He turned the horse and rode out from the valley under the gazes of his children.
Behind him a wail rose to the sky. The Mortals were mourning the death of their Sovereign.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE SEYALA VALLEY was filled with midmorning sunlight. Overhead, starlings burst from the trees atop the eastern cliff, too startlingly alive above the ruins below.
Bahar, the ruins were called. The Spring of Life. They lay broken, shrouded in shadow so that none who looked at them might ever think that life had been granted here.
And taken.
Rom squinted across the first stirrings of a camp rising from a night of mourning. Those unable to fight had returned and a few had erected yurts, most of them in the same place they’d stood before, perhaps seeking comfort in familiarity. But all it did was draw the eye of anyone looking to the gaping patches of ground in between. Ground covered not with the dwellings of the living, but the bodies of those dressed now in death.
Despite the objections of more than a few, Rom had insisted they leave Triphon’s body on the pole, guarded to keep vermin and birds away. Jonathan’s dying demand made little sense even to Rom, but they were all past reason now. When they vacated the valley, nature would consume Triphon’s flesh and leave only a skeleton as its own kind of memorial, a monument of death in this place where life had once reigned.
Two hundred and thirty-nine Mortals had perished in yesterday’s battle. One hundred and seventy-eight Nomads, sixty-one Keepers. The fallen Nomads lay together in rows, leaving space for the living to move among them-bathing and dressing them, wrapping the disfigured in makeshift shrouds of bedding and canvas. The Keepers lay apart, faces shrouded. Rows of dead warriors, no longer aligned in the formation of battle as one race, now separated by kind in death. Nomad, to the pyre. Keeper, to the ground.
But it wasn’t the line of dead that drew Rom’s eye again and again. It was the single body wrapped in muslin atop a carefully constructed pallet nearest the ruin steps.
Jonathan.
The young girls had come down from the hills with armloads of fragile anemones. The younger children crowded around them-children he recognized as those Jonathan had often run off with to carve their toys as they laughed in the western hilltops. They had covered his body in flowers.
Too red. Too much like the blood they had carefully collected from the ruin steps and sealed in ceramic jars solemnly provided by the Keeper. The initials on them had been scratched out. The Keeper had kept them for his own burial, to be placed beside the body in acknowledgment of the day that it would be reborn-the ritual of all Keepers.
A day that would never come.
Jonathan had died on his eighteenth birthday.
Rom looked away.
The previous evening scouts had reported that the bodies of the fallen Dark Bloods on the plateau had been collected by their comrades. No word of Saric. No word of Feyn.
The Keeper had come to Rom to say he’d run a final test on Jonathan’s blood. Dead, he said. All its extraordinary properties depleted.
Nine years of hope. Gone.
Now, as the sun crept toward the steps of the body that lay at the foot of the ruin steps, Rom could feel the eyes of the Mortals upon him. As they loaded the bodies of the fallen onto the horse-drawn pallets the camp was littered with the soft cries of mothers, lovers, and children. The zealots were more stoic than usual, not reciting the names or stories of the ones they lifted onto their horses as was custom. They were exhausted and tense, looking often toward the scouts on the cliffs, listening for the cry that Saric’s army had returned. But no attack would come. Saric had what he wanted.
Neither Rom nor Roland spoke as they met on either side of Jonathan’s body, lifted it onto the cart strewn with wildflowers, and set the ceramic jars of his blood beside him. Jordin, eyes swollen from crying, could not be pulled away, as though the charge that Rom had issued her yesterday to never let him out of her sight was one she would carry out forever. Even as Rom mounted his horse and gave the signal for the procession to start, she held on to the rail of the cart, reaching often to touch his shrouded foot.
Up from the south end of the valley floor, they wound their way into the western foothills toward the plateau. The moment they crested the last rise, Rom half expected to see carrion birds pecking at the eyes and wounds of bodies strewn across the battlefield. But the field was swept clean of the dead. Only the smell of blood remained, saturating earth and air alike.
A crow to Rom’s right plucked at the dirt. At the far edge of the battlefield, rows of funeral pyres had been built from the dismantled horse pens, the frames of the yurts of the fallen, and wood from the forest. They stretched across the field like a bridge to hereafter.
Adjacent the pyres, a long grave had been dug for the fallen Keepers. A tunnel to the same destination, wherever that was.
And there, in front of it all, a single, lone grave. It was to that grave that Rom led the procession with leaden feet.
Reaching it, he stared the pit, aware of the eyes of the rest on him.
What was he to say? There would be no Sovereign. No kingdom. Jonathan had not only failed to deliver what he’d promised them, he had destroyed it.
Rom slowly turned in his saddle to look out at the gathered Mortals. At Jordin, her face crumpling at sight of the grave. At Adah, weeping into her sleeve. At the zealots, staring fixedly as though right through him. The Keeper, pale, his expression terrible for its utter uncertainty. At Roland, beside him, face chiseled in stone.
He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. His voice was unmistakably hoarse.
“We mourn the loss of our Sovereign,” he said, and cleared his throat again. “We mourn him as the true Sovereign. The one who was to be. We gave our lives for him. We did it gladly, because he gave us life first.”
He could not look them in the eye. He could not meet the hard gazes of the zealots, their jaws clenched tight beneath the bright sun. The Keeper’s lost stare.
“We mourn him, and we celebrate him. We do both, because he did what he came to do, even if not in a way we understood. He taught us what it was to live. Not for an idea or for an Order, but for the sake of life itself. He taught us to love. And now his legacy lives in our veins. We will remember Jonathan always-not as a boy, or as a man who spilled his blood, but as our true Sovereign. We will remember and honor him forever as the embodiment of life, of love, of beauty.”
He hesitated, but there were no more words. He could not tell them any more, because there was no more that he knew.
Nine years. So many lives. So much hope.
Rom nodded at Roland, mounted beside him. The prince lifted his chin.
“Today we stand as a race of the living!” His voice carried over the field. “We are broken in number, but victorious. A race that will live forever.”
A few nods among the zealots.
“We will live! We will protect our life, zealously, to the death. Never again will any harm come to the pure of blood. Today we send the bodies of those who have fallen to the sky. Today we who yet live will rise, determined, never again to court death. I say to all those who would rob us of life, ‘Die in your own grave. Our blood knows no end!’ ”
Rom glanced at the stark lines of his face, as hard and resolute as his words. He returned Rom’s look without a hint of conciliation. He doubted he would ever again look the same to Roland’s eyes.
So be it.
They swung down from their horses. Together they lifted Jonathan’s body off the cart. Jordin hovered near, holding the ceramic jars containing Jonathan’s blood close to her chest.
They lowered his body into the ground. Too pale, too light, drained of its blood. Too lifeless to be the boy Rom
