Untitled Starfell #2 (Starfell #2) - Dominique Valente Page 0,43

the Great Wisperia Tree.’

‘Yew means ter tell me the other one was there all this time?’ said Oswin with a groan, an orange paw coming up to cover his eyes. The kobold had dared to venture outside the bag under cover of darkness.

Willow stared. There was even a tiny house at the top.

She sighed in despair. Had this all been for nothing?

‘It’s not Wisperia,’ said Feathering. The iris in his golden eye whirred as he stared, but he wasn’t focusing on the jar. ‘Look.’

Willow turned from him to the topiary children. They were pointing and seemed scared, their leaves rustling as they trembled. A small one was hiding behind its taller friend. As Willow frowned, they shifted, merging to form the tree, except they did it upside down, so that the roots were exposed to the air, long and enormous. Dotted among these roots were strange figures, whose hands reached up into the sky.

What were the mischief topiaries trying to tell them?

Willow frowned and looked back at the jar. She upturned it to match the upside-down version of the tree the topiaries were showing her, and peered at the miniature, mist-shrouded roots. As she did so, she gasped. There among them were tiny, ghostly figures, with hands reaching out from the mist and shadows, like they were desperately trying to reach up towards something …

She stared, then swallowed. All at once, Willow understood. She gasped and dropped the mimic plant. Essential raised both hands, freezing the jar in midair, and she caught it safely. Willow was too freaked out by what she’d discovered to thank her. ‘It can’t mea—’ she breathed, turning deathly pale.

‘What?’ asked Essential, turning the jar in her hands and pulling a face as she noticed the little figures crawling between the roots and reaching up towards her. Essential’s eyes widened in a mixture of fear and disgust.

Willow looked from Essential to the others and found it hard to say the words.

Feathering gasped. ‘That’s what mirali meant. I couldn’t put my talon on just what the forest-touched people were saying in the old language, but that’s what it was. Mirali means the other side – the abyss. The mimic plant is not showing us Wisperia, but the ghostly echo of the Great Wisperia Tree down in Netherfell. The forest people must have meant that it was forbidden for them to send someone alive there – because you will lose your soul. That’s why they wouldn’t help us, and why they believed it was too late. Nolin Sometimes must have been taken by Umbellifer, or her subjects at least … That’s why the treetop community was up in arms. It is very irregular for her or her wraiths – her undead followers – to come up here, to Starfell …’

Umbellifer, the Queen of the Undead.

She was the stuff of nightmares and myth. It was said that she waited in the Mists to snatch souls away to her queendom below: Netherfell, the waiting room where all souls were judged before they were sent to their final resting place. The unlucky, however – the lost souls – were doomed to be with her forever as her subjects.

Willow thought of what Holloway had said about people who had gone through the Mists. ‘They haven’t really come back, have they? Just their bodies.’

Her eyes were bright with fear. ‘We have to find the Queen of the Undead if we’re to get him back?’

Feathering nodded.

‘You can’t mean …?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I’m afraid I do,’ he whispered. ‘We’re going to have to cross the Mists … and enter Netherfell.’

19

The Mists of Mitlaire

The blood drained from Essential’s face. ‘Enter Netherfell?’

‘Oh, Wol, no!’ cried Oswin. ‘Oh, me greedy aunt, why’d yew curse us kobolds? I don’ wanna go find the soul-snatching harpy-hag of the underworld!’

Willow couldn’t help but agree. ‘But … HOW? Even … even if we wanted to, we can’t. Not without losing our souls.’

She looked at Sprig, waiting for him to confirm this. The only person they knew who could cross the Mists was him – but, like he’d said, that was because he was partly born there.

‘Is there another way?’ she asked.

‘I can help you,’ said Sprig. ‘It’s complicated – as I told you, I can cross the Mists safely. But I can also extend this protection to those who travel with me. If you’re in contact with me in some way, you can pass through – and, more importantly, return – with your soul intact.’

The dragon looked at Sprig, his golden eye