We were in the woods. Iolanta must have transported us here.
“You need help. You’re hurt . . . ,” I whispered, looking down at her.
The Fate of the Present gently extricated herself from South and stood on her own. With a wave of her wand, the arrow in her side fell to the ground. She waved the wand again, and her wound disappeared.
“You healed yourself,” I said, elated. She had listened to me after all.
She looked down at her wand. “Ah, I have missed doing that . . .”
She waved her wand a third time, and her ragged dress changed into a pretty poplin gown.
I felt myself relax seeing Iolanta healed and looking like she had in our childhood. In fact, Iolanta looked better than she did all those years ago. She’d never used magic on her clothes back then. Instead, she’d tried to make clothes and furniture with her own hands so that no other Presents could touch her. I felt myself tense up again, remembering that we were all still very much in danger.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“You know in your heart where we are, Farrow,” Iolanta said softly.
And I did. We were where the Veil in the Enchanted Forest used to be, the entrance to the Reverie.
“We can’t be here, Iolanta,” I protested, looking to South to back me up, but he was still and silent. “The guards still patrol here. We’ll be discovered. They’ll come looking for us.”
“The spell will hold. I will make it so they cannot find us. We have until tonight,” Iolanta vowed.
I realized what she meant to do. It used to take the Three to cast the spell of the Veil. Iolanta was going to do it all by herself, with an arrow wound.
“We could use that time to put distance between us and the Queen’s army. A whole night of distance,” I said gently.
“We have other work to do.”
She waved her wand and the Veil went down, cloaking the entrance to the Reverie. After all these years, I felt a rush just seeing the translucent skim that looked like the forest cover.
With another wave of her wand, the Reverie was returned to its former glory. The buildings that the guards had destroyed reappeared. The trees from which we had gotten the wood to make our wands filled the courtyard.
“It’s just an illusion,” she explained. “But I guess in some ways it always was . . .”
“It was real to me,” I countered.
“It was real to all of us,” she admitted, and moved on to where the garden used to be.
Iolanta looked at me a long beat.
“Don’t fret. Hecate is on her way back to you. And your face! Would you like your nose and ears returned to you?”
I paused, thinking. I wasn’t sure. I hated what I had sacrificed for the Couterie. But erasing the evidence felt like I would be erasing scars.
She pulled her wand back.
“Why don’t you try it out for a while, and then you can decide?”
I nodded and felt my face transform.
I leaned over the river and took in my reflection. I could see Hecate in my features again. My nose was hers.
I felt my eyes well up with emotion, and I wiped away a tear.
Iolanta returned her attention to South, who remained eerily quiet. Was he just in shock from the events of the last few hours or was it something else entirely?
Iolanta turned to him. “And you, South, would you like to finally get rid of those wings of yours?”
“Do you think I care about my wings?”
“Wings are a pretty serious decision for anyone . . . ,” she mused, raising her wand again.
South shook his head. “You don’t get to pretend like nothing happened. What you said before, Iolanta—is it true?”
She stopped smiling, and as she relaxed, I could see the effort behind her expression.
“I am your mother, South. I should have told you . . .”
I gasped and looked from South to Iolanta.
“Why didn’t you? Because of some arbitrary rule barring favoritism?”
Iolanta shook her head. “South, you wouldn’t have existed if I cared about the rules. In hundreds of years of Entente, there had never been a boy born to any of us. When I had you and we could detect no magic in you, the others wanted me to leave you among the humans on a doorstep of a church. I refused.”
“Then why? Why keep me in the dark when you knew better than anyone that the only thing I wanted was to feel like I belonged? You knew that I wanted to belong to you. Instead, I spent my whole life thinking I was human.”
“Hecate foretold that the Entente would be endangered someday. To be a boy Entente with Rook blood . . . born of love . . . love between me and my Rook . . . and our love for you . . . you would have been the rarest of things. The biggest prize someone targeting magical beings—someone like Magrit—would have set her evil heart to capture. We thought it best that you thought you were human. So at least you could have a Future hidden among them if we could not keep you safe. Believing you were human didn’t hurt you; it made you who you are.”
South shook his head. Her answer clearly did not satisfy him.
I ached for both of them. Iolanta had robbed them both of a lifetime of love. Like Hecate before her, she had thought she had no other choice. In making the Entente strong, they had both forgone a family.
Iolanta sighed as if what she was going to say next took everything in her to reveal. “I wasn’t fit to be your mother. I wasn’t fit to be around anyone. No matter how much I wanted to be. I know you must have so many questions, but humor one of mine.”
South didn’t look at her, but he nodded.
“I felt every moment of your life. Every heartache, every victory . . . but you deserved a mother who was there to kiss your knee—not one who could barely leave her room. Do you think you can ever forgive me?”
South wordlessly turned to Iolanta and wrapped his arms around her. She pulled him to her chest. When he released her, they were both crying.
But as they parted, I noticed something that made my heart sink. There was a red stain in the center of South’s shirt. Blood.
South read my face. “What’s wrong, Farrow?”
Iolanta sighed beside him, and the illusion dissipated. A bloodstain bloomed on her new dress. The arrow reappeared. She had never removed it.
Some part of me must have known it was too good to be true. It had felt too good to be beside South and Iolanta, walking through the Reverie. It was as close to whole as I had been since the day of the Burning. But it wasn’t real.
“No . . . ,” South whispered as Iolanta sank to the ground.
“I need my sisters. We need to make a circle,” she whispered.
“But South and I . . . We don’t have any powers.”
“I know. That’s why we have to make haste and call the others.”
The others? Had she really meant what she’d said back there in the palace? Were more of the Entente alive?
“Just get me to the circle,” she commanded.
South picked her up and carried her to the center of the courtyard under the never-ending sky. The courtyard was where we had trained when we were small. This was where the sisters drew power from one another when Fate was far off course.
South laid Iolanta gently on the ground. She opened her arms and began to chant.
I drew the circle in the dirt with my wand while South lit the candles. He was still incredibly quiet. Iolanta asked us to join hands, and we sat with her on the floor of the courtyard.
Was she right? Were our sisters still out there somewhere?
Her eyes closed, she chanted.
We have waited so long. East, West, North, South, Sisters, Come back . . .
Heed my song, come back to me, where we belong.
We followed suit. We repeated her words over and over again until Iolanta finally squeezed our hands. Then she dropped hers into her lap and looked to the sky.
We waited for a seemingly interminable pause.
“They’re here.”
I looked around. I didn’t see anything. South’s eyes met mine. I could see the doubt in them. But there was something else too—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Take a closer look,” Iolanta ordered hoarsely.
I followed her intense gaze and still saw nothing.
There was a strike of lightning behind us that seemed to last seconds too long. It was as if it were somehow frozen in time. And then, out of that sliver of jagged light, a person slipped into the sunlight. It was Galatea.
She took us in for a split second as the light dissipated, and then she rushed to Iolanta’s side.
“Sister . . .”
“You are just in time . . . ,” Iolanta whispered, collapsing.
South caught her and helped her sit back up.
Galatea’s eyes fell on South and then me. “South . . . Farrow . . . You’re alive.”
Iolanta moaned again.
I found my voice. “She was shot with one of the Queen’s arrows. She used her wand. But it’s not working. Maybe she used too much power transporting us here.”
Galatea knelt beside Iolanta. She touched her face as if she were trying to determine if she was really there. If she was really real.
“Hecate is here too . . . ,” Iolanta whispered.
Hecate’s ash form stepped forward into the center of the circle and grasped Galatea’s hands.
They stayed like that, palm against palm, for what felt like an age—as if they were looking into each other’s souls.
“You’re really here,” Galatea said. “How I have missed you, sister. We are so close to having everything we want . . .”
“She doesn’t talk,” I explained.
“Why couldn’t I feel your presence all those years?” she asked Iolanta, taking her hand.
“Long story. Let me tell it to you.” Iolanta pulled Galatea’s hand and put it over her heart.
I knew what she was doing. She was letting her in. She was letting her read her Past.
Next, Galatea put her palms over the arrow in Iolanta’s side. She began to chant under her breath.
Make right what was done.
We have just begun.
Despite the horror for Iolanta that blanketed me, I found myself struck by the image before me. The three sisters reunited was something I had dreamed of since the day we had been separated. But I had never imagined it could happen. Future, Past, and Present. Ashes, alive, and half dead.
Iolanta just had to live, to hang on and have more of this, a Future with us all. After all these years, the Fates could not have brought us together only to lose one of them again.
But a few moments of chanting later, Galatea began to cry.
“I don’t understand.”
She tried again.
Make right what was done.
We have just begun.
I could hear Iolanta gasp for air and whisper something.
“This is the way of the Fates. Take care of one another—Take . . . take care of our sisters,” Iolanta said softly, gasping for air.
“Shh—you need your strength—we will save you,” Galatea whispered.
“Can’t you do something?” I could hear my voice breaking.
“The Entente do not step between life and death. You know that,” Iolanta said.
“I will not lose you again,” Galatea argued, putting her wand to the sky. Lightning came off it.
A second later, two more figures slipped out of the lightning bolt and joined us in the courtyard. They were older, but I recognized them immediately: Amantha and Bari.
A smile broke across Bari’s face when her eyes met mine.
“Farrow . . .”
Then she saw Iolanta.
“No!”
“Go, get your sisters. Hurry,” Galatea ordered.
I watched a blur form in the center of the circle, and Amantha went into it.
Within seconds Bari’s flesh began to dissolve, and in its place were thousands of bees with shimmering blue wings. Her dress dropped to the ground as the bees made a furious fluttering line back up to the sky. Just as quickly as Bari and Amantha had appeared, they were gone.
I felt relief well in me. Bari and Amantha were alive.
Iolanta reached out to me and South. She held his hand.
Around the courtyard we watched as my sisters came back to the Reverie. Each slipped out of the lightning and into the circle.
When the lightning stopped, there were fourteen figures wearing hooded robes standing around us in the circle. My sisters had returned.
As Galatea invoked their names, each girl stepped forward. Sistine, Effie, Perpetua, Selina, Odette, Xtina, Horatia, Tere, Freya, Walla, Em . . .
Their faces were the same as I remembered them—only older. Their eyes looked different, and I imagined mine did too. The contented, peaceful look of the Entente had been replaced by something more tortured. More haunted.
“The rest of the fifteen,” I whispered out loud.
“In the flesh,” quipped Tere.
“You’re all here . . . ,” I said as I felt my heart flood with emotion. Iolanta had been right about everything. The Entente were alive.
“Join hands, sisters. There isn’t a moment to waste . . . ,” Galatea commanded.
Iolanta laughed softly beside me.
“Stop, sister. Just be with me. All I ever wanted was to be back here with my family. I am home.” Iolanta looked out at all the Entente, and then she squeezed South’s hand.
A tear rolled down his cheek.
“My beautiful boy . . . my son . . .”
She turned her head to me.
“I feel your anger, young Farrow,” Iolanta said to me. “It is so strong. But it is your love that is stronger than the Queen.
“Love is all,” she whispered, then turned back to South and all of us. “I know the truth of this moment better than anyone. It’s time. Right now.”
And just like that, we watched the light go out in Iolanta.