The Young Elites (The Young Elites #1)(72)
Author: Marie Lu

“And what’s this mention of a White Wolf?”

“Some new Elite,” Maeve mutters, distracted, as she rereads the letter. Killing off Fortuna’s chosen ones? Those Kenettrans get more barbaric every year. She turns around and hands the parchment back to her brother. “Give this to the queen.”

“Of course.”

“And gather the others,” she adds. Time to call her Elites into action. “If we still want to make a move, we’ll need to do it soon.”

Augustine folds his arms across his chest and smiles. “With pleasure, Your Highness.”

Maeve watches him go. Lucent. She misses Lucent desperately, their intimate conversations and their friendly duels and their wild forest adventures. Lucent would track the deer; Maeve would deliver the killing shots. Lucent would scowl; Maeve would tease. Lucent would kneel to pledge her loyalty to the crown; Maeve would help her to her feet. Lucent would shy away from her kisses; Maeve would pull her back.

Lucent fled to Kenettra after the queen banished her; Maeve grew quiet and cold in her absence.

As the guards clean up after the execution, Maeve heads back into the Hadenbury Palace. Her brothers continue on to their mother’s bedchamber, their voices excited as they talk about the news, but Maeve takes a different route that steers her away from the palace’s apartments, out across the courtyards, and toward a small, separate manor. Her mother married two husbands and birthed seven sons before finally getting a daughter. Maeve has waited her whole life to step into her birthright . . . but becoming the queen of Beldain means that her mother will first have to pass away. She winces at the thought.

Still, she chooses to avoid visiting the dying queen with her brothers. Maeve was not in the mood for another lecture on choosing a husband so she could start birthing an heir.

Two soldiers standing guard at the manor house bow low to her. They escort her up the familiar halls until they finally reach a quiet floor. Here, Maeve takes the lead while the nervous guards stay several feet behind her. She approaches a narrow door with iron bars stretching across its wood, then pulls out a key strung around her neck. On the other side of the door, she hears someone stir. The keepers back away. Even her pet tiger refuses to get closer.

The lock clicks open. Maeve pushes aside the iron gratings and swings the door open with a faint screech. She enters alone, closing the door securely behind her.

The room is dark; shafts of blue light beam in from between the windows’ iron gratings. In the chamber’s bed, a figure stirs at her entrance and sits upright. He looks tall and thin, his hair rumpled. Her youngest brother.

“It’s me,” Maeve calls out gently. The young man in bed squints sleepily at her. In the light, his eyes shine like two glowing disks, the color not quite of this world. He doesn’t reply.

Maeve stops a few feet before the end of the bed. They stare at each other. She knows that if she opened his chamber door and gave a command, his eyes would turn black and he could very well kill everyone in the palace yard. But she doesn’t, and so he remains quiet.

“Sleep well, Tristan?” she says.

“Well enough,” the young man finally replies.

“Do you know what I heard today? Kenettra has a new ruler, and the country’s Young Elites are at war.”

“Tragic,” Tristan replies. Somehow, over the last few months, his conversations had finally faded away into brief sentences. Every day, the light in his eyes grew more distant.

She swallows, trying to ignore the way his silence twists her heart. They were only a year apart, she and Tristan, and he used to be so talkative, to the point where she’d shout at him to leave her alone. They spent such long days in the forest with Lucent. She closes her eyes and thinks back five years. The accident. Tristan’s death. Lucent’s banishment. Maeve’s discovery.

She still remembers how she visited the Underworld in her nightmares, shortly after Tristan was killed. She’d had dreams of the realm of the dead before, but that night’s was different. She was there, physically there, swimming through the dark waters in an attempt to find her brother. She’d found him. And she pulled him back to the surface. A miracle, a power from the gods. Magic, people would call it now, the gift of the Young Elites. But she never told anyone what she did—everyone simply assumed that Tristan had never truly died in the first place. She kept her power a secret, even to her mother, even in her rare letters to Lucent. Only her society of Elites knew. If word got out, the palace gates would swarm with people from all over the world, begging her to revive their loved ones. Better to keep a low profile.

For the first few years after he returned, Tristan was himself again. Alive. Normal.

Then, slowly, he began to change.

Maeve smiles sadly at her brother’s silence, then touches his cheek. She can feel his strength even now, a strange, unnatural power coursing through his body that she alone, who chose to bring him back, has the power to unleash on the enemy of her choice.

“Come,” she says. “I need to pay Kenettra a visit.”