“Twelve things plus one more thing connecting them,” I said. “It’s on all the tattoos.”
“Twelve plus one more.” Stellan looked up from the paper in his hand. “The One true ruler.”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
Jack stood abruptly. “In all the lore about the mandate, I’ve never heard of the One being someone outside of the Circle. That can’t be what he means. It wouldn’t make any sense.”
“It would mean they’re wrong about the mandate is an understatement.” I took his place on the cot and pulled my knees to my chest. “It’s not impossible.”
“It’s not impossible.” Jack paced. “But the mandate is about the twelve Diadochi. Some random person wouldn’t make sense.”
He was right. It wouldn’t.
Stellan had been leaning against the doorframe, but now he stood. “Unless it’s not a random person. Like if the Diadochi’s thirteenth was Alexander the Great himself.”
My feet fell to the floor with a thud. Not a random thirteenth person. The ruler of the twelve. The one who held them together. Like the twelve knights of the round table, and King Arthur. The twelve apostles and Jesus.
But if Alexander was the thirteenth for the Diadochi, if his was a thirteenth family of the Circle, then Mr. Emerson must mean the One we were looking for now was . . . from Alexander’s bloodline?
“But he didn’t have an heir,” Jack said, like he was following the exact same thought pattern. “Alexander’s bloodline died out immediately.”
“Are you sure?” I said, my head spinning with ideas. “Maybe that’s the missing piece. That’s why nothing’s fit together yet.”
If somebody from Alexander the Great’s own bloodline was the One, how would anyone find him? Would the Circle even accept him?
Probably not. He’d be in great danger . . . just like Mr. Emerson had said.
“Mr. Emerson said in that message he’d found something about the One. Like he was maybe talking about a person?” I said slowly. My gaze flicked to Jack, who paled. “And that he’s been protecting him.”
Stellan snorted. “Not even you two could be that dumb.”
Just as quickly, the shock fell off Jack’s face. “I remember that part of the message. He said he brought in whoever it was,” he said to me, ignoring Stellan. “I didn’t meet Fitz until I’d been with the Saxons for years.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Of course. Okay. Dumb idea anyway. If that’s even what he meant, which it might not be, he probably has him hidden somewhere far away.” Still, my heart hadn’t slowed down yet. It felt like we were so close. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
. . . the One who walks through fire and does not burn . . . the new Achilles . . . the One true ruler . . .
I kept coming back to the walk through fire thing. If we knew what it meant, it might give us some ideas. Jack had said it probably meant a “trial by fire,” like that they were good in a crisis. But what kind of crisis?
I sat back and closed my eyes. Fire. Trial by fire. He lives, Napoleon had said, with pictures of flames. Make the One who walks through fire and doesn’t burn . . . Burn . . .
When I opened my eyes again, they flicked not to Jack, but to Stellan, who leaned against the wall, his back to us, studying the book again. He hadn’t put his shirt back on yet. But now I wasn’t looking at the lines of muscle down his arms. Instead, my eyes were drawn to his tattoo again, and the scars under it.
Scars from a fire.
I read a lot of fantasy when I was younger. In some of those stories, the term trial by fire wasn’t metaphorical. To choose the next ruler, candidates would walk through a fire, and the one who didn’t die was special.
He was the one who literally walked through fire and didn’t get burned.
I snapped out of my trance to find Jack watching me stare at Stellan. “The new mandate line,” I said. “Repeat it for me again.”
“‘The One, the true ruler, the new Achilles,’” he said.
Achilles.
Achilles was invincible, except for a spot on the back of his heel. When struck there, he could be injured, or even killed. That’s where we got the term Achilles heel, because it was his only weak point.
And now, thinking in terms of Alexander’s bloodline, I remembered hearing that one of the legends about Alexander the Great was that the night before he was born, his mother had a dream about her baby being consumed by fire and coming out unscathed. Walks through fire and does not burn. All his life, Alexander cheated death so many times that people started saying he was invincible, too. Even that he was descended from Achilles. In fact, some followers called him Achilles.
The new Achilles. Alexander’s bloodline. Does not burn.
I looked at Stellan’s scars again. Strange scars, unlike any burn I’d ever seen. That weren’t really like burns at all.
All the shouting voices in my head coalesced into a perfectly in-tune chorus, singing a song that didn’t make any sense.
I had to check anyway, to prove my absurd hypothesis wrong.
“Take off your shoes real quick,” I said to Stellan. “And your socks.”
Now both of them looked at me like I had lost my mind, and maybe I had.
“If you’re trying to get me naked, there are easier ways to do it,” Stellan quipped, and then with a sideways glance at Jack, “and more appropriate times . . .”
“Will you shut up and take your shoes off?” I must have sounded serious, because he sat down on the cot and did it. I motioned for him to prop his feet up.
Holy mother-freakin’ hell oh wow oh no.
“Oh my God,” I said aloud.
Stellan had a burn. Not a quasi-scar like the translucent ones on his back, but angry, puckered skin, scarred like every old burn I’d ever seen. And it was on his right heel.
CHAPTER 38
I don’t believe it for a second.” Jack paced the room.
At any other time I might have appreciated the irony. I’d spent the last few days learning about a world-controlling secret society, and he didn’t believe me?
Stellan stared at his foot. “After the fire, the doctors called it a miracle I’d lived,” he said slowly. “My sister, too. They’d never seen anything like our scars.”
I thought of something. “Your parents. If it’s a bloodline thing, one of your parents would have it. One of them wouldn’t have died.”