“That’s right,” Bryn agreed. “To be completely honest, I think hewantedus to find you and join you. Onlythe fact that none of the Dragonmeet can agree with any of the others—as though they ever did—has stopped them from doing something stupid.”
“How can we be sure he wanted that?” Theo asked.
“Well,” Bryn replied, grinning, “most of these supplies were stacked in his office, and he left the door wide open. Then he called Ferdie, Isabina, and me in to talk to us. He said at a time like this, it was important not to stop learning, and gave us a book he thought we might find interesting. It was all about a small group of warriors who managed to win a war against a much larger army.”
“It would make sense,” Anders said. “He’s the one who sent us off after the Sun Scepter in the first place, more or less. He never actuallysaidwe should do something, but he sort of... made it obvious.”
The conversation drifted on, and those who had come to Cloudhaven first explained to the others about their difficulty getting inside. The afternoon was already growing chilly, and a cold wind was sweeping in through the open archway that led out to the landing pad.
“Wehaveto get the rest of you properly inside, past the wooden door,” Rayna said. “There’s hundreds of rooms in there. Some of them must be bedrooms, and we’ll be able to get warm as well. And we’ll be much safer if anyone shows up looking for us.”
Viktoria and Ferdie finished with Pellarin, who was dozing lightly.
“We’ve cleaned his wounds and seen to his leg,” Viktoria said. “Ferdie’s supplies are very good.”
“So’s your splinting technique,” Ferdie replied as he accepted a piece of fruit tart from Sam.At least,thought Anders,the medics are getting on.And maybe even doing a better job together than they could have apart.
“Pellarin will sleep for now,” Viktoria said. “It would be much better if he could rest somewhere more comfortable. That’s not possible though, is it?”
“No,” said Anders. “Really, we have the same challenges as we did before, and maybe some extra. We need to find a way inside Cloudhaven, so we’re safe. Then we need to find a way to make everyone else in Vallen safe. We need to clean up the messes we’ve made. It doesn’t matter that we were trying to stop the Snowstone from killing the dragons and harming the humans. We’re still responsible for what happened to Holbard. So from finding Jerro right up to figuring out what to do about the city, we...”
“We need to fix everything,” Rayna agreed.
The thought of climbing a mountain that high was enough to silence everyone.
Eventually, it was Jai who broke the silence, rising totheir feet. “Well,” they said, “if we’re going to do all that, a sticky fruit bun might not be enough. We should probably start with dinner.”
So Jai and Det got to work bossing around assistants and starting work on a meal, and Anders and Rayna headed inside Cloudhaven proper one more time.
Anders’s job was to go to the wall that concealed the way to their mother and copy the words down for Bryn to try and translate. Rayna’s job—which he didn’t envy—was to try and draw at least some of the designs inside the mechanical room for Isabina, in the hope that she might recognize them or understand how to work them. If only Sakarias had been able to go inside—he could bring anything to life with his pencil. Instead, he tried to explain techniques to Rayna for observing one piece of the room at a time and sketching what she saw. The stronghold seemed willing to light up more than one path for them at once, and he was grateful for that.
The third path it had shown them—the one that had led directly to their own feet when they had asked it to help them bring the others inside—neither of them had any idea how to investigate. They simply had to hope that Lisabet, Theo, and their helpers would find something in the books they’d retrieved.
Anders sat in front of the rock wall and put his mindto copying down the words. It wasn’t easy—Anders had to concentrate extra hard to understand most writing, and when all the words were in a different language, some of them even containing different letters than the ones he was used to, the task certainly didn’t get any easier. He checked and double-checked and triple-checked each letter and each word to make sure all his copying was right.
He was about halfway through, and starting to daydream a little bit about what might be coming for dinner, when he thought he heard a noise just around the corner. It was like one rock clicking against another. Then there was a soft shuffle and another click.
“Rayna?” he called. “You can’t be done already. No way.”
When there was no answer, he lifted his head and looked along the hallway. There was nobody there.
“Rayna?” he tried again, raising his voice.
Then a third time, much louder. “Rayna! Are you there?”
He heard a very distant shout of reply. “What?”
No question. She wasn’t close. Not just around the corner. She was still off at the mechanical room.
“Never mind,” he yelled, and studied the corner again, his pulse kicking up. “Cloudhaven,” he said quietly, “is somebody else here?”
Nothing happened.
He considered his words and tried a different way.
“Cloudhaven, could you lead me to someone who’s here right now, who’s not me and not Rayna?”
The lights dimmed, and then the path that he had come to expect lit up once more. But it didn’t lead away toward the corner where he had heard the noise. It led straight into Drifa’s wall.
