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Chapter Forty-Six

A meera’s voice floated in a gentle wave through a sea of fuzzy half-thoughts. Astra’s eyes fluttered open, her mouth dry and stuck together. “As?”

“Here, drink this,” a familiar voice murmured as someone pushed a cup of tea between her lips.

“Ehlaria?”

“Your Highness,” she chuckled.

Astra’s head swirled again, the edge of her vision dissolving as she fought to hold on to consciousness. “I need everyone to stop doing that. Now.”

“Is that your first official order?” Ameera smirked as Astra’s vision clarified.

Ameera sat perched at the edge of the bed as Astra pushed herself up on her elbows.

“I mean it, Ameera. I’ve had a really crazy day, okay?”

A dark laugh bounced off the walls.

Not a laugh Astra recognized.

Her head swiveled as she looked for the source. Everything in her lit up with greens and pinks when she realized who it was.

“Mother?”

“I’m afraid we’ve overwhelmed you,” she said quietly. “It’s only been about five minutes. Don’t worry. Nothing like last time.”

Astra felt a flush creep over her neck. “Tula?”

Oestera smiled softly. “Your father. We don’t keep secrets.”

Astra glanced around the room. Lunelle sat on the couch, looking as dazed as she felt.

“Where’s Lux?”

“I sent him to get your father. He went back to the manor to hide the shadow dagger. We have a safe room there. They should be back any minute.”

Oestera crossed the room and sat beside Ameera, resting a hand on Astra’s knee.

“I know you have a million questions, Astra, and we’re going to answer them all. But first, we need to get you out of these clothes.”

Astra looked down, her lips crinkling into a frown. Selenia’s golden blood splattered across her chest and hands.

“I’ll help you clean up,” Ameera said.

“I can help her,” Oestera replied. “Why don’t the rest of you go get everyone settled and have some snacks? Nayson hasn’t run that fast in thirty years. He’s going to be starving.”

Ameera stared wide-eyed at the queen, who, until today, had never cracked a joke in her presence.

“Can Lunelle stay?” Astra asked.

Oestera nodded. “Of course.”

The room emptied and Astra stood carefully as Oestera and Lunelle followed her into her bathing chambers. Sand poured from the soiled garments as she peeled them off, but the discomfort she felt being alone with just her mother and Lunelle was far more demanding.

“Grab her something soft, Lu. We’re going to be working all night.”

Lunelle disappeared into Astra’s dressing room, leaving just the buzz from Oestera’s chest, a soft pink glow rolling over itself.

Wait.

“Mother above,” Astra breathed. “Is that... am I reading you?”

“I suppose you are,” Oestera whispered, untangling Astra’s hair from the knotted bun it sat in. She ran her fingers through Astra’s curls slowly, reverently.

“I don’t know how to process this,” Astra admitted as Lunelle returned. She unfurled a soft knit set in a pale cream yarn, catching Astra’s eye. “I don’t want to be queen, Lunelle. You should be queen.”

Lunelle snorted. “Astra, thanks to you I will be a queen. Just not here.”

Astra’s face flushed again. “But is that what you want? I never asked for this. I don’t want it!”

“As,” she said, placing a hand on her bare shoulder. “This is exactly what I want, I promise. And more importantly, Mother and I agree, it’s what people need.”

She whipped her head around. Oestera leaned against the vanity, watching her daughters in the mirror.

“She’s right.”

“Me? The Fire Queen? The selfish monster who will never do what’s right for the crown?” Reliving the words stung.

“I don’t want you to do what’s right for the crown, Astra. I want you to do what’s right for the court.”

Astra swallowed, acid coating her throat. “I feel like I’m hallucinating.”

“I know.” Oestera sighed, shockingly small in this setting.

“And by the end of the night, you’ll probably feel like your entire world has been turned upside down.

But as we untangle everything with you, I need you to remember that while you are demigoddess Astra Leona Aurellis, Queen of the Lunar Court, you are also human.

And it’s okay for you to be hurt and confused. We’re all here to support you.”

She turned to Lunelle. “What was in the tea Ehlaria made?”

Lunelle snorted. “I don’t know, but I think I’d like some.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Astra sat across from her father at the very same table she announced her engagement to the Mercurian king.

This time, they’d be telling some actual truths, it seemed.

Oestera paced nervously across the back of the room as she waited for her final guest. Around the table sat Ehlaria, Maeve Maelstrom, Lunelle, Mirquios, Luxuros, and Ameera, half of them completely lost and the other half waiting patiently for Oestera to speak.

Astra’s head swirled with information already, still reeling from what Luciela told her in the Court Below.

“We can start without him,” Oestera finally said, sitting between Nayson and Ehlaria. She drew her shoulders back and began her long-awaited explanation, her voice no longer the frigid trill Astra was so accustomed to, but a warmer honey.

“I know you have a very specific notion of who you think I am, and I know that what I’m about to tell you is going to be quite difficult to reconcile with that narrative, so I understand if it takes us a while to get things sorted.

I don’t expect you to suddenly shift your entire worldview in one conversation, but you and your friends are not the first generation of Nova Rebels. ”

Astra and Lunelle exchanged a panicked glance.

Oestera continued, “You are the carefully curated second generation, trained from the moment of your birth to pick up where we left off.”

Astra glanced around the table, confusion rolling off Lux and Ameera’s chests, but a steadfast confidence from her mother and Ehlaria gave her something to hold on to as she tried to focus on breathing.

They’d been waiting for the chance to tell this story for a very long time.

“Oestera.” Ehlaria leaned toward her. “It might be easier to show her and not just tell her. She needs to see it.”

Oestera’s eyes flickered over her daughter, a breath leaving her lungs as she considered this. She unfurled her hands, resting them across the table. Astra hesitated. They did not touch often—she was rarely within arm’s length of her mother her entire life.

She glanced at the commander, who picked up her other hand and squeezed.

Astra reached for Oestera’s hand, warmer than expected.

“I’m a little rusty, but I can take you within. I don’t want you to rely on my memory. I want you to see it exactly as it happened. Stay in the shadows, and don’t talk to anyone. You never know who might be sensitive to you.”

“A lesson I learned the hard way,” Astra said.

“When I was even younger than you are now, my dear sister fell in love with a Solarian King. So far in love, in fact, that she Tethered to him, something that we didn’t even know was possible.

And when they Tethered, they each took on qualities within one another that made them both incredibly powerful—a result that made us question what we’d been told our entire lives. ”

Oestera’s fingers squeezed against Astra’s, pulling her into the strange funnel within them, passing through the haze of time.

“This is madness, Leona!” Oestera shouted, her face round with the youth Fate would soon steal from her.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two.

Her silver hair was braided down her back, and a simple Summer linen frock in a pale lavender danced around her ankles as she chased Leona around her bedroom.

“It’s all madness,” Leona hissed, shoving another piece of clothing into a bag. “It doesn’t matter what you say, Oestera. If you felt like this, if you only knew ? —”

“You cannot touch him!” Oestera reached for her sister’s arm, clutching at her wrist.

Leona’s lips twitched, a dusting of peony pink and silver Astra now recognized in her blossoming in her lungs—the kind of colors you cannot will away or deny.

“Says who, Os?”

“Everyone! Mother. The priestesses. Father said touching a Solarian is like touching fire and expecting it not to burn.”

Leona twisted and jerked her wrist from her sister’s hands, a lightness to her smile that confused Oestera.

“You know, you could use a little heat, Oestera.” She jostled the bag to make more room.

She must have been planning on leaving for a while.

“Gaze upon me, sister, and tell me—am I scarred? Is my flesh melted? Because Solan had me pinned up against a wall six hours ago and I can tell you, the burn, indeed, lingers, but it does not kill.”

Oestera’s jaw dropped as Leona swept from the room, her slippers tapping down the hallway. Oestera sank into her bed, squeezing her eyes shut—her mind could not wrap around the possibilities.

The lies.

“Once we knew they could touch with no consequence… well, not no consequences, of course, but not instant death, we had to learn more.” Oestera’s tone shifted as her eyes fell on the Elvish queen beside her.

“That’s how Ehlaria and I became friends.

I offered her one of the golden trinkets Solan sent Leona and forced her to tell me everything she knew. ”

She squeezed Astra’s hands again, transporting them just across the Midwood to Ehlaria’s drawing room forty years prior.

“You do realize that if your mother catches you with these texts, she’ll have both of our heads, yes?”

An eternally ageless Ehlaria plopped onto a sofa across from Oestera’s tired eyes, half-moons worn into her skin, despite her youth.

“Add it to the list of things my mother wants my head for,” Oestera mumbled as she flipped through another worn book. “Is this accurate? The Solar and Lunar Courts were not originally part of the system?”

Ehlaria reached for the book, checking the title inscribed along the spine.