“Well, I already knew that,” he muttered.
Still, he was sure he’d heard something. So he levered himself to his feet and made his way along the hallway up toward the corner, silently wondering what, exactly, he was going to do if it turned out therewasan enemy there.
But when he reached it, trying to walk as though he had confidence, standing tall, shoulders squared, there was nobody there at all.
“Guess I was hearing things, Cloudhaven,” he said. “And I guess now I’m talking to a giant pile of rocks in the sky. This is going well.”
With a sigh, he turned and walked back to his work, picking up his notebook so he could finish off the second half.
When he was eventually done, he took the long way out, checking in on his sister first. She was muttering feverishly to herself, and he wasn’t sure how to tell herthat her picture looked like nothing so much as a cobweb made by a demented spider, the scratchy lines that were meant to depict wires spinning out in every direction to every corner of the page.
“Looks good,” he said instead, and patted her on the shoulder. “Do you need a hand?”
She waved him off. “I’ll see you out there.”
So Anders headed back out to where his friends were hopefully researching and cooking and checking on their patient.
They were indeed all hard at work. Jai and Det were commanding a group of wolves, dragons, and Sam the human, pulling together a meal that smelled absolutely amazing.
Lisabet and Theo had all the others helping them. They already had a dozen books open, and were crawling back and forth across the floor, comparing paragraphs and arguing with each other in quiet voices. They didn’t look like they’d had any breakthroughs yet, but if they were stopping to read parts of the books, Anders hoped that meant they might be relevant.
Lisabet had always been famous among the wolves for her love of the library, and Theo had been studying research and archiving at the Finskól. Ellukka had been studying storytelling, and Mikkel history, and the two ofthem were also nose-deep in books, hunting for information about how Cloudhaven worked.
He stood for a moment before he approached the little camp, just watching. Mateo was holding three books open at once for the others, one with each of his hands and one with a foot. At least they were all talking to each other—wolf, dragon, and human—and working together a little bit. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Anders delivered his notebook to Bryn, who promptly buried herself in it, ignoring him and everyone else. Anders was no scholar, though, so as Bryn settled herself down by the fire to begin work on the arduous translation, he presented himself to the cooks to see what he could do.
It was much later that night, after food and a little more work, when they all reconvened to talk about what they should do next.
“I think we’re starting to get an idea of how this place works,” Lisabet said, “but it won’t be fast, and we can already tell there are going to be some dead ends. Dragons have been forbidden from coming here for as long as we can remember. If Drifa came here, then she was breaking the rules. Cloudhaven’s ancient, and so are the books about it. Only a few of us can work at once—there aren’t enough books for everyone to research.”
“Is there anything the rest of us can do?” Sakariasasked. “I don’t just want to sit here and do nothing, not with everything that’s happened.”
Sam was sitting beside Pellarin, who had woken long enough to have a small meal and was now fast asleep again. Anders saw Sam shift, as though he wasn’t sure whether he should speak or not.
“We could... ,” Sam began, then paused. His black hair was falling into his eyes, desperately in need of a cut, and there was nowhere to wash at Cloudhaven apart from the ice-cold water in the tiny sink of their one little washroom. (“We’re lucky someone thought about whether visitors might need bathroom facilities at all,” Sakarias had pointed out.) So Sam still had dirt daubed across his cheeks, more smeared than cleaned by his efforts at tidying himself up. He looked thin, but to Anders, he didn’t look young. Anders knew how much experience Sam had had on the streets. He knew Sam was used to fending for himself. In a way, Sam was like Anders and Rayna, older in experience than any of the wolves or dragons here.
“Go on,” said Anders when it seemed no one else had noticed Sam thinking about speaking. “Did you have an idea, Sam?”
Sam nodded, and the others turned their attention to him. “I was thinking about the camps,” he said. “Almosteveryone from Holbard is outside the city, in the camps, but they must be a mess. They won’t have any shelter. I’m not even sure if they’ll have enough food. How could they possibly have found a way to look after that many people this quickly?”
“And your brother might be there,” Rayna pointed out. “Jerro must be somewhere.”
“Maybe,” Sam agreed, “and I want to find him. I want to find him very badly. But there’s more to it than that. Maybe you could help the Holbard refugees. There must be a lot of injuries. You have people here who have trained as medics.”
To Anders’s surprise, it was Viktoria who spoke up. “Wehave people trained as medics,” she corrected him. “You’re here too, Sam. You’re one of us. And I think we should do it. Pellarin will be okay tomorrow without us.”
Sitting beside her, Ferdie nodded, his usually cheerful face grave. “We’re doing what we can,” he said, “but mostly, Pel just needs to sleep. And wait.”
“Then let’s go to the town camp,” Anders said. “Maybe we’ll find Jerro. Maybe we’ll find people who need medics. Maybe we’ll find some other way we can help. I want to do something, not just sit here.”
“I’ll take you,” Ellukka offered.
“And I’ll come too,” Rayna said.
“Viktoria and I can both come,” Ferdie said, and Sakarias looked at him just a moment too long.
And so it was decided. In the morning, they would head to the camps.
