The Young Elites series by Marie Lu

Teren bows his head to Giulietta. “We are hunting for her relentlessly, Your Majesty. I’ll not rest until she’s dead.”

It is Teren who is spearheading the hatred of all malfettos, Raffaele realizes. He is the executioner, while she is the politician. Giulietta has no reason to annihilate them now that she is queen. This is the wedge between them that can drive them apart.

Finally, Giulietta shakes her head. She steps closer to Raffaele. “I do not grant mercy easily,” she whispers as she admires his jewel-toned eyes. Raffaele hears the clicks of crossbows around the room. One wrong move from him, and he will die. Giulietta studies him a moment longer, and then turns away and waves a hand. “Take him back to the dungeons.”

Inquisitors seize his arms. As Raffaele leaves the chamber, he reaches out one more time for Giulietta’s energy. She is suspicious of him. But at the same time, his words have stirred a new emotion from her, something that Raffaele had not sensed earlier.

Curiosity.

Only the beautiful young Compasia dared to defy Holy Amare. Even as he drowned mankind in his floods, Compasia reached down toward her mortal lover and changed him into a swan. He flew high above the floodwaters, above the moons, and then higher still, until his feathers turned to stardust.

—“Compasia and Eratosthenes,” a Kenettran folktale, various authors

Adelina Amouteru

Getting to Estenzia will require traveling by land. We can’t afford another round of inspections while on board a ship, and from what we’re hearing, the harbor at the capital is teeming with Inquisitors and workers, all preparing for the celebration in honor of Maeve’s arrival.

Early the next morning, we set out on horseback along the road from Campagnia to Estenzia. Two days, says Magiano. He plays his lute the entire way, humming as he goes, and by nightfall he has composed three new songs. He creates with an intensity I haven’t seen since I first met him. He seems preoccupied, but when I try asking him what’s on his mind, he only smiles and plays a few measures of music for me. Eventually, I stop asking.

The first night, Sergio sits away from us. I watch him as he looks up at the night sky, studies the sheet of stars, and closes his eyes. Only Violetta stays at his side, her attention riveted on him. Occasionally, she asks him a question, and he answers her in low tones, keeping his body turned toward her in a way that he doesn’t do for us.

After a while, Violetta rises and makes her way back over to us. “He’s calling the rain,” she says as she approaches. She sits next to me, her side pressed against mine. I lean against her. She used to do this when we were little, I recall, as we rested together underneath the shade of trees. “Weaving it, you might say.”

“Can you imitate that too?” I ask Magiano, my stare still fixed on Sergio.

“Not well, but I can strengthen him,” Magiano replies. He glances over his shoulder to where Sergio still sits, then up at the sky too. He points to one glittering constellation. “See that? The shape of a swan’s neck?”

I follow the curve of stars. “Isn’t that Compasia’s Swan?” There are dozens of folktales about this constellation. My mother’s favorite was about how Amare, the god of Love, brought endless rain to the land after mankind burned down his forests, and how Compasia, the angel of Empathy, saved her gentle human lover from drowning by turning him into a swan and then putting him in the sky.

“It is,” Magiano replies. “It aligns with the three moons—which I assume helps him know which direction to pull from.”

Violetta’s attention stays on Sergio as he works, her eyes riveted on his still posture. “It’s fascinating,” she says, not to anyone in particular. “He is actually gathering individual threads of moisture in the air—mist from the ocean, ice crystals high in the sky. It requires so much concentration.”

I smile as I watch Violetta. She has grown more sensitive to the energy of others, to the point where Raffaele would have been proud of her. She will be a powerful weapon against the Daggers when we meet them again.

I’m about to ask her to explain how she has managed to figure out so much about Sergio’s powers, but then Sergio stirs for a moment, and his movement prompts Violetta to get up and hurry back over to him. She asks him something else I can’t hear, and he laughs softly.

It takes me a moment to notice Magiano watching me. He leans back on his elbows, then tilts his head curiously at me. “How did you get your marking?” he asks.

Familiar shields go up over my heart. “The blood fever infected my eye,” I reply. That’s all I want to say. My gaze goes to his eyes, the pupils now round and large in the darkness. “Do you see differently when your eyes slit?”

“They sharpen,” Magiano says. Right after the words come out of his mouth, he contracts his pupils, giving them their catlike appearance. He hesitates. “That’s not my main marking, though.”

I turn my body to face him. “What is your main marking?”

Magiano looks at me, then leans forward and starts to pull up his shirt. Underneath the coarse white linen is smooth, brown skin, the lean lines of his stomach and back. My cheeks start to redden. The shirt slides higher, revealing all of his back. I gasp.

There it is. It’s a mass of red and white flesh, scarred and raised, that covers almost his entire back. Rough ridges outline the mark. I stare at it with my mouth open. It looks like a wound that should have been fatal, something that never healed right.

“It was a large, red, flat marking,” Magiano says. “The priests tried to remove it by peeling off the skin. But of course that didn’t work.” He smiles bitterly. “They only replaced one marking with another.”