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“You,Tempest, are the only one since my mother who has touched that crown. As long as you didn’t damage or wear it, it should have worked.”
An image of me reflected in the largest mirror I had ever seen, dress torn from running through the woods and eyes bright from longing, flashed in my mind. On my head sat the crown.
“I didn’t know it would hurt… Nothing happened.”
“Thank the gods,” Helia said. “Now you get to marry him.”
Dimitri flinched. My own feelings were too much of a mess for me to even dare inspect them.
“We’re married—everyone saw us go to the Tower,” he grounded out.
Helia waved her hand. “It didn’t take, and we already established we’re interchangeable in the eyes of the nobility.”
As they debated me, Vanya the dead thief, marrying the king of Tal, the Gate called to my magic, telling me to approach and touch with cold death and warm life.
The song invited me to join it in dance. A twirl and we would be one—music and girl never separated again.
Dimitri’s strong hand caught mine before I stumbled into the green light.
My sister, who’d had no one to catch her, pressed her hands against the glowing green mist.
“No more arguments. This isn’t about you,” Lumi said when she saw Dimitri. “Or my sister. Call it what you want—no need for it to be a marriage but do it now, and when it’s over, keep her in the land of the living.”
Blue and orange flames flashed as Ealhswip backed Pyre against a wall.
Pebbles fell from the ceiling. Lumi cried in pain and rage. The emerald mist flowed until it covered our ankles.
On the other side of the Gate, shadowed creatures moved. The glass screamed as the cracks Ealhswip and the priestesses created widened. It pressed against my mind again. I had felt it when I retrieved the crown from the tree.
It had tasted me. Recognized me as I did it.
Perhaps the Gate itself held the Goddess’s will, like the treasury door held the royal family’s. Perhaps I had no idea what a god was.
Standing at my sister’s side, I tore out of Dimitri’s grip and sank my hands into the green mist.
A cold so strong it burned latched onto me. My walls crumbled and the green rippled into a quicksilver mirror. Lumi and I reflected back—four of the same face. Dead and alive. Necromancer and mind witch.
Almost, the Gate seemed to say,you’re almost ready.
Knowing flowed from it to me. I could not let the things on the other side into Tal. It needed to open and be healed from both sides for the balance to be restored. For the Spirits to pass from our worldto the next. The priestesses had been breaking the sigils closing it while reversing the flow from death to life.
The presence reached inside me, searching for something to latch on to. Men screamed in the dark while I stood frozen, unable to understand.
Listen, Morovara had said.
Kindness, my mother had said.
Sacrifice, Lumi had said.For change doesn’t come from nothing.
“Place the crown on my head.”
Far above me something cracked and Spirits, thousands upon thousands, approached. We were running out of time.
“I don’t want to be queen. I’ll never tell anyone,” I said, struggling to get the words past my chattering teeth. “But this Gate needs someone bound to your line and the crowns. It’s all connected. I wore the crown unknowingly.”
Dimitri stood behind me, untouching but close enough that if I fell, he would catch me.
“It would always only have fitted you,” he said, settling it on my head.
