The Midnight Star (The Young Elites #3)(75)

—but her expression tells him otherwise.

Magiano puts her down and holds her at arm’s length. He furrows his brow at her. “How are you here?” he exclaims. “Where’s Adelina?”

Violetta returns his stare with an unbearable look in her eyes. At that, Magiano’s smile wavers. He shakes her once. “Where’s Adelina?” he asks again.

“She made a deal with Moritas,” Violetta finally says, her voice cracking.

Magiano frowns, still not understanding. “We all made a deal with Moritas,” he replies. “I was there in the Underworld—we were there, with the gods and goddesses.” He looks to where Maeve and Lucent stand, still dazed, and pauses to hold up one palm. He turns his hand over. “Like stripping a layer of my heart.”

Violetta looks toward the sky. She can’t seem to bear meeting Magiano’s eyes. “No,” she says. “Adelina traded her life.”

Even when the realization hits Magiano, he doesn’t dare acknowledge it aloud. Instead, they all stand frozen in the snow, trying to grasp the weight of Violetta’s words, hoping that Violetta is wrong and that Adelina will somehow emerge from the forest and rejoin them. But she doesn’t.

Magiano gives an imperceptible nod, then releases Violetta. He slowly slides down to sit in the snow.

The first time Raffaele ever saw Adelina, it was a storm-wracked night that changed her life and, indeed, the world. He recalls looking down from a window in his Dalia lodging to see a girl with silver-bright hair, conjuring an illusion of darkness such that he had never seen. He remembers the day she first came to his chambers in Estenzia, when Enzo was still alive and she was still innocent, and the way she looked up at him with her uncertain, damaged gaze. He remembers her test, and what he said to Enzo that night. How long ago that had been. How he had judged her wrongly.

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.