“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, Iknowit. 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. Ellerywas 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.’”
