“Stop!” Claire screamed out to the unicorns. “Go back!” But the unicorns galloped forward. Once, Claire had seen a single unicorn sweep away a plain of these monsters with a swoop of his horn, but now … Claire imagined another unicorn, shoulders as large as boulders, with a blue sheen to her creamy coat, charging at the solid shadows, only to be blown out like a spark.

Claire tugged at the unicorn’s mane. “Please! You have to tell them to turn around! It’s not working!”

It wasn’t unicorns who defeated the Wraith Queen.

“What?” Claire shouted, confused, but the unicorns surged with them, brighter than sun on snow—a burning brilliance that should have blinded Claire but, somehow, made her see everything. Remember everything.

Her first evening with Terra, after a day of disappointments, Claire thought that maybe she’d run out of magic. “Magic never runs out,” Terra had told her. “It’s always there, in the material. Magic is really about seeing, about finding the possibilities.”

An evening Claire should have been practicing but instead chose to follow Sophie down a forbidden set of stairs to a chamber full of red-stone warriors. An army, they’d thought. But no. Jasper had said it was a memorial—one that commemorated all the Gemmers whose bodies were never recovered from the battlefield.

And now Claire understood why those Gemmers’ bodies had never been recovered.

They had never died.

“A changing of hearts,” Sophie had said. “Estelle saved herself.”

Claire knew what needed to be done.

“Let me down!” Claire shouted, and the unicorn beneath her swiftly dropped to her knees. Claire flung herself off and hit the ground, rolling to the edge so she wouldn’t be trampled. Without the unicorn’s touch, the wraiths’ cold prickled against her skin, but she was not afraid. Claire was loved by a unicorn, and she knew, somehow, that she would never again be in danger of a wraith’s touch. And with that knowledge in her mind, Claire threw herself onto her hands and knees and plunged her hands into the earth—into Arden.

She gasped.

Magic—hot and fresh—bubbled, trilled, surged, and sang at her fingertips.

The hum that had first scared Claire in the chimney had become a familiar friend, but now it was gone, and in its place was a symphony: a concerto of tectonic plates, chiming gemstones, and warbling pebbles. The magic of Arden spoke to her, singing a story of all the possibilities of Arden—how the smidgen of clay near her thumb could be crafted into a perfect grail, how the boulder a few yards away could shoulder the weight of a new and airy palace on a hilltop, how the wyverns hidden in the heart of the mountains were ready to return.