Chapter XXXVIII. Ellery
XXXVIII
ELLERY
WINTER
“It’s always been so obvious, hasn’t it?” Ellery murmured, her cheek against Domenic’s chest. “This. Us.”
Domenic gently brushed a tendril of hair from her face. “At the risk of sounding corny, I think part of me always knew.”
In the dreamy dim of Ellery’s bedside lamp, Alderland’s Chosen Two lay curled beneath the covers, impossibly, inevitably together.
The windows were shut. The shades were drawn.
A clock ticked on the nightstand, marking time’s passage in the outside world even as they carved out a fraction of it for their own.
“I do recall a confession of you fantasizing about me for five years.” Ellery tilted her head back and smirked. “Come on. You can’t expect to admit that and have me never tease you about it.”
“I never said you couldn’t tease me,” he drawled.
Ellery laughed. She wished they could linger the way they deserved, reclaiming every moment they had so foolishly denied themselves. But the rest of the country could only wait so long.
“If we’re going to be the first Chosen Ones to survive our cataclysm, then I think we’re meant to do more than just save Alderland,” she said, sobering. “I think we’re meant to change it.”
“So do I. This is what the prophecy meant by peace. No more ghasts. No more scurges. And Summer and Winter wands serving Alderland side by side.”
“That’s what I want, too. But even with the right wielder paired with a winterghast heart, in Winter territory, we still couldn’t make a Winter wand.”
Domenic’s fingers traced up and down her arm thoughtfully. “So what do you think would need to be different?”
Ellery hesitated. For all they’d promised each other, she didn’t know if he could promise her this.
“I think Summer would have to cede territory permanently. An Alderland that’s split between the two seasons, I guess. Is that a compromise you can make?”
“Of course I can,” he said immediately, fervently. “For people to stop living in terror of the day Winter arrives? For magicians and civilians both to stop dying in a pointless war? That’s worth sacrifice. That’s worth anything.”
The only acceptable response was to kiss him again.
After how close she’d come to surrendering all hope of their shared future, the truth burned deliriously within her.
Domenic Barrow was as much a part of her as her magic, and she could no sooner uproot him from her heart than she could purge Winter from her veins.
Of course loving him was her destiny. It could be nothing else.
Abruptly, the bedside lamp cut out. The room darkened, but the darkness bore a heaviness, as if the air Ellery breathed crushed her from the inside out.
“What was that?” Domenic gasped against her lips.
“I-I don’t know.”
Simultaneously, they bolted from the bed. Ellery yanked open the window shades and uttered a horrified noise.
It was midday, and yet a false, sunless twilight was suspended across the firmament. No lights shined in any neighboring windows, no lampposts glowed on the streets, no billboards glared from atop the buildings. Gallamere, the City of Magic, had gone dark.
And above it, descending in a terrible oblivion, was a storm.
It was a winterscurge at its beginning: frost just sharp enough to grate against the window glass, winds that whined rather than wailed.
But it wasn’t the storm’s power that horrified Ellery—it was its size.
It smothered the skyline, vaster than anything she’d ever lived through, even heard of.
Yet as she searched for a heartbeat, she couldn’t feel Kythion’s, nor any other winterghasts as its source.
It didn’t have one. It was nothing but Winter magic—unbridled, ravenous magic—threatening to devour the city she loved.
“This is it, isn’t it?” she rasped. “This is the cataclysm.”
Domenic staggered back from the window, the ember gleam of his eyes the only hint of him in the darkness. “You’re right,” he choked. “This is it. I feel it. I feel this…”
“Dread,” she finished gravely.
“All right. W-we don’t need to panic. Even if we can’t thwart the cataclysm before it begins, we can still stop it before it gets worse.
” Domenic riffled through his discarded clothes until he wrenched Valmordion from his pants pocket.
Its core ignited, and he stumbled as he held it and dressed.
“But what do we do? Do we fight this thing like a scurge?”
“I don’t know if that’ll be enough,” Ellery said. “Chosen Ones can’t defeat the cataclysm until they finish the prophecy. And we haven’t.”
“Then we finish it. Right now. I know we’ve been going in circles about the traitor for weeks, but things are different now. We have each other.”
His words steadied the more he spoke. And they steadied Ellery, too.
“You’re right,” she said. “Where’s Iskarius?”
He cocked a brow. “I believe it’s where—”
Ellery flushed. “I remember now.” She darted into the living room, then snatched her wand from the carpet and cast a light. It illuminated the slivers of ice creeping like ivy across the floorboards. A vase swept off her mantel in a gust of wind, then shattered.
She hurried to the closet and yanked hanger after hanger aside, overwhelmed with the suddenness of so many decisions, both significant and trivial.
For all Ellery knew of fashion, she wasn’t quite prepared to choose an outfit for the potential end of her world.
She pulled on a pair of thick woolen trousers and a random sweater, then shoved her feet into combat boots.
“If Summer’s traitor isn’t me, or you, then who is it?” Ellery called.
Domenic appeared at the closet entrance, still buttoning his shirt. “I’ve got no clue. I really don’t. We’ve interrogated every last member of the Order.”
“Is it possible it could be someone outside the Order?”
“What, like a hedge magician?” he asked skeptically.
“No, that doesn’t seem right. And we know it’s not the Winter magicians, either. It has to be someone with real power. Someone important.”
He barked out a stressed, high-pitched laugh. “‘Ms. Prime Minister, ma’am. Sorry to disturb you in your hyper-insulated bunker, but are you actually working to dismantle the current magical order?’”
Ellery laughed direly in return. “There must be something we haven’t thought of, something we missed. Someone Hanna didn’t…”
She froze.
“What?” Domenic asked uneasily.
“Hanna,” she breathed.
He snorted. “You’re suggesting Hanna is the traitor? I don’t know … If Hanna wanted to destroy the country, believe me, it’d already be ash.”
It did seem preposterous. Hanna had given more to the Order than almost anyone. But as Ellery searched for another suspect, she struggled to let the thought go.
“She’s the only magician with a Living Wand who hasn’t been questioned.”
Domenic paused tucking in his shirt to study her incredulously. “Well, no shit. She’s the one doing the questioning.”
“And yet after all this time, we’ve made no progress. She could tell us anything, and we’d believe her. Everyone trusts her word. She knows all about the Order’s plans, its defenses, its weaknesses…”
“You can’t tell me you’re really considering this,” he hissed. “Hanna would never betray the Order.”
“We have to consider everyone—”
“Hanna would never betray me.”
Ellery reflected on her conversation with Hanna in Nordmere. How Hanna had seemed not just suspicious of Ellery, but deeply bitter. How much the burdens of Hanna’s own duty clearly weighed on her. How, like Ellery, so much seemed buried below her surface.
“I know it’s a horrible thought.” Ellery rested a hand gently on Domenic’s chest, right above his heart. “But she’s our only lead. And we’re running out of time—”
“Exactly. And this would only be a waste of it.”
“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded, drawing away. “Because we can’t just do nothing. The cataclysm is here. And it’s only going to get worse.”
Domenic stared, haunted, out the window at the oncoming storm. Then he dragged a hand down his face, smoke leaking from his nostrils.
“Fine,” he surrendered. “We’ll find her. We ought to, anyway. Because once we prove it isn’t her, we could really use her help.”