My heart twists again as I think of what I am doing, and I choke back a sob. Oh, Magiano. I will miss all the days we will never have, all the moments we will never share. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
I open my mouth. I mean to tell my sister I’m sorry, sorry I couldn’t save her in the mountains, sorry I didn’t listen to her, I didn’t tell her more often that I loved her. I am ready to say a thousand words.
But I say none of them. Instead, I say, “The deal is done.”
A faint glow encircles Violetta. The pillar vanishes. She sucks in a deep gasp of air, then falls to her knees. She is alive. I can even sense the beating of her heart, the life that it gives her, that permeates through her like a wave, adding color to her skin and light to her eyes. She shakes her head, then reaches out to grasp my hand as I kneel beside her. “What happened?” she murmurs. She looks around. Behind her hovers the shape of Moritas, waiting patiently for me.
The deal is done.
Violetta tugs on my hand. “Let’s go,” she says, her fingers wrapped tightly around mine.
But I can already feel the weakness invading my body. My shoulders hunch. I struggle to draw in my next breath. All around me, the threads of darkness once tied to my body now anchor deep into the gray ground, and when I try to push against them, it feels as if each had pierced my flesh, a million hooks in a million places. Death has already come for me.
“I can’t,” I whisper to her.
“What do you mean?” Violetta frowns at me, not understanding. “Here, let me help you,” she replies, bending down to me, looping one of her arms around my shoulders and trying to lift me up. Her pull only strengthens the tug of the threads, and I cry out as pain lances through me.
“I am tied here, Violetta,” I murmur. “It is my bargain with Moritas.”
Violetta’s eyes widen. She looks at the looming darkness all around, the towering, faded image of Moritas silently watching us. Then Violetta turns back to me. Now she understands. “You traded your life for mine,” she says. “You came here for me.”
I shake my head. No, I’d come here for myself. That was my goal from the beginning, to save myself under the guise of saving the world. I spent my entire life fighting for my welfare and power, destroying in order to make it happen. I wanted to live. I still want to live.
But I don’t want to live as I had.
Violetta grabs my shoulders. She shakes me once, hard. “I was meant to go!” she cries. “I was weak, dying. You are the Queen of the Sealands, you had everything ahead of you. Why did you do it?” Tears swell in her eyes. They are the same as our mother’s, sad and kind.
I smile at her weakly. The darkness pulses, waiting for me, and the strings tying me down continue to pull. “It’s all right,” I whisper, taking Violetta’s hand off my shoulder and squeezing it in my own. “It’s all right, little sister, it’s all right.”
Violetta turns her face up to Moritas in desperation. “Give her back,” she says. A sob distorts her words. “Please. This is not the way—I am not supposed to live. Let her. I don’t want to return to the mortal world without her.”
But Moritas just stays silent, watching. The bargain is done.
Violetta cries. She looks back down at me, then curls her body around mine, pulling me to her. I reach out and wrap my arms around her, and, here in the mist, we cling together. My strength wanes; even the act of hanging on to Violetta seems to take all my effort, but I refuse to let go. Tears roll down my face. The realization sinks in that I am dying, and I hold on to Violetta tighter. I will never see the surface again. Will never see Magiano again. I can feel my heart breaking, and I am suddenly afraid.
Fear is your sword.
“Stay with me,” I murmur. “Just for a little while.”
Violetta nods against my shoulder. She starts to hum an old song, a familiar song, one I haven’t heard in a long time. It is the same lullaby I used to sing to her when we were small, the one Raffaele had once sung for me along the banks of an Estenzian canal, a story about a river maiden. “The first Spring Moons,” she whispers. “Do you remember?”
And I do. It was a sun-drenched evening, and I pulled Violetta through the fields of great golden grass that spanned the land behind our home. She laughed, asking me repeatedly where I was taking her, but I just giggled and pressed a finger to my lips. We made our way across the expanse until we reached a sharp outcropping of rock that overlooked the center of our city. As the sun threw purple, pink, and orange across the sky, we crawled on our bellies to the very edge of the rock. Sparks of color and light danced on the city streets below. It was the first night of the Spring Moons, and the revelers had started to appear. We looked on with delight as early fireworks lit up the sky, bursting in great explosions of every color in the world, the sound deafening us with its joy.
I remember our laughter, the way we casually held hands, the unspoken feeling between us that we were, for a moment in time, free from our father’s grasp.
“Sisters forever,” Violetta declared, in her tiny, young voice.
Until death, even in death, even beyond.
“I love you,” Violetta says, hanging fiercely on to me even as my strength dies.
I love you too. I lean against her, exhausted. “Violetta,” I murmur. I feel strange, delirious, as if a fever had wrapped me in a dream. Words emerge, faint and ethereal, from someone who reminds me of myself, but I can no longer be sure I am still here.
Am I good? I am trying to ask her.
Tears fall from Violetta’s eyes. She says nothing. Perhaps she can no longer hear me. I am small in this moment, turning smaller. My lips can barely move.