The Fates of the Present and the Future were gone.
South broke from us and ran from the courtyard toward Iolanta’s room, where she had spent most of her days. I got to my feet and followed him. The grief was too much. When I got inside, I found South as he fell onto the bed, moaning in obvious pain.
“South?”
Beneath South’s uniform, his wings sounded a crack. They made jerky movements as if they were trying to unfurl, as if he were trying to fly.
I grabbed his hand and tried to get him to his feet but couldn’t. He pulled his arm away reflexively.
Something was wrong.
South sat up and tore off his jacket to free his wings. There was a chaotic pattern of scars where the wings met his back, a map or timeline of every time he’d tried to get rid of them. I had witnessed the aftermath of South’s first attempt to remove them by the river when he begged me to take them off. He’d apparently never stopped trying. I shuddered at the thought.
With another cracking sound, the wings extended and stretched out. His scars smoothed and his crooked and gnarled wing bones righted themselves. Tears streamed down his face.
As his wings mended themselves, I realized what was happening.
It was more than grief that had struck him.
It was magic.
It was Fate.
“It’s okay, South . . . I think Iolanta healed you,” I said at his side.
His wings were still there. But every scar was gone. The wings had grown as South had grown, and they unfurled and extended to their full span. I was struck by their beauty as I stood in the shadows they cast.
Perhaps that was what Iolanta had done with her last breath, the way Hecate had protected me with a kiss, I thought.
“Not like Hecate,” he said softly.
I hadn’t said it out loud, but somehow South knew what I was thinking.
I have to go get Galatea, I thought. I didn’t know how long we had until the guards would find us. But could South walk?
“Don’t go. Stay with me,” he said, trying to get to his feet.
I gasped. “You’re reading my thoughts, South.”
“Not just yours . . . ,” he replied, holding his head suddenly and falling backward. “I can feel everything. I can hear everything. I can . . . ,” he said painfully.
I tried touching him and he flinched again.
“South,” I said. “Hecate stripped me of my magic in her last gasp at life, but Iolanta did the opposite. You have Iolanta’s gift. When she passed into the Ever After, she gave her power to you.”
South held his head in his hands. “That can’t be possible. From the beginning of Time, the Fates have always been female.”
He was right. There had never been a male Entente. But there was no other explanation.
“I don’t think magic cares what you are. It just cares if you are worthy. Iolanta has made you a Fate.”
“Iolanta is my mother,” South said. “I’m not a human after all. Or an orphan. I always felt closest to her. Now I know why.”
“Oh, South,” I said, knowing exactly how he felt. I might be the only person in all the Queendoms who did. “You were never an orphan to me.”
“I found her and I lost her, all in a matter of hours,” South grieved.
“It was fated,” Galatea offered suddenly from the doorway. She lit her wand to illuminate the room.
I gasped again, looking at the walls. I looked closer at the scribbles and drawings. There were the Presents that I half remembered from when Hecate had sent me to see Iolanta after I had given South wings. I realized now what I should have seen then, that among all those other images there were those that told a story—one that neither South nor I knew at the time. There were drawings of Queen Magrit at the funeral of her mother and the years before. But there were also drawings of South from when he was a baby to when he got his wings. And a drawing of a golden palace . . . one that I had never seen before. Not in our lessons with the Entente or my studies at the Couterie. This was Iolanta’s story, a story of a mother who loved her son.
“She loved you very much,” I whispered.
South took in the walls and sobbed. I almost reached for him again, but I stopped myself. He sobbed louder and recoiled as if I had actually made contact.
His grief combined with the Presents pressing in were too much.
“You’re feeling all your sisters’ pain on top of your own, aren’t you, South?” Galatea said as she moved to the side of the bed.
South grabbed his head and whimpered again.
“Can you help him?” I begged.
Galatea placed her wand over South’s long, brown curls and whispered into his ear: “South, listen to me and only me. Think of the moment that you were happiest.”
He closed his eyes. A smile crept across his face.
Find your place in time and space, where your cares are strangers,
and you know no danger . . .
The spell is cast.
You decide how long it lasts.
She tapped his forehead with the wand.
His breathing slowed, and for the first time since all of this happened, he seemed at peace. She let her wand rest at her side, and she whispered to South.
Stay in that moment.
Rest in that moment.
You never have to leave that moment.
Not until you want to.
Or until I do this again.
“It’s a sleeping spell,” Galatea said. “Or rather, a dreaming spell. He can stay in that moment until I wake him from it. I promise you he is perfectly content. He is living in the Past, which is less painful than all the Presents. See for yourself.”
She tapped her wand against his temple, and then against my own. I could feel my cheeks warm as an image formed in my mind’s eye.
It was the moment in the palace when the guard had come in. It was my kiss with South. I gasped despite myself. I didn’t know that I had made so much of an impression on him. Not in that way.
“Can you fix him? Is he going to be okay?”
“We will tend to him, but first we must tend to Iolanta,” she said resolutely. “Magic isn’t always easy, child. And South is going to have to handle all those Presents without being in a nap forever.”
“And what if he can’t?”
“Then his mother’s fate will be his.”