As Tunde gently lowered her to the bed once more, Karina saw herself falling in love with this boy. Maybe not a year from now or even five years from now, and maybe not like she could have—would have?—with Adil.

But the unwavering love born of trust and respect—Karina could see the spark of it between them, as easily as she could see children with her silver curls and his gap-toothed smile.

It was more than she could have hoped for. More than she deserved.

Karina put a hand against her husband’s cheek and pulled him down until his lips met hers.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and she meant it.

Hours later, long after even the creatures that stalked the night had gone to sleep, Karina disentangled herself from Tunde’s arms and dressed in a simple robe. Tunde shifted on the bed but did not wake, and Karina tiptoed out of the room into her mother’s garden.

She sat on the edge of the fountain above the Queen’s Sanctuary, the cold night air barely bothering her. As she ran a hand over the smooth marble, she recalled tumbling through the hidden entrance with Adil. She could still feel his arms wrapped around her after they’d survived the river, an embrace so similar yet worlds apart from the one she’d shared with Tunde.

Unable to dwell on Adil any longer, Karina looked around the garden. She didn’t know what would happen now that she had decided not to perform the Rite of Resurrection, but she did know she would need to find someone who could care for these plants as expertly as her mother had. There had always been something special about her mother’s skill with plant life, and as Karina examined the withered husks of the flowers near her feet, a memory returned to her of another afternoon in this same garden.

Years before tragedy and heartbreak had turned her mother into a near stranger, she and the Kestrel had knelt side by side, elbows-deep in the warm soil. Her mother had pulled a single vine from a tree.

“To be an Alahari is to be part of a lineage that has toppled dynasties and overthrown kings. It is being able to do extraordinary things,” her mother had said, and Karina had watched in awe as flowering buds had popped up across the vine. “One day, you will do extraordinary things too.”

Her mother had been able to command the earth with a single twist of her hands. Grandmother Bahia had crafted an enchantment that was still protecting their people a thousand years later, but Karina had never done anything extraordinary, not like that, anyway—

A storm in the middle of the still season when the sky should have been calmest. A single bolt of lightning striking the residential portion of the palace. A blaze that swept across the grounds, one Baba and Hanane would never escape.

For a single instant, the memory of that night was clear in Karina’s mind, but then it was gone again behind the searing pain of her migraine. She grasped for it, but the memories remained jumbled, a knot she did not know how to untangle.

A single tear fell down her cheek, followed by another. Soon Karina was crying full sobs that racked her body. She cried, not for the mother she had known or the queen Ziran had lost, but for the woman captured within the gentle details of this garden, this woman who had lived through hope and despair and heartbreak same as anyone else. She wept for all they could have been and all they would never have, for the generations of her family that had spent their lives trapped in this beautiful cage of a city. She cried until she could not recall that she had forgotten something to begin with.

When Karina looked at the first rays of morning’s light spreading across the sky and Bahia’s Comet overhead, she knew she had made the right choice.

Her mother was never coming back.

Baba was never coming back.

Hanane was never coming back.

But she held within her all their love and their hopes and their dreams. She was neither a reflection of them nor a replacement, but rather everything they’d been, combined to form something completely new. Something more than she could have been on her own.

The best way to honor them would be to take them with her toward whatever lay on the other side of that marvelous sunrise. And maybe as she did, she would find her way to the answers that lay on the other side of her pain.

So Karina rose to her feet. With the sun warm on her face and birdsong in her ear, she left the garden to welcome the last day of Solstasia.

29

Malik

Much like the moment when one first wakes from a dream, the last day of Solstasia arrived before anyone was ready for it to. The festival wouldn’t officially end until the Closing Ceremony that night, but with the challenges completed, an air of finality hung over Ziran. The savviest travelers already had their eyes on the horizon for their next destination, and decorations were coming down on every street as people braced for the approaching stormy season.

From his vantage point on the roof of the Azure Garden, Malik watched Ziran awake with a sense of detachment. Everyone in the riad was giving him a wide berth, as no one knew what to say to the boy who should have been king. Life Priestess had spoken to him only once, to inform him that they’d be having a trial for Leila the next day. She didn’t have to voice what they both knew—the punishment for murdering a Champion, in self-defense or otherwise, was death. Leila’s connection to Malik was the only thing that had spared her from execution on the spot.

A bell chimed through the city; it was a call to the last morning prayer of the dying Sun Era. In a few minutes, Malik would gather with the rest of the court to thank Gyata for watching over them for the past fifty years, before the Water Era began tomorrow.

In a few minutes, Malik would have to stand before Karina as if she hadn’t destroyed any hope he had for the future.

He would never forget the way she’d looked at him after the Final Challenge—as if he were nothing. Malik had spared this girl’s life again and again, losing both Leila and Nadia in the process, yet to Karina, he would always be nothing.

The worst part was that he had no one to blame but himself. Leila, Tunde, even Karina herself had warned him not to get carried away by the rush of Solstasia. Like a child wishing on shooting stars, he had bought into the fantasy that there might be a place for someone like him in this world of wealth and magic.

But space was never given to the people the world decided belonged at the bottom. It was taken. And now his sisters would pay the price for his failure.

Usually when Malik was upset, his magic sparked within him, a living force to be dealt with. But right now, it was alarmingly still, a bowstring stretched as far as it could go before snapping in two.

His knuckles tightened around the railing of the terrace—thin and ancient, just like the one Driss had fallen to his death over—and he summoned the spirit blade to his free hand. He ran a finger over the dagger’s impossibly sharp edge, a thin line of blood pooling on his fingertip in its wake.

Solstasia was not over yet. If he would not get a chance to be alone with Karina before the festival ended, then he would make one.

After all, he was an Ulraji Tel-Ra. Facing down Alaharis was in his blood.

“My siblings, let us bow our heads in deference to the gods.”

A thousand bodies knelt in unison, and Malik knelt along with them. He was in the Sun Temple with the rest of the court for the morning prayer, and what should have been a normal task had become a somber ritual. After a hundred years and two Solstasias, the era of the Sun had finally come to a close, and it was impossible not to look at the empty place where Driss should have stood. The Sun Temple had been built to let in as much natural light as possible, and it bathed every person within it in a golden glow that was incongruous with the solemn tone.

Today might be Life Day, the day of Malik’s Alignment, but this would forever be Driss’s temple. Though Malik did not regret using his magic to protect Leila, he prayed that Driss’s soul had found peace with the Great Mother. He wasn’t sure what else he owed the boy, but he could at least give him that.

As ever, Karina oversaw the service from the front of the temple with Sun Priestess at her side. She was still dressed all in white, but there was a different air to her now, as if the clothes fit better than they had the day before. Though custom dictated that Tunde stand with the other Champions, his eyes were only for his betrothed as she made her way to the front.

At least Tunde had the decency to look Malik in the eyes when he entered the temple; Karina hadn’t even bothered, and Malik had hated her all the more for it.