Leona warned, “I did not bring you here to stop me. I brought you here to witness.”
“You’re both fools,” Oestera hissed, shaking her head.
Solan nodded, the grim lines in his forehead worn and tired. “Unfortunately, I’ve always been a fool when it comes to your sister.”
“Her mind is made up,” Oestera cried. “You have to stop her!”
Solan stared at Oestera, their eyes speaking in a language that couldn’t be translated.
“I’ll do it myself,” Leona ground out, a crimson fire lighting inside her chest. “It’s the only way we break this curse, Solan. If we don’t, the gods will maintain their grip on our courts for yet another generation. For a thousand years, they’ve pitted us against one another and bound us to make it impossible to rise against them… if we don’t do it, who will? Your heir? His? How many more centuries will we tolerate their cruelty?”
“Leona,” Solan breathed, his heart sinking into his chest, drowning in blood-red anxiety. He kneeled before her, and that’s when Astra saw it.
The knife in her hand.
“It is impossible to sever a Tether. If it weren’t, one of our predecessors surely would have done it by now.”
Leona set her face, drawing in a deep breath and resting her hand on his chest. “Selenia said it could be done.”
“Is that true?” Solan looked to Oestera, who looked rather like she was about to vomit.
“She assured us it was.”
“But you don’t believe her,” he said, his eyes searching both sisters’ expressions.
Oestera shrugged. “If it were possible, why would we still be here, millennia later?”
“Because no one has ever been brave enough to do it,” Leona muttered. “They’d rather destroy each other’s courts or murder each other to avoid fulfilling some prophecy we both know isn’t true.”
Leona leaned forward, brushing her hand against Solan’s cheek, opal and bronze fusing together in a shimmering heat. “They’ve told us for centuries one touch was instant death, and you know it’s not true. We’re proof it isn’t true!”
“Leona—”
“I know you are not like us. You do not rely on intuition and gut feelings the way we do, but ask yourself, really search yourself—what’s the truth, Solan? It lives within you just as surely as it lives within me. Selenia is sure that we can sever the Tether and break the bond because we’ve been the only two strong enough to accept it.”
Solan leaned into Leona’s palm, the swirling in his chest shifting from anxiety to devastation.
“What if I’m not strong enough to let it go?”
“We have to,” she whispered. “I will come back to you, Tether or no. If we sever it, we’re free from the gods’ interference. If they can’t control us, they can’t stop us from rebelling. We could end this for everyone,” she pleaded.
“I can’t live with myself if something happens, Leona, I can’t?—”
Leona cut him off with a desperate kiss, her hands clutched around the blade between them. When she pulled away, everything had changed within both of them.
The choice to do what is right, not what is easy, rolled through them like a Summer storm.
“You have to do it,” she rasped. “Selenia said the Solar heir had to choose heart over head.”
Solan glanced at Oestera. She nervously twisted her fingers together over her womb, deep purple dread climbing up over her spine.
“It’s what she said,” she confirmed.
Solan turned back to Leona, his eyes welling with stinging tears, lips trembling as he spoke. “Tether or no, I will choose you in every lifetime, Leona.”
She smiled reassuringly. “This is neither first nor last for us, my love.”
The Solar King held her gaze as he wrapped his hands over hers, curling around the handle of the blade. For a moment, neither moved. Time ceased. He held his breath as they communicated a lifetime’s worth of words in a single glance, the blade shining in the sunlight as Solan rotated it.
