The Powers Bestowed: The Rising



Harmonytis, Aelin — September 1991

The crash came first.

Jace heard it from three corridors away — the unmistakable sound of something substantial meeting a stone wall at considerable velocity. He’d been walking toward Galena’s office with a folder of agricultural reports tucked under his arm, notes from the Neart Farmer’s Coalition that needed the Prime Minister’s attention before the week’s end. Routine governance. The kind of steady, necessary work that had become the backbone of his existence since they’d come home from New Zealand.

He stopped walking.

Then came her voice.

“Ты чёртов идиот! Как ты смеешь говорить со мной так?!”

(You damned idiot! How dare you speak to me that way?!)

Jace knew that voice. He’d heard Galena angry before — had witnessed her fury firsthand, had seen what she was capable of when pushed past her considerable patience. But this was different. This had an edge to it that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

He started moving.

Another crash. Louder.

“Я премьер-министр Аэлина, и ты осмеливаешься унижать меня?!”

(I am the Prime Minister of Aelin, and you dare disrespect me?!)

Nathan came through the door like something had launched him through it. The Conjurer’s eyes were wide, his hands raised in the universal posture of a man who had survived something and wanted very much to keep surviving. When he saw Jace in the corridor, he grabbed his arm without breaking stride.

“Do not go in there,” Nathan said.

“What happened?” Jace asked, matching his pace immediately.

“The Prime Minister of Denmark,” Nathan said, his voice still shaky. “He said something about Aelin’s trade policies. Something about how a female-led government might be reconsidering its international commitments.” He swallowed hard. “She kept her composure on the phone. Professional. Measured.” He paused. “The moment she hung up—”

“Ублюдок! Животное!”

(Bastard! Animal!)

Nathan’s grip on Jace’s arm tightened considerably. “That happened.”

They ran.

———

The route to the Great Hall took them past Brotherhood Studios.

Neither of them looked at the doors.

They hadn’t looked at those doors in months. Not since New Zealand. Not since the world had watched Connor’s possession broadcast live on a family television program, and Aldus’s threat had come down like a hammer, and the countries of the world had begun turning Battle Cry away one by one — afraid that if the band tried to perform within their borders, Aldus would make their citizens pay the price. The studios had gone dark the night they came home. The instruments had gone silent. And somewhere in the weeks that followed, the silence had settled into something that had begun to feel less like a pause and more like an ending.

The island had noticed.

It started small — the kind of thing you might dismiss if you only saw one piece of it. But the pieces kept coming.

The fishermen of Harmonytis noticed first, the way people who work by rhythm always notice when a rhythm breaks. For years, the sound of their King playing drums in the alcove above the harbor had marked the evening the way the tide marked the morning — reliable, familiar, woven so deeply into the fabric of daily life that nobody had ever thought to comment on it because it had never needed commenting on. It was simply there. The boats were readied, the nets were checked, and somewhere above the shimmer-stone rooftops, Jace Elias played his drums and the evening was complete.

He hadn’t played in months.

Samantha knew. She watched him walk past the alcove every evening without stopping, without glancing toward the kit that had followed him from the garage days all the way to the Castle of Elders, and she felt the weight of that small detour around something he loved more than almost anything in the world. She had mentioned it to Sidney once. Sidney had nodded slowly and said nothing, and filed it alongside everything else he was quietly watching.

In Leirstenach, the county orchestra's lead conductor had gone to Indira. Not through formal channels. Not with the official language. Just quietly, personally, asking if the Visionary was well — he had not come to hear them rehearse in weeks. The conductor hadn’t known how to say that he missed his Governor sitting in that hall, that the rehearsals felt different without him there, so he had dressed it in professional courtesy and hoped Indira would understand what he actually meant. She had understood completely. She carried that question the same way she carried everything else Connor brought home with him now — the nightmares, the mornings when he woke with tears on his face, the silences that stretched longer than they used to. The man Rolling Stone had called the most dangerous combination of talent and blatant sexuality since Robert Plant — the Headmaster who had built the Conservatory into something extraordinary — had gone quiet in a way that the kidnappings had never managed to achieve. The kidnappings had wounded him. The sequester was hollowing him out from the inside, and the cruelest part was that Aldus hadn’t needed to touch him to do it. Students at the Conservatory had begun whispering their concerns to professors who had no answers because they were asking the same questions themselves.

Across the island in Draícħt, the same quiet had settled over Daerdon University. Nathan’s laboratory burned with activity — the science filling the hours the music used to fill, the engineering substituting for the songwriting that had always poured out of him as naturally as breathing. But his students knew the difference between a Headmaster who was present and one who was simply occupying the space where a Headmaster should be. They talked about it among themselves and carefully with their professors. Something was wrong with him. Something that had started in New Zealand and hadn’t stopped.

In Neart, the Farmer’s Coalition had made the trip to Galena’s office. Practical people. Hardworking people who dealt in soil and weather and the honest arithmetic of harvest. They had come to ask if the Warrior was unwell. But it wasn’t only the farmers who had noticed. The Aelinian Military had noticed too — and in a force built on the strength and presence of its Warrior, that carried a different kind of weight. Officers who had served under Erik Hahn knew what he looked like at full capacity. They knew the particular quality of his command, the way his presence in a room raised the temperature of every soldier in it. What they were seeing now was a man going through the motions of leadership with mechanical precision, and the whispers about morale had already begun in the lower ranks. A diminished Warrior was not something the Aelinian Military knew how to process. Rebekah could have told all of them exactly what was wrong. She saw it every day in the quality of light in Erik’s eyes — the fire she knew better than anyone, the fire she watched diminish by degrees. She knew its absence the way you know a room has gone cold before you can say exactly when the warmth left.

And in Ainmhithe, the sanctuary animals had begun to notice long before Doctor Voss called Galena’s office to ask if the Sentinel was unwell. The panthers felt it first — they always did. When Ricky came to them now, they approached him carefully, the way animals approach something familiar that has become uncertain, nosing at his hands and watching his face with an attention that was less about affection and more about concern. The banded silver foxes, who normally descended on him in a chaos of silver fur and noise the moment he appeared, had grown quieter in his presence, orienting around him instead of climbing over him, as if they understood that something needed gentling rather than celebrating. Even the horses had changed — standing closer than usual when he walked the paddocks, following him along the fence lines with a steadiness that wasn’t their normal energy. They knew. Animals always knew. The chaos goblin energy that had made Ricky Strathan the undisputed favorite of every creature on the island had gone somewhere none of them could follow, and they were waiting, in the patient way of animals, for it to come back.

John Kavanaugh and Linda Kramer were holding everything together from the outside with the particular skill of people who had been doing it long enough to make it look effortless. Linda, who knew all five of them well enough to read the temperature of a room from a single phone call, had been talking to Samantha. Kavanaugh had been talking to Jace. Both conversations careful. Both conversations circling the same unsayable thing.

They were frightened. All five of them. More than any of them would say out loud to each other or to anyone else.

———

The Great Hall opened before them.

The Brotherhood was already assembled — Connor standing near one of the tall windows, his dark curls catching the pale afternoon light, his emerald eyes moving toward the door before Jace and Nathan even crossed the threshold. Erik sat on one of the lesser benches, blond hair pulled back, the stillness about him that meant he was running on discipline alone. Ricky stood near the center of the room, arms crossed, not pacing — which was somehow more concerning than if he’d been pacing.

Samantha was there. Sidney was there. And arranged throughout the vast space, each attending to the brother they served, were the aides — Yara near Jace’s throne, Leo positioned close to where Connor stood, Colin near Ricky, Joseph with Erik, Matthew already visibly relieved to see Nathan walk through the door alive, and Daria moving quietly between her various responsibilities as she always did, attending to everything at once.

The moment they saw Jace and Nathan’s faces, the entire room shifted.

“What happened?” Connor asked. His emerald eyes had that particular intensity — the one that meant the psychic wind was already telling him something.

And then, carrying through the stone corridors of the Castle of Elders, distant but unmistakable —

Crash.

“Никогда больше! Ты слышишь меня?! Никогда!”

(Never again! Do you hear me?! Never!)

The Great Hall went very still.

“That,” Nathan said quietly, “is what happened.”

He explained it as steadily as he could — the call from the Prime Minister of Denmark, the insult about Aelin’s female-led government, Galena’s extraordinary composure on the phone, and the equally extraordinary loss of it the moment she hung up. Connor listened with his head slightly tilted, receiving information through both his ears and his psychic sense simultaneously.

“She’s furious,” Connor confirmed. “I could feel it from here before you even walked in. The anger at him specifically — it’s...” He paused, choosing words carefully. “It’s considerable.”

“She was throwing things when I left,” Nathan said.

“She’s still throwing things,” Connor replied.

From the direction of Galena’s office, as if to confirm this, came another distant crash.

The Brotherhood absorbed that. Ricky uncrossed his arms. Erik straightened. Jace set the agriculture folder down on the nearest flat surface, the Neart Farmer’s Coalition reports, suddenly feeling very unimportant.

“She’s been under enormous pressure,” Samantha said carefully. She’d been watching Galena for months the same way she’d been watching Jace — quietly, attentively, filing away the small signs. “The sequester affects her, too. She’s managing the island, managing international relations, managing all of you—” She said it without accusation. “And now a fellow head of state insults her credibility to her face.”

“She keeps everything together,” Sidney said. He’d been standing near the wall, arms folded, his trainer’s eyes moving between each Brotherhood member the way they always did. “She’s allowed to break occasionally.”

“This is more than occasionally,” Nathan said. He sat down heavily on one of the benches. His hands were clasped together.

“She’s been different lately. More emotional. More easily overwhelmed. I thought it was the stress. I thought—”

He stopped.

Ricky was looking at him with a strange expression. The chaos goblin’s mind had done what chaos goblin minds always did — taken several unrelated pieces of information and arrived somewhere the rest of the room hadn’t reached yet.

“Nathan,” Ricky said slowly. “Could she be pregnant?”

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Nathan’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. His hands came apart. Somewhere behind those remarkable eyes, the most sophisticated mind in nine centuries of Aelinian history ran its full sequence — collected the data, cross-referenced the variables, attempted to reach a logical conclusion — and then produced nothing. A long moment of complete silence where an answer should have been. The mental equivalent of a process that had tried very hard and arrived nowhere useful whatsoever.

“She has been feeling sick lately,” he finally managed. “In the mornings. I thought it was stress. I assumed—”

“Nathan.” Samantha was already on her feet. “I’m going to call Doctor Oksana.”

———

Doctor Nancy Oksana arrived within the hour.

She took in the situation with the calm efficiency of a woman who had handled Brotherhood crises across many years, listened to Samantha’s summary with one eyebrow slightly raised, and picked up her medical bag without ceremony.

“I’ll speak with her alone,” she said. She looked at Nathan, who appeared to be operating at a frequency only he could hear. “Don’t fret. Give me an hour.”

“An hour,” Nathan repeated, as if committing it to memory would make the waiting more manageable.

“Go sit down,” Doctor Oksana said, not unkindly. “I’ll come find you.”

———

After Doctor Oksana disappeared down the corridor toward Galena’s office, the Great Hall settled into a different kind of waiting.

The Brotherhood talked about the new patrol rotations Sidney had been developing, about each man taking shifts to survey their respective counties, building surveillance skills, and establishing a more deliberate presence across the island. There was something in the room as they discussed it. Not quite enthusiasm. The ghost of it, maybe — the muted shape of men who remembered what it felt like to engage with a challenge and were trying to locate that feeling again from a considerable distance. Sidney watched them carefully. He could see what it was, and what it wasn’t. He filed it away.

Samantha sat beside Jace, her hand in his, and watched the same thing Sidney was watching. She could feel the tension in him — the Guardian’s constant low hum of responsibility, the exhaustion beneath it, the way he was present in the room but part of him was somewhere else. Somewhere dark and quiet, he hadn’t let her all the way in yet.

———

On the far side of the Great Hall, near the hearth, the aides had drawn together in the way people do when they need to say things that require a certain amount of quiet.

Yara spoke first. She’d known Jace in a way the others didn’t — had shared something with him during the Elixir incident that had created a bond between them that went beyond the professional. She knew how he carried things. She knew what he looked like when he was managing and what he looked like when he was barely managing, and she knew which one she was looking at across the room right now.

“He’s not sleeping,” she said quietly. “Not properly. I can see it every morning. The Guardian is exhausted down to the bone, and he won’t tell anyone how bad it is. More than one member of the Aelinian Congress has come to me in the past month. Separately. They wanted to know if something was wrong. They said it was beginning to feel different in the chamber when Jace is there — like the focus has gone out of him. Magistrates Kovar and Kellegrin both used the word distracted. For Jace.”

She let that sit for a moment.

“That’s not a word that belongs near him.”

Leo nodded slowly, his eyes on Connor across the room.

“Connor hasn’t been to the Conservatory in weeks. The Leirstenach Musical Conservatory sent a formal inquiry to Galena’s office. When Connor doesn’t show up to the institution he heads, people notice.”

He shook his head.

“The county can feel his absence. It’s a musical county, and its Governor has gone silent. That ripples outward.”

He paused, something quieter moving through his expression.

“He’s been playing his violin alone in his quarters. Late at night, when he thinks no one can hear. Short pieces. Nothing finished. Like he starts something and can’t find where it’s going.” He glanced at the others. “I’ve heard him stop mid-phrase and not start again.”

The hearth was very quiet for a moment.

“Ainmhithe has felt it too,” Colin said.

He served Ricky and knew the Sentinel’s energy better than any of them.

“Doctor Voss called Galena’s office. Said Ricky was unusually quiet during his last visit to the sanctuary. The panthers were off. The silver foxes weren’t themselves around him either. When the animals start worrying about him, things are serious.”

“The Farmer’s Coalition in Neart came to Galena as well,” Daria said.

She moved among so many people in the castle that she eventually heard everything.

“Practical people who concern themselves with crops, water, and livestock. " They came to the Prime Minister’s office to ask if the Warrior was unwell," she said, "and I’ve heard from the castle staff that the military officers have been talking." Quietly, but talking. They feel it in the ranks.”

The word melancholy didn’t usually describe Erik Hahn, and everyone standing at the hearth knew it.

Matthew pressed his hands together, saying, “Nathan went four days without sleep two months ago. Four days. I had to get Galena involved to make him take a sleeping draught. He was filling every hour, so he didn’t have to feel whatever he was feeling.”

He looked across the room at Nathan, sitting forward on the bench, staring at the corridor Doctor Oksana had disappeared into.

“He’s still doing it. Just more slowly.”

Joseph folded his arms. Erik’s aide was as straightforward as his Brotherhood member.

“And the studio,” he said simply. “When did any of us last hear music come out of that place? Not a note. Not one note since Connor's possession in New Zealand.”

The hearth crackled. None of them had an answer that felt adequate.

“The pregnancy,” Daria said finally. “If it’s true — that’s the first good news we’ve had in months.”

“It is,” Yara agreed. But her eyes were still troubled, still tracking Jace across the room. She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to. Every one of them understood what was underneath it.

———

Down the corridor, in Galena’s office — considerably quieter now, the evidence of her earlier performance scattered across the floor in the form of overturned furniture and shattered crystal — Doctor Nancy Oksana sat across from the Prime Minister of Aelin and asked her questions.

Fatigue. Nausea in the mornings. Emotional volatility beyond her normal considerable range. Appetite changes. The way certain smells had become unbearable. The way she’d wept two Tuesdays ago over something that, in retrospect, had not merited weeping.

Galena answered each question with the composure she’d managed to rebuild since her earlier performance, her hands folded in her lap, her sage green eyes steady on the doctor.

“I’ve been worried about Nathan,” she said while Nancy made notes, “About all of them. Since we came home from New Zealand.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Nathan went four days without sleep. Did you know that?”

“I could tell by looking at him,” Nancy said.

“The universities have noticed,” Galena continued, “Professors from both Daerdon and the Conservatory have come to my office separately, concerned about absences since New Zealand. The Farmer’s Coalition in Neart, the military officers, Magistrates Kovar and Kellegrin, about Jace in the chamber.”

She paused, thinking about everything that had transpired.

“And Doctor Voss from the Ainmhithe sanctuary told me something I hadn’t heard before — that the horses have started following Ricky along the fence lines when he visits. Standing close. The way horses do when they sense something is wrong with someone they love.”

She looked at Nancy steadily.

“When an entire island is quietly coming to my office to ask about five men, Nancy, something is very wrong. And when the horses know it too...”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“I plan to have a talk with Sidney about it,” Nancy said, “If the whole island sees it, it's a safe bet he’s been seeing it, too.”

She set her pen down.

“But right now, I’m here about you.” She took the test out of her bag. “Let’s find out what we’re dealing with.”

———

The waiting was its own kind of quiet.

Galena sat by her window and looked out over the rooftops of Harmonytis. The capital gleamed white in the afternoon light. Her island. Her home. Her people.

Their people.

She thought about Nathan’s face at breakfast that morning. The way he’d been watching her lately — that particular combination of adoration and quiet worry he tried to conceal and failed entirely at concealing. She thought about what it would mean. What would it change? What would it mean for all of them?

“It's ready,” Nancy said, handing the test to Galena.

Galena looked at the test.

For a long moment, she said nothing at all.

Then she straightened her spine, squared her shoulders, and looked at Nancy with the expression of a Prime Minister who had just received information that required immediate and deliberate action.

“Fetch Daria,” she said. “I need Nathan.”

———

Back in the Great Hall, the Brotherhood’s conversation about patrol rotations had wound down into a quieter territory — the kind of meandering that happened when tired men ran out of agenda and hadn’t yet found the energy to generate more. Sidney was watching. Samantha was watching. The aides by the hearth were watching.

Then Daria appeared in the doorway.

“Nathan,” she said simply. “She’s asking for you.”

Nathan was on his feet before Daria finished the sentence.

They didn’t wait long.

Nathan came back through the doors of the Great Hall with Galena on his arm and Doctor Oksana behind them both. Galena moved with the posture of a woman who had decided exactly how this moment was going to go. Her blonde hair was composed, her sage green eyes bright. Nathan looked like a man who had been struck by something enormous and was still trying to determine what it was.

He looked at his four brothers. At Samantha. At Sidney. At every aide standing near the hearth. He looked at all of them, and his voice, when it came, was quieter than anyone expected from a man with news this size.

“We’re having a baby,” he said.

The room exploded.

Erik was on his feet. Ricky grabbed Nathan by the shoulders. Connor’s emerald eyes blazed warm and alive, the first genuine, unguarded light in them in months. Jace went to Galena first — because Jace always knew exactly what the moment called for — and took both her hands in his.

“Congratulations, Prime Minister,” he said quietly. And there was so much warmth in those two words that Galena came very close to losing her composure entirely.

Samantha was crying. She was allowed.

Even Sidney allowed himself a rare and unguarded smile.

———

The celebration that followed was genuine and unrestrained in a way that nothing had been since New Zealand. The depression didn’t vanish — good news doesn’t work that way — but it was pushed back, crowded out by something real and warm and impossible to argue with. A child was coming. The Brotherhood was growing. The Seventh Generation was beginning the work of becoming something permanent.

It was in the warmth of that celebration, as the initial joy settled into something more conversational, that Ricky said it.

“Maybe we should take some time.” He said it genuinely, without carelessness. “From the music. Nathan and Galena have a child on the way. Jace and Samantha—”

He glanced at them.

“Recently married, new beginning...It’s all coming. Maybe this is the season for that. For building what comes next.”

Erik nodded slowly.

“Our families. Our legacy. That’s where our energy belongs now.”

Nathan was quiet, turning it over the way he turned everything over — methodically, genuinely.

“It makes sense,” he said finally. “We can always come back to it. The music will be there.”

Jace looked at his hands for a moment. Then he nodded.

“When we’re ready. When things settle.”

Connor said nothing.

He was sitting very still, his emerald eyes on the middle distance, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who had heard something he knew was wrong and couldn’t quite locate the words to say so. He nodded once, slowly, the way you nod when the room is moving in a direction and you don’t have the energy to stand against it. It was the quietest thing in the room. It was also the most alarming.

The word later moved through the room like a current beneath still water.

———

By the hearth, the aides had heard every word.

Yara’s expression had gone very still. Leo looked at Colin. Matthew closed his eyes briefly.

“They’re talking about setting it aside,” Colin said quietly.

“They’ve never set it aside,” Leo said.

His eyes were on Connor, who was still sitting with that expression — nodding along with words that didn’t fit him, agreeing with something that was visibly, fundamentally wrong for him.

“Not once in everything they’ve been through. Music is who they are. " Not what they do — who they are," he continued, his voice dropping, “Connor just agreed to walk away from it. Think about that for a moment.”

He said the name like it explained everything, because it did.

“We can’t let that happen,” Yara said. Her voice was quiet and absolute. “We have to find a way to reach them. Before later becomes the answer to everything.”

None of them knew yet how they were going to do it.

But tonight, a child was coming.

Tonight, that was enough.

For now.