She looked deeply into his eyes, imagined diving into them.
“No,” she breathed. “Not even close.”
“When you put a stick in the water, does it look straight or does the water distort it?”
“It distorts it.”
“In the same way, your mind distorts your life. Your mind doesn’t know it, but it’s looking through dirty water most of the time. Soon, I’ll show you a new kind of water.”
“You will?”
He flashed another smile. “I will. Look around you. What do you see?”
Jordin lifted her gaze from him for the first time since he’d set her down and looked around at the desert. At the hills, the valley floor, the two canteens, the trail left by Roland’s horses. All as they had been, now shimmering with energy.
“I see the Bethelim desert,” she said. “I see it new. I see it truly.”
“And you see me,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered. And then, in her heart:
Yes!
He walked up to her. Lifted his hand. Pressed his palm against her chest. Love pressed into her lungs and wrapped itself around her heart, her spine, rode through her nerves to every fiber of her being.
“I am here, Jordin. I am the
I am
in you. And you are in me. Do you feel it?”
“Yes.” Tears spilled from her eyes again. “Yes.”
“The moment you took my blood you became Sovereign. I offered you salvation, and yet you found none from fear and anger. You found no true love, no true peace, no true joy. They’re the fruits
of my realm, not the anxiety spawned by a diseased mind. Now you may be set free of your mind.”
“I was possessed by a mad mind,” she said, lost in thought.
“There’s no need to become perfect, Jordin. Only to
be
perfect, not in what you do, but in how you are being. Beneath the layers and lies of the mind, you are perfect already. So
be
, even as I am.”
It all made sense. Jonathan had repeatedly spoken of the fact that his kingdom was within. Not one of earthly thrones or political futures.
“You’ve called yourself Sovereign. As have Rom and the others. But you haven’t lived Sovereign. How can you be saved from hatred and yet imprisoned by it at once? You’ve spoken of love, but now you know—love and fear cannot remain in the same heart at the same moment. Your mind has become your master, imprisoning you in a dungeon that’s bound by flesh and thought. You aren’t your mind or thoughts, Jordin. You never were. Now you know a new realm, one with me. And in this Sovereign Realm, my love, there is more power than you can possibly imagine.”
“How is it possible to be one with you? We’re the same?”
He removed his hand from her chest. The warmth remained.
He winked. “Let me show you.”
Stepping back, he lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. Immediately, a green plant sprouted from the desert floor ten feet away. Jordin watched, stunned, as the plant grew before her eyes, first into a sapling, and then larger, and larger still, until its branches spread out, full of rich green leaves that threw shade over them both.
“You see? The tree of life. The same veins run through trunk and branch to offer life to the world. Are branch and trunk not one?”
Of course!
“I see,” she whispered. And then: “I see!”
He laughed, grabbing her hand and spinning her around. “You see!”
“I see! I really see!”
Why this simple revelation was so profound, she wasn’t sure. But at that moment it felt like the gateway to an entire universe.
He took both of her hands in his and drilled her with a mischievous grin. “Would you like to see more?”
“I
have
to see more!”
“Would you like to see me move mountains?”
“I would like to see you build a new earth!”
“Would you like to dive into a lake and breathe the water?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“A lake within you. An eternal spring of life-giving water as vast as an endless ocean.”
She threw back her head, eyes closed, and cried for the heavens to hear her every word. “I want to dive into a lake and breathe your love!”
Mirth peeled through the air, her own, carried by the unbridled enthusiasm of the child she’d become in Jonathan’s Sovereign Realm.
“I want to dance and sing!” she cried. “I want to fly and laugh and sing and dance and swim in an ocean of love! I want to….”
She stopped short, unsure what else she could possibly want. Only then did she become distantly aware that the very faint hum in the air had shifted. It sounded more like music—a perfect strain of haunting, harmonic tones that flowed directly into her nerves as though they were highways of light, taking her back to the dream she’d had in Roland’s Lair.
Come to me, Jordin….
Her eyes snapped wide. The blue sky swam with long, ethereal, wavering swaths of red and purple against a deep, golden background.
She lowered her chin. Jonathan was no longer holding her hands. Was not before her. The hill directly in front of her was no longer hardened, pale desert. It had been transformed into a lush landscape, alive with green grass, blossoming with white and yellow flowers. She turned her head.
Jonathan stood on the sandy shore of a lake fifty paces to her right, stripped of his shirt. The water before him stretched north, as far as she could see, brilliant aqua shimmering under the colorful sky. Trees lined the hills—the same acacias Jonathan had called the “tree of life.”
Jonathan’s eyes flashed with daring. He held out his hand, palm up, inviting her.
“Do you want to dive deep, Jordin?”
She spun to face him and tore toward the lake, breathless with desire.
T
HE INTERIOR of the tower was dark, the windows an eye into the night. Below, two thousand torches glowed against a mile-deep swath of newly cleared land surrounding the perimeter of the Citadel wall. The rubble had been pushed into giant berms high enough to obscure many of the shorter buildings beyond it, a great barricade that opened in only one direction: south. Within the cleared battlefield, no less than fifteen rings of Dark Bloods, staring outward like one great black iris around the Citadel, fifteen thousand mounted, sixty-five thousand on foot, eighty thousand in all.
Clouds had gathered, thick and black, over the city. Restless, low, and volatile.
Feyn turned from the view that had been her preoccupation for the last several hours. She’d berated the servant when he’d brought food and sent him to wait outside the door. On a nearby table, a goblet of wine stood untouched. In the center of the room, Rom stood silent and still as a pillar, clad in silent misery.
“What keeps them?”
When he didn’t respond, she crossed to him, took his chin in her hand, and turned his gaze directly to her. “Roland knows no fear. He has every reason to come at me with everything he has.” She shoved his face away. “And so here I wait,” she muttered.
She stalked to the other side of the tower, scratching at the inside
of her forearm, just above the wrist. The vein beneath would give her no peace. It had always prickled, like nettles in her blood, but in the last day it positively burned.
It’s the virus. It’s killing you now.
“How long was the incubation period on this virus?”
“Three days,” he said quietly. “It was an estimate.”
She lowered her arms and faced the window again. Roland would come from the south. Through the city. It was the way of greatest resistance. The least logical, and therefore the most expected. His bravado would demand he be seen.
She laughed, the sound brittle as shards in the tower room. “What a pair we might have made, he and I. Now there, I tell you, is a man worthy of Dark Blood.”
Outside, the torches burned like so many amber beads on a deadly gown of velvet.
“This is the way it always should have been. You see? Nothing has changed.”
Except the final outcome.
They would all die. Zealot Wars would reshape the world again. But where were they? Was it possible she’d misjudged him? That he’d led his people into the wasteland to die?
No. They might move like ghosts, but Roland would leave his indelible mark before becoming one. He would have his Immortality one way or another. Nor would she be deprived.
She’d given the command for her guards to throw open the great southern gate, for her Dark Bloods to thicken their formation before that gate. The glut of them before that entrance would be irresistible to his ego.
Then where was he? If she looked carefully enough, she could just perceive the subtle movements of her warriors, shifting where they stood, glancing up every so often at the sky roiling overhead. Twice she thought she’d heard one of the commanders bark an order
to hold. Their movements had quieted for a time after she’d given the command to open the gate, only to become restless again.
They were spoiling for a fight. Three hours ago she’d stood on the rampart of the wall and delivered news of the virus. That the Immortals would come against them in one last, desperate stand. That to outlive her would be treason…. but to outlive any Immortal, victory.
She willed the anxiety that had crept up her spine back to submission. Told herself that it mattered for something, this last theater of blood—if only to prove to Roland that he was vanquished, utterly, before he died.
And then what?
Born once into life, we are blessed. Let us please the Maker through a life of diligent Order.
The words of the old liturgy sprang to mind unbidden. Words without meaning, meant to control the fearful.
She knew now that Bliss did not await her.
So there is only this.
She crossed back to the southward window.
“I’m glad he hasn’t come yet,” she said, eyes fixed toward the city. She didn’t finish the thought aloud: that when it was over and the Immortals lay slain alongside any number of her Dark Bloods…. she would have accomplished nothing.
Rom shifted behind her. “My liege.”
“What?”
“Surely you know that none of this will save you. Only Jordin can save you now.”
She whirled around. “Well, there’s no chance of that now, is there! You’ve failed in your useless attempts to save anyone. What has your life gained you but the death of everyone you have ever loved? Avra. Jonathan. Now me.”
A tear spilled over the rim of his eye. The sight of it enraged her.
“Spare me your pathetic sadness! Isn’t this what you wanted?” She strode toward him, grabbed him by his tunic, and heaved him toward the window so hard that he had to put up his hands to keep from crashing through it. “Look out there! Order and the Corpses who cling to it are all that will survive us. The aftermath of your efforts, your manipulations, your schemes! All in the name of what?”
“Love,” he rasped.
“The Maker, if there is one,
spits
at the curse of your love. There”—she grabbed him by the hair, shoved his cheek against the glass, and pointed—“there is love, the only kind that there is! Loyalty—blind and deadly….”
Her rancor fell away; something had caught her eye. There, to the south. She let him go, laid her hands against the sill, and leaned forward. A spark of light. It vanished, and as she stared down the length of the darkened street, she wondered for a moment if she had imagined it, if it were an effect of the virus, burning the back of her retina. But no—there, emerging past the distant silhouette of that basilica. And there, another, traveling even with it—and two more, speeding through the black city toward the Citadel.
Her arms prickled.
The Immortals had come.
Two more, and then two more. She pushed Rom aside, seized a long looking glass from the table, knocking over the goblet of wine in the process. She raised the glass to her eye. Now she could see that they held torches, traveling as fast as a horse could run. Evenly spaced—every third or fourth rider. Every fifth. A glowing worm of light rushing down the wide street.
An order, shouted from below, sounded muted through the window glass. They’d been sighted. The distant street was by now ablaze with light, the flames of the torches trailing behind their riders. She sucked in a breath as the first of them came within blocks of the barricade.
The black of their hoods and cloaks was gone. Flames shone on
bare skin, off the hard panes of chest and corded muscle of shoulder. Roland was showing his gall.
She focused on the front of the line, the rider to the left seemingly carved of white marble, quiver and bow slung over his back, sword belted around his waist. His arms were veined with tattoos that shot out like the barbs of an arrow toward his shoulder.
To his right, a rider as white, with his chest smeared in red, as though having killed already. His hair was unbound, glinting in the light of his torch. A long red sash trailed from his bicep and no less than fifteen knives were belted around his waist. He rode hard, seemingly without effort except for the deadly intent on his face.
Roland.
She lowered the glass and leaned as far forward as the window would allow. Horns from the field. Two flags rose from the southeast and west quadrants. Her Dark Bloods had begun to shift, amassing at the southern edge of the battlefield like black water running into a broad basin.
The Immortals came. Three blocks away from the barricade.
Two.
The riders behind rode low in the saddle, racing to close the gap between themselves and the horses before them so their mounts rode nose to tail.
Just before reaching the barricade, they closed rank. Feyn’s body went rigid as she watched a spearhead form with blazing speed—two and then four and then six, ten, twelve riders abreast. Crashing through the opening in the barricade, those on the farthest edges of it leaping the rubble. Straight toward the bulk of massing Dark Bloods waiting to engulf them still fifteen lengths away.
Torches went flying as the leading Immortals tossed them aside and reached not for swords but for knives, hands flashing, steel glinting in firelight. One of the Dark Bloods on the front line buckled, grabbing at his face—and then another, as blood gushed from a gash in his side.