Adelina Amouteru
I fade in and out of a strange, disturbed sleep filled with ghosts. Or illusions? I can’t tell the difference anymore.
Maybe there is none.
Sometimes I see my father hovering over me, his face distorted and smiling. Other times, Violetta’s tear-streaked face appears. And Enzo. Enzo. He hovers there, a little too far away, and I cry out for him, struggling against invisible bonds to reach him. He’s alive. He’s right there. Shouts come from somewhere in the distance. Hold her down! I’m in too much of a daze to dwell on anything other than the enormous creature carrying us across the sky and the silence and stillness of those riding with me. I want to open my mouth and say something. Anything. But my state of half consciousness muzzles me. I run a hand along my chest and feel a thick bandage there, trying gamely to lessen my blood loss.
My vision blurs as I try to look around at the others, but I can’t focus enough to see who they are. I look back up into the evening sky and close my eye. The world has faded to gray with Enzo’s passing. The only feeling I’m aware of is Violetta’s hand in mine, squeezing, and I squeeze back with what little strength I have. A few strands of my hair crisscross over my vision—they are dark gray, the darkest they’ve ever been.
I have a vague recollection of us leaving the balira’s back, and of my changing surroundings. Evening light slants through tree canopies, and fireflies dance in the darkness. Occasionally, I glimpse a rolling hill, a gentle valley full of deepening green. The gates of an estate. The outskirts of Estenzia?
A wave of nausea hits me, and I close my eye again. Sleep threatens to pull me under.
The next time I come to, I’m lying in a twilit bedchamber, the air blue and waning, turning into night. For an instant, I think I’ve gone back in time—I’ve returned to the moment when the Daggers first saved me and took me to the Fortunata Court. It even looks like the same chamber. If I wait long enough, I’ll see the maid come in and smile at me, and Enzo will follow in her wake, his dark eyes pensive and wary, lit with slashes of scarlet. He will lean forward and ask me if I want to hurt those who have wronged me.
Slowly, the chamber shifts until it looks like an unfamiliar room. My illusions are happening spontaneously again. It takes me a long moment to realize that this is not the Fortunata Court, but some strange estate I’ve never been in, and that I’m not alone at all, but surrounded by the Daggers. I groan, then turn to look at the person sitting closest to me.
The instant I move, everyone backs cautiously away. Blades appear in their hands. I freeze. Their gesture sends a brief course of excitement through me, their fear stimulating my energy. Then the feeling vanishes, replaced with a sharp pain. My former friends. They’re afraid of me.
The person sitting closest to me is Raffaele. He is the only one who doesn’t jump away. His bruises and injuries are still prominent, his cheekbone blue and purple, his lip marred by a thin cut. Scars circle his neck. When Gemma approaches to pull him away from me, though, he holds up a hand and wordlessly stops her. She backs away. I look at them all silently.
“Where’s my sister?” I finally whisper. My first words.
“Resting.” Raffaele nods once at me when he sees my alarmed expression. “She’s well.”
The divide between me and the other Daggers is thick in the air. I realize through the fog in my head that they still aren’t sure what role I played in Enzo’s death. The words make me wince. My energy stirs, and Raffaele tightens his jaw.
“You killed Dante, didn’t you?” Lucent says. Her voice holds none of the wry amusement that I remember, none of the reluctant friendship and trust that I’d started to earn from her. Now there’s nothing but anger, held back only in deference to Raffaele. I’ve lost her completely. “How’d you do it?”
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I had indeed killed Dante. I did it by twisting his pain illusions so severely that his heart bled. My silence is all that Lucent needs—her lips tighten, and a veil of fear and unease blankets the room.
“It was an accident,” I choke out. The only thing I seem able to say, apparently.
“Were you working with Teren?” Lucent snaps. “Is that where you disappeared to when you ran away? Did you go off to see the Inquisition? Did you make some sort of pact with them?” Her voice rises. “He thanked you over Enzo’s body. You—”
“No! I can explain.” The thought makes the anger rise in me, and my illusions threaten to veer out of control again. I clamp down on them in time. But the gesture makes Raffaele turn concerned eyes on me. Gemma studies me while chewing her lip. Fear comes off her too. My heart twists. “I would never. It was an accident. I swear to the gods.”
“Well, Raffaele?” Michel says, cutting through the silence that follows. “What do we do with her now?”
The way Michel addresses Raffaele and the way Gemma obeyed Raffaele’s simple hand gesture tell me that the Daggers have anointed a new leader. Raffaele shakes his head at me once. His eyes are heavy with sadness. “You said you could explain,” he says. “So tell us what happened.”
I start to tell Raffaele about how I’d cloaked Enzo in invisibility, but he stops me with a subtle hand. “No,” he says. His voice turns firm. “Tell us what happened, from the beginning.”
My lips tremble. The truth. I hesitate, as always.
But then I crumble. In a stammering voice, I finally do.
I tell Raffaele about the evening at the Fortunata Court, when I first saw him perform. I tell him how Teren came to me in the audience and threatened me with my sister’s life. I tell him how I took advantage of the qualifying races to go to Teren and tell him about the Tournament of Storms. I tell him how Teren found me again during the Spring Moons, and how I overheard Enzo and Dante’s conversation about me. How I fled to the Inquisition Tower to free my sister. How I killed Dante in a dark alley. The release of all of my lies and secrets is a relief, exhausting me. I tell them how Teren lunged for me in the arena, how I threw up my hands in defense and conjured an illusion of indescribable pain on him. How I realized I was not attacking Teren at all, but Enzo.
My voice falters here. The retelling leaves my heart so pained that I can barely breathe, and in my sorrow I see a ghost of Enzo flickering in and out of the room, his dark eyes turned toward me, his expression haunting. I can feel the suspicion emanating from everyone, their unspoken thought that I am responsible for what had happened. That I am a monster.
I am so sorry. So very sorry.
Perhaps Teren had always known that I would do something like this.
When I finish, they are quiet. Lucent stares at me with an expression both disgusted and frightened. Gemma has retreated behind her, and Michel looks ready to stop me in case I try to hurt them here. I know what they’re thinking, even though they don’t say it out loud. They want me dead. It would make them all feel much better. A thick, dark anger begins to build inside me. I claw for it. More fog lifts from my mind. I feel sparks of strength growing in me, pushing past the weakness of my blood loss and grief.
Finally, Raffaele speaks. There is a certain reverence the group gives him—with his words, the others quiet immediately, turning to him as if hoping he has the power to set everything right again. His voice is weak, but steady. “When I first tested you,” he begins, taking one of my hands, “you aligned with fear and fury, passion and curiosity. Do you remember?”
He is using his energy on me. I can feel his soothing pull on my heartstrings, the gentle tug that warms me to him, calming me. I find myself leaning into his touch, squeezing his hand harder. That afternoon when we’d first met doesn’t seem like so long ago. “I remember,” I reply.
Raffaele goes on. A certain sadness enters his voice. “Your reaction to the nightstone and amber, to darkness, frightened me. It frightened me very much. Still, I wanted to believe that, somehow, you would be able to tame it to your will. Do you know how powerful you could be, if you mastered these two emotions and learned how to use them both in yourself and in others? I believed. I thought . . .” He hesitates for a moment. “I thought your alignment to passion would save you. Passion’s energy is bright and warm, just like the color of its gemstone. It is a light in the darkness, a fire in the night. I thought at first it would make you safer, that if you were around those whom you loved, you would be able to use your darkness to your advantage. I thought it would help tame you, and subsequently, that it would help you.”
Tears prickle the corner of my eye. I know what path Raffaele’s words are going down.
Raffaele lowers his jewel-toned eyes. “I was wrong. Passion is bright and warm . . . but passion has a dark side too. It links with fear. Our hearts fill with terror at the thought of harm coming to our loved ones, don’t they? You cannot have love without fear. The two coexist. In you, your alignment with passion instead fed your fear and fury. It made you darker. The more you love someone, the more unsteady your powers become. Your growing passion for Enzo made you volatile. It led to you losing control over your powers, powers that had grown to dangerous strengths. That, coupled with your anger and bitterness, has made you incredibly unpredictable.”
“What are you saying?” I whisper through my tears.
Raffaele continues to pull on my energy, and his gentle touch sends waves of sadness washing over me. He feels guilty, I realize. “Adelina,” he murmurs. Oh. I gasp in sudden pain. I’m surprised that this is what finally breaks my heart. He has never, ever called me just Adelina before, not even when we first met. He is breaking his affectionate ties with me. “I advised Enzo from the very beginning to kill you. He refused.”
I begin to cry. A memory comes to me of my afternoon with Raffaele, when we sat together along the golden waters of Estenzia’s canals and watched the gondolas go by, when he sang me my mother’s lullaby. Dante was right. Raffaele, kind, beautiful, sensual Raffaele, whom I cared about with all my heart, the only person in the world I thought I could trust entirely, the person I returned to the Daggers to help save, had never trusted me in return. Kindness with strings attached. He was the last thread suspending me in the light. Without him, I can feel myself spiraling downward, falling to a place where I can no longer pull myself back up.
“Even you,” I whisper through my tears. “How could you?” I don’t need to ask to know that Raffaele must have also suggested that Enzo kill the boy who couldn’t control the rains. In some ways, Raffaele had always been the Daggers’ leader. “Were we ever friends?” I say in a small voice. “Did you ever care about me?”
Raffaele winces. I can tell it pains him to tell me this truth, that even as he yearns to give me some comfort, he holds back and hardens his heart. “I stand by my advice to him. I trained you slowly because I didn’t want you to embrace your full powers. I knew, early on, that it could bring all of us suffering—including you.”
Who will ever want you, Adelina? Did you honestly think you could escape who you are? You will never fit in anywhere. My father’s ghost materializes beside me, his breath heavy and cold against my skin, his familiar voice hissing in my ear. No one else reacts to his presence, though. He is an illusion that tortures only me.
“We can fix it,” I say. My hand clenches harder around Raffaele’s. One last, frantic attempt. “You told me once that there were rumors of an Elite who could bring the dead back to life. Right?”
Raffaele shakes his head. “You’re deluding yourself, Adelina,” he says gently, and I know that he isn’t talking about the impossibility of bringing Enzo back. He’s talking about Enzo’s love for me.
He cared. He risked his life for me. In desperation, I reach out with my energy and conjure an illusion of emotions around Raffaele, trying to convince him that Enzo loved me, if even briefly, if even in a moment of weakness—trying to convince him that he cares for me. My words come faster. “I’ll learn how to rein in my powers—I promise, I can do it next time. Just give me one more chance.”
Raffaele closes his eyes. I feel him resisting the illusion being woven around him. “Don’t,” he whispers.
“Please,” I whisper back in a breaking voice. “You’ve always been kind to me. Don’t leave me behind, I beg you. I will be lost without you. What will I do? How will I learn?”
When Raffaele opens his eyes again, they look glossy with unshed tears. He reaches out to smooth hair away from the ruined side of my face. “You have goodness in your heart,” he says. “But your darkness overwhelms it all; your desire to hurt, destroy, and avenge is more powerful than your desire to love, help, and light the way. I have reached the limits of my knowledge. I don’t know how to train you.”
Beauty and pain go hand in hand, my father always said. For an instant, I fantasize about making Raffaele feel the pain that he’s giving to me, forcing him to cower before me in agony. How satisfying that would be. My energy swells in anticipation. Then I recoil in horror at the spark of joy I felt at such a depraved act. He’s right about me. He’s always been right.
Raffaele tightens his lips. Tears no longer shine in his eyes. Maybe I imagined them all along. “You can stay the night here,” he says. “But in the morning, you and your sister need to leave. It is my job to protect the Daggers, and I no longer feel that we can be safe with you among us. I’m sorry.”
He’s casting me out. I’m no longer one of them.
Darkness swirls within me, washing at the shores of my consciousness. I see all the times I trained with Enzo, how he saved my life and took me in, how we kissed, the glow of his silhouette in the darkness, the way his hair would fall, loose and unruly, over his shoulders, his gentle expression. Then I see the stormy night when my father made a deal to sell me, the first time I called on my illusions in the middle of pouring rain, the real reason why Enzo chose to save me on my execution day, all the times I was hurt and abused, left behind and abandoned, the iron stake and the fire and the people chanting below, wishing me dead and gone, Teren’s pale eyes staring back at me, the Daggers, my training, Dante’s sneering face, Raffaele’s betrayal. The ambition churning in me reaches its peak, displacing my sorrow, fusing with my anger and hate and fear, my passion and curiosity. The whispers that lurk in the back of my mind now claw their way out into the open, their fingers long and bony, gleeful for the freedom I’m giving them. Are the Daggers any different from your father, who wanted to sell you to settle his debts? they hiss at me. From Teren, who wanted to use you to get to the Daggers? Even the training cavern, hidden underground, was not a far stretch from the Inquisition’s dungeons.
Perhaps I’d simply switched one dark prison cell for another. No one ever gives me their kindness without hoping for something in exchange.
Are they any different?
Are they all the same?
They all want to use you, use you, use you until they get what they want, and then they will toss you aside.
Everything Raffaele saw in me on my testing day is true. Together, my alignments with energy swirl inside me, shifting and powerful. I am shaking.
Raffaele feels the rising power in me, because a note of fear hovers over him. Still, he doesn’t move. He faces me with grim determination, refusing to back down. Don’t. Concentrate. Control it. The only way to clamp down on my energy is to erase my emotions, and so I fold them each away, one by one. My sorrow turns to anger, then to ice-cold fury. My soul curls in on itself in defense. I am gone. I am truly gone.
I am not sorry.
“You have no right to judge me,” I whisper, looking around at the others. “You belong to a society that thrives on murder. You’re no better.”
Raffaele only returns my look with his level gaze. He nods at the others to leave. Lucent starts to protest, then sighs and casts me one last glare before following Gemma and Michel out the door. Raffaele and I are the only ones left in the room. For a moment, however brief, the gentleness on his face fades away to reveal something hard and dark.
“Murder is a means to an end,” he finally says, tilting his head slightly at me. This time, the gesture looks more cunning than flirtatious. “Not an activity of pleasure.”
If you cast me out of the Dagger Society, then I will form my own. I am tired of losing. I am tired of being used, hurt, and tossed aside.
It is my turn to use. My turn to hurt.
My turn.
“You’re making a mistake,” I say. My voice emerges flat and cold. The voice of someone new. “By not killing me now.”
“No,” Raffaele replies. “I’m not.”
He finally stands. His hand separates from mine. He walks toward the door with his signature grace, then stops right before it.
“Adelina,” he says, turning. The look in his eyes threatens to break me. “I loved him too.”
Then he leaves me, and I am truly alone.
I pledge myself to the Rose Society until the end of my days,
to use my eyes to see all that happens, my tongue to woo others to
our side, my ears to hear every secret, my hands to crush my enemies. I will do everything in my power to destroy all who stand in my way.
—The Rose Society Official Initiation Pledge, by Adelina Amouteru
Adelina Amouteru
Night has fallen, and it is quiet again. Out in the estate gardens, a few candles flicker in mourning for Enzo. I don’t know where the other Daggers are; perhaps they’ve long ago left this place. Perhaps they’ve fled to the Skylands, where Beldain might give them shelter. Tomorrow morning, things will be different—the uprising has been crushed, Giulietta will rule as the queen of Kenettra, and Teren will bring his wrath down on all malfettos. Enzo’s supporters have gone into hiding to lick their wounds. Violetta and I will flee Estenzia. Where we’ll go, I’m not sure. I’ll settle in another port capital, perhaps, one far from here. Maybe I’ll start my own society to strike back against Teren. Maybe we’ll run across other Young Elites. The Daggers can’t be the only ones.
I sit before the mirror of my vanity in my chamber, leaning weakly against my chair. My chest wound hurts every time I breathe. The knife tucked into my boot is my only remaining weapon, and now I take it out and set it on the vanity’s surface, its point facing me. Through the window, I can see the dark blue silhouettes of the estate gardens. Enzo walks down there, gliding through the grass surrounding the main fountains. His sapphire robes trail behind him. I know he’s not real, that it’s only another vision that I cannot control.
Everyone will talk about me. Word of the prince’s death is going to spread through the country like wildfire—Lucent has already sent doves to deliver the news to other Dagger patrons. People will say that the prince had fallen for me, and that I killed him in order to help Teren gain the throne. They will accuse me of tricking Enzo into loving me, and then trying to seize his position of power. I will be whispered about. I will have enemies lurking in every shadow.
Let them talk. Let their fear of me grow. I welcome it.
I stare silently at my reflection in the mirror, studying my long silver locks, the broken side of my face, all of it illuminated by the blue-white hue of moonlight. I think back to the night when I screamed at my reflection and shattered my mirror with my brush. Has anything changed since then? My father’s ghost blurs in and out of the mirror’s reflection, gliding behind me, his face a dark, menacing portrait. I try in vain to make him go away, but I can’t. My powers overwhelm me, creating visions of things I don’t want to see.
I suddenly seize the knife on my table. Then I grab a lock of my hair and frantically begin to cut it off. Strands glitter across my vision—for a moment, I can’t tell if they are strands of energy or strands of my hair—and then fall, shining, to the floor. A strange fever seizes me; my wound twists in protest under my bandages, tearing open again, but I don’t care. I hate everything about my markings, I want them gone, they have brought upon me all of the pain and suffering in my life, they have taken from me everything that matters. In this instant, none of my powers give me joy. I am still alone, broken and small, the butterfly fighting for life in the grass. Maybe it will be for the best if Teren wins. Let him destroy us all. Let our markings die out from this world and end our fight.
I have to get rid of this marking. Again and again I slice away, chopping off locks of my hair and spilling the broken strands all around me. In my frenzy, the blade nips at my fingers and my scalp, leaving cuts as it goes. I sway in my chair, then fall to the floor. Red blurs across my vision, mixing with the gray.
“Adelina!”
Somewhere in the midst of my frenzy is a small, clear voice. Then Violetta is here in my room, her smooth hands reaching for mine, her pleas falling on deaf ears. I jerk away from her grasp, jump to my feet, and continue to slash away at my hair. “Let go of me,” I hiss, tasting salt and water on my lips.
Someone seizes the blade from my hands, leaving me helpless. In blind fury, I lash out at my sister with my illusions, trying to force her to return the knife to me—but Violetta wrenches my power away. The sudden rush of energy leaving my body robs me of my breath. I gasp, then brace myself against my table as my knees crumple. Violetta’s arms are around me; she’s lowering me carefully to the floor. All around us are locks of my hair, painted silver and gray by the moons. Violetta pulls me into a tight embrace. I cling desperately to her, terrified.
“I can feel myself losing,” I whisper, my voice cut by broken sobs. “The darkness seeps in a little more every day. What have I done? How can I be like this?”
“I can make it stop. I can eventually learn to take it away from you forever.” Her soft words cut through the angry voices poisoning my mind. She hesitates. “I can save you.”
Teren’s exact words come out of my sister’s mouth. I flinch away. “No,” I snap. “Give it back.”
Violetta’s eyes glow with tears. “It will destroy you.”
Let it. I don’t care. “Give my power back, I beg you. I can’t live without it.”
Violetta studies my face. It is not often that I see our resemblance . . . but here, in this pale moonlight, her eyes become mine, my hair becomes hers, and the sadness on her face breaks my heart as surely as mine must break hers.
Finally, Violetta lets go; my energy comes rushing back to me, giving me life and freedom. I seize the threads and hold them close. This is all I have that is mine. “Just leave me alone,” I mutter over and over again. “Just leave me alone—”
My words cut off when Violetta wraps her arms around me again.
“Mi Adelinetta,” she whispers in my ear. “Do you remember how we used to lie in the long grass, counting the stars as they emerged in the evening sky?” I nod against her shoulder. “Do you remember how we used to dance in Mother’s old bedchamber? Do you remember how we used to hide in the closet and pretend we lived far, far away?” Her voice starts to tremble. “Do you remember how I sat up with you late into the night, binding your broken finger as best as I could? Do you remember?”
I nod, biting back my tears. Yes.
“You are not alone.” She tightens her embrace. “All my life, I have tried to protect you.”
And then I realize that all I ever wanted, kindness with no strings attached, had only ever come from Violetta. I do not know why I never saw it. In all this world, only she has done things for me, bad or good, with no thought of her own gain. We are sisters. Despite all we’ve been through, all that we have held against each other, we are sisters until death comes for us.
Something breaks inside me, dissipating the ugly whispers that plagued me moments earlier, and the gates holding back my tears break down. I hug Violetta fiercely, as if I might die were I to let go. Grief envelops me. I begin to weave. I form an illusion all around us, a vision of things that I dream of and things that don’t exist. The room shimmers and then disappears, replaced instead with the sun-drenched gardens of our old family home. My hair and lashes are no longer silver, but dark like my sister’s and mother’s, and my face is unbroken and perfect. Violetta giggles at me and tucks a flower behind my ear. Our father comes to greet us from inside the house—he is a whole and healthy vision, a fantasy of someone I never knew, with laughter in his voice, the scent of wind and wood on his coat instead of the familiar perfume of wine. Beside him is our mother, an amused smile on her lips, a vision of the women we will grow into. I run into their arms. My mother puts her hands on my cheeks and kisses me. My father hugs me and lifts me high in the air. He spins me around in a wide circle. I throw my head back and laugh with him, because I am his daughter and he is my father, and he is not ashamed of me. He loves me wholly, the way it should have been.
I hold the vision for as long as I can. I would have held it forever, happy to lose myself in it for the rest of my life.
Finally, I release the illusion. It slowly fades away around us, the sun and grass replaced with moonlight and wooden floors, my mother and father replaced with Violetta, her arms still wrapped tightly around me, her skin warm. I lean against her, weak and exhausted, bleeding, my energy spent. Neither of us speaks.
Tomorrow morning, I will lead us out of Estenzia. I will find others like ourselves. I will turn us against Teren with such fury that he will beg for forgiveness. Tomorrow, I will take on all of these things. I will be unstoppable.
But tonight, we stay where we are, holding on, lost in the dark.