Page 72

Chapter Forty-Four

A stra leaped over the decaying logs between them, following the muffled sounds of screams and Mirquios in pain.

When she burst through the trees into the clearing, Lunelle and Mirquios were back to back, two shadows dancing amongst them, blurs of smoke and fury.

“He’s hurt,” Lunelle screeched at her sister. Astra scanned over Mirquios, looking for the source of his injury as he dodged his shadow again.

She yelled to Lunelle, cornered by a transparent version of herself. “Did they tell you how to get them back?”

Where are you, Lux beamed, his voice heavy, tired.

In the forest, Mirquios is hurt. They’re battling their shadows, where are you?

Coming.

“Tula said something about listening to them, I don’t know!” Mirquios yelled as he dodged another swing.

“You have to embrace them!” Lux called out from the treeline. He held a squirming blue prince over his shoulder. “You have to embrace them!”

“The more you fight, the harder it is!” Arcas screeched from over Lux’s shoulder.

There, Astra saw it as Mirquios made another swift spin around his shadow.

A gash in his leg, from knee to hip, bright red blood spilling from his wound.

Lunelle was the first to stop dodging and slicing at her shadow, staring at it in the gnarled forest, the silence deafening save for Arcas’s lithe body landing with a thud on the forest floor as Lux tossed him off his back.

Lunelle reached forward, wrapping her hands around the silky black figure, the commotion ending immediately. She turned, lifting her hands, the arms of the shadow following her exactly as they should. Mirquios mimicked her movements, screaming in the process.

Lunelle gripped his shoulder in concern. “Your leg?”

“No! You could have warned me they’d say such horrifying shit,” he grunted, heaving.

“Mine wasn’t that bad,” Lunelle shrugged. “But noted for you.” She patted him on the back as he stretched, shivering at whatever his Shadow whispered as they reunited.

“What happened to your leg?” Astra pointed at the injury. “What happened to Pluto?”

“Shadow,” Mirquios sighed, sitting on the ground and examining the wound.

“Bastard attacked me,” Lux said.

Astra turned to Arcas. “You know you don’t have to be the only champion back, just the first, right? We aren’t barbarians.”

Arcas pushed himself from the ground, his deep eyes flashing wildly between each of us.

“I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on.

I didn’t even want to be here, okay? The queen said that if I came back to the Lunar Court, and pretended to court the princess, she’d pay off Pluto’s debts and help us manage our rebellion!

I wasn’t even supposed to make it to the trial!

She was supposed to announce at the ball that Lunelle is capable of ruling the court without a man and pass the crown to her unwed but then that goddess changed all the rules and the commander somehow got roped into this and I wasn’t trying to attack you! ”

He drew in a heaving breath as he turned to Lux.

“I wasn’t expecting to run into you on the other side of the woods, I can’t track you in here, the Tethers are really hard to see in such a dull environment.”

“What did you just say?” Lunelle huffed as she marched toward Arcas, her chest barely touching his as he backed away.

Arcas frowned and closed his eyes. “Which part, Princess?”

Astra groaned, rubbing the bridge of her nose, sure that her head was about to cave in from all the new information she’d learned in the last fifteen minutes.

“Oh, I don’t know, Arcas, maybe the part where you can see Tethers? Have you known about the king and I this entire time?”

Arcas dropped his eyes to the forest floor. “Yes. I’m sorry. My mother was Venusian, they can see Tethers.”

Astra’s cheeks caught fire. “All... Venusians? And all... Tethers?”

His navy eyes briefly flitted from the flora below to hers before finding anywhere else to look.

“Yes.”

“Oh my gods,” she gasped, Lux’s hand reflexively reaching for her hip. How long had Ameera been sitting on her secret?

Lunelle twisted in her boots, her lips parted in pure rage. “Are you—Astra? Are you two... Tethered ?”

Astra sighed. “I think there is much more pressing information that Arcas just dropped on us?—”

“Please!” Mirquios cried from the ground. “Please, just tell her so I can have some peace !”

“You knew?” Lunelle dropped to the ground, kneeling across from him.

“I suspected,” he muttered, pulling at the sliced fabric of his pants. “They weren’t subtle.”

“Well, we knew they were sleeping together, but you never once thought to tell me you thought they were Tethered?”

Mirquios winced. “We’ve had a lot on our plate, dear. I assumed Astra would tell you!”

They both turned to Astra, her face as red as her hair, surely. “Again, bigger things to talk about right now?—”

Lunelle forged ahead. “All that stress, all that heartache, all the worry that my little sister must sacrifice her happiness for me was for nothing?” She turned to Arcas, focusing her anger on him.

Arcas pointed to himself. “Oh, we’re mad at me again?”

“I think we’re just confused.” Astra tried to smooth things over. “It’s been a hard few months and we don’t exactly know who to trust right now.”

Lunelle frowned, her shoulders dropping. “It really has. Gods, Astra. I wish you had told me how dire this was for you, too. I put too much pressure on you!”

“No, no, Lu. You’ve taken the brunt of the responsibility your whole life. I was happy to do this for you! I swear it?—”

“As?” Lux stepped into the space between them.

Astra clicked her tongue, still not done making her point. “Yes, Luxuros, what is it?”

“We’ve got about half an hour before the gate closes. Do you think you and your sister can hash this out when we’re not at risk of getting sealed into the Court Below for three months?”

Lunelle sprang into action. “Mirquios is hurt. We need to get him back, but there’s no way he should walk on that leg.”

“I can help,” Arcas said. “Least I can do, I suppose.”

Astra’s brows furrowed as she watched Arcas’s thin limbs reach for Mirquios. She turned to Lux.

“I got him,” he said, pushing past the Plutonian prince. “You good to get what you came for?”

Astra nodded. “Just get him back safely.”

“Wait for us at the gate,” Lunelle said.

“Lunelle, no. Go with Mirq,” she sighed. “I can do this!”

Lunelle placed a quick kiss on the king’s cheek.

“Not a chance, As. We’re doing this together.”

I’ll see you on the other side, Sol’ah , Lux beamed as he dragged Mirquios away, Arcas doing his best to help.

Astra turned to her sister, her eyes sparkling even in the blunted light of the Court Below.

“Let’s do this.”

* * *

Astra fished the locket out of her vest, the chain cool against her hand as they stood in a clearing a few hundred paces away.

It felt like the right place to be, and summoning a Shadow couldn’t be all that different from summoning a Soul, could it?

“Selenia Aurellis,” Astra said, her voice shaking. She held the locket in one hand and Lunelle’s in the other. “We’ve come to return you to your rightful place.”

She closed her eyes, listening for anything in the dead silence. A black flash whipped through sticks and trees, racing across the clearing, sending her a step back as she recoiled.

Lunelle watched it race by, circling the meadow. “Steady, As. Selenia,” Lunelle announced, directing her energy at the shadow that edged back into the forest. “We’ve come to claim you!”

Astra held out the locket again, bracing herself for impact when she ran through again.

She felt her Shadow before she saw it this time, the temperature dropping ahead of her arrival, blasting through the treeline.

She held the locket high, drawing her in, picturing the Shadow slipping into the silver locket in her mind before she charged again.

Lunelle closed her eyes, too, afraid to watch as Selenia darted toward them. The Shadow hit Astra’s hand full force. Her arm screamed at the pain, but when she opened her eyes, the locket swung mid-air, closed shut, freezing over in icy condensation.

“Did... did we do it?” Lunelle’s jaw clenched in the silence of the forest.

“I think so?” Astra fastened the locket around her neck, the metal like a block of ice against her skin.

“That seemed too easy,” Lunelle mused.

Astra laughed. “I’ll take easy on this end. It’s what comes next that’s going to be impossible.”

Lunelle sighed as she turned to walk, watching the trees ahead as she led them through the gnarled branches. “What do you think Arcas was talking about?”

“I’m not sure, Lu, but the Nether Queen... she told me that Selenia was Tethered to the Solar God, Lucian. And that she severed it after trading her shadow to Luciela for a shadow diamond dagger—the same one I saw Solan use with Leona.”

Lunelle jumped over a larger log, the bark peeling into crumbling layers that snapped as she passed and turned to dust in the air. “Mother asked me to wait at the Lunar Gate before I came through. She said she’d signal me.”

A chill ran over Astra’s spine. “Did you tell her what we planned?”

“No,” she shook her head. “This was before. In Pluto. She said that she would be waiting beside the gate and that no matter what, I wasn’t to come through until she reached for me. At the time, I thought maybe it was a ritual thing, a symbolic gesture. But now I don’t know what to believe.”

The edge of the forest came into view, more sand and dust and flat light stretched beyond the trees. Something snapped behind them.

“What was that?” Astra asked, twisting to watch for it. A spark flickered in her fingertips, ready to strike.

Lunelle walked faster, pulling her along, moving from her hand to her wrist when she felt the heat. Astra jogged to keep up with her, another snap of a tree limb driving them forward.

“We’re almost out, As. Just keep going!” Lunelle increased her speed again as they heard more crackling footsteps moving quickly. As they broke through the trees, Astra turned, spotting a massive black cat slinking in figure eights between the tangled trunks.

She swore it smiled.

“Let’s hustle, Fire and Ice!” Lux cupped his hands around his mouth from the top of the dune, the onyx gate rising behind him.

“For the record, I really like the version of you the commander brings out. Mortal enemy thing aside. What are you planning on doing about that?” Lunelle said between ragged breaths as they pumped their legs over the sliding sand.

“Small detail,” Astra laughed, her lungs burning.

They rounded the top of the dune, stopping for a moment to catch their breath as Lux tied a torn shred of his sleeve around Mirq’s thigh.

“Well,” Mirquios said as he hobbled against Lux. “Are we ready to take down a Lunar Goddess?”

Lunelle slipped his arm around Astra’s shoulders.

“ We are. You are going straight to the infirmary.”

Lux held out a hand, dragging Astra into the Rift, the chill on her neck somehow even colder as they passed through the Lunar Gate.

Astra’s knees absorbed the impact, stinging as she brushed herself off, confused at the strange mix of silence and nerves that greeted them. Someone pulled Lux’s arms away from her, a dark sleeve weaving around her elbow.

“Evening.” Alastair ducked his head in a stilted greeting. Astra’s eyes searched the garden, hundreds of faces watching her every step.

“The Lunar Goddess would like a word.”