“We’re getting the Star, and we’re taking her with us. She’s being kept in the dungeons.”
There it is. The thing I’d been yearning to overlook. To protect myself from as though it’d somehow protect her.
I remember the day Kaelis and I briefly discussed the Star. He’d told me they were in or had been through Halazar, and I’d wanted to hear no more. Now I sway and stagger, Ravin’s words echoing loudly between my ears.
This time, she goes into the dungeons of Halazar. Somewheredeep.Somewhere no one, but especially not my brother, will ever find her…Put her with her sister.
A tapestry of memories weaves across my mind, threads of individual moments knotting together into a final pattern.
Glavstone’s office fades away. I’m with my mother, cradling my sister as she sleeps.
“Mother,” I ask quietly so as not to wake my sister, “will Arina be like me?” I sit on the floor with my sister’s head in my lap; my inking supplies are scattered around us—half-finished drawings that I’d started while listening to Mother’s instructions of “feeling the cards” but that didn’t go anywhere. Pages of circles, endless circles wrapping on one another.
She doesn’t look up from her inking. She is always working, over and over, on the same meaningless drawing exercises that she has me focusing on regularly. “How like you?”
“Will she also be drawn to the cards?” I stroke my sister’s hair. She doesn’t even stir.
“Perhaps, but you are very,veryspecial, Clara. If she is drawn to the cards, it will not be in the same way as you are.”
I close my eyes and speak with intention. “I want—I wish for Arina to be very, very special, too. That way, we can be special together, forever.”
I’d said it with every fiber of my being. With the same force of will and flare of magic as when I cast a card. I remember Mother’s panicked expression, her slightly parted lips. She never told me what surprised her about what I said, quickly moving the conversation on.
What if I…Could I have inked my Major all those years ago? Had I spun the Wheel without knowing what I was doing when I was nothing more than a girl? Were those cards I was inking rudimentary versions of my Major? DidImake Arina “like me” in that I shifted fate and made her a Major?
Has there ever been a turn of fate where my power hasn’t made those around me suffer?
“…Clara.” Gregor shakes me. Twino is at my other side, looking on with worried eyes.
I’m shaking. I stagger and grip Glavstone’s desk with white knuckles. But not for support…It’s to keep me from hurling myself at the prince.
Whatever expression I wear is enough that Kaelis takes a half step back. For a split second, he looks as though he might bolt.
Good. You should be afraid of me.
When I speak, my words are colder than the night between the stars. “Did you know?”
A thousand questions are wrapped up in that: Did you know the Star was my sister? Did you know she was alive? Did you keep the truth from me?
Whatever he says next will shape everything.
“Know what?” Jura interjects.
“That she was the Star.”
“Who?” Ren looks among the remaining members of the Starcrossed Club for clarity, but none of them has any to offer.
“My sister.” I don’t remove my gaze from Kaelis. “Did you know Arina is the Star?”
Chapter 6
Silence. And then, just as I am about to break it, Kaelis speaks.
“I didn’t even know Arina was your sister,” he says calmly. The flash of hurt in his eyes has my frayed nerves calming. “You only ever called her your ‘friend.’ ”
“Sister or not, did you know Arina was the Star?”
“No,” he answers calmly. “If I had, I would’ve told you, I swear.”
