The flight back to Khadreen passed in a blur for Ellie. If it weren’t for Nox and Gussie supporting her, she knew she would never have made it. Pain consumed her like fire, her shattered leg completely useless. Every bump in the air sent a new spike of agony knifing through her body.

When they reached the candle shop, they hurtled through the window and landed in a heap, Ellie too racked with pain to even scream. She lay on the floor, tilting toward unconsciousness, the room spinning around her.

“Jaff!” Nox cried. “We’re back! Why is the doctor—Wait! NO! Get away from him!”

Nox’s shout shocked a bit of clarity into Ellie. She lifted her head to see that Dr. Alceda was leaning over Twig—a bone saw in her hand.

“No!” Ellie gasped. “Nox—!”

The Crow boy lunged toward the doctor, knocking her aside and wrenching away the saw.

But the floor was already littered with brown and white feathers.

“I had no choice!” Jaff said. “Your friend took a bad turn while you were gone, Nox. I waited as long as I could. The boy was delirious with fever and pain. He would have died—”

“His wings!” Nox cried. “Why couldn’t you have just waited? I have the cure! I have it right here!”

Ellie lay back, her head clunking on the floor. Her chest felt as if it were caving in, sinking through the floor, dragging her into a red sea of pain.

They were too late.

*  *  *

When Ellie next woke, the room was quiet, the windows shut. She lay for a moment in a fog of confusion, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth and her body heavy as stone.

Her leg still hurt, but in a distant, vague sort of way. She guessed she’d been drugged, probably with something stronger than just maticca leaf. Something soft had been spread beneath her and a pillow put under her head.

It took her several minutes to find the strength she needed to sit up. Propped on her elbows, she looked down to see her leg wrapped in a splint, with boards strapped from her ankle to her thigh. The foot was no longer pointing the wrong way, but the longer she looked, the more it began to hurt.

Blinking away tears, Ellie lifted her eyes to the bed where Twig lay still, fast asleep.

His feathers had been swept away.

Nox sat in a chair by Twig, slumped over the foot of the bed with his head resting on his arm, sound asleep. Gussie was on her pallet in the corner, a bundle of striped wings. Nox’s grandfather had been sleeping in the shop below, where she guessed he was now, but there was one more person in the room—wide awake.

“Don’t move,” whispered Dr. Alceda. She sat at the table, looking far from tired. An oil lamp burned low by her elbow, and judging by the quill and paper before her, she’d been writing down notes.

“How is he?” Ellie asked, her voice dry as sand.

The doctor glanced at Twig. “Recovering. I know this is difficult to understand, child, but it was the best thing—”

“Stop,” Ellie whispered, her voice knotting. “Just stop. We got the skystones. We could have saved him.”

“Ah. The stones.” The doctor had one in her hand, Ellie realized. She released it and watched it float gently toward the ceiling before catching it again. “A fascinating anomaly, these. Your friends told me they came from islands in the sky. That old Macaw legend, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure whether to believe you, but I plan on keeping one of these for further study.”

“It’s true. You’d have seen it heal Twig too, if you hadn’t been so eager to—”

“You think I enjoy my work, girl?” The doctor’s voice turned cold. “I don’t. I got into this job to help people, not to remove their wings. Yet that is what I must do, day after day. It’s getting worse out there. This time last year, it was a new case every week or so. Now it’s dozens a week.”

“We can stop it. If people would just listen to us—” A sudden splinter of pain shot up her leg, and she whimpered.

Dr. Alceda was at her side in an instant, shaking a small bottle. “You’re due for more maticca extract. It’s far more potent in this form than raw, and it’ll knock you flat again. You need the rest.”

“My leg …”

“I’m not one to soften the truth,” said the doctor. “Your leg is broken in several places. It will never heal straight.”

Ellie stared at her, chest tight.

“You will be lucky to walk again,” said the doctor. “But you won’t run.”

The room tilted. Ellie lay back, her hands trembling. She stared hard at the ceiling for several long moments, until she’d pushed down the sobs in her throat enough to speak.

“What about flying?” she whispered.

“You’ll learn to adjust for the leg in the air, but it will take time. Your wings are all right, though you’re bruised all over. I heard you flew into a storm and ran into gargols—no surprise there. You three are lucky to be alive at all. That was mightily foolish.”

Ellie felt a warm tear run down her temple.

Lucky.

She’d been within a heartbeat of becoming a Goldwing knight, just weeks ago. Her greatest dream had literally been within reach, until she’d sacrificed it to protect Nox, Gussie, and Twig from King Garion. She thought of the moment she’d stood before the whole of Thelantis, a victor in the Race of Ascension, proud and strong and as tall as any Sparrow had ever stood.

And now here she lay, broken and bruised, a fugitive in exile.

Stubbornly, she brushed away the tear. Self-pity wasn’t her style, even now. What did she have to cry about, really? She was alive. She had her wings.

Her leg was nothing compared to what Twig had been through.

His wings …

Oh skies. They’d been so close. So very close to saving him.

Now he would never fly again.

Pain and fury clashed in Ellie’s chest until she gasped aloud, a long, wordless sob.

“Drink this,” said the doctor, tipping the bottle to Ellie’s lips. “Sleep deeply, little Sparrow.”

*  *  *

“I figured it out,” Ellie said. “The reason Tirelas matters.”

She and Nox sat on the roof of the candle shop. It had been one week since their wild flight into the storm, and this was the first time she’d been outside since. She’d floated on a maticca-extract haze for days, and she was sick of it. At least the raw leaves didn’t knock her out cold. The flavor of the one she was chewing turned her stomach—it tasted like old lemon peels—but if she went even an hour without it, the pain in her leg would have her screaming.

Again.

There had been complaints from neighbors.

Getting onto the roof had been an ordeal and a half. She couldn’t fly yet, so she’d had to recruit help from Nox and Gussie, who’d managed to lift her up and onto the rooftop. She’d tried so hard to hide the pain that had caused, biting the inside of her cheek, that she could still taste blood on her tongue.

“Of course you did,” Nox said, sitting hunched beside her, his arms wrapped around his knees. “Go on, then. I know you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“You have to see it too,” she said. “I can’t believe we didn’t realize it sooner. The skystones, the way they heal wingrot …”

His lips pressed together and he looked down at his chewed fingernails. After a minute, he said quietly, “I put it together too. I’m not a total idiot, you know.”

“Of course you’re not.” Ellie pointed to the sky. “Anyway, it’s obvious that Tirelas is where we came from. It’s where we belong. What’s more, our wings, our flight, are tied to the skystones. I talked to Gussie about it and she agrees.”

Gussie had taken to the idea with such alacrity it had startled Ellie, since the Falcon girl had seemed so reluctant to admit the skystones’ power to begin with. She’d called it a mineral deficiency, and theorized that whatever the skystone was made of, it was obviously integral to the geological makeup of the sky islands. And geology—she’d explained in slow, simple terms so Ellie could keep up—was linked to ecology. In other words, the mineral properties in skystone were likely found throughout all the flora native to the islands, leached through the plants’ roots in tiny, trace amounts.

Therefore, everything the clans had eaten when they’d lived in the sky would have had a tiny bit of skystone in it—and somehow, that mineral had strengthened and sustained their wings. Gussie’s best guess was that it had something to do with making their bones lighter and stronger at the same time, so that their wings supported their weight. The less skystone in their systems, the weaker and heavier their bones became—until they began to break down altogether.

Ellie squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of Twig.

He’d barely said two words all week. He sat inside, cold and vacant, Lirri whimpering in his lap. Already small to begin with, he looked even smaller without his wings—a pale, gray ghost with eyes like great empty holes.

Shuddering, she opened her eyes again and gazed at Nox.

“We’ve gone so long without being close to skystones,” Ellie said now, “that our bodies have started paying the price. We’re changing, losing our wings without it. Gussie and I think that even if we brought down bags and bags of skystones, it wouldn’t be enough. In the end, we’d still lose our wings.”

Nox’s feathers ruffled. “Even if we don’t get wingrot …”

“Our kids might, or our grandkids. In fact, they’d almost definitely get it, and we’d always have to be raiding sky islands, risking death, to get more stones. Either that … or we do what Dr. Alceda did to Twig. We start cutting off our wings ourselves.”

She shuddered as her mind flashed to a future in which every child’s wings were shorn off before they could even fly, to protect them from ever catching wingrot.

To ground them forever.

Oh, Twig.

“We’re meant to be skyborn,” she whispered. “But Gussie figures in just a few generations … we’ll become earthbound. Permanently.”

“Let me guess,” Nox said hollowly. “You have a plan.”

“What choice do we have? Lose our wings—or fight for them?” She drew a deep breath. “We have to return to the sky, Nox. It’s where we belong. No more people should suffer like Twig has. We have to go home.”

He stared across Khadreen, and the forest of plumes rising from its many chimneys. Ellie watched him anxiously, wondering if he’d agree. Did he see what the future held for their people, if they didn’t act soon?

“But Ellie … we’re just kids. We can’t take on every gargol in the sky. Look what happened to Twig. To your leg. Haven’t we lost enough already?”

“Of course we could never retake Tirelas with just the four of us.” Three of us, she amended to herself. Twig would be flying nowhere. “That’s why we need …” She pressed her lips together and swept a hand at the city. “Well, them. We need them to know what we know, and to make the same choice we’re making: to go home, whatever it takes.”

The warm wind ruffled her feathers.

“We still have two bags of skystones,” she said. “All it will take is using them to heal people of wingrot, then telling them where the stones came from. They’ll see what to do from there, I just know it. We’ll take the fight to the gargols at last, once enough people realize that’s the only way to save ourselves.”

“And the ones who don’t care?” he said. “The ones who shrug it off and say, better to be grounded than dead? The ones like my …” He twisted his neck, his barely contained fury pulsing in his temple. Ellie could hear his teeth grinding together.

She knew what he wanted to say.

The ones like his grandfather.

Ever since that awful night, when they’d found Jaff and the doctor standing over Twig, Nox had turned a cold shoulder on the old man. Ellie’s heart ached for him, that he had come so far to find his one last family member, only to have this seemingly irreparable rift open between them. Nox’s expression alone made it clear that as far as he was concerned, what Jaff had done to Twig was unforgivable, no matter his reasons.

“It’s not just Jaff’s fault,” Nox said after a long, tense silence. Skies, how empty his voice sounded. “I should have told him about the skystones before we left, instead of waiting to prove it after we’d returned.”

“Twig is not your fault,” she said firmly. Then she shook her head. “Anyway, as I was saying before, nobody would rather sacrifice their wings than face the gargols.”

“Of course they would, Ellie. It’s the way people work. They’ll take the safest course of action, the most comfortable one, every time. If that means losing their wings, they’ll do it. Most people aren’t heroes.”

“I don’t believe that. Maybe some won’t care, but most will. I believe the right people will do what’s needed.”

“You have a lot more faith in them than I do.”

“Well, then maybe …” She looked at Nox, her heart beating harder. Words thickened in her throat, needing to be said, but she wasn’t sure she dared. She knew how he’d react.

But he had to know the whole story—and the last, most dangerous truth she’d kept to herself. She’d been turning it over in her mind for days, trying to find the courage to tell him what she’d discovered on the island in the sky.

But would he even listen?

Her next words might end their friendship forever.

“Nox …”

“Hmm.”

“There’s one other thing. One other … person, who I think can convince them better than anyone.”

Frowning, Nox tossed a nut at her. “If you say King Garion—”

“No,” she laughed. “But … you’re not too far off. What I mean is, I think we need a leader. Someone linked to Tirelas like no one else. Someone whose very existence changes everything.”

“Ellie …” he groaned. “Whatever lunatic idea you’ve cooked up, just spit it out.”

“Okay.” She inhaled, held her breath. And when she spoke, she let it all out in a rush. “I think we need a Phoenix.”

He scoffed, popping another nut into his mouth and crunching it. “Right. The supposed kings and queen of the islands in the sky. You want to find this long-lost Phoenix clan, let them magically fix everything?”

“I don’t need to find them,” she said softly. “Because I think I already have.”

She turned to the satchel she’d brought up with her, the same one she’d carried to Tirelas on their last raid. The skystones had all spilled out when the gargol had attacked her, but she hadn’t returned totally empty-handed. There’d been the shiny thing she’d found in the escape tunnel, moments before they’d dived off the island.

She took it out now, held it reverently between her hands.

Nox stared, then slowly put down the bowl of nuts. “Ellie. What is that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She gave him a weak smile. “It’s a crown, Nox. The kind a king or a prince might wear.”

It was ancient; there was no denying it. The golden band, composed of three intertwining strands, was tarnished and worn. But the exquisitely cut skystone set at its center was still bright, its color clearer and purer than any other she’d seen. When she tilted the crown, the stone glimmered like a diamond. Around it, the gold filigree had been wrought to resemble flames.

But the most astonishing thing about it wasn’t the pureness of the gold or the brightness of the skystone, but the simple emblem engraved on the headband, just under the gem.

Nox stared at it.

“That …” He shook his head slightly but seemed unable to tear his eyes away. “It’s just an ashmark.”

“What if it’s not just an ashmark?”

“Ellie …”

“The Corvain crest,” she whispered, running her finger over the lines that she’d always thought looked like an open flame. “Nox, it’s carved onto the candle shop sign. Onto the table your grandmother built. You said your father had it tattooed on his arm.”

She watched the blood drain from his face. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean—”

“What if the ashmark and your family crest aren’t two different symbols? They look identical. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? What if, all this time, even after we forgot Tirelas, forgot our home, a part of it still lived on—in the symbol we draw over our doors and windows to keep us safe? The symbol … of an ancient royal clan.”

Nox jumped to his feet, his face twisting with anger. “Ellie, stop. You’re doing it again—pushing things on people, trying to control everyone around you. You’re making things bigger than they really are. That crown is nothing. It’s just an old relic. We’d be better off selling it.”

“Nox.” Her grip tightened on the crown. “You’re immune to fire. So was your grandmother and your father. And those Phoenix royals in that mural we saw—their wings looked like fire. You saw it too. Or do you really think that’s just another coincidence?”

“That doesn’t prove anything!” he cried out, desperation in his voice.

“But it answers our questions, doesn’t it? Why you have that gift—and why the Eagles have hunted your bloodline for generations. Because they know, Nox. They know who you are, who you’re descended from. You’re not a Crow at all. You’re a Phoenix.”

“Do my wings look like they’re made of fire?” he asked, unfurling his dark feathers. “Do I look like those snooty high clanners on those palace walls? No.”

“Maybe the Phoenix part of you is hidden. Maybe there’s a way to unlock it.”

“Enough!” With a snarl, he slung himself into the air, flying high over the city.

“Nox, wait!”

Ruing her injured leg, she could only watch as he winged away. He’d reacted just as she’d feared he would. A part of her wished she’d never said anything at all.

It had been days since she’d put it all together in her head, linking the present to the past. He might not believe it, but she had never been so certain of anything in her life. She’d shattered her leg to uncover this truth. That had to mean it was important, right?

Looking down at the crown, Ellie felt a stir of whispers.

Elder Rue’s voice: You will carry a flame through the darkness, to light a great fire.

Her thumb ran over the engraved flames on the crown.

But if you drop it, or if the flame goes out … the sky will fall.

For weeks, Ellie had wondered what her destiny was, where she might belong. And the answer had been beside her the whole time—black-haired, black-winged, sulky and aggravating and brave and more loyal than he’d ever admit.

Nox.

He was the flame. This crown was proof. He was supposed to lead them to their true home in the sky, where they’d be healed. Where they’d be who they were meant to be.

That had to be worth every risk … even if it meant losing Nox’s friendship for a time. Maybe he wouldn’t believe her yet, but Ellie would make sure he did. She’d make him understand, and together, they’d change everything. Even if he hated her for it, she had to help him find his true path, for everyone’s sakes.

It was, after all, her destiny.