Mortal

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

PERSUADING THE COUNCIL to allow Feyn into the camp had taken a virtual act of the Maker, and even after they’d agreed, the sharp eyes of distrust that had been her only welcome became silent questions when they turned to Rom. To have even the scent of Corpse-let alone Dark Blood-among them as they celebrated their delivery from death was blasphemy. Even Rom wondered if he’d made a dreadful mistake.

But he saw no other alternative. Jonathan’s ascension depended on Feyn’s express willingness to place him in power. And for that to happen, she had to see life for what it was. And he could think of no better demonstration of life than the one that was to take place here, tonight.

The Council had only agreed with several conditions. Feyn would have to remain under constant guard in a yurt north of camp, where the prevailing breeze would carry her scent into the narrowing canyon lands beyond. She would remain there until the Gathering and come out only under cover of darkness and after Roland’s and Rom’s men had time to pass word that there would be a Dark Blood prisoner among them. They would share no other information. She must not be recognized and would therefore be veiled. Only members of the council would be permitted to speak to her. The warrior who’d come with her, Janus, must remain under guard in a separate yurt and was not to enter the camp under any circumstances.

Furthermore, Roland had insisted that he, not any other council member, stand near her during the celebration that night. He would keep her upwind of the main body. If Jonathan wanted to speak to her, he would do it beyond prying eyes.

Roland had expressed his distinct displeasure at the entire situation.

“She has a remnant of the Keeper’s blood within her,” Rom had insisted.

“You can’t possibly believe it’s enough to mitigate the Dark Blood in her veins,” Roland had said.

“I knew her when she was alive. And I’m telling you her heart remembers it.”

“Her heart? Or your heart?”

“My heart is only for Jonathan.”

“You think I don’t see your eyes when you talk about her?”

“My heart, my life, is for Jonathan. That’s all you need to know,” Rom said, and walked away before the Nomad could respond.

Yes, there was at least a measure of truth to Roland’s suspicions. But he refused to see that it was the very bond forged between Rom and Feyn a lifetime ago that had made it possible to find Jonathan in the first place. Mortals were alive today because of his bond with Feyn. Was this not the way history was made?

And was love, in all of its forms, not the cornerstone of the life Jonathan had brought them?

Word had spread quickly about the Dark Blood near the camp. He knew it by the lingering gazes, the nods in the place of greetings, thick as the smell of cooking meat coming from the direction of the pits. Even Adah had considered him with silent questions as he collected a basket of dried meat and fruit he’d asked her to prepare. But if she suspected the food was for the Dark Blood, she said nothing.

Rom had seen to Feyn only once during the day, and then only in the company of the Mortal guard. She’d demanded to know how long they intended to keep her shut in, not bothering to touch the food he’d brought for her. He wanted to show it to her then, in the daylight, so that she could see the eyes of those who lived and the palpable anticipation for the coming celebration. But the terms had been agreed to, and he’d already pushed Roland and his zealots as far as he dared for now.

“Soon,” he promised.

All through the afternoon the camp seemed to vibrate with strange and growing energy. Defiance. By dusk, snippets of flute drifted up toward the cliffs. Random drumbeats sounded from the direction of the ruins as drums of all sizes-nearly a hundred of them-were lined up on the steps leading up to the open-air basilica. Laughter rang out throughout the camp, the sound of it flaring up like the myriad fires set outside the yurts and up on the cliffs, illuminating the dark forms of guards against the waning day.

The drums began as the last glow of twilight faded along the western edge of the cliff and the first stars appeared in a rare cloudless sky. A whoop sounded from the edge of camp, answered by another, louder than the first. Then a shrill ululation, answered immediately by another like an echo. Within seconds, a chorus of cries rose up from the valley, rolling upward toward the cliffs, reverberating from the limestone face.

The warriors came, shouting, tearing off their tunics as they made their way toward the ruin steps. Their faces were marked: black for skill, red for life. Their chests were painted with ocher and the ashes of last year’s fire, passed among them earlier in the day. Some of their nipples were newly pierced with thick metal needles, the ends of which were adorned with feathers. The women wore paints across their foreheads and bellies; those who were pregnant emphasized the swell of their abdomens with a wide circle of red, some of them spiraling in toward the navel. Braids of men and women alike were so thick with feathers as to have been transformed into the giant combs of birds trailing down to the waist. Every Nomad had brought out their best jewelry: earrings and armbands, beaded belts slung low over hips already relieved of more cumbersome clothing.

The cries rose to a deafening pitch as bare-chested warriors and sarong-clad women beat their chests with their fists; naked children darted through the thickening mass of fevered adults surging around the steps of the ruins. The entire camp had been transformed into a sea of brightly appointed souls.

Rom stood atop the steps, pulse quickening at the sight of the thick band of humanity brimming with emotive celebration. Beside him, Roland inhaled as though he would breathe in their collected fervor-that one voice that was neither man nor woman, old nor young, but that was simply and exceptionally alive.

On either side of the ruin steps, wood had been stacked, each the height of a man. Behind Rom three thick wooden poles had been erected and bound together at the top to form a rigid tripod that supported a sagging leather bowl.

With a glance and a nod at Roland, Rom stepped forward to the edge of the top step and thrust his fist up toward the sky.

“Life!”

Life! the entire camp echoed.

“Freedom!” Roland thundered from his side.

Freedom! the reverberating cry.

Rom and Roland each seized a torch from the nearest of the ancient columns. Rushing down the steps, they shoved the torches into the resin-soaked woodpiles. With a whoosh, twin flames leaped into the air. Ululating calls pierced the night. A hundred drums beat in unison.

Rom ran back up the ruin’s steps, fists lifted high and wide, crying out his approval as the valley filled with the dissonant roar of unrestrained triumph. Sparks flew to the sky as wood popped within the fire. For a few minutes, thoughts of Feyn fell away.

The Gathering’s celebration filled the Seyala Valley.

He leaped to the ground, ran into the circulating mass, and caught a young woman with braided blond hair up into his arms. She threw back her head and stared at the night sky with bright Mortal eyes highlighted by large red circles. He swung her around then brought her down into his arms and kissed her.

He let her go, both of them breathless, and then she was gone, the feathered mass of her braids disappearing into the throng.

He surged ahead, slapping Keepers and Nomads on their backs. With a roar, Roland threw himself into a circle of warriors who leaped at him like cubs springing at a lion.

Rom veered away and swept his arms high, urging increase. “More!”

They gave him more. The roar of the drums and cries shook the ground beneath the ruins, drowning out his own. And then he was back in the mix, dancing and surging with the sea of Mortals.

The Nomads had a penchant for celebration, but none compared to the surreal scene before the ruins. Between the twin raging fires, the twelve hundred Mortals who had found life in a dead world celebrated their humanity in extravagant abandon.

The celebration showed no signs of slowing for an hour. Rom lost track of time. Of those bodies pressed against his own; the kisses given and taken like wine.

And yet no drink had been tasted. No food had yet been touched. The night would begin and end with dancing. With Mortality, wild and untethered. With the reason they danced at all.

Jonathan.

Only then did it occur to Rom that he hadn’t seen him. Jonathan had kept to himself in the hills west of the river most of the day, Jordin had said.

Where was he?

Rom broke from the dancers and bounded up the stone steps, turned to gaze out over the celebration, searching for him. With so many, it was nearly impossible to pick out any one person. There was Michael, her thighs clasped to the chest of one of the warriors who held her up as she reached for the sky. There were tears on her face, smearing the black stripes on her cheek. The man released her and caught her in his arms.

No sign of Jordin, but she was too diminutive to stand out in the crowd. Surely she was here somewhere. Jonathan would be with her.

His gaze fell on two forms standing far to his right, beyond the main body of Mortals. Roland, no longer bare-chested but in a black tunic. A veiled figure stood next to him, tall in the darkness, unadorned, clothed in leathers.

Feyn.

So then, let her see. He nodded, wondering if they caught the sign of approval.

It was time.

Rom lifted his arms and let out a cry that rang above the din.

“Mortals!”

On queue and in unison, the drums ceased their pounding. The dance stopped; silence settled. Heads turned to stare up at him in anticipation.

“We come to celebrate life! Today your liberation has come. Let the earth know that we are alive!”

A thunderous roar of consent.

“Tonight, we honor the blood in our veins. Of Jonathan our Life-Giver. Our Sovereign, who brings a new kingdom of life without end!”

A reverberating echo from twelve hundred throats filled the air.

But Jonathan was nowhere to be seen.

Rom lifted his hand for silence, and spoke only when the night was still. On either side of the ruins, the freshly fueled bonfires crackled and sent flames high into the sapphire sky.

“Tonight we honor the blood of those fallen,” he said, his voice now lower. “Of all those who have died, alive.”

They stared with wide eyes, each remembering those Mortals who’d died in sickness or mishap. They revered passed Mortal life in this way at every Gathering, hearing each as they stood in silence.

Rom spoke their names, seven in all since the last gathering, one a mere child of two, Serena, who’d been struck in the head by a horse’s hoof and died. It wasn’t the Nomadic way to mourn with keening except in private. Every life was sacred. Every name spoken. But in the end they would celebrate, not mourn, them all.

He came to the last two, pacing before them. “The warrior Pasha.”

Still, not a sound.

“The Keeper and third-born, Triphon!”

He let the name linger, knowing that these last two were still fresh in all of their minds and hearts.

“We remember them all with honor, knowing they are alive still.”

His words echoed over the assembly for several long beats as tension mounted. They all knew what would come next.

Avra.

Slowly, he dipped his head once, then turned and looked at the leather bowl suspended on the wooden tripod.

Stirs in the crowd.

Every year a shudder ran through his body when the time came-not for the memory of Avra’s slaying or of the lifeless body he had buried, but for the sacrifice she’d made so that he could live.

He lifted his right hand and held it steady, palm open. A hundred drums began pounding as one in steady rhythm. From the corner of his eye, he saw Zara the councilwoman striding up the steps, a wrapped bundle in her hands. It should have been Triphon, as had become custom.

She set the bundle in his hand and the cadence of the drum beat surged. Blood dripped through the bindings onto his fingers as Zara untied the parcel. It smattered the limestone as she pulled the pouch open before retreating down the steps.

“And then, there is the first martyr,” he said.

Rom reached into the vessel, gripped the organ inside. An equine heart, cut just that morning from one of the horses, the meat of which had been quartered onto the spits. It was the most sacred kind of heart the Nomads knew, standing in now for Avra’s, enshrined in the inner sanctum.

He thrust the fresh, raw heart up into the air.

A resounding roar from the mass below.

“Tonight we honor the first martyr. Who gave up true life to usher in the hope we have before us now!”

The drums stopped.

“For Avra’s heart!”

The Mortals erupted in one resounding cry.

Goose bumps crawled up Feyn’s arms as the entire camp exploded into a fresh riot of celebration, the drums threatening to reorder the beat of her own pulse. They mourned Triphon’s death, not knowing that Saric had found a way to coax life from him yet. Telling them the truth would betray her Master and accomplish no good among these Mortals.

It was Avra’s heart that fascinated her more. She’d laid eyes on the woman outside the Citadel grounds once, in that other lifetime. This woman whom Rom had loved.

“She died?” she said, glancing at Roland.

“The day before you did.” The impassive lines of his face expressed no empathy for the reference to Feyn’s own death at the hands of the very Keeper she now saw wending his way through the back of the gathered celebrants. Did he know she was here, the one he had so brutally cut down and then so carefully preserved? And if she were to come face-to-face with him, what would she say to him, or he to her?

She shifted, thinking of the scar across her torso. It itched. “And Triphon?”

“Killed by your brother’s Dark Bloods days ago.”

Triphon, too, she had met once, if only briefly.

The prince returned his attention to the ruins, making it clear he wasn’t waiting for any sort of a reply.

He had come to her earlier, calling her out from her yurt, saying that it was time. Janus, he had said, would have to remain behind. She could not mistake the lines of mistrust and displeasure etched into the Nomad’s face as she’d followed Roland into camp. She had not needed to be told that it was only Rom’s order that assured her any safety here.

Now they watched together as Rom moved across the elevated ruins to the tripod and carefully set the heart inside the soft leather bowl suspended between the wood supports. How strange to reconcile the naïve, impetuous man she had known with the leader who commanded such respect among these wild Mortals. The Rom she’d known had been a poet, an artisan who’d sung at funerals-the lowest kind of fare in the world of Order.

The man at the top of the stairs was a leader of warriors, majestic in his own way.

A man who had kissed her… tasted her…

He was also the enemy of her Maker and therefore hers as well.

Rom turned toward the gathering. He drew a knife from the sheath at his belt. “We remember those lost to us. We remember those who died. And we celebrate, proving with our lives that their blood was not spilled in vain!”

With his last words, he slashed the bottom of the leather bowl. A stream of blood began to flow to the ground.

Bodies were in motion once more, grappling for the sky, the names of Avra, Triphon, and Pasha shouted to the stars. They were fervent, these Mortals, she would give Rom that. Fervent… impassioned…

And as such, more dangerous than she would have guessed.

She glanced at the yurts to her right, each of them lit from inside, with fires burning in the pits outside. Children dashed from one dwelling to another, snagging food from the fires before running toward the cooking pits at the edge of camp.

Where was the boy? She hadn’t seen him anywhere in the crowd or on the ruin steps. He was the one, after all, she had been brought to meet.

She surveyed the assembled Mortals. These were only what… a thousand? Slightly more? But she’d seen the faces of the warriors and had noted their zeal, in such stark contrast to the icy discipline of Saric’s Dark Bloods.

“I can smell your calculation,” Roland said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It smells like curiosity. And ambition. And interest.” He turned toward her as he said it. She studied the high and hard line of his cheekbone. The broad forehead, the long, thick braids with their wealth of beading. The paintlike tattoo on his temple. A woman’s finger had painted it, she thought. She wondered what kind of woman kept the interest of a man like this. One as magnificent as he was deadly.

He leaned toward her as though to share her line of sight. “You’re counting what… five, six hundred? There are seven hundred. And twelve hundred of us altogether. Far less than your brother’s army; tell him that. But make no mistake.” He turned to gaze at her, his eyes both heavy-lidded and sultry. “March against us here and we will defeat you.”

A shout went up from the frenetic dancers and echoed through the crowd like a rolling peal of thunder. Feyn turned and saw its cause.

Jonathan. Leaping up the ruin stairs.

He was naked except for a loincloth.

His face was bare of the paint the other warriors wore, and his hair was adorned perhaps the least of any Nomad in the company, but no one seemed to care. The shouts of the throng escalated into a roar unrivaled yet this evening.

Rom embraced the boy, then stepped back, arms spread.

“Your Sovereign!” he cried.

The Mortals roared, a cry so forceful, so full of hope and emotion that Feyn felt tears well in her eyes. What power in this boy evoked such powerful expression, devotion, and loyalty from others?

The roar coalesced into a chant: Sovereign! Sovereign! Sovereign! Rom seemed to be waiting for the shouts to die down enough to speak, but the cry continued, unrelenting, rising impossibly. The Nomad beside her stood in stony silence.

Jonathan stood still, unpretentious, making no sign that he was embracing their praise or that he longed for it. Only when Rom lifted his hand did the last chants die down. He looked at Jonathan and nodded.

The boy faced them, silent for a few seconds. And then their Sovereign spoke:

“Do you celebrate the martyrs?”

Shouts of agreement.

“You celebrate their blood, shed for me. For the new kingdom, for the Sovereigns of the new realm to come. You celebrate my blood, given for you.”

Roaring agreement from the Mortals.

“Then you celebrate not only life, but death.”

This time, a confused response. They waited, anticipating more. And the boy gave it to them.

“Because that death brings life.” He beat his chest once with a fist. Now he leaned into words and his voice rose, nearly accusing. “You want blood?”

Cries, frenzied from the assembly. Next to Feyn, Roland frowned slightly. Rom glanced away from him, seemingly unsure.

Jonathan suddenly spun and took three long steps to the canvas bowl that held Avra’s heart. He dipped his hands into the bowl and scooped a remnant of blood out with both hands. And then he splashed it on his chest and smeared his face, his hair his torso.

The drumbeats drifted as if those responsible had forgotten to beat them.

Jonathan whirled around and raised both fists in defiance. “Death, for life!” he shouted. His teeth and eyes gleamed macabre white behind the mask of blood.

The crowd fell deathly silent.

But their Sovereign was not finished. He grabbed the canvas vessel and tilted it so that a fresh torrent of blood fell down over his hair and chest, darkening the flax of his loincloth to match the rest of him.

Even from where she stood, Feyn saw the mask of shock on Rom’s face. He made for the boy, then stopped, at a loss.

Jonathan plunged his hand into the canvas bowl, pulled out a bloody fist, and stared at his fingers. The heart which Rom had ceremoniously placed in the bowl bulged in his hand.

Gasps now, from those assembled. Feyn stared, stunned. The celebration clearly had taken an unplanned turn. Those in the throng cast about furtive glances as strange silence settled around them.

Was the boy drunk? Mad?

“He’s lost it,” Roland muttered beside her.

“For now…” Jonathan staggered forward, holding the heart high. He opened his hand and the heart fell to the ground with a sickening, wet thud. “Let the dead bury the dead,” Jonathan said.

Five paces away, Rom stared. The last of the drums stopped. The entire celebration had come to a standstill.

Rom laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder but he batted it away. When he spoke again, it was in a quiet voice:

“You won’t know true life until you taste blood.”

As though desperate to find something worthy of celebration, someone shouted agreement.

“You came for life! I will give you life! I will bring a new Sovereign realm!”

A cry rose, immediately joined by more. The drums returned as though relieved, like a heart stuttering back to life after arrest.

“Life!” he screamed. “Life!” He spread his arms and began to dance. His movements were wild, jerking like blood spurting from an artery.

The crowd didn’t seem to care, relieved to return to its celebration in ways more fevered than before. Dancers leaped up at the sky again, holding others aloft as though to pull down the stars.

A figure raced up the steps, taking them two at a time. A young girl on the cusp of womanhood, clad only in a sarong, thick braids flying.

“Kaya,” Roland muttered. “She’s the girl he took from the Authority of Passing.”

The girl leaped up the last step, impulsively set her hands in the blood at her feet, and smeared it on her face and chest. She curled her hands into fists, tilted her head to the sky, and began to dance like Jonathan, stomping naked feet into the blood as it spattered onto her legs.

Jonathan grabbed her hand and together they ran down the steps where no less than two dozen children were gathered-as nearly a hundred more ran out to join them in their frenetic dancing. As one they hopped and whirled, arms raised, laughing as the drums thundered approval. The sight of so much rapture filled Feyn with a strange longing to be a child once again, this time with the full emotion with which they celebrated.

She glanced up then, her eyes prisms of firelight.

Up on the stage, Rom stared at the fallen heart, all but trampled underfoot.