Sovereign Hope

by Frankie Rose

Colors. There were so many colors. My hand flew to my mouth in amazement as I spun around, taking in the lush greens of the soft grass under my newly bare feet, and the fragile blue of the duck-egg sky overhead.

  There was the faint smell of cut grass on the breeze as it tugged lightly at my loose hair, and I knew I was actually breathing in fresh air. It tasted crisp, like biting into a green apple.

  This whole world was cast in a variety of greens: lime, jade, emerald, olive… Each individual leaf or blade of grass seemed to be shaded in a color entirely its own.

  I looked at Daniel, shocked that he could just stand there with a regretful look on his face and not be completely overwhelmed by the experience. A hundred yards behind him, a vast line of evergreen trees stretched from left to right for a mile before the land retracted on both sides, sweeping out of view. It gave way to the fast-running river that babbled beyond, streaming out like a shining satin ribbon in blue and grey and silver, with the occasional kiss of gold where the sunlight caught the surface and burned. There wasn’t a building or car in sight, let alone another person.

  Speechless wasn’t the right word to describe what I was feeling, but it was as far as I got. I turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees so I could take everything in—the wide, bowing horizon that seemed to go on forever, the small mountains in the distance, the way the sun heated my skin and warmed me through.

  Birdsong and faint cricket chirps rose in chorus, the air abuzz with activity. I was so used to the low hum of the generator and the drone of an underlying electrical current by now that I had almost forgotten those sounds existed.

  It suddenly occurred to me that inside this place, wherever it was, I wasn’t injured. My arm was free at my side instead of being strapped up in a sling. I rotated my shoulder, swinging my arm in circles back over my head, enjoying the freedom of the movement.

  Daniel gave me a moment to acclimatize and stretch. He kicked the scuffed toe of his worn black boot boyishly in the grass.

  “Is this us or him?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat and looked up at the sky. “Him. Come on. We gotta go.”

  “Huh?”

  “Aldan’s waiting for us. We need to go.” He gestured to the trees behind him.

  For a split second I panicked about what would happen if I followed him, but I rejected the thought. It was pointless. I was so totally out of my depth. The only thing I could do was just roll with it and hope for the best. Daniel’s face was determined. He was obviously ready for an argument, but when I nodded, walking towards the trees, he relaxed and pushed ahead to take the lead.

  It took less than five minutes to reach the tree line, but I relished every second of it, enjoying the delicious sensation of the grass tickling underfoot. As we drew closer, I made out a well-worn pathway cutting into the forest. Daniel headed for it so purposefully it was obvious he must have traveled down it many times before. He stopped at the edge of the forest’s perimeter to wait until I caught up.

  “His house is about five minutes down this track. Watch your step.” With that he set off into the trees. Being left behind wasn’t an option. He would only complain about having to wait for me, or worse still be unbearably smug if I managed to get lost. With that in mind, I followed him like a shadow.

  We’d only walked a couple of feet before the well-worn path became overgrown and wild. Thick vines snaked around the huge trunks of the old tamaracks and spruces and laced their way from tree to tree, mapping across the pathway in a dense carpet.

  “So, you feel like revealing where you disappeared to for six whole days?” I asked.

  Daniel cast a look over his shoulder that bordered on hostile. “Not really.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “Why bother asking, then, if you know I’m not going to tell you?”

  I pulled a face at his back. “Because I hoped maybe you’d be so stunned by my congenial attempts at conversation you’d tell me before you realized you’d let something about yourself slip. I thought maybe you’d gone to hang out with friends or something. You do have friends, right?”

  Daniel tensed. “I have friends.” He fell silent for a moment and then said, “Those faces you’re pulling are really attractive, by the way.”

  I pulled my tongue back in and pouted, wondering if he had eyes in the back of his head. “So you were with friends?”

  “No. I was working.”

  Working meant he was doing something Reaver-related. I sped up so that I was only a couple of paces behind him. “Has something happened? Does Elliot know I’m with you?”

  Daniel sighed and halted on the path. He turned to face me. “This isn’t going to be a pleasantly quiet walk, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Fine. I’ll tell you what I was doing. Then you have to shut up. Agreed?”

  Instead of agreeing, I arched an eyebrow. “I know I’m not that annoying. I have plenty of friends of my own who will testify to that.”

  A small smile played at the corners of his mouth. His eyes had taken on an odd shine that sparked the beginnings of irritation inside me. Only he could do that with just a look. “By plenty of friends, you mean Tessa Kennedy, right?” he said around the hint of his smile.

  “Yes, I mean Tess. Others, too.”

  “Like who?”

  I scowled. “Okay, look, if you knew any of the people at St. Jude’s, you’d understand why I’ve stuck with one really good friend. None of the others are worth knowing.”

  This seemed to amuse him even more. “You forget,” he said. “I’ve spent quite a lot of time watching you. That means I’ve also had the pleasure of spending quite a lot of time sitting in St. Jude’s parking lot. Some of those jock guys looked like they could be quite fun. If you’re into beating up freshmen and throwing up in swimming pools, that is.”

  “See.”

  He started walking again. “I’m not giving you a hard time because you have a best friend. It’s good to have someone you can trust implicitly like that.”

  “You mean like you do?” I laughed. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Daniel trusting anyone even slightly, let alone implicitly.

  He ducked under a low tree branch that blocked the path and fell into shadow for a moment, but I could practically hear him thinking. Eventually he spoke. “No. I learned my lesson where that was concerned.”

  The tone in his voice gave the definite impression he didn’t want to continue with that line of conversation, but I couldn’t help myself. “So, what? You’ve deleted your best friend from Facebook?”

  “Face what?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No point asking you if you have a Twitter account, then.”

  “Probably not.”

  He was close to one-syllable responses again. “Okay. Forget the friend thing,” I said, “Just tell me what you were up to while you were gone.”

  Daniel splayed his fingers up towards the canopy of the trees overhead, through which long javelins of golden sunlight speared into the shaded cover of the forest. “Sorry. Time’s up.”

  “What?”

  Before he could respond, I barrelled straight into his back.

  “Steady.” He turned and reached out to catch me. I took his hand for support but let go as quickly as I could, aware of the awkward look on his face. Skin-to-skin contact obviously wasn’t his favorite thing. As I met his gaze, he froze and then looked away.

  “This is it,” he said. His voice sounded hollow.

  I peeked around his shoulder to see the lone, run-down timber cottage sitting in the middle of the huge clearing beyond. Nerves that had been momentarily distracted suddenly voiced their concern: this was where Aldan lived. The man who had nearly killed me. One of them.

  The roof was clad with slate tiles that were cracked and weathered with age, and weeds grew in a mutinous uprising from the guttering. Dirty smoke trailed lethargically from a single chimney. The window frames were splintered, the paint blistered, and the cracks riddled wit
h thick black mildew. Everything about the place spoke of disrepair. In truth, it looked as though it shouldn’t even be standing. The garden, however, was a different story.

  Chantilly roses dripped from the trellises attached to the outer framework. In the flowerbeds, a riot of color ensued as snapdragons and gerberas vied for space with snow peas, miniature sunflowers, and tulips. It was like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairytale—maybe Little Red Riding Hood.

  But where’s the big, bad wolf?

  “Come on,” Daniel commanded, recovered from his fleeting unease. We set off towards the cottage, me trailing a little more hesitantly than before. We had covered half the distance across the clearing when the front door swung open and Aldan emerged, ducking to clear the doorframe. His hands were deep in his pockets, and he was wearing the same Motorhead t-shirt he had on in his room.

  When he stepped off the porch and into the sun, his skin looked fresh and tanned instead of sallow and covered with sickly sweat. His grey hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail with the odd strand blowing lightly about his face.

  In spite of his age, he was very well built. He looked strong and able. Confident. So dissimilar to the broken version of himself. This version of Aldan was healthy and full of life.

  He caught me studying him and flashed a wide, open grin, displaying a row of very white, perfect teeth. Definitely wolfish. I offered a hesitant smile in return. My pace slowed with trepidation as we neared one another. Daniel strode out and shook Aldan’s hand but was pulled off balance when the man drew him in for a rough embrace. He slapped him on the back and laughed deeply as Daniel struggled out of his grip.

  Then Aldan turned his gaze on me, and for the first time, I was no longer afraid of him. There was a warmth and kindness that radiated from his shining blue eyes, and I found myself trapped by the good humor of his expression. The roadmap of lines that traced lightly around his mouth and eyes were testimony to his broad smile, which traveled to every part of his face. It was obvious he was genuinely pleased to see me.

  He was still huge, though, and it was tough not to be intimidated. When he spoke, his voice was a rich rumble that emanated from deep within his chest.

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Farley.” His accent was like something off the BBC, though it was mixed with just enough of a northern English twang to make him sound like he might be a bit of a scoundrel. He offered me an enormous hand. I looked down at it, concerned. Not wanting to seem rude, I timidly placed my own hand in his. He pumped my arm up and down in greeting, laughing at the look on my face.

  “What’s the matter, love?”

  It took me a second to pluck up the courage to speak. “Well, I was a little concerned that if I touched you…” I trailed off.

  His face changed instantly, clouding over. “That’s just my defense system against the outside world,” he said. The sparkle in his eyes twinkled out. “I’m terribly sorry about hurting you,” he apologized. “I don’t get many visitors, you know. Daniel and Aggie know exactly how to let me know they’re coming to see me. These days anyone else unlucky enough to make contact with me gets a nice little jolt.” He finished his sentence by demonstrating a wild shock through his body, causing a few more strands of hair to fall loose from his ponytail.

  I couldn’t help but smile at his playacting, but it fell as soon as I saw the look on Daniel’s face. “That’s really okay,” I told Aldan. “I know it was an accident.” It wasn’t an outright lie. I really did believe it now, after only a few moments of standing with him. He really didn’t need to know that this was a recent development, and that before I’d been convinced he’d tried to kill me.

  “She nearly died.” Daniel’s voice was quiet and strained. It took the wind out of me. Aldan paused as he went to say something in return and then decided against it. He rested his hand on Daniel’s shoulder, who seemed so much smaller next to Aldan, as if his personality and confidence was muted around this powerful man.

  “But she didn’t,” Aldan said simply. The old man came back to life and clapped his hands together, making us both jump.

  Daniel’s sullen mood was confusing. It was difficult to worry about it for too long, though. Mainly due to Aldan, who boomed, destroying the awkward silence that had fallen over us like a suffocating blanket. “Who wants something to eat?” he cried, setting off towards the porch. We both stood there uncomfortably for a second before I could bear it no longer and jogged after Aldan, abandoning Daniel to continue staring at the floor.

  Aldan’s boots clomped up the wooden steps that led to the veranda, and he scrubbed them off in a slow sweeping motion on the welcome mat. It was ironic, I thought, given that he didn’t receive many guests. He smiled at me as he did so, resting his hand on the doorjamb.

  “Well you most certainly are a fine-looking young lady,” he teased. “I see what all this calamity is about now.” I blushed at his compliment, unsure which calamity he was referring to. “Did you know,” he continued, “that you and I are very distant relations?” I shook my head. “It’s true,” he laughed. “Come in and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He swung open the screen door and walked through, waiting for me to enter before allowing it to slam shut. I turned back to see Daniel still standing where we had left him. His back was to the cottage, his hands deep in his pockets, as he stared up at the sky at nothing in particular.

  “I think we might just let him cool his heels out there for a moment,” Aldan tutted, drawing me into the kitchen beyond. It reminded me of my nana Jean’s kitchen. Even the assault of smells—homemade bread and coffee—teased out lost, comforting memories. The huge wooden table that dominated the room was almost exactly the same as the one I’d played on as a child, racing my cousin’s toy cars up and down its length and launching them off the ends. There were a thousand marks that scarred its surface, telling a tale of much use. I ran my hand over the smooth, worn wood, enjoying the familiarity of its texture.

  Aldan sat down in the high-backed wooden chair at the head of the table and sighed, pulling out another to his left so that I could join him. Being so afraid of him felt rather foolish now, as we listened to the cicadas buzz outside in the grass. After a while the old man gave me a slow, wry smile.

  “Well. You’re here for a reason. I guess I’d better start on this story. It’s a long one, after all.”

  “Sure.” If intestines could knot themselves, mine would have been triple-tied. I was finally going to get some answers.

  Aldan cleared his throat and leaned forwards, contemplating a small groove in the table. “You ought to tell me if there’s something you don’t understand, or if I’m going too fast, okay? I’m not very good at these things.”

  “No problem.”

  “Where would you like me to start?”

  “The beginning?” He could probably do a better job of untangling the events of the past six months than I could.

  He blew out his cheeks. “From the beginning would be a very long story. Maybe I’ll summarize?”

  That seemed appropriate. I nodded, waiting for him to begin.

  “I am the tenth of the Immortals. There are twenty-eight after me. Seems pretty funny when I think of it like that. There’s my good-for-nothing son and his after him, and so on and so forth, all the way down to Elliot. So you see we are very, very distantly related. Just don’t call me granddad—makes me feel old.” His laughter was like steel on stone, but I couldn’t help but laugh along. It seemed like the polite thing to do, anyway.

  “Okay,” he continued, “I’ll save the middle bit for another time. I suppose it was 1860 when I found Daniel.”

  The look on my face must have been telling because Aldan paused. One hundred and fifty three years. That horrible, sinking feeling returned, making me feel unreasonably miserable.

  “Sorry, carry on,” I said, attempting a poker face.

  “Yeah, that’s right. 1860. Anyway, I found Daniel laid out for dead in a partic
ularly nasty backstreet in London. The Seven Dials; a pit of vice and poverty. He was covered in all kinds of dirt and filthy rags, which wasn’t that unusual in those days, but anyway. He’d been there for a few days at least, that much was obvious. He was bruised all over and smelled like he might already be dead. He couldn’t have opened his eyes even if he’d tried. He’d had the living daylights knocked out of him, and I could see as plain as day that he wasn’t going to live. So I took him.

  “I was different back in those days. I was full of Immortal crap, high on my own self-worth. Anyway, I thought to take him and bring him back to life, you see? Perhaps keep him as a sort of pet. He was so tiny. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

  “I was due to set sail to America in less than a week, and I decided I had enough time to repair him and pass him off as my son or nephew. I went straight back to my hotel and had him brought in through the service entrance. They bathed him and tidied him up. He was the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. I put my palms on him and passed some of myself into him. I had never seen something buck and fight against life so hard before. It’s almost like he didn’t want it. But there you go…that’s him.”

  I was lost. “You passed some of yourself into him?”

  “Well, yes. I’m not proud of it, but back in those days I had plenty of extra life force floating around. All an Immortal needs to do is touch a living thing and they can take life or give it, as simple as that. When an Immortal deigns something worthy enough to give it life, all he’s doing is depleting his store a little. And back in those days, I had a huge storehouse, if you know what I mean.

  “You can take a little here and there from people and they barely notice the difference. But what truly makes you powerful is when you take it all. When you sap every last spark of vitality out of a thing, that’s what gives you the rush—the indomitable strength to take whatever you want.”

  I shuddered.

  “Oh, you’re right, sweetheart. It’s a horrible thing. I killed a lot of people before I changed my ways. But that’s a different story. One I don’t plan on getting too lost in right now.” I nodded, not sure I wanted to get too lost in that story, either. He rubbed his fingertips on the tabletop and rocked gently back on his chair. “So Daniel got better either way. He didn’t speak for days and wouldn’t do what he was told. I caught him trying to escape more times than I care to remember. He would sit there in silence with his knees drawn up to his chest, backed into a corner, glowering at me like he knew what kind of bad I was. There was something in that look of his that made me feel like I was being judged and coming up rather short.

  “I came back to the room one night and found him sitting there waiting for me. He gave me this look of complete disgust. I tell you now, if it had been anyone else, I would have found an interesting and exquisitely painful way of sending them to their maker. Instead, I just sank down into a chair and started sobbing like a baby. I’d been alive for over eleven hundred years by that point. It didn’t matter what people thought about me. People didn’t register as anything more than a means to an end in my book. But something in this child’s face brought all that crashing down around me. I despised him for it.” The quietness in Aldan’s voice portrayed the heaviness of the memories for him as he continued to rock back and forth. He sucked on his teeth sharply, looking me squarely in the eye.

  “Do you know what he did then?” His intelligent eyes searched my face as if I might already know the answer to his question. I had no idea. “I was sitting there crying and wailing, and I couldn’t understand why, and then all of sudden I felt something touch my shoulder. I looked up, so stunned I couldn’t believe my eyes, and he was standing there with his hand on me. Those wild eyes of his were fixed straight on mine as if to say, ‘it’s all going to be just fine.’ Right there and then I saw a grown man in that little boy. That very moment I vowed I’d never take something that didn’t belong to me again. I promised him. I didn’t want to let him down, you see. And I haven’t since.”

  He got up and went to the fridge, pouring out two glasses of orange juice. I was busy thinking. So Aldan had saved Daniel’s life, and in return Daniel had given him back his conscience.

  “It was a day or two later when he finally spoke to me. He asked me if I knew where his little brother was. He was so desperate. It felt cruel not to help him. I went out and asked around. It took me all of an hour to learn what had happened. It turned out his mother had come home in a drunken craze a few nights before and drowned the little boy in a bathtub. The mob had caught up with her, and she’d been hanged that morning. Apparently, a pretty big crowd had gathered to send her off. She was a nasty drunk. All the women in the back streets knew about her. They told me how she was constantly beating her children. No one knew where her oldest boy was.” He took a sip of his juice.

  His mother killed his little brother? It was too horrible to think about. “What did you tell Daniel?”

  Aldan laughed. “Not the truth, I can tell you. I just didn’t have it in me. I told him a horrible lie that I still regret to this day. I told him his mother had taken Jamie and sailed off to America to start a new life. It was pretty plain that he would want find him, so he was raring to go when I suggested he come with me a few days later.

  “It took me a long time to work up to telling him what I knew, and years longer still for him to forgive me. But by that point he was angry with me for other reasons. We’d joined the Reavers in the Tower, and they didn’t take kindly to Daniel. They didn’t like how I treated him or why I refused to kill people anymore. Whenever I had my back turned, this particularly nasty piece of work would snatch him up and lock him in this tiny wooden chest. They would weight it and then throw it in the ocean. See, Daniel wouldn’t die because of what I had given to him, but the experience of drowning is just as terrifying all the same. Not being able to breathe or scream out… When I found out what was happening, I lost my mind.

  “By this stage I hadn’t killed anybody in nearly a hundred years. I was ready to make an exception for that evil monster, but Danny wouldn’t let me. I broke every bone in the bastard’s body instead. No one bothered Daniel again after that.”

  “Wouldn’t Daniel would have been grown by then, though? Agatha said that the people of the Four Quarters aged much slower than regular people. I know he’s not like them, but even so, surely it wouldn’t have taken that long for him to grow into an adult?”

  A flicker passed over Aldan’s face. He looked at me blankly, as though I had misunderstood some vital part of his story. “There’s no point comparing the two. Just because I gave him the gift of life doesn’t make him anything like people from the Quarters. He’ll never be like them. Or me. He’s like you.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Prophesied