NDC vehicles were parked haphazardly in a nearby lot. Ellery found one with the keys left on the dashboard and scrambled inside. She started the engine, jammed her foot down upon the gas pedal, and sped down the block, dodging non-magical cars left abandoned in the road. She drove past parents carrying children and yapping, panicked pets, past dark windows and doors hanging open on their hinges, as though people had fled in too much of a hurry to shut them. The radio stations all blared static.
The storm worsened as Ellery drove toward the Barren. Ice crusted on her windshield and dimmed her headlights; snowflurried through her vents, collecting in her hair. She gripped Iskarius with one hand and the steering wheel with the other, casting frantic spell after spell to clear the glass and keep light beaming upon the treacherous road. Once, she nearly hit a ghast as it stampeded across the pavement, wheels skidding frantically as she swerved at the last second.
Ellery’s chest heaved as its blue eyes disappeared from her rearview mirror. If she’d seen one, there had to be more.
The Barren was even worse than she remembered. As she ran through the desolate forest, Ellery’s light spell illuminated the carnage of her and Domenic’s battle with Eledrium: some trees were gone, obliterated by their magic, while others lay like bodies frozen to the ground. Although snow crusted the dirt, scarring still peeked through like rotted veins in the land.
At last, she found the clearing with the dead alban tree: the trunk cracked in two, its leafless branches clawing at the sky as though frozen in perpetual agony.
Ellery was positive the prophecy piece had led her here—where devastation left the land a grave. But now she contended with the rest, all of it maddening.
revive the past and claim a new future—maybe she was supposed to heal the tree. But she and Domenic had failed to heal this tree before.
bring Winter glory on a silver throne—Ellery had no idea what that meant.
But the final line did hold significance:the whispers of the trees will guide you home.
“The alban network,” she said aloud. When she and Domenic had fortified the network at Winter’s beginning, the alban trees whose roots connected across Alderland had felt so alive, had seemed to whisper with every rustle. Maybe, if she could reconnect this tree to its brethren, she could revive it.
She didn’t know how doing so would stop the storm. But she didn’t have time to question it.
Ellery pressed her palm to its mutilated trunk. Immediately, silver glowed around her hand.
Previously, she’d felt the power of the alban trees intrinsically, her own magic melding to their tangled roots as though extensions of each other. But this time, she felt no such power. She grasped Iskarius and shut her eyes, trying to block out the barrage of wind and snow. Then she reached out beyond the tree’s ossified roots, searching for any sign of life with which to forge a connection.
Until, at the very edge of her awareness, she felt Winter’s territory.
Ellery hadn’t been able to sense Winter’s trees when she’d fortified the network. But at the time, she’d yet to visit Winter’s territory, yet to feel how much stronger she was there. Now that strength flooded through her, pouring into every groove and crack in the dead wood beneath her hand.
A great, heaving groan sounded overhead. Ellery’s eyes shot open, then widened as the two halves of the tree knitted back together. Gray bark flaked away, revealing fresh ivory wood beneath. Buds sprang open across the branches, then bloomed into delicate flowers. Silver plums grew from them until the branches lowered, creaking, weighed down by the sudden bounty.
But it was not just the alban tree that resurrected. The terrible scars throughout the forest faded, and saplings burst through the ground. Bushes sprouted between them, some dense and adorned with red berries, some thinned and coated in ice.
The Barren was barren no more.
It was Winter territory. And it was beautiful.
Ellery tipped her head back, wishing, hoping. But the storm didn’t wane. The cataclysm hadn’t been defeated. Maybe Domenic hadn’t fulfilled his own prophecy piece yet. But no, that didn’t make sense—if she’d truly fulfilled the final piece of the prophecy, she should have what she needed to defeat the scurge.
“What else am I supposed to do?” she called into the wind.Frustrated tears pooled in her eyes, and she felt so powerless despite being surrounded by evidence of her strength. “How do I s-stop this? I’ve always done everything you’ve asked of me, and here I am, regrowing this random fucking forest when the entire country’s about to get annihilated, and if I fail, if I can’t save everyone—”
Ellery cried out as pain burst through her palm. She tried to wrench it from the tree, but something tethered it there. Her veins bulged as roots wound beneath her flesh, then burrowed deeper, and deeper, as though infusing themselves into every inch of her muscle and marrow.
This time, it was not her reaching out to the alban network—it was the network reaching intoher.
Impressions and images of Alderland coursed through her mind: woods striating across the country; mountain peaks marbled with snow; waves roiling upon rocky cliffs. Suddenly, the Nordmere alban loomed before her, the same tree where she’d first discovered her magic. Its leaves rustled in ominous greeting.
Although Ellery hadn’t touched it since she was a child, it bore her silver handprint.
The agony continued until Ellery swore the roots had wound all the way into her heart. She scarcely recognized the sound of her own whimpers; they felt so distant, so human.
She returned to herself, panting. Iskarius glowed searingly bright in her grasp. When she at last yanked her hand from the trunk, its print had indented deeply into the bark.
But although Ellery no longer touched the tree, her connection to the alban network remained, anchored to her grip on her wand. Iskarius had always felt like an extension of her own magic, but now that magic was far vaster and wilder than ever before. She had been broken, then remade. Shefeltthe whole of Winter’s power across Alderland. Somewhere far away, a pine forest swayed as she shuddered. A lake rippled with her sigh.
Ellery understood now why the prophecy had led her here.She no longer simply wielded Winter—shewasWinter. But there was a price to so much power; if she died trying to defeat the cataclysm, Winter’s hope of ever becoming more than monstrous would die with her.
She was truly Winter’s champion now.
