Giulietta’s eyes harden at that. “Do you insult me?”
Teren swallows, then continues, “It’s true that I am unworthy of you. But you forgave my abomination in return for my loyalty—and I will carry that loyalty with me to my grave. Please, Giulietta—”
Giulietta holds up a hand, and the Inquisitors behind her tighten their grips on their crossbows. Teren stands with
his shoulders hunched. “You have until tomorrow night to leave Estenzia. This is a command. Do this, Teren, if you truly love me.”
Tears well in Teren’s eyes. Raffaele grimaces, feeling the Inquisitor’s dark energy twist in the familiar pain of heartbreak. “Giulietta …,” Teren whispers, but he says it this time in defeat.
Finally, he bows his head. He falls to one knee before her. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he says. He stays there until Giulietta dismisses him, and then he storms out. His cloak remains on the floor.
Giulietta watches him go for a moment before she turns back to Raffaele. “Go,” she says. “Gather your Daggers. Remember that if you go back on your word, I will make sure the
malfettos
suffer for it.”
Raffaele gives her a bow.
The capital weakens. We close in.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Sometimes, love can bloom like the tiny flower hidden in the tree’s shadow, found only by those who know where to look.
—
The Courting of a Prince of Beldain
, by Callum Kent
Adelina Amouteru
Enzo died in the capital’s arena. That is where the Daggers will go to revive him, and so that is where I now go with my Roses.
Violetta and I wait in the shadows of the arena’s lowest pits, where the underground tunnels let baliras into and out of the arena’s center lake. Here, where enormous wooden gates and levers cast strange shadows down the tunnel, we can hear little more than the hollow churning of water and the occasional squeaking of rats. Sergio and Magiano stay elsewhere in the arena, on alert for any signs of approaching Daggers. A full day and night pass. Lightning forks over the sky, and the storm continues on, raging relentlessly in a tirade that Sergio doesn’t have the ability to stop.
On the second night, Magiano drops in and shakes water
out of his hair before he sits down beside us with a sigh. “Not yet,” he mutters, tearing into a wet piece of bread and cheese.
“What if the Daggers don’t come?” Violetta whispers to me as she blows her warm breath against her hands.
I don’t answer right away. What if they don’t? They are already late, according to the plans we’d overheard from Gemma. Perhaps Raffaele failed in his mission at the palace, and the queen had him executed. Perhaps the Daggers were captured. But then we would have heard something, I’m sure of it—news like that would never stay secret for long. “They’ll come,” I whisper back. I untie my cloak, drape it around both of us, and we gather it around ourselves as tightly as we can. My toes feel cold and damp inside my boots.
I wish you were here, Enzo,
I add to myself. A memory returns of the heat his touch could bring, the warmth that he could send bubbling through me on a cold night. I shiver. Soon, he
will
be back. Can I bear that?
Magiano sighs loudly and leans back against the canal wall. He sits close enough to me that I can feel the warmth coming off his body, and I find myself savoring it. “Sergio says you have more mercenaries gathering behind you. Why don’t we retreat to somewhere outside of Estenzia and mobilize whatever allies you’ve gathered? Then we can figure out a way to strike at Teren and the queen when they least expect it.” He gives me a wry look. “Do we
really
need to be here?”
I huddle deeper into my cloak so that Magiano can’t see
me blushing. He has been uncharacteristically moody today. “Enzo is an Elite,” I say to Magiano, something I’ve repeated several times in the last day.
“Yes. And also the former leader of the Daggers. How do you know this will work? What if something goes wrong?”
A part of me wonders whether he is acting like this because of what Enzo used to mean to me. What he
still
means to me. And Magiano—does he stir those same feelings? Even as I lean in the direction of his warmth, I’m not sure. “I
don’t
know,” I reply. “But I’d rather not risk letting a chance go.”
He tightens his lips for a moment. “The Beldish queen has no ordinary power,” he says softly. “This is tampering with the gods themselves, bringing the dead back to life. You are putting yourself directly in that path, you realize.”
It’s almost as if he’s trying to tell me,
I’m worried about you.
And suddenly I want so much to hear those words that I almost ask him to say them. But my desire is quickly replaced by irritation at his concern. “You’ve gone this far with us,” I whisper. “We’ll get you your money, don’t worry.”
Surprise flashes in Magiano’s eyes … followed by disappointment. Then he shrugs, leans away from me, and goes back to eating his bread and cheese. “Good,” he mutters.
I make myself smaller. It was a spiteful thing for me to say, but so is his open doubt over whether or not we should be here for Enzo. I watch him from my cloak, wondering whether he will glance in my direction and give me a hint of what his thoughts are, but he doesn’t look my way again.
Beside me, Violetta stirs. She blinks while facing the arena’s center, then tilts her head. Magiano and I both still as we watch her. “Is it them?” I whisper to my sister.
Before Violetta can respond, a silhouette drops down behind us with a silent thud. I jump to my feet. It’s Sergio.
He hefts a blade in one hand. “I spy our favorite Dagger,” he says with a smile.
Raffaele Laurent Bessette
As he leaves the palace, Raffaele presses his hands together over and over, but he can’t seem to stop their trembling. A wide hood covers him, partially shielding him from the storm. He looks over his shoulder. Inquisitors escorted him as far as the palace gates, but now that he has reached the main streets, they stay behind and allow him to have his freedom.
He blinks water from his eyes, then hurries down the streets until he melts into the shadows. Teren will leave the palace tomorrow, no doubt about it—exactly the goal Maeve had set for him when bringing him into the palace. Now the city loses their near-invincible Lead Inquisitor, and the queen loses a powerful bodyguard. The Beldish navy draws closer.
Still, Raffaele frowns as he walks. Teren is not gone yet, and now he is as furious as a wounded beast. No doubt there
are still soldiers watching him right now. He walks in a wide arc, far from the arena where he knows he must end up.
I have to hide quickly.
Out here, the queen cannot protect him from Teren’s wrath. If the Lead Inquisitor finds him, he will kill him. Raffaele searches for any signs of Teren’s energy nearby, then changes his course, careful to leave the signals he had agreed upon with the other Daggers.
A deep line in the mud with his boot, clearly visible from the air. A whistle, nearly lost in the storm’s roar, mimicking a lonely falcon. A glass ring on his finger that reflects the lightning whenever it flashes.
He hopes Lucent is watching from somewhere high, and that she has raised the alarm.
Moments later, he calls on his memory of the underground maze of catacombs beneath the city. He makes his way through a labyrinth of alleys before finally vanishing through a small, unmarked door.
The sound of pouring water echoes everywhere down in the tunnels. Raffaele keeps one hand gripped tightly around his cloak, and the other against the wall. Water soaks his boots and keeps the steps dangerously slick.
“North, south, west, east,” he murmurs to himself as he goes. “The Piazza of Three Angels, the Canterino Canal, the statue to Holy Sapientus.” The landmarks appear in his mind in a map. He inches along in the blackness, completely blind. Glittering threads of energy flicker all around him, connecting everything to everything else, however faintly. He reaches out and tugs gently on them, feeling the way the
energy of the air connects to the walls, to the aboveground. If there were even a bit of light, he knows he would see his breath rising in clouds before him, warming the icy air.
“Left. Right. Right. Straight.”
The labyrinth continues to branch as he goes farther down. He has never been here during such heavy rain before. Sometimes, water sloshes up to his knees.
If parts of the tunnels are flooded, I might trap myself in a corner and drown.
Raffaele forces the thought away and replaces it with a still surface, a calm to keep the panic at bay. He keeps moving, relying only on his hand on the wall and the map of threads in his mind. How did such a storm like this come so suddenly?
Left. Left. Straight. Right.
Abruptly, Raffaele pauses. Frowns. It lasts only an instant, a fleeting moment of someone’s energy from the surface. He waits for a second, reaching tentatively out with his own power.
Strange. And familiar.
But the feeling has already faded away, and the storm returns in full force.
Raffaele hesitates awhile longer, until the water forces him to continue moving again. He shakes his head. The threads of energy in the storm are overwhelming in their power—they must be distracting him. Or perhaps it is the thought of what he is about to participate in, what may happen in mere hours.
The thought of Enzo returning.
Raffaele pauses again, steadying himself against the wet
walls, and closes his eyes. Again, he thinks of the calm surface. He stills, then continues on.
Finally, he reaches a spot in the darkness where the tunnel ends in a wall. Beyond it is an overwhelming pressure, the unmistakable energy of countless drops of water all tied to one another, the lake in the center of the Estenzian arena. Raffaele pauses, then heads back several paces until he finds an uneven set of stones, the hands of Moritas posted at the end of every catacomb path, and then the tiny, winding steps beside them that lead up to the surface.
He emerges into the dark recesses of the arena’s enormous canals, but after so long in complete blackness, the night almost seems bright. The sounds of the storm are suddenly deafening again. Raffaele gathers his soaked cloak tighter, then walks on silent feet up the canal’s steps to the surface.
He is alone here. The other Daggers are nowhere in sight. He folds his hands into the sleeves of his cloak, shivers, and reaches out with his energy to sense whether or not other Elites are close.
Then, he frowns. Something stirs in the air, strings pulled taut.
They
are
here. At least, someone is.
The energy draws closer. It is a dark, familiar energy, and Raffaele finds himself resisting the urge to pull away from it. He had cringed when he first felt Maeve’s energy on the day he met her, had shuddered at the connection she drew to the Underworld. He looks down the arena’s dark tunnels that
lead to the center’s lake, then out into the storm. She must have just arrived. Now Raffaele can hear footsteps. They are faint and light, the steps of someone slender. He turns all the way to face the approaching energy, then folds his hands before him. The footsteps echo faintly down the tunnel. Gradually, he makes out the silhouette of a figure approaching him. The energy grows stronger. Now he can tell that the figure is indeed a girl.
She stops a few feet away from him. Along with the scent of rain, he also detects the copper smell of blood. Raffaele eyes her warily. In the darkness, he can’t quite make out her face. Her energy is strange, too, familiar in its darkness.
Too familiar.
It is the unmistakable alignment to the Underworld, to Fear and Fury, to Death.
“Are you hurt, Your Majesty?” he says in a low voice. “Did anyone follow you?” If Maeve was injured in the process of getting here, she might not have the strength to pull Enzo from the Underworld. Worse, she might have been attacked by an Inquisitor, and word of her presence here has leaked out. Where are the other Daggers?
But Maeve doesn’t say a word. She reaches up to her hood, lifts it, and pulls it back. The shadows disappear from her face.
Raffaele freezes.
The girl is not Maeve. She has a scarred half of her face where her eye should have been. Her lashes are pale, and the locks of her hair are bright silver tonight, cut short and
scraggly. She stares at Raffaele with a bitter smile. For a moment, it seems as if she were glad to see him. Then the emotion disappears, replaced with something wicked. She holds a hand out toward him, weaves a web of threads around him, and twists hard.
“I’m sorry, Raffaele,” Adelina says.
Once every ten years, the three moons all fall under the world’s shadow and turn scarlet, bleeding with the blood of our fallen warriors.
—
The New Atlas to the Moons
, by Liu Xue You
Adelina Amouteru
There are no moons tonight to fill the Estenzian arena with silver light. Instead, the lake in the arena’s center, fed by canals, is black and churning with the storm’s fury.
The last time I stood in this arena, I was a spectator in the audience, looking on as Enzo stepped forward to challenge Teren to a duel. They fought here. And it ended with me hovering over Enzo’s dying body, sobbing, trying over and over again to hurt Teren in any way I could.
Now the arena is empty. No cheering crowds in this midnight storm. The Kenettran flags up above flap frantically in the wind—several of them have been ripped completely away by the force of the rain. And I am here not as myself, but as Raffaele.
The expression of agony on his face.
The sweat beading his brow.
His anguished cry, erased by the storm’s thunder.
The whispers echo in my mind, delighted at what I’ve done.
I follow Maeve along the stone path. Water crashes against either side of the walkway, soaking the hems of my robes. My heart pounds furiously—the energy of the storm is full of darkness, and when I look up, I can almost see the weave of threads glittering between the clouds, connecting the rain to the black sky, the threat of approaching lightning. Somewhere in the arena, Sergio and Magiano are poised to strike. From down in the arena’s lake come the occasional, muffled calls of baliras. An enormous, fleshy head emerges from the churning water for a moment, then goes under again, as if the creatures of the Underworld have come to watch us too.