The Midnight Star

by Marie Lu

  Suddenly, Teren lets out a snarl and lunges for Raffaele. Raffaele takes a quick step away just as Sergio steps between them. His sword is drawn before I can blink. He hits Teren hard in the chest with the hilt of the sword, then shoves him roughly back. Teren stumbles and falls to his knees. I wait, heart in my throat, as Teren stays there with his head down. He’s breathing hard. He doesn’t say anything.

  Raffaele looks pale now. He nods, confirming what we already guessed. “Ruby,” he says, his voice echoing in the dungeon. “For Tristius, son of Time and Death.” His gaze wanders to me. “The angel of War.”

  I exhale again. Teren has the missing alignment we need.

  “Why are you here?” Teren hisses. All hints of his taunting nature are gone now, replaced by raw anger. “What do you want? What do you want?”

  I take a step toward him and bend down to his eye level. “Teren,” I say softly. “There is something happening to the world. To you, to me, to everyone here. The immortal Underworld is seeping into the real world, poisoning everything in it.” I explain what Raffaele had told me, about the poison in the dark waters, the dying baliras, his wounds that now heal more slowly than they ever have before. “We believe we are the only ones who can stop it. The Elites. And you align with the immortal world in a way that we still need.” Teren’s head stays bowed, and somehow, a part of me aches in understanding. What had Raffaele forced up from his past? “I want you to come with us.”

  Teren lets out a broken laugh. He lifts his head, and my breath catches as his colorless eyes find mine, windows full of madness and tragedy. “We have an unpleasant history together, little wolf,” he says. “What makes you think I have any desire to help you?”

  “The last time we worked together, there was another standing in the way,” I reply.

  Teren leans forward. He is so close that I can feel his breath against my skin. “The one standing between us is you,” he snaps. “We can only be enemies.”

  I suppress my hatred of him. “When we first met, you told me that I deserved to return to the waters of the Underworld. That all Elites are abominations, never meant to walk this world.” I narrow my eye at him. “But tell me, Teren. If you are a demon, and I am a demon—abominations in the eyes of the gods—then why have the gods given me the Kenettran throne? Why do I rule the Sealands, Teren, and all armies fall before me? Why, Teren, do the gods keep rewarding me?”

  Teren glares at me.

  “You were born the son of a Lead Inquisitor,” I say. “You have been taught all your life that you are lower than a dog, and you have believed it. Even the woman you once loved told you that you were nothing. She turned her back on you, in a way that makes me pale by comparison.” Then I lift my head and look straight at him. “What if you are wrong? What if the gods sent you, and indeed the rest of us, not because we were never meant to be, but because we were always meant to be?”

  “It’s not possible,” Teren replies calmly. But he does not answer my question.

  “Is it possible that the gods created us in order to save the world, instead of destroy it?” I press, knowing the words that will weaken him. “Is it possible that they created us in order to undo something broken, so that we may one day sacrifice ourselves?”

  Teren stays quiet. “So,” he finally says, “you want me to join you in this quest to fix the break between worlds? Why would I do this?”

  “Because we need you,” I reply. “And you are still the strongest Elite I know.”

  Without warning, Teren lashes out and grabs my wrist with one of his hands. His grip is iron, painful, unyielding. I suck in my breath sharply at his touch. Sergio pulls his sword halfway from its sheath; Magiano utters a sharp warning. “I could kill you right now, Adelina,” Teren whispers. “I could break every bone in your body, could crush them into powder, and there is nothing your men can do to stop me. Let that prove to you that the gods are not on your side. You are still the same quivering little girl I tied to the stake that morning.”

  My hatred for Teren seethes, black and churning, rising above my fear and the pain in my wrist at his grip. Behind me, Magiano’s energy stirs. I stare levelly back at Teren. “And yet, here I still stand before you. Your queen.”

  My words have stirred doubt in him—there’s a flicker in his eyes that I have never seen before. He is wondering whether I could possibly be right. And I am right, aren’t I? The gods have blessed me. They’ve rid this world of the Kenettran king who despised us, then his queen who had used and manipulated us. The gods put on the throne a girl born to a father who wished her dead. They have spared my life again and again. They’ve given me everything.

  And you pushed your sister away. You murdered a man you once loved. You are an empty vessel. Nothing. The gods have given you a power that is killing you.

  “Teren, we are going to hand our powers back to the gods. We will fix the world by giving up our abomination. It is the only way, and it is the only mantra you have ever followed.” I say it as if I were also trying to persuade myself to join this journey, that I do not fear the loss of my power, that I am not still attempting to cheat the inevitable. “I have no other reason to stand beside Raffaele. Nor you.” I take a deep breath. “This is what you’ve always wanted.”

  Teren studies me for a moment. His expression shifts from one extreme to the next, settling at last into a look I can’t understand. There is a light there, behind his madness, a glimmer of something that lures him forward. This is what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it, Teren? I think.

  He releases me. Sergio loosens his grip on his sword, and the others in the chamber shift their stances. I relax, letting out my breath, trying to keep my composure. My heart hammers in my chest.

  Teren gives me a slow smile. “We will see who is right, mi Adelinetta,” he says.

  Teren Santoro

  In the first memory, Teren was seven years old.

  He was in the uniform of an Inquisition Axis apprentice, a simple gray tunic and trousers, a student training to join the white cloaks that his father presided over. His hair was cut short and clean, and his eyes were still the color of the ocean. He’s in one row with a dozen others, looking out at a crowd of young apprentices gathered in a courtyard of the palace, fenced in by tall statues of the twelve gods and angels. His father addressed them all. Teren stood tall, his head held high. He was the only son of the Lead Inquisitor of Kenettra, and that made him better than the others—so his father said, anyway.

  “Our order has always existed to protect the Kenettran crown,” his father was saying, “to protect the superiority of our people above all others, and to protect the purity of our heritage. By pledging your lives to the Inquisition’s order, you promise to forever dedicate yourselves to the royal family, and to guard the throne with your lives.”

  Teren felt his little chest swell with pride. The Inquisition Axis was the most esteemed army in the world—and his father led them. He hoped that, one day, he could look as regal as his father did in his Lead Inquisitor armor and cloak.

  “We wage a noble war against those who are impure. Remember this, and go forth with it in your minds: Protect your country, at all costs, at whatever sacrifice.”

  Teren closed his eyes and took a deep breath, internalizing the words. A noble war against those who are impure.

  “Teren Santoro.” His father was calling his name now. “Come forward.”

  Teren needed no second calling. He immediately stepped out of his row and made his way forward. When he reached his father, the man nodded for him to kneel, handed him his first sword, and told him to look out into the crowd. Teren obeyed. The other apprentices, who were instead given wooden practice swords rather than Teren’s steel one, followed his example and knelt. Teren bowed his head and closed his eyes as his father read out the Inquisition Axis oath.

  He was pure. Superior. And he would follow in his father’s footsteps.
r />   Teren was eleven years old in the second memory.

  The blood fever had swept through Kenettra earlier in the year, so his eyes were no longer a pure ocean blue, but pale, so pale that they were inhuman, a complete lack of color. He stood with a bowed head and heavy heart before the funeral pyre upon which his father’s body lay. The fire had spread now from the kindling to the late Lead Inquisitor’s clothes. Teren stayed silent as the flames roared. His father had gotten sick only after Teren did—but while Teren had managed to survive, the blood fever had killed his father in only two days.

  Teren knew it was his fault. It had to be. The gods did not make mistakes, and he knew he had to have been marked by the fever for a reason.

  Later that night, Teren crept out of his chambers and fled down to the palace temple. There, in the dark recesses and pools of candlelight, he knelt before the gods and sobbed. The Inquisition Axis doctrine specifically taught that survivors of the blood fever were abominations, a punishment from the gods.

  He was a demon now. What had he done? He whispered to the temple floor as he knelt. Before him loomed a statue of Holy Sapientus, the god of Wisdom. Why my father? Why didn’t you take me too?

  He knelt there for three days, until he was thirsty and starving. How far I’ve fallen, he thought to himself, over and over again until the thought seemed embedded in his very being. I was once superior—and now I’m nothing. My father is dead because of me. Trash. Filth.

  Suddenly, in a fit of desperation, Teren grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled it out. It was the same sword his father had gifted him on the day he joined the Inquisition as an apprentice. He took the sword, placed its blade against one of his wrists, and slashed as hard as he could. He cried out at the jolt of pain. Blood bloomed instantly against his skin.

  But, then . . . the wound closed. Teren saw it close, watched with his mouth agape as one side of the slashed flesh rejoined with the other, sealing shut. The pain disappeared.

  Teren blinked at the sight. Then he tried slashing his wrist again.

  Again, the wound bloomed with blood—before closing.

  It can’t be. Teren tried a few more times, gritting his teeth at the pain and then in horror as the pain faded almost instantly. He cut himself more and more frantically, trying to spill more of his blood. But he couldn’t. Each time, the wound healed itself as surely as if it had never happened at all.

  Finally, Teren flung the sword away. He collapsed at the feet of Sapientus, weeping. He couldn’t even end his life. He was cursed forever by the blood fever.

  He stayed in the temple for another day. Then another. A few friends, other young apprentices, came to check on him. He pushed them away, refusing to answer their questions. He didn’t want to tell them the reason why he wouldn’t speak to them—that it was because he was no longer an equal, but a dog who dared to talk to a man. He didn’t want to speak because he was terrified of the horrible, secret power the blood fever had left with him.

  The question haunted him every night he stayed in the temple. Why would the gods let him survive the blood fever marked and disgraced, and then take away the ability for him to end his life? What did they want him here for? Why were they forcing him to stay?

  On his last night in the temple, he drove his fist down against the ground in frustration. To his shock, the marble of the floor cracked beneath his knuckles, leaving a hundred jagged lines in the stone. Teren stared, frozen. He held his hand up to the moonlight, observing that his knuckles had healed over and left no mark or injury behind at all.

  The gods had made him an abomination—and then given him near-invincibility and strength.

  Perhaps they have punished me for a reason, Teren thought. He knelt quietly before Sapientus for the rest of that night, thinking. The next morning, he left the temple.

  Teren was sixteen in the third memory.

  Though his father’s legacy shielded him from punishment, he’d been kicked out of the Inquisition Axis for being an abomination—but that still didn’t stop him from staying faithful to the crown, trying always to find some way or other to prove that he wanted to devote what little worth he had to serving the throne, to serving the gods.

  So he scouted on his own, secretly helping the Inquisition root out malfettos without making himself known. He would follow those he suspected around the city, watching them talk and laugh with their families. Whenever he found a malfetto, he would creep to their door in the night and mark it with the Inquisition’s symbol. The Inquisitors didn’t know he did this, but they must have been grateful for his secret spying.

  Then, one afternoon, he stumbled across an apothecary.

  It was a charming, small shop, run by a white-haired old man and his cheerful daughter, a beautiful Tamouran girl with a quick smile and infectious laugh. Teren would stop by several times a week to watch them taking orders from customers. Something seemed off to him about the girl. Her name was Daphne. Sometimes, Teren would see her run deliveries in the city. She would take so many winding paths that he’d always lose her in the busy streets. When she returned to the apothecary in the afternoons, Teren would wonder where she had disappeared to.

  Until he heard a rumor about a group called the Dagger Society, a supposed team of demonic malfettos with frightening powers not of this world. Apparently, Daphne used her father’s apothecary as a place where she would create pastes that would cover malfetto markings. She helped the Daggers and others paint over their markings. Teren thought that Daphne was the one responsible for keeping the Daggers hidden.

  One night, Teren trailed Daphne as she left her father’s apothecary and made her way toward the University of Estenzia. What was a girl doing out at an hour like this? She disappeared for a long time at the university, but Teren finally found her in a narrow alleyway. She was exchanging words with a hooded figure and handed him a small satchel.

  Teren reported her immediately. Several days later, the Inquisition came to take Daphne away. They dragged her to the Inquisition Tower not far from the piers—and even though he couldn’t see what happened to her, he knew what these soldiers did in the dungeons when they wanted to extract information from someone.

  Daphne was supposed to burn at the stake. But she didn’t live long enough to make it out of the dungeons.

  Later, Teren was summoned by the king of Kenettra and the young queen, Giulietta. Teren knelt before their thrones as the king praised his loyalty for identifying a traitor in their midst. The king reinstated him in the Inquisition, telling the public that Teren did not have a marking after all. That he was not a malfetto.

  In that moment, Teren knew. He knew why the gods had chosen to keep him alive, why they had taken away his choice of dying.

  He was an abomination sent here to rid the world of abominations, to stop those demons from corrupting the kingdom of Kenettra. He was meant to atone for his sins by protecting all that was pure and good.

  This was his reason to live.

  This was his reason, and now the gods have given him a chance to prove it.

  I am the wind, calm and fierce and deep.

  I am the soul of life, the howl of storms, the breath of sleep.

  —Imodenna the Great, by Sir Elias Mandara

  Adelina Amouteru

  When we board our ship, Teren is still wearing his chains. We trust him only to the extent he has agreed to accompany us, but we know that won’t keep him from trying to attack us in our sleep. So he remains our captive, surrounded by guards at all times. As we sail from Estenzia’s harbor, he is the only one who remains belowdecks, chained in his bunk. I stand at the bow of the ship and try not to think about his presence under our feet. Sailing beside us is Raffaele’s Tamouran ship, gliding in unison through the waves. Magiano climbs up the mainmast and swings down with his usual ease. From the shore, I can still see Sergio on the pier with a troop of Inquisitors at his back, watching us go.

/>   He’d kissed Violetta right before we left. It was the first time I’d ever seen him finally act on the subtle feelings he’s always expressed around my sister. Now Violetta is at the stern, her eyes trained on his speck on the pier. Sergio, with his mercenaries’ help, is going to command the army while I’m gone. Still, I can’t help but worry. What if he fails? What if I return to my hard-won empire only to find out that there had been an uprising—or that he’s turned his back on me?

  Everyone turns their back, the whispers sneer gleefully. Their poison caresses my thoughts. Best if you turn yours first.

  “We sail northeast,” Raffaele says the first night as we gather around the dining table. He had crossed over to our ship on a connected gangplank to meet with us. Violetta stays close beside him, while I try to keep as much distance between us as possible. “It will take several weeks if we follow the shortest route, as the northern terns migrate.”

  “How do you know where to go?” I ask. “You mentioned the origin of the Elites. Where is it?”

  Raffaele runs a finger along the table, drawing an invisible line that represents the border of the Skylands and the sea, and then points to a spot far north of the shore. “Northern Amadera, deep in the ranges.” He glances at each of us in turn. “The Dark of Night.”

  “Like in the myths?” Magiano says through a mouthful of dried meat. I’ve heard the tales before too, and now I raise an eyebrow at Raffaele.

  Raffaele nods, strands of his silken hair slipping over his shoulder as he goes. “There are four places where the spirits still wander,” he replies, quoting some ancient tome. “The snow-covered Dark of Night, the forgotten paradise of Sobri Elan, the Glass Pillars of Dumon, and the human mind, that eternally mysterious realm where ghosts shall forever walk.”

  “They say the Dark of Night is a remnant of the gods,” Lucent adds. “It is sacred land. Priests make pilgrimages there.”