“Tragic,” Tristan replies. Somehow, over the last few months, his conversations had finally faded away into brief sentences. Every day, the light in his eyes grew more distant.

She swallows, trying to ignore the way his silence twists her heart. They were only a year apart, she and Tristan, and he used to be so talkative, to the point where she’d shout at him to leave her alone. They spent such long days in the forest with Lucent. She closes her eyes and thinks back five years. The accident. Tristan’s death. Lucent’s banishment. Maeve’s discovery.

She still remembers how she visited the Underworld in her nightmares, shortly after Tristan was killed. She’d had dreams of the realm of the dead before, but that night’s was different. She was there, physically there, swimming through the dark waters in an attempt to find her brother. She’d found him. And she pulled him back to the surface. A miracle, a power from the gods. Magic, people would call it now, the gift of the Young Elites. But she never told anyone what she did—everyone simply assumed that Tristan had never truly died in the first place. She kept her power a secret, even to her mother, even in her rare letters to Lucent. Only her society of Elites knew. If word got out, the palace gates would swarm with people from all over the world, begging her to revive their loved ones. Better to keep a low profile.

For the first few years after he returned, Tristan was himself again. Alive. Normal.

Then, slowly, he began to change.

Maeve smiles sadly at her brother’s silence, then touches his cheek. She can feel his strength even now, a strange, unnatural power coursing through his body that she alone, who chose to bring him back, has the power to unleash on the enemy of her choice.

“Come,” she says. “I need to pay Kenettra a visit.”