Authors: Marie Lu
Raffaele looks to each of the rulers in turn. They nod once in silence, giving him some sort of unspoken permission. As they do, Tamouran soldiers approach me from where they had been standing guard around the edges of the chamber. I stiffen as they draw nearer. Raffaele tilts his head at me, then starts walking to the chamber's entrance. “Come with me,” he says.
Enzo shifts where he stands, as if he would accompany us tooâbut he stops as Raffaele shakes his head. “His power affects yours far too much,” Raffaele says to me. “You need to stand alone for this.”
Others follow in his wake. I'm pulled to my feet by soldiers, unchained from the floor, and guided along. We exit the chamber and enter a hallway, then leave the recesses of the palace and head down in the direction of the shoreline. The pressure on my chest eases, and I sag in relief as walls and hills come between the tether binding Enzo to me. It is a dark night; the only light comes from two slivers of moonlight I
can see peeking through the clouds. The storm Sergio had raged over the oceans has dispersed by now, but the scent of rain still hangs heavy in the air, and the grasses are wet and glistening. I crane my neck, searching. Somewhere out there on the waves are my ships and Sergio. I wonder what he's thinking. I wonder where Magiano has been taken.
We keep going until we finally hit the shoreline. Here, Raffaele comes over to us and murmurs something at the soldiers. They pull me forward toward the water. I have a sudden feeling that they intend to drown me in the oceanâthat is what this whole ritual is about. I struggle for a moment, but it's no use.
I stagger forward. To my surprise, Raffaele comes to my side. We are standing on wet sand now, and I look on as the waves head toward us. The water and sea foam rush up the beachâI suck in my breath as cold water runs over my feet. Raffaele lets it rush across his legs too, soaking the bottom of his robes.
Instantly, I feel it again. I'd gotten only a quick flash of the ocean's strange darkness during the battle, and then I'd left it behind. But now, with the world around me quiet enough that I can concentrate, I can feel the death in the water. The ocean pulls away, then rushes forward again. Again, it soaks the bottom half of my legs. Again, I gasp at the cold energy swirling in the depths.
Raffaele looks at me, his eyes shining different colors in the night. “You, more than anyone, should be familiar with this energy.”
I frown. The feeling turns my stomach, nauseating me with its wrongnessâbut at the same time, I realize that I look forward to each surge of the ocean, hoping for another dose of this dark energy. “Yes,” I say automatically, almost against my will.
Raffaele nods. “Do you remember the day when I first tested your powers?” he asks. “I recall your alignments well. Ambition and passion, yes . . . but most of all, fear and fury. You remain the only person I've met birthed from both of the angels that guard the Underworld. Your energy is tied to the Underworld more than anyone I know.”
This power I feel in the waterâthis is energy from the Underworld.
Raffaele's expression is grave. “The Elites exist
only
because of an imbalance between the mortal and immortal realms. The blood fevers themselves were ripples in our world caused by an ancient tear between those realms. Our existence defies the natural order, defies Death herself. Queen Maeve bringing Enzo back has only accelerated the process. There is a merging of the two realms that is slowly poisoning everything in our world.”
I shudder. The water rushes forward again, and I close my eye, both repulsed by and drawn to the dark energy.
“The reason I persuaded the Tamouran royals to release you, on condition of a truce,” Raffaele goes on, his eyes trained on the night's horizon, “is because we need your help to fix this. Tamoura is already feeling the effects along her
shores. If we do not do something soon, then not only will all Elites perish, but so will the world.”
I stare out at the horizon, unwilling to let Raffaele be right. Of course it's ridiculous. “What do my alignments have to do with any of it?” I finally say.
Raffaele sighs and bows his head. “I think we had better take you to your sister.”
I have tried every root, leaf, and medicine I know, but nothing has worked on any of my patients. Only two have survived, both with discolored hands. You mentioned a six-year-old boy with scars on his face. Does he still live?
â
Letter from Dtt. Marino Di Segna to Dtt. Siriano Baglio, 2 Juno, 1348
V
ioletta.
I hardly recognize her.
Her skin, once a rich, beautiful olive, looks ashen whiteâand deep purple, bruise-like markings cover her arms and legs. They even run up along her neck. Her eyes are sunken with illness, and her body is much thinner than I remember. She stirs at the commotion of us entering her chamber. I wonder if she can still sense our powers close by.
Raffaele walks to her side, then sits carefully at the edge of her bed. After a while, I draw near too. Perhaps this isn't my sister at all, but some girl they've mistaken as her. Violetta does not have markings. She does not have pale skin. This can't be her. I move closer until I am staring straight down at her face, studying her features. Her hair is damp, her skin
dotted with sweat. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, as if she can't quite catch her breath.
Look what they've done,
the whispers hiss, and I turn on Raffaele.
“You did this to her,” I say in a low, ominous voice. My chains clink together. The soldiers that line the walls of Violetta's chamber draw their crossbows, the arrows clicking as they aim at me. “These bruises on her arms and legs”âI pause to glance again at the markings that scar herâ“you had her beaten, didn't you? You
are
using her against me.”
“You know that is not the truth,” Raffaele replies. And even though I don't want to believe him, I can see in his eyes that he's right. I swallow, trying to push down my own fright and revulsion at her appearance.
“How long has Violetta looked like this?” I ask.
I'd hoped that Raffaele wouldn't be able to sense the shift in my energy, but he tilts his head at me in a subtle, familiar gesture, a slight frown on his lips. “When I wrote you that letter, the markings had appeared on her just the night before.”
It's been barely more than a month since then. “It's impossible for her to have changed this quickly.”
“Our powers affect each of us in different ways, often opposite that which gives us strength,” Raffaele replies, remaining infuriatingly calm. “Violetta's abilities kept her immune from the blood fever's markings, just as Lucent's powers of flight made her light and strong. Now it has reversed. The meeting of the immortal world with our own is poisonous.”
My stare returns to Violetta. She shifts, as if able to sense my gaze, and as I look on, her face turns on the pillow toward me. Her eyelids flutter. Then she opens her eyes for a moment, and they focus on me. I gape at the color of her irises. They are
gray
, as if the rich, dark colors that have always been there were now slowly fading away. She says nothing.
I feel a wave of disgust. Raffaele can't possibly feel pity for Violetta's conditionâhis compassion always comes with a price, a request.
Because we need your help,
he says. Just as he'd needed me when I was a member of the Dagger Society and then cast me out when I no longer suited him.
So why should I help a liar and a traitor? After everything the Daggers have put me through, does Raffaele honestly think I am going to fight for their lives just because he is using my dying sister against me? I am the White Wolf, Queen of the Sealandsâbut to Raffaele, I am merely
useful
again, and that has made him interested in me once more.
One of the other Daggers speaks before I can. It's Lucent, and she rubs her arms incessantly as if trying to stave away an ache. “This is preposterous,” she mumbles. “The White Wolf is not going to help us, not even for her sister's sake. Even if she does, she'll betray us, as she always has. She's interested only in herself.”
I glare at her, and she glares back. Only when Raffaele gives a firm nod to her does she look away, cross her arms, and let out a grunt. Raffaele turns back to me. “You know the myth of Laetes, yes? The angel of Joy?”
“Yes.” The halls of the Fortunata Court had been adorned
with paintings of beautiful Laetes falling from the heavens. Teren once recited it to me, when I'd confronted him in the Inquisition Tower and taken Violetta from him.
Do you remember the story of Denarius casting Laetes from the heavens, condemning him to walk the world as a man until his death sent him back among the gods?
It makes me think of Magiano and his alignment to joy, that Magiano is probably somewhere down in the dungeons right now, where I can't reach him.
“The stars and the heavens move at a different pace than we do,” he explains. “Something that happens to the gods will not be felt in our world for generations. Joy's fall to the mortal world tore the barriers between the immortal and the mortal. It was his fall that caused the ripples of blood fever that swept across the land. That birthed the Elites.” Raffaele sighs. “The ever-shifting silver of your hair. The sapphire strands in mine. My eyes. These are lingering touches of the gods' hands on us, blessings from them. And it is the poison that is killing us.”
The ghost of Teren's words comes back to me so strongly that I feel like I am standing once again in the Inquisition Tower, staring up into his ice-colored eyes.
You are an abomination. The only way to cure yourself of this guilt is to atone for it by saving your fellow abominations. We are not supposed to exist, Adelina. We were never meant to be.
And suddenly, I know why Raffaele needs my help. I know it before he can say it.
“You need my help to close the breach between our worlds.”
“Everything is connected,” Raffaele says, a phrase that
Enzo once said to me when he was alive. “We are connected to the point where Laetes fell, where immortality meets mortality. And in order to fix what has gone wrong, we need to seal the place that birthed us, with the alignments that we each bear.”
We need to give back our powers.
“We are the children of the gods,” Raffaele finishes, confirming my fear. “Only we can enter the immortal realm as mortals.”
“And if I refuse?” I reply.
Raffaele's quiet nature has always both calmed and unnerved me. He lowers his eyes. “If you don't,” he replies, “then in a matter of a few years, the poison of the immortal world will kill everything.”
I look back down at my sister. Violetta's body, collapsing under the weight of her powers. Lucent's hollowing bones. Sergio's eternal thirst and exhaustion. Teren's never-healing wounds.
And me.
My worsening illusions, my nightmares within nightmares, the whispers in my head. Even now, they are chittering, chittering, chittering.
“No,” I say. The voices hiss at my sister's body.
You owe her nothing,
they growl, stirring now and climbing out of their caves.
Raffaele watches me. “You are running out of time,” he says. “She will not last long like this.”
I glare at him. “And what makes you think I care if she dies?”
“You still love her. I can sense it in you.”
“You always think you know everything.”
“Well? Don't you?”
“No.”
Raffaele narrows his eyes. “Then why come to Tamoura to find her? Why ask for her? Why hunt for her all over the world, as you conquer your new lands?”
At that, the whispers turn into shouts.
Because she doesn't get to turn her back on me.
I lash out so suddenly with my illusions that the archers along the walls don't even have time to react. My powers wash across the others in a waveâ
knives in your hearts, twisting, barbed, tearing
âbarely within my control. I can even feel the pain of it myself, as if it had turned its head on me too and sought my own heart. Lucent gasps in agony, stumbling backward with wide eyes, while Raffaele clutches his chest with one hand, turning pale. The crossbows draw back.
“Quickly!” Raffaele manages to call out.
Something heavy hits me.
Not an arrow,
I manage to think before I'm knocked to the floor. All the air rushes out of me. I struggle to breathe, and in this instant, my powers flicker out, scattering from my grasp.
Someone has managed to throw a net,
I realize dizzily. No, it had dropped from the ceilingâRaffaele had guessed how I might react. Rough hands grab my arms and yank them painfully behind my back. I struggle to gather my power again and strike, but the whispers have grown so loud and disorienting that I cannot focus.
Leave this place and finish your conquest,
the whispers snap.
Show him why he will regret what he's done to you.
Violetta stirs
restlessly in her bed, oblivious to our presence and lost in some nightmare of her own.
I hate you.
I throw the thought at her, willing her to hear it. I think of how she had cowered in our childhood, unable to protect me, and how she had turned on me before leaving my side, trying to take away something that is mine by right. I try to hold these images in my head as Raffaele orders the Tamouran soldiers to take me away. I have become so good at remembering these moments during the past year, letting them strengthen meârecounting Violetta's failures in order to push my power to new heights.
But now, the images that flood my head are of a different sort. I see Violetta and me running through the tall grasses behind our old estate, hiding on summer afternoons in the shade of giant trees. There's Violetta wrapping her arms around me on a moonlit floor, holding me as I sobbed for Enzo. And Violetta curling up beside me during a thunderstorm, trembling. Her hands in my hair, braiding flowers between the locks.
I don't want to see these. Why can I not clear them from my vision?
If she dies, you lose yourself.
This time it is not the voice of my whispers . . . it is my own voice.
If you do not go, you will die too.
As the soldiers force me to my feet, Raffaele takes a step closer. “We were never meant to exist, Adelina,” he says. “And we will never exist again. But we cannot take the entire
world with us.” He meets my gaze. “No matter how it has wronged us.”
Then he nods at the soldiers. I try to lash out again, this time with Raffaele in my sights, but something strikes the back of my head, and the world goes dark.