Chapter XVI. Ellery
XVI
ELLERY
WINTER
The car’s headlights beamed onto the frosty gate at the entrance to the Barren. An ominous sign was fastened to the chain links:
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
Barrow cranked down the passenger window and pointed Valmordion at the gate. Obediently, it swung open. Beyond stretched a thin dirt path, crowded by forest and crusted with ice.
“Quite the rap sheet we’re growing here,” Barrow muttered. “Trespassing, breaking and entering, carjacking…”
“Technically it’s not carjacking if we borrowed it.”
“Don’t worry. Hanna’s car has definitely seen worse.”
Ellery didn’t doubt it. Gum wrappers littered the floor. Spare shoes were piled in the back alongside stacks of overdue library books. And Iskarius sat in a sticky cup holder, shoved in a plain brown sheath, ancient and unknowable and perilously close to a sloshing thermos of mystery liquid.
She still couldn’t believe what the two of them had done.
Barrow had cast an illusion of Ellery sound asleep in her dorm.
Then they’d taken Iskarius from the Vault, supposedly the most secure place in the Citadel, a place Barrow claimed he’d somehow broken into before.
They’d stolen a Councilor’s car. And to top it all off, if they were wrong, she’d be tried for treason.
Ellery Caldwell, perfect hero, was well and truly gone. In her place was Ellery Caldwell, rogue Winter magician.
Ellery drove on until the paved road abruptly stopped, replaced by inhospitable underbrush. She pulled over, and they stepped out into a cluster of trees, birches with bare branches, pine still adorned with green bristles.
“The forest looks normal,” she said as she tucked Iskarius inside her uniform blazer.
“But it’s not,” Barrow said. “You feel it too, right? It’s like…”
“Like there’s something wrong about this place. Even if I can’t see it, I know it. And I feel this awful dread.”
“Exactly.” He approached the tree line. “You said there’s a dead alban here?”
“According to Glynn, yeah. And I don’t think he was lying.”
“Well, knowing the Order, they’re hiding it with more than a trespassing sign. Do you see anything? Any flickers? Seams?”
Ellery studied the nearby branches. Illusions often bore a telltale golden shimmer of magic or an unrealistic feature, like impossible symmetry. “Not yet.”
Then, mere moments later, Barrow gasped, “There! You see it? By that oak?”
Ellery joined him beside the oak in question. There was the slightest hint of a magic seam on its trunk, like a loose stitch in a piece of clothing. “Yes, I do.”
Barrow drew Valmordion. Ellery reached for Iskarius, then hesitated, images of Sharpe’s frostmaul vivid in her mind. She couldn’t lose control again.
Barrow swiped Valmordion down, as if slicing a crease through the air. Instantaneously, the illusion dissipated.
“Well, damn,” Barrow breathed.
The Barren was much larger than Ellery had expected, a forest of death that blotted out the horizon with its clawed branches. The hollowed husks of trees were packed together tight as headstones. Striations of scarred earth snaked through the dirt like veins.
“It’s like a horror movie set,” Ellery said. “All that’s missing is some cheesy fake fog.”
“I should warn you. I’m terrible at horror movies.”
“Even the ones with bad special effects? Come on, those are only scary if you’re a kid.”
“Hey now. My past two days have been one continuous horror movie. So be prepared—if there’s a jumpscare, I might leap straight into your arms.”
Barrow offered her the same charming smile he’d worn back in Mercester Square. And although Ellery was tempted to return it, the weeks since that night already felt like a lifetime, the enchantment they’d made together inevitably long since faded.
Besides, flirting probably meant something very different to him than it did to her.
She strode into the forest.
The crooked canopy shrouded the sun, making her feel as though they wandered through an endless twilight. The wood felt utterly removed from Gallamere. They could have been thousands of miles away. They could have been in another world.
Ellery understood why the Order had concealed this place. It disturbed her to know an alban languished in such a dismal grave.
The two of them kept up a seemingly lighthearted conversation, ranging from more horror films to magazines, most of which Barrow had never heard of. Yet Ellery’s dread grew more and more difficult to ignore, a pervasive, unmistakable sense that each step she took was closer to her doom.
Until she tripped on a root—an alban root. But instead of the familiar white, this one was gray.
“Found it,” she whispered.
They followed the shriveled roots to a nearby clearing, where an alban tree awaited them, split nearly in two.
Each half was twisted, mangled, with deep, ugly grooves carved within the bark.
The branches were emaciated, devoid of life, devoid of Summer.
And the scarred, ruined land twined around it, like the center of a knot. Somehow, it still stood.
Dread seemed to ripple outward from the tree itself. Ellery was gripped by the sudden sense that something terrible had happened here.
“What could possibly be powerful enough to kill an alban tree?” she murmured.
“Beats me.” Barrow treaded toward it wearing a haunted sort of wonder. His grip tightened around Valmordion. “But you were right about this being the place from the prophecy piece. I’m sure of it.”
“I think so, too. The question is what we do next. The prophecy piece said, ‘silent land in need of resurrection.’”
“Wild guess: this alban tree’s dead. We revive it.”
“I’d agree with you, but Glynn said past Chosen Ones couldn’t heal this. So if we’re meant to save this tree, I’m not sure how.”
Barrow’s charming smile returned. “Well, none of the past Chosen Ones were part of a Chosen Two.”
Ellery knew this was what they’d come here to prove. But she struggled to meet his eyes. And when she drew Iskarius, she stiffened. Its power—her power—poured through her, plunging to unfathomable depths.
Barrow rolled his neck, shook out his limbs. As if readying for a sports match. His smile was gone. “All right. We’ve got this. On three?”
He pointed Valmordion at the trunk. Ellery mirrored him with Iskarius.
“One,” she counted, “two…”
Yet as she spoke “three,” it was only Barrow who cast a spell, not her. A soft golden glow emanated from the tree, then spread up its branches and down its roots. For several seconds it shone, until it gradually faded.
The tree remained unchanged.
Barrow glanced cautiously toward her.
“I know,” Ellery said. “It’s just that last time I used Iskarius, I … Forget it. I’ll try.”
Ellery grasped Iskarius more tightly, then leveled it once more. Barrow paused, looking like he wanted to say something.
But before he could, wind whipped through the clearing. With it came a soft susurration that crescendoed to a frantic howl.
In front of the tree trunk, flickering furiously, a monster materialized.
An outline of liquid silver coagulated into a humanoid form, but far taller than any person, stretching at least ten feet high.
A ridge of spikes rippled down its back, and blue eyes blazed within a gaunt, sunken face.
Yet its form was ephemeral; pieces of it shifting, always shifting, as if it were made from the static of a broken projector screen.
Ellery gaped. “Is that a winterghast?”
“Um,” Barrow croaked, “according to an acquaintance of mine, it’s called Decibel.”
“What—”
Before Ellery could finish, their surroundings shifted. Trees warped and bent at impossible angles, and Ellery staggered, stricken. A winterghast who conjured illusions, not storm.
“It’s using enchantment magic,” she rasped.
“That’s not possible.”
“Well, does that look like nature magic to you?”
“No, but it’s a monster. It can’t—”
“Glynn told me the winterghasts might be evolving, somehow. Getting smarter.”
Barrow uttered a choked noise. “Is there anything else Glynn filled you in on that you wanna—”
The monster lunged for them. Barrow hurled a torrent of flames, blindingly luminescent. But before the spell could connect, the ghast vanished.
“Where did it go?” Ellery asked anxiously, as seconds passed.
“I don’t know,” Barrow answered. “I didn’t know ghasts could cloak—”
Decibel reappeared at the opposite end of the clearing.
Barrow instantly shot a golden beam at the creature, and it shrieked as light struck its chest. The sound was unlike anything Ellery had ever heard, neither human nor monstrous.
Like the thunderous crackle of white noise, serrated enough to slice through an eardrum.
As she willed herself to fight beside him, a rhythm pulsed behind her sternum.
Just like the battle in Mercester Square, her magic felt like the ghast’s magic.
But now that she wielded Iskarius, that connection was deeper, more intimate—as though she could sense Decibel’s heartbeat beneath her own skin.
And for the first time in her life, when faced with danger, Ellery didn’t move.
Without warning, the earth around them tilted.
Like a dial turned, the sky dropped clockwise as the ground reared up into a great wall.
Ellery’s balance tipped, and Barrow crashed into her, sending them both sliding into a tree.
While she toppled onto her side, he scrambled up and fired another blast of nature magic at the ghast.
Decibel dodged as it advanced upon them. The spikes on its back seemed to grow sharper. The blue of its eyes flashed as a row of spikes sloughed off, then spun around its body, hovering in the air like throwing knives.
All at once, they launched toward them.
Barrow hastily conjured a shield, and as the spikes collided with its translucent dome, they disintegrated into speckles of silver. Keeping the shield intact, he whipped around to face her.