24
C larion anticipated a splash, a rush of cold. But as she slipped beneath the ice, there was nothing but open space and blackness enveloping her. Her fall slowed, then stopped entirely. Even with her wings bound beneath her coat, she floated somewhere above the bottomless abyss, suspended in total darkness. A crawling sensation spread over her skin, akin to the feeling of a predator’s eyes fixed on her from the underbrush.
Something was watching her.
Clarion suppressed a shudder and tipped her head back. From here, she could see the crack in the prison she had entered through—and just beyond, spears of gauzy light filtering down. The sun illuminated the ice from above, casting strangely beautiful patterns around her. The world above was blurred and tantalizingly out of reach. She could almost understand why the Nightmares wanted to escape so desperately. There was nothing at all down here: no light, no sound, no scents. It unsettled her terribly.
Then, there came a steady drip, drip, drip.
Clarion’s breath caught in her throat. It sounded too much like…Shaking her head to dispel the thought, she demanded, “Who’s there?”
No reply but drip, drip, drip.
The sound ricocheted through her mind, maddeningly loud. With every drop, guilt and horror climbed up her throat like bile. She whirled toward the sound and channeled her power. Starlight pooled in her palms, but the curtain of shadows did not lift. The sensation of unbearable pressure—of malice—intensified. But she saw a thin wisp of white against the dark.
Milori.
She caught only a glimpse of his hair streaming behind him as he retreated with slow, faltering steps. It reminded her too much of how he had looked the other night, dragging himself up the stairs to the healers’ clinic.
“Milori?” she called. Her voice echoed endlessly in the darkness.
He did not acknowledge her.
Abruptly, her feet struck solid ground. She stumbled as she caught her balance. Nothing had appeared beneath her that she could see, but with every step forward, the blackness rippled under her feet as though she’d alighted on the surface of a still, dark pond. Gradually, she broke into a run. She had to catch up to him.
What was he doing here? And where was he going?
“Milori!”
She chased after him. But no matter how quickly she moved, no matter how far they traveled, he never seemed to get any closer. The darkness churned around her, the shadows slithering and swimming and closing in.
A shift in the air pressure. Then, something lunged at her.
Clarion ducked, barely dodging the snap of teeth as they closed over her head. She fired a bolt of starlight at it. Whatever it was shrank back, hissing its fury at being thwarted.
Her heart pounded in her throat; her hands, set aglow by her magic, trembled. How was she supposed to fight when she could hardly see her enemies? But she could not dawdle here; she could not lose Milori in a place like this.
When she looked up, she saw him standing in the near distance, staring at her with those piercing gray eyes. Clarion charged toward him. The closer she got to him, the more the world began to take shape around her in shades of charcoal.
Silhouettes of trees loomed out of the dark. Grass sprouted, waving in a wind she could not feel. Her feet knew exactly where to carry her, which obstacles to step over, as though this were a dream she had wandered through many times before.
This wasn’t Winter anymore.
Milori turned and walked away from her with purpose, heedless of what the heat would do to him. No, she thought. What it had already done to him.
She could not watch this happen again.
Clouds gathered overhead, limned by a sinister violet glow. It felt like the moment before a lightning strike—like the moment before a Nightmare attack. Every hair on the back of her neck rose, and her skin crawled with a formless anxiety. Her mind had emptied of every thought but I have to stop it.
The air thickened and settled heavily in her lungs. It smelled like decay: a foul, sickly-sweet vegetal smell that made her stomach turn. She recognized this place now: the last stretch of woods before she would reach the river that divided the Pixie Dust Tree from Summer.
As she pressed onward, she would have sworn she heard screaming.
Briars surged from the earth, barring her path. Clarion shoved her way forward and tripped, her boot catching on an upturned vine. She sprawled across the ground, skimming the skin clean off her hands. Blood welled on her palms and dribbled down her wrists. But the pain hardly touched her. When she looked up, what she saw rooted her to the spot. It made her entirely numb with horror.
The Pixie Dust Tree was rotting.
Viscous black liquid dripped from the ends of its branches, and all the leaves had gone slick with decomposition. A sickly rot licked up the sides of the trunk, bubbling and oozing. But worst of all, it had put out feeble new growth: wispy clusters of rhododendrons and black roses, barely managing to unfurl.
Danger, it said. Despair.
Help me.
Pools of Nightmares rose from the spongy ground at its roots, clawing their way toward the Pixie Dust Well. Everything about the fairies’ world depended on the survival of the tree. Without it, there would be no pixie dust. No home. Nowhere for newborn fairies to land. Pixie Hollow would be gone—and without Never Fairies, what would happen to the Mainland?
“No,” Clarion choked out. “No, no, no.”
Clarion forded the shallows of the river, nearly frantic in her desperation. She was sweating in her winter coat. Why was she wearing a winter coat at all? The few Nightmares she saw, she blasted insensately, hardly even looking to see whether her blows landed or if they stayed down.
When she reached the other side, she grabbed the first fairy she saw by the shoulder. “What happened?”
He recoiled from her, disgust plain on his face. There was something in his eyes that she had never been confronted with: hatred. It contorted his features into a horrible rictus and set his eyes aglow. The sight of it rattled her to her very core.
“You did,” he spat.
Me?
He wrenched away from her. Clarion whirled around to find that a small group had gathered behind her, huddled close as they watched the heart of their queendom putrefy. All of them glared at her with pure loathing. Mutters spread through the group, low and baleful. She could pick out a few words here and there:
Cold. Uncaring. Undeserving.
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
It rang in her head: the confirmation of all her worst fears.
No, she could still do something. She could still save them. Hadn’t she come here to save them? Panic obliterated all sense as she fled to the base of the Pixie Dust Tree. Fairies lay scattered across the roots, still as corpses beneath the Nightmares’ spell. Some of them had begun to sink into the rotting earth. And there, against the stain of black rot, was the spill of Petra’s red hair.
“Petra!”
The earth bubbled like bog water, dragging her down into the depths. Clarion plunged her hands in, gagging on the stench, and dragged her out.
“Petra,” she said pleadingly. “Please, wake up. I’m sorry.”
Petra’s eyes cracked open. Clarion let out a strangled sob. If nothing else, then there was some good in this world. Some small mercy.
“You,” Petra said, full of venom. She sat up slowly, staring unblinkingly at Clarion. “You did this to me. You refused to listen to me when it mattered the most. You are so selfish .”
Clarion scrambled backward—directly into someone else’s shins. She craned her neck and found herself staring directly into Elvina’s dispassionate face.
“You are an utter disappointment,” said Elvina with a curl of her lip. “Why did the stars send you ?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, curling in on herself. “I don’t know.”
She wished they hadn’t. The weight of the crown had always been too much to bear. How had she ever thought she could shoulder it all? Being born a governing-talent was a mistake. No matter what she did, it would never get any better. It was always destined to end up this way.
Pixie Hollow, ruined. Her, alone and reviled.
Darkness flowed off the river, encircling her like fog. What was the point in fighting back?
“Clarion!”
She knew that voice, but from where? She dared to lift her head, but it felt so heavy—and her eyelids even more so. All she saw were the cruel faces of those who loved her best and hated her most bitterly. At least they were vanishing slowly, as this darkness closed in around her. If she let herself, she could drift off to sleep forever.
“Clarion.” The voice sounded far more strained than it had before, edged now with a hint of desperation. “It isn’t real. You have to wake up.”
Milori. What was he doing here?
He couldn’t be here in the warm seasons. And yet, hadn’t she seen him only moments ago…?
No, she realized. She wasn’t in the warm seasons at all. She was beneath the ice, deep in the Winter Woods. The fog had enshrouded her entirely, so choking, she could barely draw breath. If she focused, she could see the violet light of the Nightmares’ magic threaded through her surroundings. An illusion. Like all those fairies trapped in their slumber, she’d been cast into the Nightmares’ realm.
She bit down on the inside of her lip, hard enough that the pain startled her awake. The horrible nightmare version of Pixie Hollow fell away, revealing nothing but the swallowing darkness beneath the lake once more.
Clarion fought through the malaise and harnessed her power. Starlight poured from her in beams, and the darkness binding her fell away, like fabric sliced to ribbons. She fell to her knees, landing hard on the invisible, glass-like water beneath her. Her teeth rattled together. But with the light of the magic reflecting off the ice overhead, she realized now what had taken hold of her: a sickly purple smoke, curling upward from a massive creature’s nostrils. She let out a shaky breath and scrabbled backward to get some distance.
A guttural hiss cut through the silence. Two reptilian eyes blinked open—and locked on to her with a vengeance. She saw now what had been lurking in the deepest recesses of the prison.
The Queen Nightmare.
A dragon.
Clarion could not fathom how such a thing existed. She did not know how she was supposed to face something like this. Her terror rooted her to the spot. Her hands trembled violently, and that spark of starlight within her felt terribly small in the face of something so immense. Fear was not only raw, instinctual terror, or death nipping at your heels. It was this, too: despair.
The dragon opened its mouth to reveal row after row of serrated teeth, and a sulfuric light spilled into the darkness between them. It took her only a moment to realize that it was a ball of fire, ready to be unleashed.
“Clarion!”
Clarion startled at the distant sound of Milori’s voice. She looked up to find Milori, banging on the ice from above. His face was indistinct, but she could see the desperate belief shining out of him.
“Don’t forget what you promised me!”
It jolted Clarion out of her stupor—enough to startle the faintest laugh from her. It had been such a beautiful wish—one worth fighting for.
No, she could not surrender now.
Within her, she carried the dreams of the thousands who had seen her star falling. For one moment, they’d felt hopeful or desperate enough to shed their cynicism and entrust their wishes to her. As long as she had them, she could not succumb to despair.
As the flames rushed up the dragon’s throat, Clarion squared her shoulders. She was the Queen of Pixie Hollow. And this beast? It was a child’s fear, given shape and left to fester for far too long.
In the harsh light of day, it was nothing at all.
Clarion burned like a star: inexhaustible and obliterating. Golden light exploded outward, filling the prison. The dragon bellowed as, strand by strand, the horror and doubt that had made it unraveled. Threads of darkness unspooled, crumbling into ashes as they floated through the air.
In the end, nothing but this remained: twinkling motes of starlight, transforming what had lain empty into the endless brilliance of the night sky.