by Nora Roberts
By Nora Roberts
Homeport
The Reef
River’s End
Carolina Moon
The Villa
Midnight Bayou
Three Fates
Birthright
Northern Lights
Blue Smoke
Montana Sky
Angels Fall
High Noon
Divine Evil
Tribute
Sanctuary
Black Hills
The Search
Chasing Fire
The Witness
Whiskey Beach
The Collector
The Liar
The Obsession
Come Sundown
Shelter in Place
Under Currents
The Born In Trilogy:
Born in Fire
Born in Ice
Born in Shame
The Bride Quartet:
Vision in White
A Bed of Roses
Savour the Moment
Happy Ever After
The Key Trilogy:
Key of Light
Key of Knowledge
Key of Valour
The Irish Trilogy:
Jewels of the Sun
Tears of the Moon
Heart of the Sea
Three Sisters Island Trilogy:
Dance upon the Air
Heaven and Earth
Face the Fire
The Sign of Seven Trilogy:
Blood Brothers
The Hollow
The Pagan Stone
Chesapeake Bay Quartet:
Sea Swept
Rising Tides
Inner Harbour
Chesapeake Blue
In the Garden Trilogy:
Blue Dahlia
Black Rose
Red Lily
The Circle Trilogy:
Morrigan’s Cross
Dance of the Gods
Valley of Silence
The Dream Trilogy:
Daring to Dream
Holding the Dream
Finding the Dream
The Inn Boonsboro Trilogy:
The Next Always
The Last Boyfriend
The Perfect Hope
The Cousins O’Dwyer Trilogy:
Dark Witch
Shadow Spell
Blood Magick
The Guardians Trilogy:
Stars of Fortune
Bay of Sighs
Island of Glass
The Chronicles of the One Trilogy:
Year One
Of Blood and Bone
The Rise of Magicks
Many of Nora Roberts’ other titles are now available in eBook and she is also the author of the In Death series using the pseudonym J.D. Robb.
PIATKUS
First published in the United States in 2019 by St Martin’s Press
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Piatkus
Copyright © 2019 by Nora Roberts
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-349-41504-8
Piatkus
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For Bruce, and the home, the family we built together
CONTENTS
FREEDOM
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
PURPOSE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
BATTLE AND BLOOD
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FAITH
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LIGHT FOR LIFE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
FREEDOM
Of old sat Freedom on the heights,
The thunders breaking at her feet:
Above her shook the starry lights:
She heard the torrents meet.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
PROLOGUE
On the shield, one of seven forged in the timeless past to hold back the dark, fell a single drop of blood.
So the shield weakened, and the dark, spider-patient, waited as the decades passed, and the wound spread under the grass and ground.
And on the last day of what had been, a good man, in all innocence, broke the shield open. The dark rewarded him with deadly infection, one that would pass from man to wife, from parent to child, from stranger to stranger.
While the dying world reeled, its framework—governments, technology, laws, transportation, communication—crumbled like bricks of dust.
The world ended with bangs and whimpers, with blood and pain, with fear and dread. A cashier handing change to a customer, a mother nursing her child, businessmen gripping hands over a deal—these and so many simple contacts spread death like a poisoned cloud over the world.
And billions fell.
They called it the Doom—for so it was—a murderously speedy sickness with no cure that killed villains and innocents, statesmen and anarchists, the privileged and the penniless with equal glee.
While billions died, those who survived—the immune—struggled to live one more day, to find food, to protect whatever shelter they might have, to escape and evade the unchecked violence unleashed. For some, even in their most dire hour, would burn, pillage, rape, kill for the sheer pleasure of it.
Through the poisonous cloud that enveloped the world, light sparked. Darkness pulsed. Powers, long dormant, awakened. Some bloomed bright, others black through choices made. But they bloomed.
Magicks began to hum.
Some embraced the wonders while some feared them. And some hated.
The other, the not-like-me, would always spark hate in some hearts. What came to be known as the Uncanny faced the fear and hate of those who hunted them. Governments, desperate to hold their own power, sought to sweep them up, imprison them, experiment on them.
Magickals hid from or fought against those who called on a fierce and bitter god to torture and destroy, from those mated to their own bigotry like a lover.
And from and against those who bloomed dark.
On a storm-lashed night, a child whose light sparked at the moment of a good man’s death
drew her first breath. She came from love and sacrifice, from hope and struggle, from strength and grief.
With that loosed cry of life, a mother’s tears, the strong hands of the man who held her, the warrior, the leader, The One took her first step toward destiny.
Magicks began to beat.
In the years that followed, wars raged between men, between dark and light, between those who fought to survive and build and those who sought to destroy and rule the rubble.
The child grew, as did her powers. With her training, her mistakes, her triumphs, she took the next steps. So a young girl full of faith and wonder reached into the fire and took up the sword and the shield. And became The One.
Magicks began to rise.
CHAPTER ONE
A storm raged. It crashed around her with wild, wind-whipped rain, sizzling strikes of lightning, bellowing booms of thunder. It whirled inside her, a torrent of anger she knew must be suppressed.
She would bring death tonight, by her sword, by her power, by her orders. Every drop of blood shed would be on her hands—that was the weight of command, and accepted.
She was not yet twenty.
Fallon Swift touched her fingers to the cuff she wore on her wrist, one she’d conjured from a tree she’d destroyed out of temper, and carved to remember never to destroy out of anger.
It said: Solas don Saol.
Light for Life.
She would bring death tonight, she thought again, but she would help others live.
Through the storm she studied the compound. Mallick, her teacher, had taken her to one similar enough on her fourteenth birthday. But while that one had been deserted, with only the stink of black magicks, the charred remains of the dead, the dying cries of the tortured left, this one held more than six hundred—two hundred and eighty personnel, and three hundred and thirty-two prisoners.
Forty-seven of those prisoners were, according to their intel, under the age of twelve.
She had every inch of the compound—the containment center—every room, every hallway, camera, alarm, in her head. She’d made detailed maps, had spent months planning this rescue.
It would be, in the three years since she’d begun to raise her army, since she and her family had left their home for New Hope, the biggest rescue attempt by her resistance forces.
If she failed . . .
A hand gripped her shoulder, steadied her as it always had. She turned her head, looked at her father.
“We’ve got this,” Simon told her.
She let out a breath. “Bespelling the surveillance cameras,” she murmured, and relayed that to the elves mind to mind so they’d pass the word.
Now those at security monitors would see only the trees, the rain, the swampy ground.
“Take down the alarms.”
She and other witches worked the spell, painstakingly, while the storm blew.
When the all clear ran through the ranks, she ignored the pang, gave the order. “Archers, go.”
The guard towers had to be taken out, swift and silent. She felt Tonia, lead archer, friend, blood of her blood, nock an arrow, release.
With eyes gray and focused, she watched arrows strike, men fall, in the towers on the four corners of the prison walls.
Moving in, she took the electronic gates, using power to disarm. At her signals, troops flowed through the opening, elves scaled the walls and fences, shifters leaped, tooth and claw, faeries glided with a whisper of wings.
Timing, she thought as she spoke to the elf commander Flynn, to Tonia in her mind. They would breach the three doors simultaneously, and each team leader would focus their troops on priorities. Destroy communications, eliminate security, take the armory, secure the lab. Above all, shield all prisoners.
After one last glance at her father, seeing the courage and determination in the face she trusted completely, she gave the order.
Drawing her sword, she blew the locks on the main doors, charged in, blew the secondary doors open.
Part of her mind overlaid the now with the prison on Hatteras, the visions she’d stirred there at fourteen. So much the same.
But here, soldiers lived, reached for weapons. Even as gunfire rang out, she struck, enflaming sidearms that left hands blistered and men screaming with pain. She struck out with sword, swung out with shield to cut through the enemy.
Fighting through, she heard the shouts, moans, pleading from behind the steel doors, and felt the fear, the terrible hope, the pain and confusion of those locked in.
Drenched in it, she cut down a soldier as he rushed to his comm, sliced her sword across the radio, sent a bolt of shock through the entire system.
Sparks showered, monitors blanked to black.
Boots clanged on metal stairs, and death, more death, met them as arrows sliced through the air. Fallon took a bullet on her shield, sent it flying back and into the shooter as she pivoted to the iron door someone inside the prison had managed to secure.
She blasted it open, taking out two on the other side and, leaping over the smoking twists of metal, cleaved her sword through a third before she rushed toward the stairs leading down.
War cries followed her. Her troops would spread out, swarm through—barracks, offices, mess hall, galley, infirmary.
But she and those with her surged toward the lab and its chamber of horrors. There, another iron door. She started to punch her power through, stopped a breath away from the blast as she sensed something more, something dark.
Magicks, black and deadly.
She held up a hand to halt her team. Forcing patience, she searched, tall in elf-made boots and leather vest, black hair short, eyes blurred with power.
“Stand back,” she ordered, and shouldered her shield, sheathed her sword to hold her hands to the door, the locks, the deep frame, the thick metal.
“Booby-trapped,” she murmured. “We push in, it blows out. Stand clear.”
“Fallon.”
“Stand clear,” she told her father. “I could unwind it, but that would take too long.” She swung her shield up again, and her sword. “In three, two—”
She shoved her power, light against dark.
The doors erupted, spewing fire, raining out jagged, flaming metals. Shrapnel thudded on her shield, whizzed by to impale the wall behind her. Into the torrent she leaped.
She saw the man, naked, eyes glazed, face blank, shackled to an exam table. Another in a lab coat flung himself back, sprang on his hands, then scaled the back wall in a blur of speed.
She flung power at the ceiling, brought the one in the lab coat down in a heap as Simon dodged the scalpel swipe by a third before taking him out with a short-armed jab.
“Search for others,” Fallon ordered. “Confiscate all records. Two to secure this section, and the rest move out, clear the rest of the level.”
She approached the man on the table. “Can you speak?”
She heard his mind, the struggle to form words.
They tortured me. I can’t move. Help me. Will you help me?
“We’re here to help.” She watched his face as she sheathed her sword. Blocked out the chaos of fighting from above while she kept her mind linked to his.
“Got a woman over here,” Simon called out. “Drugged, cut up, but she’s breathing.”
They hurt us, hurt us. Help us.
“Yes.” Fallon laid a hand on one of the shackles so it fell open. “How long have you been here?”
I don’t know. I don’t know. Please. Please.
She circled the table to release the shackle on his other wrist. “Did you choose the dark before or after you came here?” she wondered.
He reared up, glee on his face as he struck out at her with a bolt of lightning. She simply swatted it back with her shield, impaling him with his own evil.
“I guess we’ll never know,” she mumbled.
“Jesus Christ, Fallon.” Simon stood, the woman limp over his shoulder, his gun drawn.
“I had to be sure. Can you get her
to a medic?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll clear the rest.”
When they had, the count was forty-three enemy prisoners to transport. The rest they’d bury. Medics moved in to treat wounded from both sides while Fallon began the laborious process of vetting those held in cells.
Some, she knew, might be like the ones in the lab. Others might have had their minds broken, and a broken mind could bring danger to the rest.
“Take a break,” Simon told her, and shoved coffee into her hand.
“There are some shaky ones.” She gulped down coffee as she studied her father’s face. He’d mopped off the blood, and his hazel eyes held clear. He’d been a soldier long ago, in the other time. He was a soldier again in this one.
“They’ll need to move into one of the treatment centers before they’re clear to go. Why does that always feel as if we’re keeping them prisoners?”
“It shouldn’t, because it’s not. Some are never going to be right again, Fallon, and still we’ll let them go unless they pose a real danger. Now tell me how you knew that bastard on the table down in the lab was a bad guy.”
“First, he wasn’t as powerful as he thought, and it leaked through. But logically, the spell on the door, witchcraft. The other magickal in the lab was an elf. Bad elf,” she said with half a smile. “Elves are good at getting through locks, but they can’t bespell them. I felt his pulse when I released the first shackle, and it was hammering. It wouldn’t have been if he’d been under a paralytic.”
“But you released the second one.”
“He could’ve done that for himself.” She shrugged. “I’d hoped to question him, but . . . well.” She downed the rest of the coffee, and blessed her mother and the other witches who’d created Tropics to grow the beans. “Do you have the status of the woman they’d dumped off the table?”
“Faerie. She’ll never fly again—they excised most of her left wing—but she’s alive. Your mom’s got her at mobile medical.”
“Good. The faerie’s lucky they didn’t just kill her instead of tossing her off. Once our injured prisoners are cleared, I need you to debrief. I know it’s hard for you,” she added. “They’re soldiers, and most of them are just following orders.”
“They’re soldiers,” he agreed, “who stood by or even abetted while their prisoners were tortured, while children were kept in cells. No, baby, it’s not hard for me.”