Chapter XIII. Ellery
XIII
ELLERY
WINTER
Curtains were drawn over the windows in Glynn’s office.
The scenes of a sunny Alderland were frozen in their frames, the record player silenced.
Ellery waited in her ash-smothered clothes, still reeking of burned hair and flesh.
Despite a healer’s best efforts, her wounded palm remained raw beneath its bandages.
Order magicians had confiscated Iskarius as soon as they found her in the grove, then escorted her here.
Glynn questioned Ellery while President Sharpe hovered behind him.
Ellery scarcely remembered what she’d said, only that she’d created a wand of alban wood, a wand whose name had come to her in a rustle of dying leaves.
A wand that wielded the magic of Winter.
But all thoughts of what that might mean were submerged deep within herself.
Reality rippled as though she were underwater; she was distant, lost.
Time passed. An untouched tray of refreshments cooled on Glynn’s desk.
She sank. She drifted.
The door creaked open.
“Evening.” Hanna Mayes fixed Ellery with a hollow stare. The door thudded shut behind her.
Since Mayes’s brief time at the academy, she seldom crossed paths with her former classmates, and Ellery had only occasionally spotted her consulting with Glynn about duties to the Council.
Mayes never acknowledged her. Then again, Mayes rarely acknowledged anyone.
She stalked everywhere with her head bent low, always in a rush, always with an eerie, faraway glaze to her eyes.
But never had she looked worse than tonight.
Stringy ash-brown hairs slipped from her ponytail and clung to her neck, and several zits on her jawline bled, freshly picked.
Dread seeped through Ellery, slow and steady as a tide.
“Why are you here?” Ellery asked.
“The Council would like a few more answers.”
“I already told them what I know.” Her voice sounded small and distant to her own ears.
“You told them your wand possesses Winter magic, which doesn’t make sense.
Winter magic is wild. And the reason Living Wands are all that can defend against its storms and monsters is because they’re instruments of Summer.
These aren’t just pretty notions. They’re the facts that have guided a thousand years of Aldrish history.
So either you’re delusional, or you’re lying.
Regardless, Syarthis and I will uncover the truth. ”
Mayes dragged Glynn’s chair around the desk beside Ellery and sank into it. She scrutinized Ellery, as if there was fine print hidden within her soot-clogged pores.
Ellery white-knuckled her armrests but knew better than to protest.
“The sensation will feel like a needle,” Mayes explained, in the rote style of having given this speech before.
“It won’t be comfortable, but the more you tense up, the more uncomfortable it will be.
You’ll feel a pinch in your temples and at the soft spot at the base of your skull.
You might also feel a pressure…” As Mayes kept speaking, her words fuzzed in and out.
“… You might re-experience old emotions that can vary in intensity from faint echoes to quite visceral. These reactions are all normal and nothing to panic about.”
“And … and after?” Ellery asked numbly, uncertain she’d caught any of it.
“After, Syarthis and I will leave and report our findings to the rest of the Council. Someone will speak to you as soon as we’re finished with Dom. And—”
“Barrow?” The afterimage of him in the grove flared in her mind: vibrant when everything else had been so muted. For one precious instant, Ellery roused, gulping for air. “Have you seen him?”
Emotion cracked through Mayes’s expression. She grimaced. “I have.”
“How is he?” Ellery hoped he was all right. As all right as anyone could be after Valmordion had Chosen them.
“He…” The other girl shuddered, and her gaze drifted to some aimless point over Ellery’s shoulder.
Each of her blinks was unnervingly slow, as if it was the darkness of her eyelids that truly held her focus, not the room.
Until Mayes tore at a cuticle on her thumb and said, “Again, I think we should proceed.”
Ellery remembered what Barrow had told her back in Mercester Square. I’m not in search of a grand destiny.
One had found him anyway. And although she knew he didn’t want it, she’d seen the wand in his hand, seen the truth.
He suited Valmordion.
And she suited …
Mayes reached into the inner pocket of her blazer and withdrew Syarthis. She stroked her thumb along its handle, and its tip curled and uncurled, like a cat stretching out its spine.
Ellery’s gaze followed it, disturbed. The Syarthis Disaster had happened before her arrival at the Citadel, but she knew its details intimately from her classmates, many of whom had lost roommates, friends.
And if the rumors about Syarthis were true, it could lay Ellery’s whole life bare, every thought, every moment.
“There’s no other way?” she croaked.
“I’m afraid not,” Mayes answered.
After everything the Order had given Ellery, she trusted them. If this was what it took for them to trust her too, so be it.
“I understand. Just make it quick.”
Mayes rested Syarthis against Ellery’s temple. The wand licked her, like a warm, oily tongue.
“Focus on your memories of creating the wand,” Mayes told her. “We’ll do the rest.”
Syarthis’s magic jabbed at the base of her neck, and a gradual pressure built behind her eyes, then her throat. Ellery gagged but held still. She shut her eyes and pictured the pit. The alban tree. The branch descending, her hand reaching for it.
The pressure began to burn, so hot that sweat beaded on her forehead. Then Ellery’s own magic swelled, a cool sensation that numbed the pain. Syarthis’s heat fizzled out; its pressure receded. In a matter of seconds, both vanished entirely.
Ellery opened her eyes. Mayes stood, her shoulders heaving, then shrugged off her blazer. And while Syarthis’s eyes darted wildly around the room, Mayes gawked, frazzled, at Ellery. A burst blood vessel wept across her left sclera.
“How did you do that?” she snapped.
“W-what do you mean?”
“You locked us out. That shouldn’t be possible.
” Mayes leaned against the wall and hugged her wand against her chest. Each time she blinked, so did Syarthis.
Then abruptly she kicked the stand of the record player, making the vinyls jolt on their shelves.
Ellery jolted, too. “What the fuck is going on tonight? Why doesn’t anything make sense? ”
The girl’s brusque professionalism had been intimidating, but this was far, far worse. Unbondings were rare, but they typically occurred when a wielder was distressed. And even if Mayes wasn’t showing other signs, given the wand’s history, Ellery couldn’t help but glance at the door.
Which was precisely when it swung open, and President Sharpe and Councilor Seong entered.
Sharpe frowned, examining the gap between Ellery and Mayes. “Well, are you finished?”
Immediately, Mayes lowered Syarthis and squared her shoulders. “We can’t see into her mind, sir.”
“What?” Seong said. “You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Mayes grumbled.
Sharpe shut the door behind him with a flick of Ballathim, then strode toward Ellery until he loomed over her. She felt pinned to her chair like an insect on a corkboard.
“How are you shielding yourself?” he demanded.
“I d-don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t,” Sharpe said coolly.
“You’re quite the enigma, Miss Caldwell.
As soon as we confiscated that wand of yours, we sent it to our best magicians to examine it.
And it would seem the story you told us, no matter how far-fetched, has at least some truth to it.
Iskarius, as you’ve called it, is a proper Living Wand.
The first new one in recorded history.” Yet Sharpe’s tone did not suggest congratulations.
“And it was crafted from an alban tree.”
The significance of that hung between them, but Ellery couldn’t bring herself to speak. Words were trapped like air bubbles in her lungs, and she felt just as she had in the grove, apart from herself, apart from everything.
Sharpe reached into his wool jacket and pulled out a tall, thin box made of alban wood. He rose and placed it on Glynn’s desk. Then he waved Ballathim, and the top of the box creaked open. Ice crystals puffed into the air, shimmering.
Inside, terrible and beautiful, was Iskarius. There was a single thumbprint on the hilt, smeared with blood. Hers.
The rest of the world stayed blurred as the wand came sharply into focus. It was the only thing that felt real.
“As if all those facts already weren’t fucking enough to swallow,” Sharpe went on, “you tell us this wand’s made of Winter magic. Now, it certainly looks like it. We’ve all got eyes. But our magicians can’t say for sure. Neither can Mayes, apparently.”
Behind them, Councilor Seong squeezed Mayes’s arm and whispered to her. Mayes scowled and smeared the blood on her face across her sleeve.
“Syarthis’s corporeal magic is second only to one wand,” Sharpe continued. “And given who’s wielding that one wand, I’ll admit that I’m inclined to hear you out. You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Ellery nodded numbly. “You think my wand could be like … like Valmordion.”
“We’ve been watching you for a long time.
A national hero when you could scarcely wave a training wand.
Glynn’s little pet project. He always swore you’d be a good investment.
” Sharpe leaned closer. His breath reeked of cigarettes.
“Now’s the time to show us he was right. Can we trust you, Caldwell?”
The full implications of his words yanked her up to the surface, to reality. Ellery shivered, painfully alert.
“Of course,” she choked out.
He gestured to Iskarius. “Then show us this so-called Winter wand of yours. And prove that we should place some hope in you rather than destroy this wand and whatever threat it could pose.”
Ellery didn’t know how to prove something to the Order that she didn’t understand herself. But she needed answers just as much as they did.
She stood and picked up Iskarius.
It was freezing to the touch. Yet the longer she grasped it, the more her body grew used to the cold. Glynn’s office sharpened into hyper clarity, every color muted and cool. Ellery felt an all-encompassing rightness.
Then a voice hissed in her ear.
It was the same voice that had given her Iskarius’s name, old and dry as dust and yet commanding, impossible not to heed. With chilling certainty, she repeated each word it spoke.
the unveiled truth of everything you are
is power that will rise from your own ruin
Long, stunned seconds of silence ticked by before Mayes demanded, “Where did you hear that?” Syarthis quivered in her hand.
“Something told me.” Ellery shivered again. “Something that wanted—n-no, it needed me to listen.”
Seong gaped. “Was that a prophecy piece?”
Ellery staggered backward. It was all too much: Julian burning in front of her, Syarthis’s tip at her temple, and the wand in her hand, an alban wand, a Winter wand.
Suddenly each inhale felt as they had when she’d fought the winterghast, as though she were drowning, subsumed by a current too overwhelming to fight.
Magic surged through countless tributaries within her, magic greater than anything she’d imagined.
Then it burst outward, into a spell.
Brutal cold exploded across the room in a shockwave.
Ice shredded the curtains and speared into the paintings.
It hardened across the floorboards and atop the record player, crushing the stylus.
The other three magicians screamed as Ellery’s spell shattered their hasty shields. Frostbite blistered across their hands.
As Ellery tried to wrench back control of Iskarius, the door banged open.
Councilor Peak rushed inside, wielding his wand, Targath.
Its tip flared an ominous orange, like molten metal.
Even from across the room, she smelled burning.
His gaze ricocheted from Ellery to Seong to Mayes, then back to Ellery.
“Drop your wand!” Peak commanded.
Ellery struggled to pry her fingers from the hilt.
“Now!”
She forced her grip free and threw Iskarius down. It clattered to the floor. Its silver core extinguished.
“I’m sorry,” Ellery rasped. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I swear.”
Without lowering Targath, Peak asked the others, “Are you all right?”
Ellery stared in horror at their injuries. Mayes and Seong both bore signs of frostbite, while Sharpe’s had progressed to frostmaul. Ice fused gruesomely with his engorged, bloodied skin.
“Mayes,” Sharpe snapped. “Get over here.”
Mayes held Syarthis against her wounds. “Hold on a sec. I need to heal myself first.”
Sharpe seethed and cradled his hand to his chest. Then he barked at Peak, “Why are you here? Why aren’t you with Barrow?”
“Our western team just called,” Peak answered. “We got a winterscurge forming outside Oldermere.”
Yet as the others gasped, Peak advanced toward Ellery. Ice crackled beneath his boots as her heartbeat ratcheted faster.
“What are you?” he asked, with equal parts awe and terror.
But Ellery knew they’d already made up their minds.
Monster.