things over. He sat with the Guardian's name in his mind and felt what it produced in him, which was considerable and not all of it comfortable.

Seven years ago Jason Elias had been twenty-five years old and newly crowned and entirely unformed, a drummer from Nevada who had been handed the most powerful amulet in Aelinian history and had no idea what to do with it. Aldus had assessed him then as he had assessed every new Guardian: capable, promising, dangerous in as they were all dangerous at the beginning before the full weight of what they were carrying settled into them and either broke them or made them. He had expected to find the ceiling of this one as he had found the ceiling of every one before.

He had not found a ceiling.

What he had found instead was a man who got more dangerous every year, who absorbed the power of the Guardian Amulet the way the amulet had apparently been waiting to be absorbed, as though this man and this stone had been made for each other in some way that exceeded the ordinary relationship between a Guardian and his bond. The weather moved for Jason Elias the way it moved for no Guardian Aldus had encountered since the first generation. The energy barriers the man produced had stopped things that should not have been stoppable. The echo-sticks, those ridiculous drumsticks that should have been a liability and were somehow not, focused the Guardian's power into something precise and devastating in a way that none of the previous Guardians' weapons had managed. And the borrowing, the ability to reach into the bond and pull the other amulets' powers through himself, that was the thing that had made Aldus genuinely careful for the first time in centuries.

He was not going to say afraid.

He had been careful. He had adjusted his approach. He had, on more than one occasion, which he was not going to enumerate even in the privacy of his own thoughts, declined to press a confrontation that he calculated he could not win at the relevant moment. That was strategy. That was a thousand years of discipline applied correctly. It was not fear.

The leg.

He did not look down at it. He had made a discipline of not looking down at it because every time he did he felt the cold fury come up through his chest like ice water and he had to spend the next several minutes managing it back down, and tonight he did not want to spend those minutes on management. He knew where the leg was. He knew where it was not. He knew that Jason Elias had driven the full power of the Guardian Amulet through him in Los Angeles six years into the man's reign and had taken the leg as the cost of his own survival, and he knew that no Guardian in nine centuries had ever done anything like it to him before. Every Brotherhood before this one had driven him back. They had wounded him, marginally, in various confrontations across the decades. None of them had taken anything permanent.

He was reminded of the leg constantly.

Every step. Every time he reached for his full power and felt the asymmetry in how it moved through him now. Every time he looked at the firelight and saw, in his peripheral vision, the evidence of what the drummer from Nevada had done to him in a city on the California coast one year ago.

He intended to repay it with an interest that would take a very long time to fully express.

He had been thinking about the abduction since Los Angeles. Not impulsively, carefully, as he thought about everything that mattered, adding detail over time, refining it, removing inefficiency. He knew the island's defenses. He knew the Brotherhood's patterns. He knew the Guardian's vulnerabilities, the bond, the brothers, the woman he had just married, the family in Nevada, the things that Jason Elias would move toward if they were threatened and away from if they were endangered. All of those things were tools. The possession of the Visionary had been the first use of that toolkit, and it had worked, and he was pleased with it. He had used Connor Braydee to reach Jason Elias and he had felt the reach land exactly where he aimed it.

The brothers would always be the most effective instruments against the Guardian. He understood this with the clarity of a man who had spent nine and a half centuries studying the Brotherhood's structure and the way that the bond between its members functioned as both the greatest strength and the most exploitable vulnerability in the whole system. You did not attack a Guardian directly if you could attack what the Guardian loved instead. The direct attack was for later. The instruments came first.

He thought about the plan. The shape of it. The sequence.

He thought about Jason Elias alone, removed from the amulet network, away from the Warrior and the Sentinel and the Conjurer and the Visionary, without the bond running at full strength between them. In Aldus's hands. With time.

The Guardian Amulet would not permit permanent death. He had known this for nine centuries. Every Guardian he had ever faced had carried this protection and it had always been the final obstacle between Aldus and the completion of what he had set out to do. He had driven Guardians back, and far. He had pushed the amulet to its limit on multiple occasions and watched the Guardian recover and continue and the limit had always held. He had never breached it. In nine hundred and fifty years, not once.

The thought that came to him, that he would kill Jason Elias over and over until the amulet finally let him go, was a thought he recognized, even in the privacy of his own mind, as carrying a quality. It was not the thought of a man with a clean strategy. It was the thought of a man who had been staring at the same immovable obstacle for nine and a half centuries and had arrived at the place where the obstacle had become personal. He knew that Connor Braydee had seen it in his mind during the possession. He knew the Visionary had read it as desperation.

He was not desperate.

He was furious. There was a difference. Desperation implied doubt about the outcome, and he had no doubt about the outcome. He was going to take Aelin. He had always been going to take Aelin. Nine hundred and fifty years of being driven back had not changed that and neither had a missing leg and neither would whatever this Brotherhood thought it was going to do in the training grounds of a sequestered island while it prepared for a war it did not fully understand yet.

He thought about the prophecy and felt the contempt rise cleanly and without complication.

Connor Braydee's prophecy, that this Brotherhood was destiny, that the thread of Guardian succession had been building toward these five men, that what stood before Aldus was not another obstacle but the final and definitive one. He had heard it repeated, by the band's followers and by political allies and by the religious figures who seemed to find the combination of ancient power and prophetic declaration deeply congenial to their existing frameworks, across every channel available since the Brotherhood had been exposed to the world.

Prophecy was the Visionary's power reading probability. The most likely confluence of what was currently in motion, extended forward. It was not fate. It was not architecture. It was a reading of the current, and currents could be redirected by sufficient force applied at the right point. He had sufficient force. He had been applying it for nine hundred and fifty years and he intended to apply considerably more of it in the years to come.

He knew this Brotherhood was the most powerful generation that had ever existed. He was not foolish enough to pretend otherwise, even to himself. He was seeing the surface of what they were capable of, and knew it was not the depth. They were still learning what they were, still finding the edges of their amulets' powers, still discovering what five men at this level of ability could do when they worked together and trained together and pushed together toward limits they had not yet found. He could feel it in the Veil when he pressed against it. More resistance than any previous generation had managed. More coherence. More of what came when a Brotherhood operated not as five individuals but as a single integrated force.

This was, he would admit in the absolute privacy of his own thoughts, the thing that required the most careful handling.

Not the Guardian alone. Not the Visionary alone. Not any of them individually, formidable as each of them was. The five of them together, at the level they were currently operating, with the level they were moving toward, that was the calculation that produced the need for patience and for precision and for the kind of planning that he had been refining since Los Angeles. His own powers were what they were. Fire. Ice. Water in its destructive expressions. The elements at the level he had managed to develop them across a millennium of effort, which was considerable and which was, he was fully aware, less than what the Conjurer carried in a single amulet. His destructive power was real and it was vast and the Brotherhood combined still exceeded it. That had always been the fundamental arithmetic of the situation and it had not changed.

What changed was his approach to the arithmetic.

He did not need to exceed them in raw power. He needed to separate them. Divide the force. Remove the variables one at a time, beginning with the ones that served best as instruments against the Guardian, and work through the sequence with the patience of a man who had been doing this for nearly a thousand years and understood that patience was the one advantage his longevity had always given him over men who measured their lives in decades.

He reached out with his power, a slow, expansive gesture, the way you stretched after long stillness, and felt the world beyond the lair. The island was there as always, behind its Veil. He pressed against it lightly, the way you pressed on a door to assess its resistance without committing to opening it. It held. Strongly. The Brotherhood was home and intact and the Guardian's power was running at full strength behind the Veil with four amulets running alongside it.

He withdrew.

Not retreat. Assessment.

He settled back in his chair. The fire had burned to embers in the hearth. The creatures in the outer passages were still. The dark was complete and familiar and entirely his, the dark he had made his element over ten centuries of inhabiting it, the dark in which he had outlasted kingdoms and generations and every Brotherhood that Aelin had ever produced.

He was going to outlast this one too.

He thought about the satisfaction of speaking through Connor Braydee's body in a room full of people who had come to watch an interview on a Sunday morning family program, and watching, through the Visionary's eyes, the Guardian on the floor. He thought about the fear that had gone through that room and through the world when the footage ran. He thought about the people who were calling the Brotherhood of Aelin an endangered species now, which was either amusing or irritating depending on his mood, and tonight it was slightly amusing. They were not wrong. They simply did not understand the mechanism by which the Brotherhood was going to become endangered.

He was the mechanism.

He was patient and he was old and he was not finished and the island was still there behind its Veil, waiting, the way it had been waiting for nine and a half centuries, for the day he finally walked onto its shore.

In the dark of his lair, alone with his fire and his fury and his plans and the cold satisfaction of a man who had just reminded five very powerful men that he could reach them anywhere, Aldus the Conqueror sat with the embers and smiled.

Let them train.

Let them prepare.

He had been here before.

He would be here long after.