The Forbidden Expedition

by Alex Bell

  She summoned every ounce of her energy, strength, and determination, replaced the tiara, and threw both hands up in front of her. The ice magic fizzed and crackled around her fingertips for a moment before she drew in a deep breath and then blasted it away from her, directly into the path of the approaching witch wolves. Immediately, she felt as if her whole body had been plunged into icy water, and her hands fell to her sides.

  The ice magic coated them one by one, and they fell heavily into the snow, some of them losing tails or legs as their frozen limbs snapped on impact. The spell raced all the way along the pack but wasn’t quite strong enough to reach the very last wolf, which remained snarling and unfrozen as it advanced toward Koa.

  Stella lifted her hand to freeze the wolf, but then hesitated. The final burst of ice magic had chilled her heart, and in that moment she didn’t care what happened to Koa, or to Shay, or to anyone.

  Shay saw the expression on her face and gave her a desperate look. “Stella, please!”

  Stella was about to walk away, but some inner part of her was screaming, and with a gigantic effort she fought off the effect of the tiara and threw one last burst of ice magic at the final wolf.

  But that moment of hesitation meant she was just a fraction too late. The witch wolf dodged her spell as it fell on Koa, and they became one ball of tooth and claw, black and white fur merging together, terrible howls filling the air around them. Shay groaned, doubling up on the snow.

  Stella strode forward and grabbed the witch wolf with both hands. It froze instantly at her touch, and its rigid body fell down harmlessly, but the damage had been done. Koa limped, bleeding, back to Shay’s side. Where her fur had once been completely coal-black, now there was a streak of white down one side of her back. A matching streak had appeared in Shay’s own dark hair.

  Jezzybella came to stand at Stella’s side. They both watched as the others crowded around Shay and Koa in concern, trying to work out whether they were okay and what the white streaks meant.

  “I can tell you what it means,” the witch piped up. “That shadow wolf will turn into a witch wolf.”

  “Koa? Into a witch wolf? When?” Beanie cried.

  “Hard to say,” the witch replied. “Could be one month, could be a year.”

  “And what about Shay?” Ethan asked. “What’ll happen to him?”

  The witch shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But one thing’s for sure—it’ll be nothing good.”

  Stella knew she should feel upset about this, but in fact, she felt nothing at all. The witch hunter’s ship was almost at the pier, but Stella didn’t care about that either.

  “How do you feel?” Ethan asked, leaning down toward Shay, who was shaking from head to foot.

  “Cold,” the wolf whisperer replied as Koa lay down at his side.

  “If she’s going to turn into a witch wolf, then that’s almost the same as dying, isn’t it?” Beanie said. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  “Nothing,” Jezzybella said. “A witch wolf’s bite can’t be undone.”

  Felix appeared beside Stella suddenly and plucked the tiara from her hair.

  “You did well, Stella,” he said quietly. “The witch wolf might have killed Koa if it hadn’t been for you.”

  “I’m not sure I care,” Stella said. She gazed at her friends and felt nothing. “In fact, I don’t care about any of you.”

  “Not right now,” Felix said with a sigh as the witch hunter’s ship docked at the pier. “But you will.”

  * * *

  When Stella’s heart thawed on board the ship an hour or so later, the remorse she felt was so bad that she almost couldn’t breathe with it. She knew that she’d had the power to stop the wolves, but—for those few seconds—she had chosen not to use it.

  She buried herself away in a cabin and refused to come out. She was too ashamed to face anyone—even Felix. When he told her through the door that Shay wanted to see her, she shuddered at the thought. How he must hate her! She remembered what she had said to everyone back at the witch gate:

  “If I can ever repay you, then I will.”

  Well, this was a pretty poor way of repaying the friend who had risked everything for her.

  When night fell, Stella couldn’t stand being cooped up in the cabin anymore, and sleep was quite impossible, so she snatched up her tiara and went up onto the deck. She found a quiet spot right at the back and stood there alone at the railing. Even though they’d been sailing for hours, she could still see the orange glow of Witch Mountain far away on the horizon.

  Stella had come up without her cloak and wore only her pale blue dress and fur-topped boots. Snowflakes swirled around her, patches of ice floated on the surface of the sea, and her breath smoked in the freezing air, but she wasn’t cold. She was becoming more and more of an ice princess every single day, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  She clutched the tiara tightly and stared down at the icy water churning into frothy white foam below. Perhaps she should drop the tiara straight into the sea. She might almost be able to pretend that she wasn’t an ice princess at all then, that there wasn’t this evil lurking inside of her. …

  “You came up for air at last, I see,” a voice remarked behind her.

  Stella turned to see Felix standing there, his hands buried in the pockets of his explorer’s cloak, a striped scarf wound around his neck in the blue and white colors of the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club.

  “Please don’t try to comfort me,” Stella said. “I hate myself. I hate everything about myself, and there’s nothing you can say that will make me feel better.”

  “Well, it certainly sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” Felix said. He joined her at the railing and gazed toward the glow of Witch Mountain. “So, what next?” he asked. “Now that you’ve decided to hate yourself?”

  Stella shrugged. “Just … try to keep away from people as much as I can, I suppose. So that I don’t hurt anyone else.”

  Felix was silent for a moment. “You surprise me,” he said at last. “I never would have thought to hear you say something so cowardly.”

  “Cowardly!” Stella exclaimed. “How is it cowardly to try to protect the people I love? There’s something wrong with me. What else can I do? I wish I could just be good and kind like you, but I’m not.”

  “Stella, my darling, you are good and kind,” Felix said. “We all have dark sides to ourselves that we must learn to fight against.”

  “You don’t,” Stella said. “You don’t have any badness in you at all.”

  “Dear me, you can’t really believe that, can you?” Felix asked.

  “I bet you’ve never in your whole life done something so awful you couldn’t forgive yourself for it.”

  “On the contrary,” Felix replied sadly. “You know, I broke somebody’s heart once, and that’s about the worst thing one person can do to another. And I don’t even have any ice magic to excuse my behavior. I am wholly responsible for the pain that I caused.”

  Stella turned to look at her father. He was gazing out to sea as snowflakes settled in his brown hair. “I don’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t believe that you would ever break someone’s heart.”

  “But I’m afraid I did, my dear,” Felix replied. “Falling in love is the greatest adventure there is, but it takes an enormous amount of courage as well, and I was too much of a coward in the end. It’s my greatest regret.”

  “What was his name?” Stella asked, and then immediately wondered whether she should have pried.

  Felix didn’t seem to mind, though, and simply said, “His name was Oscar.”

  She saw a flash of pain cross his face before he turned back to her and said, “Everyone makes mistakes, my darling. No one is perfect, I can assure you—least of all me.”

  Stella looked down at the tiara, sparkling in the starlight in her hands, and said, “On that first expedition to the Icelands, when I almost let Ethan fall down that ravine, Bean
ie said that it wasn’t me talking; it was the ice magic. But the ice magic is me, isn’t it? I can’t choose not to be an ice princess.”

  “No,” Felix acknowledged. “You’re an ice princess, and it’s part of who you are, but it’s only a part. It doesn’t have to define you. Nor does it have to be the biggest, most important thing about you. That’s for you to decide.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m going to turn into an evil snow queen, and maybe they’re right,” Stella said. “The ice magic makes me feel like I’m not really me. That I don’t even know who I am. Like I’m losing myself. It makes me so afraid that I’m just going to … to disappear.”

  Stella struggled to find the right words to explain how she felt. The tiara made her feel like a non-person, like a drawing that was being slowly rubbed out.

  After a moment Felix said, “You know, Stella, you don’t have to be an ice princess to feel that way. I’ve felt it myself.”

  “You have?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Many times. Most often back in those days when I was trying to fit in and be rather ordinary. And failing miserably, of course.” He looked at her. “It’s a great pity that we all spend so much time trying to be exactly the same as everyone else when, in fact, we should be celebrating those things that make us different and uniquely ourselves. So I know how you feel. When you lose faith in who you are, it can feel as if bits of yourself are being chipped away, and that’s a terrible thing.”

  “What can I do about it?” Stella almost whispered. She desperately wanted to feel like herself again, but the bad feeling was so big and horrible that it felt like it would crush her, and she was completely powerless to stop it.

  “Plenty,” Felix replied. “There’s plenty you can do. First, and most important, you mustn’t water yourself down. You must never allow other people to make you feel worthless or small. You must hold on to what you believe in. You—”

  “But, Felix, that sounds really hard.”

  To her surprise, he laughed. “Naturally. It’s devilish hard. Most worthwhile things in life are. You just have to pick yourself up when you get knocked down. And you must allow yourself to feel sad sometimes, and lost, and perhaps a little defeated as well. And you must accept that sometimes you are definitely going to make an absolute mess of things. But the only way we ever fail is if we stop trying. And ultimately, all those mistakes and wrong turns are how we find out who we really are, deep down. It’s how we strengthen our souls.”

  “But what if my soul is just bad?” Stella cried. “What if I’m just a horrible, unfeeling, worthless—”

  Felix dropped down to Stella’s level, took hold of both her arms, and turned her around to face him.

  “My dear girl, you are the best and most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me,” he said, reaching up to wipe away a tear that was trailing down Stella’s cheek. “You think you feel this way because of being an ice princess, but that’s not true, you know. Almost every person in the world has felt wretched and worthless at some point in their lives. But shutting yourself off from other people only leads to misery. We must allow others their flaws, accept our own imperfections, be brave enough to share our souls anyway, and always, always be kind.”

  “But I wasn’t kind back on Witch Mountain. I could have saved Shay—”

  “If it weren’t for you, Shay would probably have been turned into a witch wolf there and then,” Felix said. “You did what you could at the time. And all you can control now is what you do next. How is refusing to talk to Shay going to help matters?”

  “I don’t want to see him because I’m afraid he’ll hate me.”

  “Oh, my dear one, never make decisions from a place of fear,” Felix replied. “Nothing good ever comes from that, trust me. Our bonds of love and friendship with other people are not always as simple or as straightforward as we would like them to be, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth it in the end, warts and all. We must fight for our loved ones with everything that we have, and yes, sometimes that means pushing through the fear of being rejected, or looking foolish, or getting hurt, or having our hearts broken. You can break your own heart, you know, and that’s even worse. It’s something I wish I’d learned a little earlier in my life, Stella.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t lose hope just yet. There may be something that can be done for Shay. When we get home we will find out all there is to know about witch wolves. It’s not over until it’s over.” He squeezed her hand. “Now, why don’t you come and get some sleep?”

  “I’d like to stay here just a little longer, if that’s okay?” Stella replied.

  “All right, but don’t stay up too late, and come straight in if the weather turns.” He paused, then added, “I was going to wait until we got home, but you might as well have this now.” He pulled a thin silver chain out from under his collar. From the end there dangled a tiny telescope. Stella had seen this necklace before and knew it was a fairy telescope that the fairies had given Felix. He’d worn it ever since she could remember.

  “We each have a star in the sky that shines only for us,” he said. “We might lose track of it from time to time, but it’s still there nevertheless. Sometimes we just have to find a way to get ourselves back on track, to be reminded of who we really are. The fairies gave me this telescope at a time when I’d lost my way a bit. I haven’t needed it for a long time, but it might be useful to you now.” He put the chain over Stella’s neck. “Just search in the sky for your star and you’ll see what I mean.”

  “How will I know which star’s mine?” Stella asked, picking up the telescope to examine it.

  Felix smiled. “You just will,” he said. “Good night, my dear.”

  After he left, Stella stood examining the telescope, which felt cold and heavy and solid in her hands. Finally she lifted it to her eye, peered through the tiny lens at the night sky, and gasped. She could see hundreds of thousands of stars up there—far more than she’d been able to see with her own eyes—as if the sky were full of glitter. But there was one that blazed a bright, fierce, sparkling white, and Stella knew immediately that this was the star Felix had mentioned—the one that burned only for her.

  The moment she saw it, a whole flood of thoughts and feelings and images raced through Stella’s mind. She was reminded of all the things she most liked about herself: the fact that she had a polar bear who loved her; she was friends with dinosaurs; she knew how to read a map, skate on ice, make balloon unicorns, and build a snow bear. She recalled all the things that brought her the greatest pleasure: things like globes, and purple macarons, and ice flowers, and penguins, and unicorns, and beautiful dresses with petticoats underneath them, and exploring unknown lands, and being with her family and friends. Her flaws and imperfections were there too, but they no longer seemed to matter so much, or even at all, really. They were just part of who she was, and it was okay that she wasn’t perfect.

  And as she looked up at her star, she no longer felt like a black-and-white drawing that was being rubbed out, but instead she felt like a painting created in hundreds of glorious, wonderful colors. Deep inside her soul she felt a star that was the exact twin of the one in the sky, blazing strong and fierce with all the things that made her uniquely herself, including being an ice princess, and strangely, it felt okay, and she was glad that she was Stella Starflake Pearl and no one else.

  Finally, she lowered the telescope, only to find that the air around her had filled with dozens of tiny snow stars, sparkling with the same blue magic that fizzed from her fingertips. Stella smiled at the stars, glad to see something beautiful come from the magic inside her.

  Surrounded by the light of the twinkling snow stars, she stood and thought for a long time about all that Felix had said. He’d always told her that when a task seemed too big, or too difficult, or impossible to even begin, then you shouldn’t think about the whole thing in its entirety, but should focus instead on doing just one thing, no matter how small, to get started.

  Stella knew
what she had to do and went belowdecks to find Shay’s cabin. When he answered her knock on the door, she couldn’t help flinching at the sight of the white streak in his hair, and a feeling of shame burned through her. She was afraid that he might shout, or demand an explanation, but instead he simply stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug.

  “I’m sorry,” Stella said. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to do whatever I can to put this right. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “But, Sparky,” Shay replied, “there is nothing to forgive. Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Two Weeks Later

  STELLA THREW THE BOOK across the room in frustration. It hit the wall and fell to the floor with a thud, narrowly missing Gruff, who was snoozing on the rug with the jungle fairies sleeping off their lunch on top of him.

  “It’s hopeless,” she said to the room in general. Jezzybella was warming herself in a chair by the fire, yellow rain boots stretched out toward the heat, and Felix was going through a stack of books on the other side of the room. “There’s absolutely nothing in here about what to do for someone who’s been bitten by a witch wolf. Everything says there’s no known cure. But there’s got to be something I can do! There just has to be!”

  Over the last two weeks she and Felix had had much of their time taken up with complaints from both the Polar Bear and Jungle Cat Explorers’ clubs, attending disciplinary meetings and providing explanations for their behavior. Quite aside from the theft of the dirigible, the Jungle Cat president had been incensed by the treatment of his son—who Ethan had returned to human form as soon as they had arrived home. Despite the wheedling of the others, the magician had refused point-blank to change him back into a boy during the journey, and it wasn’t until they were on the docks at Coldgate that he shot a spell at the frog, and Gideon appeared sprawled on the floor before them.