The hours stretched long into the night.
We placed Iolanta in the glass casket at the back of the Reverie, the final resting place for all Fates. We said our tearful goodbyes, all except South, who would do the same when he was ready.
“May her blood be the last the Entente ever spill,” Galatea said as Hecate’s ashes floated next to the casket. Her hand caressed the glass.
“Here, here!” the other girls agreed, and raised their wands to the sky.
I closed my eyes in the moment of silence and thought of Iolanta, knowing the dull ache I felt for her could not compare to South’s. I wished Iolanta to come back to us by magic or ash, as Hecate did. But that was not to be.
“When the sun rises, so does the seal. No one but Entente can enter here,” Galatea announced.
We stood in silence and waited for the moon to set on Iolanta and for the sun to seal the spell. I could have sworn the sun shone brighter than I had ever seen it when it broke the horizon. It shone for Iolanta.
In the morning light, I looked at my lost—and now found—family. I noticed something I hadn’t before. Freya’s cherubic, dark-brown face was exactly the same as the day of the Burning. She hadn’t aged a day.
“How can it be that you look exactly the same?” I asked.
“Time stopped for me on the day of the Burning. The explosion of magic when Iolanta’s fire met the Black Glass and all the energy flowing from all of us . . . We don’t know the exact cause . . . And we have yet to find a remedy,” she said.
“Oh, Freya.”
“My malady is nothing compared to what was taken from us that day. There are much worse things than being forever seventeen.”
I took this in. Hecate, Iolanta, now Freya—how many of us had been hurt and changed forever?
Galatea jumped in. “Our scars can either hurt us or make us stronger. They are our history. They remind us what we have survived and that we are alive to tell the tale.”
“Since the day of the Burning I can stop time,” Freya boasted.
I frowned. I was not like Freya. I had lost my magic then.
Galatea looked squarely at me. “Tell me of your scars, child. I know they must be plentiful for you to have made it this far on your own.”
“Hecate gave me a kiss of protection the day of the Burning. I lost her and all my magic in one fell swoop. But she came back to me, sort of.”
“I searched for you, but I could find no trace of you. It must have been because of Hecate’s spell. We assumed you were dead. Everyone survived except the Entente on the pyre. And you, Iolanta, and South, or so we thought. If I had known you were alive, I would have stopped at nothing to find you,” Galatea explained. “The indignities you must have suffered . . . living among humans . . .”
I inhaled deeply, and my mind flew to the prince. I did not regret meeting Prince Mather. I flashed back to the moment he kissed me—
“We’ve been in hiding. Not all together, of course. That would have been too dangerous. It was safer if we spread out. Not just in Hinter but over all the Queendoms,” Bari said, putting her arms around me.
It felt strange, but in a good way. The embrace told me the Entente were changed. There was a time when the idea of an Entente hugging another Entente was unheard of. But that had changed with the Burning and all the years in between. Apparently, Galatea had given them permission to throw out the old ways in exchange for the new.
“We’ve been biding our time, gathering our strength,” Amantha said. “I’m so glad you both survived and found each other.”
“I didn’t find South until yesterday . . . I’m so glad you’re all . . . I never thought I would . . . ,” I began, but the words didn’t come. A gasping sound escaped me as I looked at their faces. Faces I thought I would never see again. Amantha put her hand on my back, a gesture she never would have made when we were small.
“All these years you were all alone . . . Oh, Farrow,” she whispered, her voice full of emotion.
And then, looking at my sisters, my entire story came tumbling out. Everything that had happened since the day of the Burning: the discovery that I was Hecate’s daughter, my time as an orphan and then as Couterie, Queen Magrit and her Black Glass, and South being a Fate.
My story told out loud sounded fantastical. But my heart lifted seeing my sisters respond with looks of empathy, wonder, and perhaps even pride at how I had handled myself without them and without magic.
Amantha touched my nose.
“All that you went through . . . I can’t believe they did that to you.”
I shrugged. The nose felt like the least of all the years’ wounds.
“I just wish I had my magic back,” I said. “I kept whittling wands, but none of them worked.”
“Hecate saved you, and she protected your Future the only way she knew how,” Galatea said firmly.
I heaved a heavy sigh. I knew that what she was saying was true, but if I had had my powers, maybe I wouldn’t have been alone all these years. My sisters had one another, and all I had was my vengeance.
“The Entente will rise again. We have a plan, and you are just in time,” Galatea said. A smile crept across her face.
“But I don’t have any power. I won’t be of much help.”
“I can’t promise your Future. I deal in the Past. But it is my hope that you will be wielding your wand again. And South will be doing it for the first time. This is how we honor Iolanta.”
I embraced Galatea quickly and released her. Then we all took our places in the circle.
“Farrow, there is no guarantee that the spell will work . . . but it will hurt,” Galatea warned.
“That’s not at all comforting. But any amount of pain is worth having magic again.”
“Then let’s begin,” Galatea said.
I stepped into the circle, tapping my fingers against my wand. I felt adrenaline course through me. I was impatient and anxious at the same time. This was what I had waited and hoped for all these years. This was my chance to get my magic back.
Return the magic that was lost,
Put it where it longs to be,
Give this girl back
What makes her Entente—
With that, we raised our wands to meet one another’s.
The dawn sky opened up again, not with rain but with a streak of lightning that met our wands.
We all fell backward from the strength of the force. I closed my eyes as the lightning coursed through my entire body.
It hurt—like my insides were on fire. At the same time, I felt more alive than I’d ever been. It was a pain that bordered on pleasure and returned to pain again.
My heart stopped beating. I heard a crack of thunder and saw another flash through my eyelids. My wand had been struck again. Suddenly, I felt my heart restart. The wand fell from my hand.
When I opened my eyes, my vision was filled with the faces of my sisters.
“You okay, Farrow?” Bari asked.
“You could have warned me that you were going to kill me,” I said.
Amantha shrugged. “What’s the fun in that?”
Galatea corrected, “I did tell you that this would hurt.”
“You could have mentioned the bolt of lightning . . . ,” I countered, my ego somehow smarting just as much as my entire body.
“Anticipation can make pain that much more acute. I wanted to spare you that,” she said matter-of-factly.
Now that we had all made sure I was not dead, it was time to see if the spell had worked.
“Can I have my wand?” I asked.