She whipped her head around. Oestera leaned against the vanity, watching her daughters in the mirror.
“She’s right.”
“Me? The Fire Queen? The selfish monster who will never do what’s right for the crown?” Reliving the words stung.
“I don’t want you to do what’s right for the crown, Astra. I want you to do what’s right for the court.”
Astra swallowed, acid coating her throat. “I feel like I’m hallucinating.”
“I know.” Oestera sighed, shockingly small in this setting. “And by the end of the night, you’ll probably feel like your entire world has been turned upside down. But as we untangle everything with you, I need you to remember that while you are demigoddess Astra Leona Aurellis, Queen of the Lunar Court, you are also human. And it’s okay for you to be hurt and confused. We’re all here to support you.”
She turned to Lunelle. “What was in the tea Ehlaria made?”
Lunelle snorted. “I don’t know, but I think I’d like some.”
Half an hour later, Astra sat across from her father at the very same table she announced her engagement to the Mercurian king.
This time, they’d be telling some actual truths, it seemed.
Oestera paced nervously across the back of the room as she waited for her final guest. Around the table sat Ehlaria, Maeve Maelstrom, Lunelle, Mirquios, Luxuros, and Ameera, half of them completely lost and the other half waiting patiently for Oestera to speak.
Astra’s head swirled with information already, still reeling from what Luciela told her in the Court Below.
“We can start without him,” Oestera finally said, sitting between Nayson and Ehlaria. She drew her shoulders back and began her long-awaited explanation, her voice no longer the frigid trill Astra was so accustomed to, but a warmer honey.
“I know you have a very specific notion of who you think I am, and I know that what I’m about to tell you is going to be quite difficult to reconcile with that narrative, so I understand if it takes us a while to get things sorted. I don’t expect you to suddenly shift your entire worldview in one conversation, but you and your friends are not the first generation of Nova Rebels.”
Astra and Lunelle exchanged a panicked glance.
Oestera continued, “You are the carefully curated second generation, trained from the moment of your birth to pick up where we left off.”
Astra glanced around the table, confusion rolling off Lux and Ameera’s chests, but a steadfast confidence from her mother and Ehlaria gave her something to hold on to as she tried to focus on breathing.
They’d been waiting for the chance to tell this story for a very long time.
“Oestera.” Ehlaria leaned toward her. “It might be easier to show her and not just tell her. She needs to see it.”
Oestera’s eyes flickered over her daughter, a breath leaving her lungs as she considered this. She unfurled her hands, resting them across the table. Astra hesitated. They did not touch often—she was rarely within arm’s length of her mother her entire life.
She glanced at the commander, who picked up her other hand and squeezed.
Astra reached for Oestera’s hand, warmer than expected.
“I’m a little rusty, but I can take you within. I don’t want you to rely on my memory. I want you to see it exactly as it happened. Stay in the shadows, and don’t talk to anyone. You never know who might be sensitive to you.”
“A lesson I learned the hard way,” Astra said.
“When I was even younger than you are now, my dear sister fell in love with a Solarian King. So far in love, in fact, that she Tethered to him, something that we didn’t even know was possible. And when they Tethered, they each took on qualities within one another that made them both incredibly powerful—a result that made us question what we’d been told our entire lives.”
Oestera’s fingers squeezed against Astra’s, pulling her into the strange funnel within them, passing through the haze of time.
“This is madness, Leona!” Oestera shouted, her face round with the youth Fate would soon steal from her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. Her silver hair was braided down her back, and a simple Summer linen frock in a pale lavender danced around her ankles as she chased Leona around her bedroom.
“It’s all madness,” Leona hissed, shoving another piece of clothing into a bag. “It doesn’t matter what you say, Oestera. If you felt like this, if you only knew?—”
“You cannot touch him!” Oestera reached for her sister’s arm, clutching at her wrist.
Leona’s lips twitched, a dusting of peony pink and silver Astra now recognized in her blossoming in her lungs—the kind of colors you cannot will away or deny.
