by Amie Kaufman
“There’s nothing wrong with the fact that an equation has a right answer and a wrong answer,” Nico snapped. “So do some of the things we’re talking about here.”
Krissin scowled. “I thought you were meant to be listening to other points of view. That’s what Leif was just saying. Our point of view is that we shouldn’t talk about this in front of wolves. You know what his name is?” She was pointing at Anders. “Anders Bardasen.”
There was a long silence—it seemed that the dragons knew where the name had come from, even though none of them were from Holbard. After the last great battle, orphans whose parents and names weren’t known were named after the battle itself.
“His family died, and he’s supposed to be friends with dragons now?” Nico asked, one brow raised.
“You didn’t see what they did in the battle,” Ellukka said, rising to her feet and pointing to Anders and Lisabet. “I did. If you want them gone, would you prefer Leif was dead?”
“I have questions about Theo too,” Krissin added. “He only came from Holbard six months ago, his family is still there. How do we know who he’s loyal to?”
Anders glanced up at Leif, who had bowed his head and was rubbing his face with both hands. Why wasn’t he saying something, defending them? Anders and Lisabet had given up everything to come here—their friends, her mother, and his uncle, it turned out. They’d given up their life at Ulfar, everything they were used to. And though they’d found good friends here, that didn’t stop him desperately missing Sakarias and Viktoria, Jai and Det and Mateo, or feeling like there was a hole in his heart when he imagined them thinking he’d betrayed them.
“The whole thing could have been a setup,” Krissin said, speaking slowly, as if she was explaining something simple. “It was their own class. Who says they didn’t make a plan that someone would attack Leif, and Lisabet would defend him, and then we’d all trust them?”
“It wasn’t!” The words burst out of Anders. “You think we wanted to be stuck here?”
And then everyone was shouting, fingers pointing and children coming to their feet, yelling accusations and snapping defenses. Anders couldn’t even make out what anyone was saying anymore, and he didn’t care—what he cared about was that the way he felt was pouring out of him, and it felt so, so good to raise his voice and shout at Nico and Krissin.
Eventually Leif raised his hands, and then his voice. “Enough,” he called, and then when nobody was listening, he shouted louder: “ENOUGH!”
One by one the young wolves and dragons went silent, and everybody turned to look at Leif.
“Well,” he said quietly. “I see you are not that much ahead of the Dragonmeet after all. And after you started out so well. I’d hoped for more from my chosen students.”
Anders could hear Rayna muttering under her breath, and even calm Lisabet sounded like she was growling in the back of her throat. He felt like doing exactly the same.
Leif shook his head. “We will do independent study for the rest of the day,” he said. “Usually I would end your lessons here, but frankly, I don’t trust you not to continue the fight without me. It’s time you all had a day off, so tomorrow will be a rest day. I will expect to see you all calmer when you return the day after.”
There was a round of muttered apologies, not one of which sounded like the speaker really meant it, and one by one the students found their work on the long tables and turned their attention to it. As Anders found the booklet that contained his reading and writing exercises, he could feel the room bristling with unspoken arguments.
More than ever, it felt like there was no solution to the bad blood between the wolves and the dragons, except to make it impossible for each to attack the other.
As the class had talked through the beginning of the fight, it had been so easy to see where things had gone wrong. But though it had all started with suspicions and wrong beliefs, the truth was that in the end, wolves and dragons had died.
It wasn’t just a case of everyone understanding the other side of the story—his class couldn’t even do it with the Drekleid’s help, and none of them had even been involved. Real harm had been done in the last great battle, and he wasn’t sure it could be undone.
Real harm was done, said a small voice in his head, in the battle ten days ago as well.
That was the thought that had been preying on his mind ever since, no matter how he tried to hide from it. He couldn’t just explain to his friends that dragons weren’t what they’d always believed them to be. They had suffered real injuries—they had run for their lives.
Just like the larger battle, it had begun with myths and lies, but now there were real hurts to be forgiven. And though he hoped against hope they could be, in his heart, he wondered if it could ever happen.
At lunch, Anders and the others took no chance that Nico and Krissin could sit next to them again and stop them from working on the riddle. Mikkel and Rayna ran to fetch food, and they met the others in the big map room that Anders and Lisabet had discovered the first day they’d broken out of their locked bedroom.
The huge map of Holbard was still there, taking up one whole wall, and as he looked at the markings on it, identifying Ulfar Academy, the site of the port fire, and other places besides, Anders felt the chill of an impending battle looming over him. He forced his mind back to the riddle and took his place with the others around one end of the long table.
“Let’s hear it again,” said Lisabet, who was helping Theo unload the stack of books he’d brought with him. He was still trying to figure out exactly what the Sun Scepter did, besides something that presumably had to do with heat—after all, it was named for the sun—and he was not having much luck with his research.
Anders swallowed his bite of his sandwich and recited the words.
“Where the sun greets herself at every dawn,
And the stars admire themselves at night,
Where blue meets blue the whole day long,
The scepter’s head is wedged in tight.”
Everyone was quiet. “Um,” said Ellukka eventually. “Where do you start with one of these things?”
“First line,” said Lisabet practically. “The sun at dawn.”
“So somewhere in the east,” Anders said. “That’s where the sun comes up. She can’t be greeting herself anywhere else, except where she is.”
Everyone turned to look at the big map of Vallen, which illustrated all the details of the island, from pools and lakes all the way up to mountaintops, with almost perfect accuracy.
“I wonder what it means by ‘greets herself,’” Rayna mused.
“Some kind of mirror?” Mikkel tried. “There have to be two of you for you to greet yourself.”
“I think it has to be,” Lisabet agreed slowly. “In the next line, it says it’s somewhere the stars can admire themselves. You admire yourself in a mirror, don’t you? Theo, is there . . . ?”
Theo was already standing up with a sigh. “I’ll find a book on famous artifact mirrors,” he said, trotting out of the room.
Everyone sat in silence while he was gone, eating their lunch and staring at either Drifa’s map or the map on the wall, occasionally breaking the quiet to murmur one of the lines of the riddle to themselves. Theo returned and started leafing through the pages of his newest book, frowning.
“What does ‘blue meets blue’ mean?” Anders said eventually. “I’m trying to think of—I mean, I suppose it’s two blue things.”
“What kind of things are blue?” Lisabet asked quietly, seeing the thoughtful frown on his face.
“The sea, the sky,” he said. “Maybe it’s somewhere along the east coast?”
Ellukka dropped her sandwich. “I know the place!” she said, shoving her chair back and hurrying around to the big map of Vallen. “There is a place where the sea meets the sky, and it’s over here in the east! I’ve been there with my father, and I was practicing a story about it a few months ago in school!”
She snatched up a
pointer that was clipped into a rack beside the map, and used it to point at a spot near the very top of the eastern coast. Just off the coast, a string of islands looked like it had been dropped into the sea, and below, where her pointer was tapping, was a patch of blue named the Skylake.
“It’s a huge lake,” she said. “It sits at the top of very high, very sheer black cliffs—that’s why it’s called the Skylake. Because it’s so high up compared to the sea. And if you’re there on the right kind of day, the water is so perfectly still, it acts like a mirror.”
“Good,” said Theo, closing the book on mirrors and reaching for his sandwich with visible relief. “Because I was getting nowhere.”
“You could see the sunrise in it,” she said. “Or the stars at night, if you flew over the top.”
“Do you think we need to go there on a perfectly calm day?” Mikkel asked.
“No,” said Anders. “It doesn’t say ‘when,’ it says ‘where.’ So we just have to go to the place where it happens, not on the day it does.”
“This has to be it,” said Rayna. “We should go on our rest day tomorrow.”
Mikkel groaned, lowering his head to thump it gently on the table. “Please get home before dark this time,” he said. “Seriously, we’re begging. Theo and I are going to completely run out of excuses.”
“We’ll do our best,” Ellukka promised.
Anders barely heard her. He was too busy staring up at the map. The Skylake.
Solving the riddle hadn’t been as hard as Hayn had warned it would be, but then again, they’d had wolf and dragon friends to help them. And perhaps in some ways, the hardest part was having Drifa’s blood—after all, that was something you couldn’t pretend.
Tomorrow, they’d find out if they were right. And if they were, they’d find the Sun Scepter.
Chapter Nine
THEY SNUCK OUT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, leaving behind a not-particularly-hopeful Mikkel and Theo—though the two boys were less worried about the success of the mission and more worried about their grilling at the hands of Valerius and Torsten, if anyone worked out that the other four were missing. Theo planned to try and speak to Hayn and let him know what they’d figured out, if he could find a time when the archives were quiet enough to slip into the little room where the mirror lay hidden.
For now, he and Mikkel were determined to do their best, and they waved the others farewell, then ran inside to set up the first of their diversions—a study session in Rayna and Ellukka’s room. If anyone came looking for the girls, they planned to say they’d only just gone to find a snack. After all, they must be around if their friends were in their room, right?
Anders kept his scarf pulled up around his face as Rayna soared between mountain peaks. She and Ellukka planned to travel east, flying low across the Sudrain River until they reached the Seacliff Mountains on the coast. From there they would make their way up to the Skylake. The journey would take longer than if they’d flown in a straight line, but there was also less chance they’d be seen from the ground.
The mists of the night before hadn’t yet cleared, and as Anders looked down over Rayna’s shoulder, he saw they were pooled at the base of the mountains like water, nestled in every gully. The Sudrain ran between tall fir trees like a gray-and-white thrashing beast, and eventually the trees thinned out as the Seacliff Mountains rose toward the sky. To his left he could see the Uplands, the broad, grassy plains that nestled between the two mountain ranges, but Rayna never went high enough for him to see the sea beyond them to the north.
It was a crisp, sunny day, with barely a cloud above them—the sky was a pale silvery-blue, the sun slowly rising from the direction they were flying. It grew colder and colder as the mountain peaks rose, and after a couple of long hours, when Anders had tucked himself down inside his layers—even for him this was getting seriously nippy—he felt Rayna start to descend.
He peeked out again and immediately spotted the Skylake.
It was enormous.
Just as Ellukka had said, sheer black cliffs fell straight to the sea below, and the lake itself somehow nudged all the way up to the edge of the cliff, the silvery-blue waters reflecting the sky, broken only by the occasional gust of wind.
The two dragons circled out to sea, and Anders leaned out far enough to spot the waves dashing themselves against the base of the cliffs in flurries of white foam, before Rayna’s rib cage shook with a rumble beneath him, and he took it as a sign to stop moving his weight around.
Side by side, wingtips almost touching, Rayna and Ellukka wheeled in from the sea to soar the length of the lake toward the hills at the other end. Anders tried to soak up every detail—the rocks along the shoreline, the green-gold grass that ran up to the edges—knowing the scepter might be hidden anywhere around the edge of this huge lake. Or worse, somewhere under the water.
The girls flared their wings and slowed to land, settling on a patch of springy grass at the western end of the lake, farthest from the sea. The rocks that ran all along the edges made this end the obvious place to land, and Rayna and Ellukka picked out spots side by side.
Anders and Lisabet climbed down stiffly, arching their backs to stretch and stumbling until their legs worked again. Lisabet looked a little green around the gills, as she had after the flights to and from Holbard. Anders set down the bag he was carrying so he could properly coax his limbs back to life.
Once they were far enough away, first Ellukka and then Rayna transformed, sinking down almost too fast for the eye to follow, shrinking and shifting until they were humans once more, holding the three-point crouch dragons always seemed to start and end their transformations in.
“It’s been nearly two weeks since we transformed,” Lisabet said, wistful. “We can’t do it at Drekhelm—it’s so hard for me, and if the dragons saw either of us . . . but I’m starting to feel like I need to. Like an itch, you know?”
And as soon as she said it, Anders felt it too. “Maybe we can today,” he said. “Just for a little.”
“But first,” said Lisabet wryly, “I think we’re having lunch.”
Rayna and Ellukka had already reached Anders’s bag, and were digging inside it for the supplies they’d packed at breakfast. “I’m starving,” Rayna said, pulling the wrapping off a sandwich and shoving half in her mouth.
“Dying,” Ellukka agreed. “Always happens after a long flight. Anders, Lisabet, we’ll be with you in a minute.”
Anders turned to study the lake as the two dragons ate, and Lisabet pulled off her boots and socks, rolled up her trousers to her knees, and waded out into the lake, letting the cold soak into her bones with a happy sigh.
“It has to be the right place,” Anders said. “There’s blue in the sky and in the lake, and you can see what a perfect mirror it makes.”
“Food first,” Rayna said from behind him. “Then quest.”
He laughed, walking back to sink down onto the grass beside his twin as she devoured the second half of her sandwich. He leaned back on his hands, studying the lake. Anders and Rayna had never really left Holbard before their transformations, and everything he’d seen when aloft with her these past few days—the mountains, the plains, Vallen’s jagged coastline—seemed impossibly beautiful.
And, a tiny part of him remembered, not just impossibly beautiful. Also, just plain impossible. The lake was huge, and there was no hint in the riddle about where they were supposed to look for the Sun Scepter. The whole Wolf Guard could search this lake without finding it. With that thought, his good mood vanished like the sun hiding behind the clouds.
He looked up at the silvery-blue sky and squinted against the sun as he mentally traced a path down to the lake itself. From here, you couldn’t even see the jagged rocks at the edge. It just looked as though the water ended in the sky, the two of them melding perfectly together.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright. Where blue meets blue. They did have the clue they needed after all! He didn’t need the whole of the Wolf Guard, he just
needed to pay attention to the words of the riddle.
“It’s at the other end of the lake!” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Look, blue meets blue, right there!”
He threw himself into wolf form, running the moment his feet hit the ground, excitement coursing through him. It felt amazing to have the grass beneath his paws once again, his nose suddenly picking up the sharp scents of the trees all around them, the delicious salty tang of the sea far below, the hint of wood smoke from some nearby cottage.
He heard Lisabet howl behind him as the two tore along the shore of the lake, and he answered her, joyful. It felt right to be running with her, stretching his legs and leaping past rocks, swallowing up the distance in no time.
They reached the far end of the lake too soon, and he reluctantly pushed himself back into human form.
Lisabet hadn’t bothered putting her boots back on before she followed him, and now she hopped impatiently from one bare foot to the other as he pulled off his own boots and socks.
“Blue meets blue,” he said, rolling up his trousers and wading out into the water. “It has to be somewhere here along this edge, where the lake meets the sky. It’s obvious from the other end, and that’s the best place for a dragon to land. It’s where Drifa would have landed. The riddle says it’s wedged in tight. That has to mean these rocks.”
Rayna and Ellukka were still running along the edge of the lake in human form, and by the time they reached Anders and Lisabet, the two wolves were well out along the edge of the lake. It was shallow along the rocky shoreline, so it wasn’t hard to wade, but Anders’s spine was tingling with the knowledge that just a few feet to one side of him was an endlessly sheer drop down to the sea.
The two dragons splashed out to join them, both shrieking at the coldness of the water.
For a time, they hunted in different spots along the lake’s edge, and then suddenly Ellukka shouted, “Something’s here!”
Anders hurried to join her, the water surging around his legs with every step. She was bent over a craggy bit of rock that seemed to be part of the cliff face itself, tugging at something fastened beneath it.