Five made a strangled, high-pitched sound that might have been a smothered scream. Phoenix couldn’t contain a whoop as the ground fell away; the feeling of freedom was too immense. Widge poked his head curiously out of her collar and closed his eyes, enjoying the fresh breeze in his cheek fur and round his ears. A gentle purr vibrated through him and Phoenix laughed in delight.
‘Ember’s only flying squirrel,’ she said with a grin. Widge looked rather pleased with that.
‘This is a-amazing!’ Seven cried, her voice bubbling with delight.
Nara turned back, her eyes bright. ‘No one ever forgets their first ice-eagle flight,’ she called, the air whirling her words away.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Five groaned. ‘I’m not feeling so good.’
Phoenix glanced back at him. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut. ‘Five, if you’re sick on me . . .’
‘I thought this was a dream of yours?’ Six laughed from behind him. ‘To fly on an ice eagle.’
‘I didn’t think it through,’ Five said, squeezing his eyes even tighter. ‘Why can’t we fly closer to the ground?’
Six tried and failed to smother more laughter. ‘You are ridiculous,’ he gasped. ‘Open your eyes, Five. You can’t miss this – it’s too incredible!’
At Six’s urging, Five opened one eye. His arms tightened round Phoenix so much that she could barely breathe. But when he spoke again it was with awe. ‘This is . . . this is . . .’
Behind him, Six beamed. Phoenix stared in amazement as they climbed. Ledge was tiny, a bright spot quickly gone as the detail beneath them blurred. Then there was only the dawning, cloud-brushed sky with the promise of a rising sun on the horizon, and the mountains, silvery and mysterious, caught on a knife edge between night and day.
Behind her, everyone was silent, and, when she turned to look at them, she saw her own wonder
reflected. They smiled at one another; there were no words.
A while later, Nara looked back again. ‘It is beautiful here,’ she called, ‘but it’s time to return to Icegaard. When I open the portal, you’ll see a disturbance in the air. Once we’ve flown through, I’ll close the portal there, but I’ll leave this side open to make your return trip easier.’
Before anyone had time to respond, she faced forward, raised her arm and whispered something that Phoenix couldn’t catch.
Chiara banked to the left, turning towards a patch of brightening air. The sky there rippled and swirled before calming, except . . . Phoenix blinked, barely able to understand what she was seeing.
The sky around Ledge had lightened to a silveryblue as the sun peeped above the mountains. But ahead of them was a perfect circle of star-filled darkness: the sky of a place where dawn was still hours away.
Phoenix’s heart began to race. Widge became very still and Five’s grip tightened even more.
‘Icegaard is much further north than Ledge,’ Nara called over her shoulder. ‘At this time of year, the sun only rises for a few hours each day.’
Phoenix found herself holding on to the witch more tightly as they approached the portal. For an instant, there was the roar of a storm, a confusing brightness and darkness, then an icy, brutal cold that hit Phoenix like a bare-knuckled punch. Behind her, she heard her friends’ teeth chattering alongside her own.
Nara craned to look behind them, and with a look of intense concentration whispered something else. Once again, the word escaped Phoenix, slipping through her senses like an eel until it disappeared. She twisted round just in time to see the circle of blue sky shrink and vanish behind them.
‘I’ve left the portal at Ledge open,’ Nara called to Phoenix, seeing her surprise. ‘But it’s not safe to leave two connected and open, even in the sky. We have too many glintwings here to risk it.’
‘What in Ember . . .?’ Six whispered, staring around.
Phoenix felt words fail, surprise muting her as she followed Six’s gaze: the mountains were gone, the breaking day was gone. It seemed as if everything was gone. The land they’d emerged into was empty, locked in night. Ghostly, moon-silvered ice spread as far as the eye could see and a throttling cold
blanketed everything, already seeping into her bones. A less hospitable place Phoenix couldn’t have imagined if she’d tried.
Nara raised her hand and murmured something. Suddenly the bitter cold eased. ‘A warmth spell,’ she said. ‘One of our most important pieces of magic out here, as you can imagine.’
Five grimaced. ‘Thanks . . . I think.’ Then, more quietly: ‘Shouldn’t she ask before doing magic on us?’
‘I d-don’t mind if it keeps the cold away,’ Seven whispered back. ‘A few minutes of that and I’d be frozen solid.’
They only flew for a short while before Phoenix became aware of a low, repetitive, booming sound.
‘What’s that noise?’ she called to Nara.
‘The Endless Ocean,’ the witch replied, pointing to something ahead of them in the darkness.
The ocean! Phoenix’s heart fluttered. Her ma’s ma had seen it once as a girl, the story of it passed down like an heirloom through the generations. She strained her eyes towards it, to the rolling, gleaming sheet of restless movement. Its surface shone sword-steel dark: dangerous, beguiling, hungry. Just as her ma had heard it described, and later described it to her.
Nara noticed her expression. ‘It’s beautiful on a clear day in summer,’ she said. ‘But it’s more powerful than we can fathom and contains more dark creatures than all of Ember. It always pays to remember that.’
Phoenix nodded slowly, unable to tear her eyes from it as Chiara turned to follow a series of sharp cliffs just north. That was how she missed the first glimpse of Icegaard.
‘What’s that?’ Seven called from behind her, jolting Phoenix out of her ocean reverie. She was pointing along the coastline. In the darkness, something glinted, rising vastly out of the ocean to curl over the cliff like a shining claw.
‘That,’ Nara said with a smile, ‘is the frost palace.’
Phoenix could only stare, her astonishment increasing the closer they got.
‘But it’s a w-wave!’ Seven exclaimed at last, putting Phoenix’s thoughts into words. ‘I think?’
‘It is,’ Nara smiled. ‘Part of a wave that would have wiped away all of Ember had it not been frozen in time since long before our records began. We don’t know what happened to stop it in its tracks like that, but it’s been our home for over a thousand years.’
Phoenix stared. ‘A wave that would have wiped away Ember . . .’ It sounded outlandish, yet there it was, frozen at the moment it had begun to surge over the cliffs, its crest trailing back into the pounding black waters of the ocean. The closer they got, the more the scale of it staggered her. It was like a mountain: the walls of the Hunting Lodge could have been stacked up fifty times and still not come close to the lofty heights of the wave’s spraywhipped peak.
It is magic that holds the frost palace’s structure together. Phoenix remembered Nara’s words to them with a terrible lurch. Magic that the Shadowseam was devouring. Suddenly the danger to Ember was abundantly clear.
‘That. Is. Terrifying.’ Five’s eyes were huge.
With a swoop that made Phoenix’s stomach heave, Chiara dived under the magnificent curling lip of the frost palace to land on the clifftop beneath it. A barrelled wall of ice surged up and over them at an impossible angle, blocking out the stars. It looked like it was about to crash to the ground at any moment, yet it didn’t.
In a sudden rush, all Phoenix’s fears crowded in on her, leaving her feeling sick and breathless. She
was here, at Icegaard, and it was more enormous than she’d ever imagined. If the Shadowseam truly threatened this place, what in Ember could she do about it? She was only one person: one girl who felt particularly small standing before the frost palace.
The goosebumps prickling up her arms had nothing to do with the cold.
‘Do you f-feel that?’ Seven whispered.
‘Feel what?’ Six asked.
But Phoenix knew what she meant. There was something in the air here, something that made her chest tight. She’d felt it in the Frozen Forest too, months earlier.
‘Magic,’ she murmured, not realising she’d spoken aloud. Widge trilled his agreement, only his ears and eyes visible above her furs.
‘If magic is freezing and smells like fish,’ Five muttered. His fingers were still digging into Phoenix even though Chiara was on the ground now. She gently prised them off. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said to Nara, gazing around. ‘Where actually is Icegaard?’
Nara smiled. ‘It’s here,’ she said, gesturing at the huge wave as she helped them down from the great bird’s back. ‘This is the frost palace.’
Five stared at the wall of frozen water, looking as worried as Phoenix had ever seen him. ‘You can’t live in a lump of ice,’ he said, speaking very slowly, as though explaining something difficult. ‘Even one as obscenely large as this.’
Nara laughed. ‘It will make sense once you’re inside, I promise.’ Then: ‘Thank you, Chiara.’
The affection between Nara and her ice eagle was obvious. Chiara ducked her head to the witch. ‘Our first true adventure,’ she said in her soft voice.
‘Worth the very long wait, I think,’ Nara replied, resting her forehead momentarily against the bird’s beak.
The ice eagle inclined her beautiful head, then took off again, flying out from beneath the curving crest of the wave to vanish, the sound of her powerful wingbeats disappearing a moment later.
Five watched her go, his eyes huge.
‘Look,’ Seven whispered, pointing.
At the base of the frost palace, right in front of them, lines of light were appearing in the ice, tracing intricate patterns across the gleaming surface.
‘Doors,’ Phoenix breathed as two shapes were completed. She swallowed hard, wonder displacing her fears. She’d just flown on an ice eagle. She was
about to enter the frost palace. How she wished she could show Poppy.
Nara smiled, her feathered cloak billowing behind her as she set her weight against the doors’ icy surface, then turned to wave the others forward.
‘Welcome to Icegaard.’