Raffaele looks around the clearing, searching for one last figure. He looks high and low, hoping for footprints in the snow or shadows in the forest line. He wishes he could still sense the energy of the living, could pinpoint where she is. But even then, he knows that he would arrive at the same answer as the others.
Adelina is gone.
After she was gone, I sheathed her sword at my belt, draped her cloak over my shoulders, carried her heart in my arms, and, somehow, went on.
—The Journey of a Thousand Days, by Lia Navarra
Violetta Amouteru
My name is Violetta. I am the sister to the White Wolf, and I am the one who returned.
It is a quiet journey back through the Karra passages. Raffaele had said that time in the immortal realms passes differently from time in our own world. What felt like a flash of lightning to us had been months for Maeve’s soldiers—but even so, they stayed, faithfully waiting for her all this time. I look on as she smiles and greets her troops, as they cheer her in turn. Raffaele stands with the rest of us, his expression solemn and sober. Our return did not come easily.
There is an empty space between Magiano and me that pains both of us, a lingering silence that neither of us can break. We walk without talking. We look without seeing. We eat without tasting. I want to say something to him, to reach out to him during evenings around our fire, but I don’t know what. What difference would it make? She is gone. All I can do is turn my eyes skyward, starward, searching for my sister. Time may be different here, but my goddess made me a promise. A bargain of our own. I search and search the skies until sleep claims me, until I can search again the next night, and the night after that. Magiano watches me quietly when I do. He does not ask what I am searching for, though, and I cannot bear to tell him. I am too afraid to raise his hopes.
One starlit midnight, as we at last begin our voyage back to Kenettra, I find Magiano standing alone on deck, his head bowed. He stirs, then looks away as I join his side. “The ship is too still,” he mutters, as if I had asked him why he is awake. “I need some waves to sleep properly.”
I shake my head. “I know,” I reply. “You are searching for her too.”
We stand for a moment, staring out at the stars mirrored in the calm seas. I know why Magiano doesn’t look at me. I remind him too much of her.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, after a long pause.
“Don’t be.” A small, sad smile touches his lips. “She chose it.”
I turn away from him to study the constellations again. They are particularly bright this evening, visible even as the three moons hang in a great and golden triangle. I find Compasia’s Swan, the delicate curve of stars standing out in the blackness like torchlight. I had knelt at the feet of my goddess, begging with a voice choked by tears, and she had made me a promise. Had she not? What if none of it were real? What if I dreamed it?
Then, Magiano straightens beside me. His eyes focus on something far away.
I look too. And I finally see what I have been waiting for.
There, prominently in the sky . . . is a new constellation. It is made of seven bright stars, alternately blue and orange-red, forming a slender pair of loops that aligns with Compasia’s Swan.
My hands cover my mouth. Tears well in my eyes.
When Compasia took pity on her human lover, she saved him from the drowning world and placed him in the sky, where he turned to stardust.
When Compasia took pity on me, she reached down into the Underworld, touched the shoulder of Moritas, and asked her forgiveness. Then Compasia took my sister in her arms and placed her in the sky, where she, too, turned to stardust.
Magiano looks at me, his eyes wide. It seems as if he already, somehow, understands.
“My goddess made me a promise,” I whisper.
Only now do I realize that I have never seen him cry before.
In the stories, Compasia and her human lover would descend each night from the stars to walk the mortal world, before vanishing with the dawn. So, together, we stare at the sky, waiting.
Over the span of a few months, the color of Magiano’s remarkable golden eyes fade into hazel. His pupils stay round, unchanging. Raffaele’s sapphire strands grow out raven black, blending in with the rest of his hair. His jewel-toned eyes, one the color of honey under sunlight, settle into an identical pair of emerald green. Maeve’s hair, half black and half gold, gradually becomes pale blond. Michel’s nails, once striped deep black and blue, have changed into the color of flesh. Sergio’s eyes transition from gray to a forest brown. And the dark, swirling lines on Lucent’s arm fade, lighter and lighter, until one day they are gone altogether.
The Young Elites were the flash of light in a stormy sky, the fleeting darkness before dawn. Never have they existed before, nor shall they ever exist again.
Across Estenzia, Kenettra, and the rest of the world, the last touches of the blood fever and the immortal world fade, leaving little difference between the marked and the unmarked. But you can never truly forget. I can hear it in our voices, the sound of another age, the memories of darker times, when immortal power walked the world.
Six months after we return to Kenettra, when twilight is descending on the day, I stop in the palace gardens to see Magiano swinging two canvas packs over the back of a horse. He pauses when he notices me. After a brief hesitation, he bows his head.
“Your Majesty,” he says.
I fold my hands in front of me and approach him. I knew this day would come, although I did not think he would leave so soon. “You can stay, you know—” I start to say, knowing my words will be in vain. “There is always a place for you in the palace, and the people love you. If there is something you want, tell me, and it will be yours.”