A part of her dared—invited—any to make an attempt on her life. She knew her reward! But then they were nearly on the Citadel, the battlefield open ahead.
Ahead and far to her right, a red-chested Immortal raced along the front edge of the Dark Bloods, leaping up onto a riderless horse. His black hair whipped the air as he raced forward, sword flashing. With one vicious swing of the blade, the Ripper took the heads from two Dark Bloods before arching his back to narrowly avoid a spear slicing in from another.
Roland!
She couldn’t see his face at this distance, but she could hardly mistake the movement that lived up to the Immortal name.
“There,” she said.
Saric followed her eyes.
No fewer than fifty Bloods broke from the main line behind Roland, rushing to cut him off. She knew that he could sense them coming after their Immortal prize. Knew also that he would escape the obvious trap.
With a blood-chilling roar, he twisted to the side and buried his blade into the head of a horse pulling abreast. Rider and mount crashed heavily to the ground, tripping up two others directly behind.
The Citadel gates loomed ahead, thrown open to give Feyn’s hounds easy access in either direction.
This prince wasn’t backing down. He might very well fight his way clear of the Bloods sweeping in behind him, and on another day, she would have watched him evade and cut them down in awe, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
“I go,” she said.
“Do what you must.”
She veered to the right, angling directly for the Bloods closing on Roland, who was fully intent on taking advantage of the distraction.
Or was his intent to save her?
He charged his mount into four Bloods on foot, knocking two on their backs. Then, dropping over the side of his saddle, he took the leg off another with a low sweep of his blade.
Fifty meters.
She pounded toward him.
Thirty meters.
Roland was in a dash for the gate. But the Bloods ahead of him were too thick.
When she was only ten meters from him she turned into the outer line of Dark Bloods. Only when the first spun and roared his warning did she scream her own.
Jordin wasn’t prepared for what happened at the sound of that cry. She
saw
it, a slight distortion in the energy field rippling out before her into a shock wave sent out by her entire being.
It struck the closest Bloods like an invisible wall, sending them flying back into those behind them.
She saw it in real time, but her mind saw more slowly—not as an Immortal would see, but with even greater clarity. The force slammed into Bloods five meters from her horse as she swept in behind Roland. She cut through the edge of the surging horde, passing only paces to Roland’s right flank. She cut short her scream and threw a command over her shoulder. “Follow!” She then veered back into the battlefield, leaving a mass of stunned Bloods behind her scrambling to their feet.
Roland hesitated a moment, obviously shocked. And then he kicked his mount and tore after her, five horse lengths to her rear. Saric, to their left, had nearly gained the Citadel. Dark Bloods swarmed toward the gates.
The battlefield had turned its focus on the race to those gates. Jordin gained Saric’s side, her head low, seat off the saddle, dress streaming behind. Roland, gore-smattered and bloodthirsty, caught up as Dark Bloods roared in from both sides.
Three lances destined to reach the point of entry at the same time.
A dozen Bloods were frantically rushing to close the gates as the hordes closed with a full-throated roar, faces reddened and knotted with rage.
They were going to collide, all of them. The gates moved to shut. The swarming Bloods, too fast. Their white lance was a second too late to avoid crushing impact, horse on horse, flesh on steel, scream on scream.
And yet she felt only surreal calm. It would be as it was meant to be. She no longer saw Dark Bloods, but a rushing sea of night come to block the light.
Could darkness dispel light?
She was aware of Saric on her left, of Roland on her heels, the Bloods converging before her, but she was far more aware of something closer. Of something inside of her.
Of the presence that was one with her.
It was Jonathan who commanded this battle—not the desperate forms attempting to be seen as shapers of their world, oblivious to the far greater reality brimming with inexhaustible power behind the veil of mind and temporal sight.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t panic. Did nothing, in fact, except fix her eyes beyond the gates and ride.
At the last possible moment, she felt a single whisper of fear. What if this was her end?
A blur of mounted Dark Bloods reached the gate with her. Her stallion collided with the Dark Blood leading the western charge.
But it wasn’t her horse that made contact with the other. It was her presence. A wave of raw energy threw the horse aside as if it were an ant. From the corner of her eye, she saw Saric slam through a dozen mounted Bloods. Light struck the Bloods head-on, sending them flying back, flinging wide the half-closed gates, parting the Dark Bloods like a black sea.
Then they were through, and by the sound of his stallion thundering behind her, Jordin knew that Roland had followed in their wake.
She raced up the grand walk to the palace itself, taking marble stairs at a full run, a stride in front of Saric. She hadn’t considered the sealed doors but she was in such a state of assurance that it hardly occurred to her that they could be a problem until they loomed, tall and thick, before her.
She didn’t slow.
“Jordin!”
Roland’s warning from behind.
Fear spiked in her consciousness at his cry—a moment of panic that flashed in her mind and cut off her breath.
She was going to crash into the doors!
But just as Jordin was sure her horse would make contact, they blew open with a loud boom. Not just open, but off their hinges and
thirty feet into the palace where they struck a far wall and toppled to the floor.
Her horse sailed through the entrance, landed on the marble floor, and slid to a whinnying stop next to one of the doors, a full ten paces into the palace.
Jordin pulled hard at the air, momentarily taken off guard by the ease with which they’d breached Feyn’s stronghold.
She scanned the rotunda. Gold glinted down from the domed ceiling like an inverted sun. Atop the grand staircase, high arched walkways split in either direction to run down the far length of the palace.
Roland sat on his horse, looking wildly about and then staring, at last, at her. Saric sat more serenely. No other soul in sight.
Those without souls, however, had recovered from the scene at the gates and were surging into the Citadel grounds, like oil flowing through a funnel.
Roland dropped from his horse, blade in hand, and crossed the main floor of the rotunda to the stair. He pointed to the western corridor above, toward the senate wing. “This way. I can smell her.”
Smell her? Jordin didn’t know that she smelled any different from other Dark Bloods.
A way will be made.
Saric was already dismounting. He tugged his mount to face the onslaught of Bloods outside and slapped its rump. The horse snorted and walked to the door, where Jordin’s stallion joined it. The sight of the white horses that had plowed so effortlessly through those Dark Blood ranks would at least give the minions pause.
And then she was striding up the stairs, two at a time, after Roland, Saric at her side. “We have to find Rom.”
“I go for Feyn.”
“And I brought you in.”
He cast a look over his shoulder as he turned down the western hall. Below, the horses reared, a wild whinny echoing up to the
domed ceiling. Their hooves crashed to the marble, shattering it, and then they were bolting down the stairs of the palace. Their fate was no longer Jordin’s concern.
She caught Roland. “She stays alive.”
He remained silent, face intent, blinded by rage even after the display of power he’d only just witnessed.
“Alive, Roland. Alive!”
They ran the length of the walk, past the end of the rotunda court where it turned into a grand hall—past office doors, the flags of the nations, until they reached the senate atrium. Four Dark Bloods stood guard outside the doors, which meant someone worth protecting was inside. Roland sprinted for them, having never answered Jordin.
The Senate Hall. And so Feyn had retreated to the place of her resurrection at the hands of Saric six years earlier. Here, she had returned to life. Here, she would make her final stand or breathe her last breath.
Jordin slowed to a stop as two of the guards stepped out to intercept Roland. Both left their heads on the floor. Their bodies collapsed nearby. The other two circled for better position, fear straining their faces.
Roland threw open the doors of the atrium and vanished inside.
Saric lifted his right hand at the two standing Bloods as he slowed to a brisk walk. “Stay!”
They blinked. They also stayed. Jordin gave Saric a glance as she passed by him into the atrium. She crossed to the great inner doors of the Senate Hall just as Roland was flinging them wide.
They strode in together, but halted as one barely three meters inside the hall.
The sight that greeted her sent a chill down her spine.
Feyn stood on the dais, long golden robe draped over a midnight gown. Her hair fell to her waist in long black waves, unbound. Her arms were at her sides, the ring of office glinting from her hand. Her
stare was hard as stone, face chiseled with bitterness. A knife was in her hand. This did not concern Jordin. Nor did the fifty Dark Bloods divided to Feyn’s left and her right, glaring with as much vitriol.
What alarmed her was the absence of Rom.
The door thudded shut behind her. The latch clanked in place. Saric stepped up on Roland’s far side and calmly took in the scene.
The end could come here.
F
OR SEVERAL LONG seconds silence reigned in the Senate Hall. No one moved. Overhead, the electric lights were on—Jordin had seen them go dark at their approach. Apparently only the supply to the wall had been cut.
Jordin could not parse a full spectrum of enhanced senses the way Roland surely could in that moment, but she knew the look of hatred. Could see the utter defiance on the prince’s face. The wrath flashing from Feyn’s black eyes.
The knife in her hand.
Feyn drew her other hand into a clenched fist.
“This is your time, Jordin,” Saric said softly. “See what you must see.”
Jordin looked from Feyn to the Dark Bloods spanning the sides of the dais.
See….
“I know who you are,” Feyn cried out, eyes locked on her. “Jordin, lover of Jonathan, the would-be Sovereign who spawned a deviant race by that name. And you, Roland, so-called Immortal. You will find your death here.” She strode toward the edge of the dais. “And my
dear
brother. Come to see me die where you brought me back to life, have you? How quaint, how poetic. A former Sovereign, one who calls herself Sovereign, one who would be prince…. and yet you stand before the true and only Sovereign of the world!”
A deep calm settled over Jordin. At one time she might have trembled before such words. But now…. she saw only a woman who had forgotten who she was. Who appeared absurd standing in the midst of her own rage and self-righteousness.
Life was a cycle of remembering and forgetting, Jonathan had told her beside the lake—of remembering that flesh and blood are only a dream next to the reality behind them. Of forgetting the same truth again, after only minutes or hours of realizing it. It was why Sovereigns had had such clarity of knowing—even snippets of the future—immediately after taking Jonathan’s blood six years ago…. only to forget the way of that knowing.
“If this is what you want, this is what I will give you,” Feyn cried. “Death and more death until not even a single Immortal robs the earth of my air!”
Perfect love casts out fear
, Jonathan had told her—and anger and jealousy and malice with it.
She’d understood then that the world that enslaved itself to the Order had left behind the one antidote to the evils that had plagued it an age before.
Love. How clearly she saw it!
Stained head to foot with his victims’ blood, however, Roland did not.
Dragging the tip of his sword along the floor behind him, he strode forward, up the center aisle, eyes fixed on Feyn.
Let him go, Jordin.
She breathed with ease and held back.
“Kill him,” Feyn snarled.
Six Dark Bloods on either side bounded from the dais and stormed forward, blades ready. Loyal to the end, surely aware that Roland could best them.
But he would have a hard time besting the ten others in their wake, or the ten that suddenly moved to either flank and rushed up the side aisles.
Roland strode evenly, as if he’d been truly blinded, in both mind and sight.
The Dark Bloods converged, rushing with a speed that defied their bulk.
Jordin held her place. But Feyn wasn’t as resolute.
“Kill him! Cut off his head, you pathetic worms!”
Roland didn’t even lift his sword from the long mark it had left along the floor until the first Dark Blood reached him and brought his blade to bear.
Then he moved with stunning speed. He dropped to a crouch as the blade sung overhead and then sprang up into a head butt that landed on the Blood’s chin with a loud crack. The Blood staggered into the man behind him.
Roland flowed with his momentum, leaping onto the long senate bench to his right before they could recover. He raced across the tops of the tiered benches with the agility of a cat, a far better judge of distance and weight than his Dark Blood pursuers.
The Dark Bloods cleared the center aisle and cut into the tiers, running along the benches with devastating speed to intercept him.
But Roland had timed his outing perfectly, waiting until all but ten had vacated the platform in pursuit. In one last bound, narrowly avoiding twin blades that clashed where his legs had been, he cleared the last bench, took two long running strides, and leaped onto the platform, not five paces from Feyn.