Chapter 57
Chapter Fifty-Seven
EMORY
S ure enough, that damn nuisance of a dust finally proved useful. We followed its trail, swift and without taking any breaks. It took us hours to get to the border, and Aron was able to keep us from getting eaten by sinking sand, sticky trees, caterpillars as big as logs, and the bright hillsides.
Every time I stumbled, Maverick was right there to hold me up, to keep me going. We’d been through a lot over the years, and at least we’d gotten a few solid days to rest. Well, we were supposed to be resting. I couldn’t exactly call all the things Maverick and I had done last night rest. But it had been good. Beyond good. It had restored parts of me I thought lost forever. He’d lit a fire in me that melted all those icy walls I’d put up so long ago. Maybe it was better than rest. It was exactly what I’d needed.
“Up ahead,” Aron called from in front of us. He stood at the top of a winding path, the black shimmers of dust blowing past him.
Driscoll reached him, and Maverick grabbed my hand as we ran up the hill as fast as our legs could carry us.
At the bottom, Annalee and Bellamy faced a towering wall of fire, ice, earth, wind, shadow, and star. Vines made up the bulk of it, but they spit out fire, their exterior shimmering hard with ice, which would make it impossible to climb. Shadowy tendrils reached out, lashing at Annalee and Bellamy. Bellamy drew closer, and a blast of wind blew her backward. The seven swans surrounded her, flapping their wings and backing away. Her brothers. So she was taking them with her on this journey.
I admired her grit, but she’d never make it out of the shadow court alive with these seven swans. She’d never knit those sweaters of nettle. I wanted her to succeed. I wanted her to be reunited with her brothers. But not like this. Not when this was clearly a suicide mission.
I gasped as my gaze dropped to the bottom center of the border. There it was: a hole big enough for someone to crawl through. Annalee had been right. Of course she’d been. She was right about everything when it came to this place. That was our chance at escaping. I pulled the pocket watch out. The big hand was one tick away from the twelve. We had an hour, if we were lucky.
“Bellamy, stop!” Maverick’s voice rang out, and Bellamy whipped around, her long black hair whipping around her angular face.
“It’s okay, Mav,” Annalee said. “I wanted to help her.”
We all stumbled down the steep hill to the little grassy plain, the black dust that had led us here settling down on the tips of the grass. The wind calmed, Bellamy glaring at us while clutching the lightning bolt tight.
“Give us the bolt,” I said as we approached. “It’s not yours.”
She signed, and I understood enough of it. “Not yours either.”
I crossed my arms. “Except we’re the ones who found it. We need it. I need it. You don’t even know if that will kill Spirit Shadow. You have no idea the power it wields. What it might do. The consequences of using it. It needs to be studied, tested, kept in a safe place.”
From the hard set of her jaw, I could tell my words hadn’t moved her. The clock ticked steadily toward twelve, getting closer. “We don’t have time.” I showed her the clock.
Her gaze softened, and I thought maybe I’d gotten to her.
“What does the bolt have to do with you, Mav?” Annalee asked, staring at him curiously .
“It’s a long story.” His gaze never strayed from Bellamy’s face.
“El.” Aron stepped forward. “I’ve stood by you all these years. I’ve never wavered in my loyalty. But this is a fool’s errand. Your father, he’s?—”
Before Aron could finish, Bellamy raised her hand to the sky. The stars brightened, their glow stretching down, shining on each of us, our own individual spotlights that left us transfixed. Suddenly my eyes were growing heavy. So, so heavy.
It dawned on me too late what was happening. “She’s using her star magic.” I stumbled into Maverick, whose own eyes were fighting to stay open.
And she was using it to put us all to sleep.
I stood in the frost court. My boots sunk into cushy snow. The cold wind soothed me, and I raised my face to a grey sky, thick flakes falling from it. Home. I was home. Then I remembered all the events that had just occurred.
This wasn’t real. I was dreaming. Asleep. I pinched myself.
“Wake up,” I said. “C’mon, wake up.”
I pinched myself again. Harder this time. All I managed to accomplish was giving myself a thick red mark on my hand.
“It won’t work,” a voice said.
My head snapped up as Bellamy emerged through the flurries. Her voice was low, raspy but smooth. It reminded me of a singer. Her blood-red dress was stark against the snow, and in this dreamworld it wasn’t torn or raggedy, but smooth and full and clean. Her raven hair fell in smooth waves past her shoulders.
Her hand moved to her throat. “The only place I can talk. In dreams.”
“Your father is alive,” I burst out.
Her face went slack for a moment, but then her usual hard mask returned. “You’re lying,” she said. “Trying to catch me off- guard.”
“I’m not,” I said gently. “Something’s wrong. His brain. He’s troubled.”
“Then he’s already gone.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “I have to focus on saving my brothers. I owe them this. I owe them everything.”
Snowflakes swirled between us.
“But not like this. Not when the stakes are so high.” My voice took on a pleading tone.
“You just want the bolt,” she said. “And you’re not going to get it.”
I threw out my hands. “Despite what you believe, I don’t just care about myself. I do care about you, El.”
She flinched.
“I care about you and your brothers.”
“Then you know why I have to do this,” she shot back.
“So that’s it? You’re going to leave us while we’re all asleep, defenseless? You’re going to escape through that hole and keep us trapped here the same way you were trapped so long ago?” Tears welled in my eyes at the injustice of it all.
Bellamy looked away, the wind blowing her black hair so that it covered her face. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Yet you want to.” I stepped toward her. “That’s why you’re here, in my dreams.” I said my suspicions out loud, even if they seemed impossible. “You’re the one who lured Annalee here, aren’t you? But why? How?”
I half-expected her to laugh or tell me to stop being crazy. Instead, her eyes widened. “How could you know that?”
“You just put all of us to sleep at once. Five people. There is no star elemental in recorded history with that kind of power. To have the power to enter a girl’s dream who lived all the way in the fire court—it would be someone with the kind of power to sink five people into unconsciousness at the same time.”
It didn’t make sense. Star elementals could enter someone’s mind when they slept, to create nightmares or the best dreams. They could put a person to sleep, but typically just putting one person to sleep could drain their magic, except for the strongest of star elementals. To reach out to someone in another court halfway across the continent, Bellamy must’ve had powers far greater than I understood.
She swallowed, gaze still guarded. “My brothers and I always had powers that far exceeded other elementals of the star court. My father didn’t know why. He and my mother were baffled by all of us. Well, my mother never knew me. She had already transformed by the time she gave birth to me. But my father told me that before the Shadow War, when they were just a normal family, they’d agreed that my brothers shouldn’t tell anyone about their powers.”
I’d never heard of anyone wielding magic like what Bellamy had used.
Bellamy waved a hand in the air. “They instructed my brothers to act like everyone else. They didn’t want any attention, afraid of what that attention might bring.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered?” I asked. “Where that kind of power came from?”
“Of course I have,” she snapped. “But my parents didn’t want to risk our family being ripped apart, thrown in the star prisons, or worse, executed. You know how the courts could be about anything different, anything suspicious, anything dangerous.”
I did. The seven courts were infamous for being terrified of conflict of any kind, terrified the Seven Spirits would swoop down and take our powers away if we acted out in any way. What fools we’d all been.
Bellamy reached out a finger, and a snowflake fell onto it. She stared at it in wonder. I didn’t know if she’d ever been out of the star court in her life. She might’ve never even seen snow before, other than far in the distance on the peaks of the Glacier Mountains.
“That day I fell in the lake and saw my future, I saw the bolt, saw Aron in his wolf form. And I saw the girl who would ultimately help me escape the Wilds.”
“Annalee,” I said.
Bellamy stared off into the distance, like she was reliving these memories. “I knew what she looked like. I could feel her soul, her magic. I entered dream after dream after dream, spent night and day searching through minds. It took a while, but I found her, and I started filling her dreams with visions of the Wilds, giving her this purpose, this obsession. I knew eventually she would come and show me the way out. It took five years. But now she’s here and fulfilling that vision I saw of my future.”
“Futures can be changed.”
Bellamy shook her head, her brown eyes swirling with so much anger. “Not this one.”
“So you saw yourself killing Spirit Shadow with the bolt? You saw success?”
She looked away, which gave me all the answers I needed.
“This is a fool’s mission, Bellamy,” I said again. “You’re doing all of this, and you don’t even know if it will work.”
She didn’t answer, her jaw set, arms crossed.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“You’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone.” She pursed her pink lips together.
“You’re just going to leave us here?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s only a few months until the border opens again.”
“A few months in a dangerous land,” I argued. “Where we can’t get to the outside world and give them all this information. They need to know about this, Bellamy. This place. Everyone here.”
“So they can kill them?” She whipped around. “I don’t think so.”
We wouldn’t let that happen. Change was coming. The frost queen might’ve been the last leader following the old ways, staunchly against change. New rulers were emerging in every court, and from what I’d heard, they all were on the same page when it came to no longer sweeping the atrocities of our past under the rug. I had to believe they’d choose to protect these innocent souls.
“I’m going to stop you,” I called after her.
Bellamy looked over her shoulder as she walked away, her red dress fluttering behind her. “You can’t. I’m already gone.”