The Morning Flower

by Amanda Hocking

  With the passports, they went with very common American names to help us travel under the radar. That’s why the name under my photo in the passport was “Emily Miller,” and Dagny Kasten had become “Alexis Williams” and Panuk Soriano was now “Austin Williams.”

  “You two have the same surnames,” I commented after I’d read them.

  “I thought they’d more easily pass for siblings,” Elof said.

  They eyed each other suspiciously, but Elof wasn’t wrong. Their skin had a slightly darker umber undertone than mine, their eyes and hair were the same color, and they both had rather full lips. Elof had apparently finished his conversation with Amalie, and he swiveled his stool toward us. “Do those look all right to you?”

  “Yeah, they look great,” I said.

  “Wait, Pan, why do you even need a new passport?” Dagny asked. “Don’t you have one? You were born in a Canadian human hospital, right?”

  “We just call it Ottawa General Hospital,” he said dryly. “But the Mimirin has super-intense safety protocols, and they really regulate the connections and trails left by passports and records. They prefer I don’t use my legal name in the human world whenever it can be connected to Merellä or any troll business.

  “But this way, I finally have a little sister I never wanted,” he added, and he playfully punched Dagny in the arm.

  She shot him a look. “I have two older sisters, and that’s more than enough for me.”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  Mästare Amalie had been reading over the itinerary, handwritten in a sleek calligraphy under her elegant letterhead, but she slid it across the island toward us. As she ran through the list, she tapped each item with her long, midnight-blue fingernail.

  We were flying out at eleven P.M. from Portland, and we’d be landing in Sweden thirty hours later. From the airport, we’d rent a car and drive to a port near Nikkala, where Patrik Boden would meet us and ferry us over to Isarna.

  Isarna was a quiet island town in an archipelago in the Bay of Bothnia off the coast of Sweden. It was the largest troll settlement in Scandinavia, and it was unusual for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest was that it had dual fealty, meaning it belonged to both the kingdom of the Trylle and that of the Skojare. They jointly appointed a Markis or Marksinna to govern the city, called the Markis Ansvarig or Marksinna Ansvariga, the current Markis Ansvarig being Patrik Boden.

  “Patrik has offered to be a city guide for you, and he’s assured me that he’ll help you get whatever you need to find Áibmoráigi,” Amalie said. “We’re all very excited for you to be going as ambassadors for the Mimirin like this.”

  “So, as ambassadors we get a free trip to Sweden, and you guys get what, exactly?” Pan asked her carefully. Amalie and Elof had really rushed through the explanation when they’d told him this morning.

  “Information, as much as you possibly can gather,” Amalie said. “When you return, we simply want you to tell us all about your trip. Nothing too invasive, I assure you.”

  “How come Patrik and the folks in Isarna haven’t found Áibmoráigi yet?” I asked. “If they’re so close, what’s stopping them?”

  Amalie smiled, but her jaw tensed visibly. “That is a good question, and that’s why this is exciting for us all. Because I hope you’ll be able to answer it very soon.”

  “Well, we’ll have plenty of time to go over everything on the very, very long trip there. And since we have a long drive to Portland, we need to leave here by”—Elof paused to check his watch—“four o’clock. That gives you a little over two hours to pack up and get your things in order. We’ll meet up outside the doors of the Mimirin then, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I should get going, then,” Pan said. “I’ve gotta take Brueger to my coworker’s for him to dog-sit while I’m gone.”

  “Dagny, can you spare a moment to help me get my schedule in order for my replacement?” Elof asked, and he was already walking back to the desk.

  “Yeah, sure. I’m all packed up anyway,” she said.

  So was I, actually. Last night Dagny couldn’t sleep until she had everything packed up, and with my bedroom being an open loft, I couldn’t really sleep while she was running around making sure she had everything she needed, so I figured I might as well pack up too.

  But since I was ready to go and everybody else was busy, I realized I had a window in my schedule. I waited until after Pan had left, and I snuck out of the lab before anybody else would notice. Neither Dagny nor Pan trusted Jem, and neither of them thought that I should visit him alone.

  I understood their trepidation, but he’d never done anything to hurt me, and I had a feeling he’d be more truthful if I was alone. Dagny’s abrasive questioning didn’t exactly inspire an honest and open dialogue.

  As I headed up to the fourth floor in the staff housing, I grew more and more anxious. By the time I got to Jem’s door, my heart was racing and my mouth was dry. I knocked on the door, trying to be for gentle, but sometimes when I was nervy like this my strength got the best of me. Under my accidental hammer of a knock, the door popped open and swung inward.

  “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry!” I said frantically, and I pushed the door the rest of the way open so I could apologize properly. “I didn’t mean—”

  My words died when I saw the apartment. All the big pieces of furniture were here, but all the smaller, personal possessions were gone. Some of the books were still on the shelf, but most of them had been cleaned out, and the piles of jewelry and even the succulent were no longer here.

  “Jem?” I stepped farther into the apartment. “Jem-Kruk? Are you here?”

  I peered in the bedroom. The bed was made, and no one was there. The top drawers on the dresser were open and empty.

  Jem-Kruk was gone. Again.

  34

  Fate

  “Okay, seriously, what’s wrong?” Pan asked. We were waiting at the gate for our plane. Dagny and Elof had gone off to scrounge up something to eat, but the two of us had stayed behind.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’ve been acting weird ever since we left the city. I thought you were nervous about making it past security, but you still seem … spacey. You keep staring off and looking anxious and biting your nails.”

  I’d been chewing on my thumbnail, and I self-consciously stopped and tucked my hands under my thighs. “I went to see Jem before we left.”

  “What? Why? What happened? Did he do something?” Pan asked.

  “I wanted to tell him that we were going to Isarna to look for Áibmoráigi. I don’t know if Áibmoráigi is the same thing as the Adlrivellir city he comes from, or if it’s something else entirely. But I … wanted to see what he thought.” I shrugged, unable to fully articulate why I wanted to see him one more time before we left. “But it didn’t matter anyway. He wasn’t there.”

  “You mean he wasn’t at his apartment?” Pan asked. “Or that he was gone?”

  “It looked like he was gone gone.”

  “Maybe he went home. That doesn’t really mean anything,” Pan said. “I mean, he said he came here to assure you that Eliana is safe. He did that, so why would he stay?”

  “I don’t know. Why did he want me to know that Eliana is safe?” I chewed my lip. “Why is Amalie so eager to help us? Something is going on, and every time I feel like I’m getting close to understanding what it is, something changes and I realize that I don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on either. But if anybody can figure it out, it’s the four of us.” He looked past me to where Dagny and Elof were walking back toward us, bearing lemonade and apples. “And that’s why we’re going on this trip. So we can find out the truth.”

  I gave him a tired smile. “I hope you’re right.”

  Since the flight had been booked last minute, none of our seats were together. I ended up in a tight window seat near the back of the plane, next to an elderly couple who fell asleep and started snor
ing before takeoff, but things could’ve been worse.

  As tired as I was, I was still too anxious to sleep. I’d been on a plane before, but never one this large, never for this long. For a little while, I stared out the window, watching the country sleeping, thousands of feet below me.

  Suddenly the darkness erupted in glittering flashes of light. I gasped in surprise, and the flight attendant’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling everyone we could watch fireworks out the plane window. It was the American independence holiday, but I’d been so wrapped up in everything that I hadn’t even noticed.

  I watched outside long after the fireworks had ended, when most everyone else in the cabin had fallen asleep. It was a dark night, with clouds blotting out the moon, so there wasn’t much to see, and I decided to make better use of my time by pulling out the book.

  I ran my fingers across the gilded title Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir. I’d snuck it out with me in my carry-on bag, since I thought it might offer some insight about where we were going, especially now that I knew that Jem came from a place he called Adlrivellir.

  The earth had finally dried from the Great Blue Thunder, making the passage across the Valley easy again. It was on the first clear day after the water had receded, when bright red flowers bloomed brightly on the green fields, that Jem-Kruk announced his intentions.

  “I will go into the Valley to harvest the sweet Idunnian pear,” declared Jem-Kruk.

  “You can’t,” Jo-Huk argued. “The etanadrak guard the Idunnian grove.”

  “The waters drove them away, but if I hurry now, I can get the fruit before they return.”

  “But is the fruit worth the risk?” Jo-Huk questioned his younger brother.

  “It is no risk.” Senka dropped into the conversation—literally.

  She had been climbing in the willows around them, nimbly hanging on to the slender branches, and when she wanted to be, she was lighter and quieter than the wind.

  Senka crouched on the ground when she dropped, grinning mischievously up at them. Her long hair was a dull shade of lime, and it hung around her shoulders like a shawl.

  “See, I told you!” Jem-Kruk shouted rather gleefully, but Jo-Huk had never been so easily swayed by Senka.

  “How can you possibly promise such a thing?” Jo-Huk asked, rather dubious of her.

  “Because. I will go with, and I can handle the etanadrak.”

  That was enough for Jem-Kruk, and no amount of protests from Jo-Huk would stop him once he was in action. Jem-Kruk and Senka were already racing out into the Valley, and he ran after them.

  Many of the other animals had come back already. They ran alongside a pack of binna deer. The giant beasts nearly crushed them under their hooves, and Jem-Kruk and Senka whooped in glee as they darted through the shadows cast by the large antlers.

  They kept running, long after Jo-Huk’s legs ached and he couldn’t keep up with them anymore. When he came to the field of flowers, he lost sight of them, as they weaved between the boulders.

  On the other side was the Idunnian grove, but Jo-Huk heard the bellows of the angry etanadrak. He finally made it through, and he saw them coming for Jem-Kruk and Senka.

  They were giant slimy beasts, with rotund shells of emerald green, and a row of pointed teeth in their mouths. Senka and Jem-Kruk fought them valiantly. Jem-Kruk used his daggers, while Senka used her arrows tipped with the poison nectar of the mourning flowers.

  One of the etanadrak managed to wound Jem-Kruk, a sharp fang catching the palm of his hand and spilling blood out all over. Jem-Kruk responded by immediately cutting off the beast’s head.

  Within short order, the three of them were sitting in the field eating fresh Idunnian pears, and though Jo-Huk hated to admit it, nothing had ever tasted so sweet. It had been worth the risk, after all.

  35

  Midnight Sun

  By the time our final flight landed at our destination, I had discovered a kind of tired that I’d never known before. My body felt strange and gummy, and I lumbered through baggage claim and renting a car.

  Pan drove, Dagny beside him helping with navigation. That left me and Elof to sprawl out in the back seat, and Elof had totally sacked out before we even hit the road. I planned to do the same, resting my forehead against the cool glass of the window, but then we got out on the open highway, away from the town and the mountains to the west, and I finally saw the full scope of the landscape.

  I sat up straighter and rolled the window down, so there was nothing between me and the view. It was so utterly breathtaking. The vast, lush green flatlands, rushing up to meet the snowcapped mountains that arched across the land.

  “Is everything okay back there?” Pan asked, trying to look at me in the rearview mirror.

  Dagny craned her head around to look at me. “Are you getting carsick, Ulla?”

  “No, no, I’m just…” I waved out the window. “It’s beautiful here.”

  It did remind me a bit of the places where I’d grown up—the evergreen flatlands like what I saw during the summers in Iskyla, and the mountains a more epic scale of the bluffs of Förening. But despite the similarities, this was much grander. It was so vast and green, seemingly stretching on forever.

  Elof shivered on the seat next to me, so I rolled up my window. I watched for as long as I could, admiring the majestic fields, until my eyelids grew too heavy. But even with my eyes closed, the lush scenery played on in my dreams.

  I saw the fields, but I was soaring above them. A herd of giant woolly elk appeared from nowhere, their antlers reaching high into the sky. I dove down lower, so I was floating alongside, chasing them. They should’ve been running fast, their long legs bounding through a wildflower meadow, but they moved in slow motion, so their graceful strides appeared almost magical.

  From the herd came the piercing call of one of the elk—a deep thunderous roar underneath a high-pitched whistling scream. It was a ghastly sound, as if two different demons were crying out in agony from the throat of one of the woollies.

  This call was louder than I’d ever heard before, sounding more like it belonged to a fierce dragon than a monstrously oversized deer. Then I spotted the beast that made the sound. Unlike the others with their fur in dark shades of umber and mahogany, this one was pure white. Even the broad antlers were ivory colored.

  The rest of the animals ran, but the white elk stayed behind. Its cinnamon-red eyes were locked on me when it let out another long, tortured bleat, and I put my hands over my ears, futilely attempting to block it out.

  But the meaning got through loud and it clear: it was a warning.

  “We’re here,” Pan was saying, and he gently shook me.

  “Ulla, get up!” Dagny snapped. “We’re here and the Markis Ansvarig is waiting.”

  I sat up, blinking back my grogginess, and tried to get my bearings. Elof and Dagny had already gotten out of the rental car, and they were unloading their bags from the trunk. We were parked in a lot next to a harbor, under a gray cloud of mist.

  Pan lingered in the front seat, but as soon as he’d told me, “It’s time to go, Ulla,” he was out of the car.

  When I got out after him, Elof was standing nearby, talking to a man in a trilby hat with a white feather in the brim.

  “We’re so happy to have ambassadors here,” he was saying in a clipped accent. His hands moved the whole time he talked, gesturing in quick, fluid movements. “We don’t get many visitors to the city.”

  “It is quite the journey,” Elof commented with a smile. “But we’re so grateful to have your hospitality.”

  “The gratitude goes both ways, it seems,” he said, and his dark eyes landed on me. “We missed introductions. I’m Patrik Boden, the Markis Ansvarig.”

  “Ulla Tulin,” I said and shook his hand. He smiled then, and it was sharp and clean, like a brand-new blade.

  “Does everybody have their things?” he asked and checked his watch. “The next ferry leaves in ten minutes, so we should catch it while we
have the chance.”

  “Here.” Pan handed me my duffel bag, and Dagny checked the car one final time to make sure we hadn’t left anything.

  It was a five-minute walk to the ferry. The paint-chipped sign out front promised that the ferry made stops at all the islands in the nearby archipelago, including the uninhabitable national park Isarna. (That’s what the sign said, to keep humans at bay.) The boat was rusty, and the wooden benches that served as seating had seen better days. But there was a canopy to keep out the drizzling rain, and a heater in the center to help ward off the chill.

  I sat down as close to the heater as I could get, while Patrik told us about the amazing views of the bay that we could see even better from the bow. Dagny and Elof decided to take him up on his guided ferry ride, but I offered to stay back with the luggage and warm myself.

  When the boat finally departed, it let out a loud blast of the horn, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

  Pan sat down beside me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I had a strange dream on the way here, and it’s lingering.” I rubbed my temple. “I think I’m just really tired, and this rain’s got me shivering even though it’s not even cold out.”

  He put his arm around me, in a casual way that managed to warm me in more ways than one. “We’ll be there soon, and then we can all get some rest.”

  “I can hardly wait.” I rested my head on his shoulder and softly added, “Thanks for coming here with me.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He nodded at the clear waters that stretched around us for miles, save for bright green patches of islands scattered about. “I wouldn’t miss any of this for the world.”

  Once I had warmed up—and woken up some more—I was able to better appreciate the beauty around us. It was a tranquil, breathtaking boat ride. For most of the trip the visibility was very high, despite the light misting rain. But as we went along, it was like we were driving into a thick cloud, and that’s when Patrik announced our stop was coming up.