by Ted Dekker
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.
CHAPTER THIRTY
FOR 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 de
ath 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.
Hold…. hold….
She held and she saw.
Only now did Roland use his blade, slashing across his body right into the necks of the two nearest Bloods on stage. Throwing it like a knife into the face of a third. Rolling past the rush of three others to come up behind and to the left of Feyn with a large carving blade in his fist.
He was going to reach her, but to what end? The Bloods on the senate floor were already storming the dais from all sides.
Jordin began to walk toward the dais, eyes on Roland. But he had no time to notice her. He threw himself behind Feyn, sidestepping the wicked stab of her knife. He slapped the knife away, spun her around, grabbed her hair with one hand, and tugged her head back at an obscene angle.
His blade was pressed against her jugular.
“Call them off,” he growled.
She struggled, and he pressed the blade against her with enough force to draw blood.
“Off!”
“Back!” Feyn cried.
The Dark Bloods pulled up sharply—all but one. He launched up the front of the dais with a growl. Roland kicked in his teeth with an audible crunch of heel against jaw. The warrior dropped with a hard thump.
The Senate Hall stilled to silence.
Jordin continued down the hall, eyes locked on Roland, who was dragging Feyn back toward the exit behind the dais. That he meant to leave through that door was clear. That he would not leave her alive before he did was a given.
And then he would go out to the battlefield and fight to the end.
Now, Jordin. See. Do what you know to do.
“Roland.”
Her voice was gentle but not without power. She watched the wave of energy leaving her, rushing to meet Roland where he stood. He turned his eyes and stared at her over Feyn’s head, as if remembering for the first time that she was even in the chamber.
“No, Roland.” The words left her mouth as silent, concussive ripples like heat on a blistering road. As they folded around him, he paused, appeared confused.
“No, Roland. Not now.”
His movement stalled, one knotted fist full of Feyn’s hair, one hand pressing his knife against her panting throat. Feyn’s face had paled to bleached bone, lips drawn back as much in fury as fear.
“Not ever,” Jordin said.
She was acutely aware of every eye on her. That they stood transfixed in the grasp of a power that they couldn’t possibly understand, much less resist. As for her, the entire room had become a waking vision far more real than the stage play that had just unfolded with all of its screaming and leaping and swinging of swords.
Spoiled, angry child’s play. Insanity.
And she, the bearer of serenity.
Of true Sovereignty.
She mounted the steps and rose to the platform, eyes locked on Roland’s. For several long breaths, she rested in the presence within her. Jonathan’s presence, humming through her veins. Of water, tree, trunk, and branch….
Life beyond the veil.
She stepped forward, hardly feeling the floor beneath her feet.
“You, Roland, are destined for the throne. You will rule in a kingdom far greater than the one you seek. In a realm filled with more power than you realize.”
He blinked, eyes squinting in consternation.
She stopped three paces before him. Compassion swept through her like a hot breeze. Roland stood as the Prince of Immortals, waging war on principle, bound by an honor that was as much his identity as the brawn of his frame. He was a man who could snap his fingers to call a thousand Rippers into battle or issue a single word to bring them all to their knees.
And yet here he stood, struggling to hold his own over an orphan girl he himself had once saved to serve him.
One who had come to show him salvation.
She closed the distance between them, only vaguely aware of Feyn’s frantic breath, her long white neck bleeding under his blade.
Jordin lifted her hand to Roland’s face, brushed his cheek with her thumb.
“I love you, Roland.”
The words were borne on white light. It flowed into his eyes, through his skin, washed over the top of his head. And she knew then that she spoke with wholeness, void of posturing or position for gain.
This, too, Jonathan had told her: that she would truly love Roland. That it was Jonathan’s gift to her, to them both.
His brows drew together. A tear broke from his right eye and slipped down his cheek. The misguided bonds of loyalty to his realm resisted unconditional love—a love that knew no status or position. And for his resistance, she only felt more compassion.
“I love you,” she repeat
ed, her own eyes filling with tears.
She lowered her hand.
“It’s time to surrender your suffering. To embrace new power and life.”
He started to speak, but whatever he meant to say came out only as a stutter.
She offered him a shallow nod. “You will see. You already do. You feel my love washing away your deepest fears. Surrender, my love. Surrender and live.”
His face slowly strained with emotion. Surrender didn’t reside in Roland’s world. He knew no such word, knew it only as weakness—never as power.
“Let Jonathan save you, Roland. From this. From yourself.”
His lips parted as tears spilled from his eyes to trail through the spattered blood staining his cheeks.
“Rule with me in a realm where all sit on the thrones of love. Let Feyn go. She will be Sovereign of this world. It will be her burden to bear, not yours.” And then, “Let her go.”
She knew it was not her but the truth in his own heart that he obeyed as he relaxed the blade at Feyn’s throat. He lowered his knife, released his grip on her hair.
Feyn jerked forward and spun out of Roland’s grip.
Jordin’s glance lingered a second longer on Roland. “You will see, my prince. I promise, you will see.”
“Kill them!” Feyn cried, voice filled with wretched dread.
But her Dark Bloods were either too confounded by the strange power in the room or struck by the sight of their maker so twisted by terror to move.
“No,” Jordin said, turning to Feyn. Her deception was deeper than Roland’s, flowing to every cell in her body through veins blackened by alchemy. But the life she had tasted once many years ago still lived behind that darkness, a tiny ember waiting on only a breath of love to fan it into flame.
“No,” she said again. Waves of light streamed between them.
Feyn was lost to rage. She shoved a trembling finger at Roland and spewed her demand, spittle flying past her lips.
“You will kill them!”
“No!” The force of Jordin’s shout filled the room with a thundering echo that surprised even her.