“More than one washroom,” said Jerro.
Then Bryn and Mateo reached for Sam’s hands, and prepared to hold him in place as Anders and Rayna made their next introduction to Cloudhaven. One by one the children were brought in, and with each new addition, Anders felt the hope inside him swelling. It felt good toachieve what they had set out to do.
Everyone immediately spread out to explore. Isabina headed for the mechanical room without delay, carrying a pile of books and promising they’d have running water and other helpful things in no time.
“Not,” she said diplomatically, “that your drawing wasn’t very useful, Rayna. I’m sure it gave me a head start on figuring out how it works.”
That turned out to be a little optimistic, though, and some time later Anders found her sitting with Mateo, Theo, and Sam at the entrance to the strange room. It might have been where Cloudhaven had led them when they asked how to make it easier to stay there, but to him, it still looked more dangerous than anything else.
“We’re getting there,” Isabina promised. “Some of these instruments remind me of the ones at Drekhelm—I think they’re artifacts that control the hot water and the lights and all kinds of things. But they were all designed so long ago that it’s like trying to remember something you dreamed. Nothing’s quite the same. We can figure it out together, though.”
“She’s right,” Theo agreed. “Mateo thinks that section over there looks like something from Ulfar, so I’m about to squeeze in and go and poke at it.”
“It’s safer than it sounds,” Sam promised, when he sawAnders’s face. “Once when I was, uh, passing through a fancy house in Holbard, I saw some gears just like this. I think it’s fine if he touches them.”
“Add in these books from Ulfar, and we’re nearly there,” Isabina promised. “Wolf, dragon, and human expertise, at your service.”
Anders couldn’t help smiling as he walked away. Of everyone, Isabina was perhaps the least concerned with the old enmity between wolves and dragons. She just wanted to invent things, and she didn’t care who she did it with, as long as they were interesting.
One of the children’s greatest concerns about Cloudhaven had been the fact that—just like its name suggested—it was permanently hidden in the clouds. That made it very hard to know if dragons were approaching. A few hours later, when Isabina and her team were able to switch on a series of alarms that would warn them if they had unexpected visitors, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. When they announced they’d managed running water as well—“Andhotwater!” Theo said, with a dragon’s love of all things warm—their friends cheered out loud.
Meanwhile, behind the many doors of Cloudhaven, Anders and the others found lots of useful things, including bedrooms, and everybody moved inside to more comfortable surroundings. They also found empty forges,abandoned inventions, a banquet hall that would have seated at least a hundred people, and dozens of other strange rooms besides.
The big entrance hall remained the heart of Cloudhaven, though. There was always a fire burning in the fireplace, always at least a few children gathered around it to work or to talk.
They were in touch with Hayn every day via the communicator, and he reported that the camp outside Holbard continued to grow. He’d been on several scouting trips to the wolf camp to the north, though he couldn’t go too close for fear he’d be seen and imprisoned again.
“I’d hoped to speak to them,” he said via the mirror one night. “But the camp is set up for combat. I don’t think they’re in the mood to do anything but imprison me again, so I’ve kept my distance. They’re training hard, every wolf down to the very youngest student. There’s a fight coming, I’m sure of it.”
In the meantime, the number of children they were sheltering at Cloudhaven continued to grow, filling up one bedroom after another. Hayn had a knack for finding those who had nobody else, and everyone at Cloudhaven knew that feeling far too well to deny them help—anything was better than the cold loneliness and the empty bellies that faced them in the camp.
They sourced their food sometimes from the camps, sometimes from Holbard, and sometimes they bought it from farms farther afield—the dragons were able to pose as travelers and spend their coins without suspicion.
But though they were busy rescuing children who needed them and making Cloudhaven into a home, Anders worried about the way the days were slipping away. They still had something much more important—and much harder—to achieve.
One evening he stood in the entrance hall, taking in the scene before him. Wolves, dragons, and humans were working together, cooking the evening meal, studying their stacks of books, or making the latest arrivals comfortable. They laughed and talked and squabbled, and though he knew not all of them had come around to trust those different from themselves, there was a kind of change in the air.
As Mateo and Bryn had said to him over lunch, it was hard to spend all day, every day, with someone, and hold on to your idea that they were all that different from you.
Anders finally felt as if they had stopped rushing from crisis to crisis, desperately trying to solve each one without time to think about how best to do it, and had earned themselves just a few moments of breathing space.
And though he never would have been able to admit itout loud, he knew within himself that at least a little bit, he was responsible for what they had achieved so far. He was proud of that.
Still, the situation was definitely not without difficulties. Lisabet was subdued, and he knew that she was thinking about Sigrid, wondering what her mother’s absence meant. There was a chance that Sigrid might be missing for the worst possible reason—that she’d been killed in the Battle of Holbard. But none of them really believed that. Someone, wolf or human, would have seen her fall, and everybody would be talking about the death of the Fyrstulf, the leader of the wolves.
It was far more likely that Sigrid was planning something, and Lisabet seemed to feel a kind of responsibility for her mother’s actions that Anders wished she wouldn’t. Lisabet wasn’t the same as Sigrid—anyone who met her for even a minute knew that.
Bryn had succeeded in translating the glowing text on the wall that concealed Drifa, but that puzzle would not be as easy to solve as they had hoped. Some of the words made perfect sense. Others were in some kind of code.
“I can tell you what every one of these letters is,” Bryn said with a sigh. “But if we’re going to decode it, we need a key. Something that tells us what kind of code it really is. Until then, I don’t know how we can get past the wall.”
Despite his mother’s warning not to come looking for her, Anders had spent a lot of time thinking about how they might reach her.
And through all these small triumphs and bigger challenges, one stood out as the hardest of all: they still had absolutely no idea how to convince the wolves, dragons, and humans outside of Cloudhaven that they needed to talk to one another if they were ever going to rebuild Vallen.
Later that night, Anders was returning from fetching more wood for the fire, along with Ellukka and Sam. Anders had asked Lisabet if she wanted to come, but she had quietly shaken her head and returned to the book she was reading. He wished he knew how to make her feel better.
The firewood came from a giant room not far inside Cloudhaven, where pieces of wood from kindling to logs had been neatly stacked by someone in the past. There was even a small red wagon on wheels for transporting the wood to whichever fireplace you were using, and just now Sam was towing it along, stacked high.
