Read Online Sovereign by Ted Dekker - Free Book Online

possible? Rom, who had tricked her into consuming the Keeper’s ancient blood, though there had not been enough for her to know its effects for long. And if there had been? So much might have been different. She herself might be living in hiding, serving a dead boy’s memory, and Saric might be standing here now.
    “How and where was he taken?”
    “My liege,” Corban said with a raised brow, “he came to us.”
    Came here? Willingly?
    He was a trickster still. A fanatic whose zeal knew no end. And now his foolishness had delivered him to her once again.
    She walked to the settee and retrieved her heavy velvet robe,fastening the hooks up the front with slender fingers. She stepped into the low-heeled brocade shoes waiting nearby and said only, “Come,” as she brushed by the kneeling alchemist.
    Rowan, Sovereign regent during her stasis when the usurper Jonathan had laid claim to the throne, had long sealed the old door to the subterranean chambers of the Citadel. Corban, at her command, had unsealed it. As they passed through the abandoned senate chamber to the ancient door, a strange sensation prickled her nape.
    In the first two decades of her life she’d only visited these chambers a handful of times, having found them morbid for their history of captivity, murder, and secrecy. Now, she didn’t need to wait for Corban to fumble with a switch to light the way; she knew the passageway well.
    But as they arrived at the heavy steel door of the ancient dungeons, she slowed. The last time she’d seen Rom, he’d been a headstrong lover who could plead passionately and persuasively. A fighter after the Nomad way. A protector—the leader of a cause and a people. And yet he was a slave to his convictions; leader only to an impotent and dying group of vagabonds.
    Corban caught up to her, breathing slightly more heavily than before, Ammon’s step light behind him. Her master alchemist was aging quickly. The day would come when he could no longer kneel before her. On such a day, she would force Corban to turn Ammon Dark Blood to her service. For now, she allowed him his illusion of mastery over another.
    He pulled the heavy steel door open, and she stepped inside. At first she didn’t smell the sterile odors of the vast laboratory that had taken up residence in this space, nor see the heavy glass sarcophagi of her newest prototypes lining the far wall. For a moment, she was back in the dungeons of fifteen years ago, where she had stolen in secret to meet a different prisoner: the old Keeper.
    But that moment quickly passed.
    She strode down the aisle of stainless laboratory tables, hardly noting the startled expressions of the alchemists who abruptly dropped to their knees. One of them fumbled with a glass vial that shattered on the ancient stone floor. Overhead, electrical fixtures gave off cold, brilliant light. For the first time in years, she did not drift toward the sarcophagi to admire the Dark Bloods within them.
    Instead, she walked directly to the back, where the smooth walls of the great lab gave way to the old hewn corridor. Here, the ancient cells remained untouched by time or history. Only the locks on the iron bars were new—as were the living samples kept behind them.
    “The one on the end, my liege,” Corban said, waving Ammon away.
    She slowed her step as she came to the last cell and then stopped.
    The man inside stood in the shadows at the back wall, arms folded at his waist. By the faint glow of the lone corridor light she could see enough to know it was him.
    Rom.
    But how he had changed. His hair was shot through with gray. He was thinner, his shoulders not as broad. He’d aged, far more than she. Even through the stubble on his face she could see evidence of scars, of the deepening furrows of time, of worry and hardship. The leader might remain, but the impetuous poet of their first meeting was gone.
    The last time she’d seen him, he had been sun-dark. The man before her was pale, pallid. So