Winter Turning

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “Maybe because she’s an animus,” Winter said. “Maybe she’s using some kind of magic to hide her power from other dragons.”

  A flurry of snowy petals swirled down from the tree and over their wings. Moon shivered. “That makes her sound very ominous,” she said.

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.” Winter reached out and brushed a petal off Moon’s shoulder. “What if she’s a lot more dangerous than she seems? What if she can hide even from you? How can we trust her?”

  They both turned to look back at the slumbering shapes beside the fading embers of the campfire.

  “Beware one who is not what she seems,” Moon whispered, sending a trail of ice along Winter’s wings. “Could that be Pyrite?”

  “We need her help, though,” Winter said gruffly. “It’s not like we can just fly off and ditch her.” He was starting to wish they could, though.

  “I guess we just have to be careful,” Moon said softly. She tilted her head to the side. “We should tell Qibli and see what he thinks.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Winter said, hoping he didn’t sound as ungracious as he felt. It was true it would be smart to get the observant SandWing on the case, keeping an eye on Pyrite. But he found himself picturing Qibli standing here, under this tree with Moon, and it made him feel hollowed out, like an ice cave. “When I wake him for the next watch. You can go back to sleep.”

  “All right,” Moon said. She hesitated, then took a step closer to Winter so that their wings were nearly touching. He felt his breath catch in his throat. She was made for moonlight, all silver and ebony, or moonlight was made for her. He could imagine her in the Ice Kingdom, silhouetted against the vast whiteness, dark as the ocean and glittering like the moonlit snow.

  Except if she set one talon in the Ice Kingdom, someone would probably kill her, or at the very least throw her into Glacier’s dungeon, where the cold would take care of her just as thoroughly.

  And his family would do the same, no matter where she was, if they had any idea how Winter felt about her.

  He would never let that happen.

  “Go on, sleep,” he said, his voice coming out rougher than he meant it to. “We might need you to find Scarlet tomorrow.”

  She dropped her gaze. “Thank you for telling me about Pyrite,” she said. “Good night.”

  And then she was gone.

  Winter took the second watch as well, knowing sleep would be a long time coming for him tonight.

  Qibli was the first to spot the eye-shaped spire in the distance, early in the afternoon the next day. Gray clouds had rolled in, covering the sky in soggy blankets and threatening to rain at any moment. Winter’s wings felt like giant seal flippers hanging off his back, heavy and ponderous. He had barely slept, and his eyelids wanted nothing more than to slam shut and drag him into slumber.

  But when Qibli called, “Over there! I think I see it!” a burst of energy jittered through Winter’s muscles. He soared over to Qibli’s side and squinted in the direction the SandWing was pointing.

  “I don’t see anything,” Kinkajou said.

  “That’s because you’re a RainWing,” said Pyrite. “I see it. SkyWings can see much better and farther than you do.”

  So can IceWings, Winter wanted to add, but he didn’t want to sound anything like Pyrite.

  “I don’t see it yet either,” Moon said to Kinkajou. “But if it’s over there, let’s go!” She put on a burst of speed and shot ahead of the others.

  “Race you to that peak!” Kinkajou yelled, zipping past her.

  The two of them swooped away, their laughter echoing back off the mountains. Kinkajou’s scales were dappled gold and silver today, like some metallic treasure version of a dragon. She’d chatted happily with Pyrite over breakfast, and Winter had felt a pang of guilt that he hadn’t woken her up to hear his theory, too. Were RainWings even capable of regarding other dragons with suspicion?

  “Terribly undignified,” Qibli said in a haughty voice, tipping his snout at the racing dragons. “We would never allow such higgledy-piggledy shenanigans in the Ice Kingdom.”

  “Was that supposed to be me?” Winter asked him. “Terribly unimpressive, if so. I haven’t once said ‘higgledy-piggledy’ in my entire life. We would never allow such linguistic imprecision in the Ice Kingdom.”

  Qibli barked a delighted laugh and did a loop in the air.

  In their shadowy conversation last night, Qibli hadn’t quite believed that Pyrite could be an animus. He’d pointed out that SkyWings hadn’t had one in centuries, possibly as long as the IceWings — which was something Winter should have remembered for himself.

  But he had agreed that there was something not quite right about the skittish SkyWing. Winter found himself oddly comforted by the idea that Qibli was watching her. If anyone could figure out Pyrite’s secrets and strangeness, it was probably Qibli.

  I wonder if this is how MudWings feel, working in teams all the time. He’d read about the MudWing sibling bond, and how they lived and fought and died together. Father said it made them weak because a MudWing warrior would listen to his brothers and sisters instead of his commander. Mother said they’d always be worrying about what might happen to the soldier next to them, instead of focusing on the battle. That’s why it should be easy to defeat the MudWings, they said.

  But it hadn’t been that easy, as many, many battles had taught them over the years of the Great War.

  Maybe I’d rather have allies like Qibli and Moon, making their own decisions and trusting each other, than a commander telling me what to do, Winter thought. Was that treasonous? Did it make him less of an IceWing?

  If he kept having thoughts like these, would he be completely ruined by the time he got home?

  They reached the spire not long after that and found the jagged mountain wall that matched Moon’s drawing. It overlooked a hidden valley where the three waterfalls turned into rivers that led into a crystal-blue lake. The lake bent and squiggled around the edges like a new-hatched dragonet’s drawing of a circle. Winter and the others landed on the northern shore, staring up at the eye-shaped rock formation far overhead.

  “I don’t like it here,” Kinkajou said at once. She shivered, flicking her tail and turning a sort of pale jade green. “It feels like we’re being watched. I mean, as if the mountains themselves are watching us.”

  “And the rivers are whispering about us,” Qibli said. Kinkajou thwacked him with one of her wings and he jumped back, looking injured. “I was agreeing with you!” he yelped.

  “Oh. Well, try to sound less sarcastic next time,” Kinkajou scolded. “My point is, it’s creepy here.”

  Moon glanced around to make sure Pyrite wasn’t listening. The SkyWing had waded into the lake and was scanning the sky and trees hopefully. “Sounds like the perfect place for Scarlet to hide,” she whispered.

  A sudden flutter of wings made them all spin around, but it was only a group of crows taking flight from a nearby tree. A murder of crows, Winter thought with a shiver.

  “There’s something over there,” Pyrite said, waving her tail toward the far side of the lake.

  They hopped over the water, following her, and found what appeared to be the wreckage of a rough structure. Long branches stripped of their leaves were scattered across the ground, and vines still tied in knots lay in crushed piles, as if they had been trampled by angry talons. The entire mess was covered in ripped-up flower petals, rose and violet and daffodil-yellow shredded scraps everywhere. The only remaining intact piece was a canopy woven from vines that tilted lopsidedly in the tree overhead.

  “Yikes,” Kinkajou said. “Someone was not pleased about something.”

  Winter glanced over at Moon, for the nine thousandth time that day, and found her frowning up at the ridge that loomed over them.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “Just a feeling,” she said, letting a shiver run out to her wingtips. “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “I do know,”
said Kinkajou. “Creepy, being-watched feeling, as I have already mentioned.”

  Pyrite let out a gasp and pounced on a stack of broken twigs. Caught on the point of one of them was a dark orange scale.

  “It’s Scarlet’s!” she cried. “I know it is. I’d recognize her color anywhere.” She looked around desperately. “But where is she? What happened here? Did something terrible happen to her?”

  “There’s no sign of violence,” Qibli said, moving one of the branches aside to look underneath. “No blood, no claw marks on the surrounding trees. It looks more like she destroyed her shelter in a temper and left.”

  “Perhaps she somehow found out we were coming,” Winter said. Dread crept slowly under his claws and up along his spine.

  “What? How would she know that?” Kinkajou said in alarm.

  Winter, Qibli, and Moon all looked at Pyrite. The orangey-yellow SkyWing was overturning bits of foliage and scraping through the moss as though she expected to find Scarlet buried in it somewhere. Preoccupied with muttering and hissing and grumbling, she didn’t notice their attention on her.

  “Pyrite,” Qibli said. “Did you happen to see Queen Scarlet in your dream last night?”

  She glanced at him and shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t think so. I don’t really remember. I think I had a weird dream about snow, maybe? But that happens whenever I sleep near Cirrus, too.”

  “It’s still possible,” Moon said. “Even if she doesn’t remember it. Scarlet could have interrogated her in her dream and found out what she was doing and where she was going.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Winter said. “What matters is that Scarlet’s gone and so is Hailstorm.” He ripped a large branch off the nearest tree and hurled it into the forest. Gone — their one chance of finding his brother. Scarlet could have taken him anywhere in Pyrrhia by now.

  Or she could have killed him, if she figured out that Winter was not, in fact, in the rainforest trying to assassinate Glory for her.

  It was strange to Winter that Hailstorm’s death could still hurt so much every time it happened. He would have thought the first time would be the worst — the night a spy had burst into the royal dining room, shouting that all of Scarlet’s IceWing prisoners were dead. “The NightWings killed them all!” he’d shrieked. It made no sense — why would NightWings enter SkyWing territory to kill prisoners? But it felt true nonetheless, like something NightWings would do.

  If they could have attacked the Night Kingdom that very moment — if they’d known where it was — they would have. All the IceWings in Queen Glacier’s domain would have risen up to avenge their murdered comrades.

  Winter’s parents hadn’t spoken to him for a month after that report, and he didn’t blame them. He didn’t want to speak to himself either; he couldn’t bear to see his own pathetic face in the icy reflections everywhere. Until then, there’d been hope that they could still negotiate Hailstorm’s release or carry out a rescue plan.

  But there was no hope. He was gone, as dead as all the other lost IceWings.

  And now Winter had the same crumbling feeling inside, except instead of a snowdrift caving in, this was a whole avalanche cascading heavily down into his bones. This time it was even more his fault. He had failed his brother and then failed him again and again and again.

  “Stop, stop it,” Qibli said, suddenly in front of Winter, taking his shoulders and shaking him. “I see you going to the giving-up place in your head. Get yourself out of there right now. We do not know he’s dead any more than we did an hour ago. What we have to do is keep searching, because he’s only definitely dead if we give up and sit here like moping camels. You are not allowed to mourn until you see a dead body, do you understand me?”

  “What else am I supposed to do?” Winter snarled. “What’s your next brilliant idea? How can he still be alive?”

  “Who are we talking about?” Pyrite asked, wrinkling her snout. “What he? I’m confused.”

  “We split up and search the whole valley,” Qibli said, ignoring her. “I’ll go with Kinkajou and you go with Moon. Look for clues about how long Scarlet was here and where she might have gone. Look for a cave or something else that could have been used as a prison. Figure out where and how she actually kept him and see if we can guess how she’s transporting him. Were there other SkyWings helping her? Or how else was he guarded? Is she traveling in a group? With a chained IceWing behind her? Because that’s going to be a little obvious, don’t you think? Look for messages she might have left behind. Look for anything that will actually tell us something.”

  Winter stared at him, breathing so hard his tail spikes were rattling. Qibli stared back, deadly serious.

  What kind of moons-dazzled dragon would do all this for a stranger from a different tribe? Why hasn’t he given up? Why isn’t he letting me give up, when it means he could go back to Jade Mountain and carry on with his life?

  “Come on, Kinkajou,” Qibli said, flicking his tail at her. “We’ll take the valley south of the lake; the rest of you go north.”

  “You bet,” Kinkajou said with ridiculous enthusiasm.

  He’s letting me go with Moon, Winter realized. On purpose, even though he wants to be with her as badly as I do. But he knows — or he hopes — that searching with her will keep me going.

  Am I that obvious?

  “I’ll go with Winter,” Pyrite declared. “Not that anyone asked. But. I figure. That’s ok, right? Although … what are we looking for?”

  “Signs of Scarlet being here,” Winter told her. “Anything that looks like the detritus of dragons.”

  She accepted this with a puzzled shrug.

  He led the way back over the lake and they started into the woods, methodically covering every square of ground all the way back to the mountain cliff ahead. Winter’s eyes raked the dirt and trees and shrubs and streams and all the small corners around them.

  “Can you hear anyone?” he whispered to Moon when Pyrite was out of earshot.

  She shook her head. “Only Pyrite. Sorry, Winter.”

  Qibli had a point, though. Where had Scarlet been keeping Hailstorm for the last two years? Was he guarded? Chained up? Had he been moved here from somewhere else? Who had fed him and kept him alive while she was trapped in Burn’s stronghold? How did she keep him from trying to escape?

  The brother Winter knew would have fought tooth and claw to be free. If he’d been imprisoned anywhere near here, there should be clues — claw marks scored along the walls of a cave, or a tree with indentations of chains crushed into its trunk.

  Or most likely of all, something Hailstorm had used his frostbreath on. They should look for signs of something that had been frozen.

  But there was nothing. They spent the rest of the daylight searching, with no success. The only sign of life in the whole valley was Scarlet’s scale in the destroyed structure. Otherwise, the grass waved peacefully, and the trees quietly filled with fruit, and it seemed as though no talons had ever disturbed the stillness.

  Winter couldn’t imagine a prison here anywhere. There were no suitable caves for keeping prisoners in — at least not close to the valley floor.

  “Perhaps Hailstorm’s prison is higher up in the mountains,” Winter speculated around their campfire that night. He was keeping his distance from the flames; the heat made his scales feel all melty and sticky.

  “We’ll search up there tomorrow,” Moon said. “We’ll find something.” She shivered. “It’s so quiet out here.”

  Winter actually found it distractingly noisy, compared to the Ice Kingdom. For one thing, it sounded like two rival cricket symphonies were competing at top volume. The owls were hooting so much it was a wonder they had time to fit prey in their mouths as well. Things flapped overhead and small splashes came from the lake. The night felt extremely populated.

  Then it occurred to him that Moon might be talking about the noise inside her head. With all of them wearing skyfire, the only voice she could hear in there was Pyrite’s, pres
umably still treading in its odd boring circle.

  That must be strange for her, he realized. To give that all up and trust us with her secret … would any other NightWing do that? Would any other dragon in Pyrrhia do that?

  He wanted to believe that he would — that if he had the power to read minds, he’d tell other dragons right away instead of invading their minds in secret. But would he really? With a rare weapon like that, wouldn’t he be tempted to use it?

  That night he let Moon take the first watch. All he wanted to do was turn off the world and his brain for a while. He gazed up at the shadowy, hulking forms of the mountains as sleep drifted through him, slowly leading him into odd half dreams about his brother in a cave up there, watching the valley below for two lonely years.

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, wandering through a half-seen labyrinth of stone passages, when he turned a corner and suddenly the dream sharpened around the edges.

  An orange dragon stood before him, wearing veils of dark smoke that poured from her snout and from the fire beside her. Blood and ice dripped across her face and wings, until she shifted, and he realized it was only rubies and diamonds embedded in her scales, catching the firelight.

  She pinned him with her yellow gaze, sharp as talons.

  “Tell me who you are,” she ordered.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked. “I know who you are.”

  “Very flattering,” she said in a slithering voice. “So perhaps then you can also gather why I am not pleased to see you.” She took a step toward him, and the dream-cave trembled around them. Something wavered across her face, like a mask slipping to reveal a glimpse of another, disfigured face underneath. “You’re a long way from the rainforest, prince of ice. There’s no one who needs killing around where you are now.”

  He was silent for a beat too long, and she began to laugh. “Oh, you mean me?” she said. “Is that your clever plan? Find the most deadly queen in Pyrrhia, kill her, and take back your brother?” She leaned toward Winter, every muscle taut with glee. “Even if you could kill me, you would never find your lost IceWing. Never. The prison I’ve got him in is far too clever for that.”