only movement around us—Nimh’s frozen. The cat and I crouch together, watching her, and the luminous mist weaves a path around her body. It feels like everything’s suspended, like time’s stopped.
Then it all comes back in a rush, and with a blinding flash she’s rising up from the ground, her arms still outflung, silhouetted perfectly against the shimmering haze. The clouds pick up speed, whirling in a quickening circle around her, spiraling up above the treetops, picking up leaves and debris and flinging them everywhere, the trees shivering and shaking. Our campfire vanishes in a whirl of sparks caught in the fierce wind and torn apart.
I slap one hand down over the ancient scroll before it can be whipped up into the air. I hunker down, letting the cat push his way in underneath the arm holding the scroll as the two of us make ourselves as small and flat as possible.
A light whirls by me and I realize it’s my chrono, tumbling along with the storm. I snatch it as it flies past, pulling it in beneath me. My hands press into the cat’s warm side as I shove it on over my wrist—my last link with home.
An instant later everything’s perfectly still, except the leaves fluttering slowly down. When I dare to lift my head, Nimh still floats in midair, holding her spearstaff, her body glowing white. And then she speaks, her voice raw, as though the words are being ripped from her.
“The Lightbringer will look upon this page by the light of the Star
and learn the lessons of years.
Then the Star shall light the path
in the place of endings and beginnings.
The mother of light shall speak,
And the two faces of the Lightbringer shall do battle.
The Lightbringer shall rise
that the sky might fall,
and the blood of the gods rain down.”
As I stare up at her, openmouthed, suddenly it’s over—she falls to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, sprawled motionless on the floor of the clearing.
I scramble toward her, but the cat is already out in front of me, and he lands flat in the middle of her back. By the time I reach the pair of them, she’s stirring.
She moves just like the cat, slow and deliberate, stretching and arching her back as she pushes herself up, shaking her loose hair away from her face and turning to meet my gaze.
But this isn’t Nimh. This is some wild-eyed version of the girl I’ve come to know, the dawn showing me a curve to her lips, a certainty in the tilt of her head that I’ve never seen before. She seems almost to glow, golden and shining against the rising sun behind her, with newfound purpose gleaming in her features.
If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I might think she was serene. But I can glimpse the whites of her eyes, the energy bursting from inside her in the way sparks fly off a live wire, ready to connect with something and send a deadly shock straight through it.
She lifts one hand, and the mist around us whirls into action once more, seeming to contract and intensify around her, and then suddenly fly out toward the edges of the clearing, as if some invisible blast had thrown it away from us. There it stays, roiling slowly as it circles us.
Nimh tilts her hand and it picks up speed, its circuit of the clearing’s edge suddenly urgent.
She tilts her hand back the other way and it slows once more.
She’s controlling it.
“Nimh?” I sound like I’m afraid of her. In this moment, I am.
“This should not be possible,” she breathes, watching the mist with those heated eyes. “To control the mist is to control magic itself.”
I fight the desire to step back, the memories of what the mist did to Quenti and those villagers all too fresh in my mind.
Nimh condenses the mist into a little tendril that weaves about her hand. “One might collect the rain to water a garden … but one does not command the rain to fall.”
Her eyes lift from her hand to meet my gaze. She must read something in my face, for hers softens. “You have nothing to fear,” she whispers. “See?” The current of mist stretches out toward me, beckoning like a finger. When I recoil, scrambling to my feet, a flicker of hurt crosses the not-quite-serene expression on her face. “North?”
I swallow hard. “You spoke, when you were—right before you woke up. You sounded like you were