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.
Why, Jonathan?
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 had known. They Keeper lowered himself into the grave, took the jars one by one from Jordin, and set them in a bed of straw next to the body. When he tried to climb out, his strength suddenly failed and Roland had to help him.
Rom lifted a handful of earth and willed his fingers to release it into the grave.
Anathema. Blasphemy, to see it fall upon that supine body.
He released the dirt onto Jonathan’s torso, then stepped to one side. Roland came forward and did the same. Jordin dropped only an armful of flowers atop the smatterings of dirt, sobbing all the while. One by one the rest of the procession came, the children last of all tossing anemones into the grave. And then the Keepers were there with their spades.
Rom turned away, looking toward the west, squinting at the sun.
They buried the rest of the Keepers in the long burrow beyond Jonathan’s grave.
By the time they’d placed the Nomads upon the pyre and set the fires, the sun had begun to set in splendid amber on the horizon.
The fires roared and crackled, lighting up the northern sky.
There were no songs. No stories of exploits of the fallen. None of the usual celebration could find footing amidst the flames of so many burning bodies.
The mass funeral consumed the day. Family members hovered over graves and smoking pyres until dusk, some feeding small meals to children beneath the first stars, others refusing or unable to eat. The embers would continue to burn into the night and morning.
Rom stood staring at the waning fire, aware only of the lone grave apart from the others. Jonathan had always been apart, alone. But there was Jordin, beside him even now in the twilight, watering his grave with her tears.
A terrible loneliness settled over him. He felt utterly lost. Abandoned in the middle of the battlefield where… where what? A victory had been won? History had been changed? Love had conquered?
Was this victory or the making of history? Was this love?
A step at his side. He hadn’t noticed Roland’s approach until the prince was at his shoulder. For a moment neither spoke.
“And now?” Rom said, without turning.
Roland quietly exhaled. “We continue as we have for centuries.”
“To what end?”
At last, the prince turned toward him in the darkness. “I know this is a hard day for you, but you must remember what the boy left us. We live as Mortals, full of his life. This was his purpose.”
“To die? I can’t believe that.”
“Believe as you will. As for me, I believe he lived to give life, and when that life left his blood, he willingly died. Now my people will take the power he gave us and fulfill our destiny. We, not Jonathan, will rule the world. Perhaps this was always the way it was to be.”
Could he have been so wrong? If Roland was right, this was only the beginning. But they didn’t rule. And there were fewer Mortals alive now than before. But even as the questions warred within him, he knew one thing for certain.
“We will honor his death forever,” he said.
Roland turned toward the smoking pyres. “We will honor his death by living forever.”
This new preoccupation seemed seared into Roland. Just as he had fused his people with their identity as Nomads, he would now draw them into his new mission: to live as a superior race that answered to no one but their prince.
How was that so different from the mission of the Dark Bloods?
“What will you do?”
“I will take my people north. We will regroup and grow stronger. When the day comes, we will do what is necessary.”
“What day?”
“The day we overcome all oppression and rule.”
Rule how? Rom wanted to ask. But instead, he only nodded.
The prince dipped his head and walked away.