Page 1 of Wings of Starlight

There are things hidden from all except those who know exactly where to look. If you gaze out your window in the early twilight hours, when all the world is still asleep, you might notice an orb of light flitting through the late-summer leaves, each one blushing red in its wake. You might see faint ribbons of gold in the air, shimmering just above the hyacinths pushing through the newly thawed earth. Perhaps, if you are truly observant, you might appreciate the chisel marks scoring the crystal lacework of each snowflake. Alas, few are. And so, few will ever experience true wonder. Few will ever know that even the most mundane thing—the waning of the moon, the flow of the tide, the serendipitous reappearance of a lost trinket beneath your kitchen table—is magical.

All of it, of course, is the work of Never Fairies.

They orchestrate the turn of the season in a single night, then return home. It is said that if you soar past the second star on the right and go straight on till morning, you will reach it, too: the Queendom of Pixie Hollow. Considered from above, Pixie Hollow is like a cake sliced into four generous pieces. At its heart is the Pixie Dust Tree, luminous and golden as a candle in the darkness. To the east is Spring Valley, where the flowers remain forever in bloom. To the south: the Summer Glade, where the days stretch long and languid as a drowsing cat. To the west: the Autumn Forest, cool and crisp and ablaze with color.

Then, to the north, there are the Winter Woods.

The denizens of the warm seasons do their best to keep the Winter Woods far out of their minds. But when they catch a glimpse of it beneath the vast shadow of the mountain, they cannot help thinking of its skeletal trees, or the icicles glittering like bared fangs in the moonlight, or those who dwell in such a gray and lifeless place. The winter fairies—so the warm fairies reason—are best left to their snowy solitude. They have managed their own affairs for centuries. Besides, the cold there is so bitter and cruel it will shatter a warm fairy’s wings in an instant. No good would ever come of crossing its border.

Now, most of their fears are baseless superstition. But unbeknownst to the warm seasons, dark forces do dwell within the Winter Woods. There is a place where all the trees bend backward, flinching away from the frozen lake sprawled beneath them. There, the very air sits as heavy and wrong as a feverish sweat. No one visits this place. No one sensible, anyway, save the young Warden of the Winter Woods.

But if you were brave enough or foolish enough, you could step out onto the ice. Beneath it, you would find not water but a deep, writhing darkness. Even if you could stomach the dread it inspires for more than a moment, you would not be able to make sense of it. The shadows only occasionally arrange themselves into a recognizable shape. Here, a tooth. There, an eye, a claw.

No, few would ever experience such terror. But if youhadsomehow wandered down to the lake on this cold, moonless night—as the Warden of the Winter Woods did—you might have seen what he did: the moment a single crack fissured the surface of the ice. You might have heard the splintering that shook the snowfall loose from the branches. You might have felt the very woods tremble with anticipation.

Then: something—barely a wisp of shadow—rose like smoke from the broken ice. It seethed, then coalesced into a form it remembered from the nightmare that birthed it. In the darkness, it was nearly impossible to see, but its footprints fell heavy against the earth. Then, compelled by some horrible, ancient instinct, it lumbered toward the warm seasons.

It was the kind of afternoon made for daydreams: the air golden with sunlight and pixie dust, the meadow humming with the low drone of bees. Clarion perched on the branch of an oak tree, surrounded by the sigh and rustle of leaves. How sweet to find herself alone and—at least, for fifteen glorious minutes—with nothing at all to do.

She almost regretted the thought, as lovely as it was. It was all too easy to imagine Queen Elvina’s response, delivered like a royal decree:The Queen of Pixie Hollow does not sit idle while there is work still to be done.

But Clarion was not the Queen of Pixie Hollow—not yet, anyway—and her weekly appointment with the Minister of Summer had ended unexpectedly early. She did not intend to let this rare glimmer of freedom go to waste.

With her coronation looming, her every waking moment was regimented with lessons, rehearsals, fittings, and more meetings than she’d ever thought possible. All essential, she supposed, when she had only one month left to absorb Elvina’s hundreds of years of wisdom. And yet, Pixie Hollow was vast and wondrous, and Clarion sometimes suspected she knew nothing about it at all. How could she, when she’d spent almost all her life observing it from afar?

Clarion gazed out at Sunflower Meadow with something dangerously close to yearning. As the golden hour drew nearer, the light-talent fairies emerged, aglow with excitement and eager to face the controlled chaos of their busiest time of day. Through the canopy, she watched them weave through the pollen-thick air, leaving trails of pixie dust in their wake. Some worked in teams to angle the sun’s rays ever closer to the horizon line, shouting things like “A little to the left!” and “No, your other left!” Others dipped their hands into beams of sunlight and scooped them into their baskets, as easy as collecting water from a well. It never failed to astound Clarion how many tiny details went into the everyday magic of a sunset. It seemed impossible that soon, on the night of the summer solstice, she would be responsible for all of them.

The prospect terrified her more than she cared to admit.

A high-pitched buzz sliced through her thoughts. Then, something hurtled past her: a streak of black against the brightening sky. Clarion stumbled backward, nearly losing her balance before steadying herself on a branch.

What in the stars wasthat?

With a hand resting against her pounding heart, she peered down through the curtain of leaves. A bee, faltering in her flight, landed heavily on the ground and went terribly still. After a moment, her wings fluttered, and Clarion let out a sigh of relief.Notinjured, then, she thought. The poor thing must have exhausted herself. Bees were an industrious bunch and tended to overestimate their limits, especially here in the perpetual heat of midsummer. Luckily, it was nothing a spoonful of sugar wouldn’t fix—and there was sugar aplenty in Pixie Hollow. The kitchens, no doubt bursting with all manner of sweets at this hour, were back at the palace. Better yet, the hive—and all its honey—was just across the meadow.

A simple problem with a simple solution.

And yet, Clarion hesitated.

Any trouble in the queendom made her itch with the desire to fix it. Once, she’d believed that tendency was a spark of her latent governing-talent magic—one small piece of the whole that finally made sense to her. But now, she understood that her instincts—her compassion—could not be trusted.

The Queen of Pixie Hollow does not belong among her subjects.

Ever since her Arrival—the night she emerged from a fallen star, as all the Queens of Pixie Hollow before her had—Elvina had impressed upon her that she was different. Thattheywere different, marked indelibly with stardust. Besides Elvina, Clarion was the only governing-talent in all of Pixie Hollow.

Clarion glanced at the meadow, where teams of animal-talents and garden-talents shepherded their flock of bees. Would they notice one missing? Even if they did, a search would take them all night. Perhaps something as menial as saving a bee was beneath her notice, but she could not stomach the thought of leaving now. What kind of queen would she be if she turned away from the suffering of even the smallest of her subjects?

Now, there was just the matter of getting down from this tree.

A heavy cloak hung around her shoulders, trapping her wings beneath its weight. All fairies emitted a faint aura—one that flared and dimmed with their moods—but thanks to her wings, her glow had always verged on irrepressible. Although the light-talent fairies here in Summer shared her penchant for gold, the resemblance wasn’t striking enough to allow hiding in plain sight. Letting anyone see her wings was as good as shoutingHere comes the future Queen of Pixie Hollow.

If anyone told Elvina she had been here, unattended…No, it did not bear thinking about. She would have to climb down. Inconvenient, yes. Dangerous, almost certainly. But she preferred by far the risk of falling to enduring another of Elvina’s lectures.

Steeling herself, Clarion lowered herself branch by branch. Her muscles burned and the bark scraped her hands raw, but by some miracle, she managed not to roll her ankle as she landed in the sea of sunflowers. They towered above her, swaying gently in the breeze and casting dappled shadows across the grass. And there, just a few yards ahead of her, the bee lay in a pool of yellow sunlight.

Warily, she approached the bee and knelt beside her. “Are you all right?”

The bee’s antennae swiveled lethargically toward her, which Clarion chose to interpret as a yes.