It moved its arm, and for one glorious moment, Anders was free of it.
Then its hand clamped down on his ankle with an iron grip, holding him so tight that Anders wondered for a terrifying moment if it was going to pull his foot off.
Ellukka was shouting something, ready to slam thedoor closed, but he couldn’t understand her. He gave one kick, and then another, and finally her words penetrated.
“Transform,” she was screaming. “Change, Anders!”
In a flash, on instinct, he did as she said, throwing himself into his wolf form. And as he did, his leg became thinner and slipped free of the artifact warrior’s grasp. He hurled himself out the door, landing on top of Sam, and Ellukka slammed it closed behind him, turning the lock with a loud click.
Without any need for consultation, all three of them turned to run back toward the entrance hall and the fireplace, Anders not even bothering to slip back into human form until they had stumbled out to the surprised group preparing for dinner.
Jai and Det lifted the cooking pot away from the flames, and all the others gathered around Anders, Ellukka, and Sam as they gasped out their story, adding details, trying to make sense of what had happened.
“We didn’t ask Cloudhaven for directions,” Anders said, still panting for breath, his heart refusing to slow down. “We knew the way to the firewood room. We didn’t need them. Maybe that’s why it didn’t know we were there. There wasn’t a path.”
In the end, it was decided that they couldn’t simply leave the artifact where it was. They banded together asa group, fifteen of them, wolves, dragons, and humans, making their way back inside, leaving some of the others to guard their newest arrivals.
They armed themselves as best they could with what they found in the rooms along the way, but when they reached the place where they had imprisoned the artifact, the door was still locked.
Ellukka opened it slowly and lifted her lamp, shining a light inside.
The room was completely empty, save for the broken red wagon and the scattered firewood. Apart from that it didn’t contain a stick of furniture, not even a rug on the ground. There was no sign at all of where the warrior had gone.
A few of them stepped inside, shining their lamps around as though it might suddenly emerge from a crack in the walls, and they were about to leave again when Theo suddenly dropped to a crouch, brushing at the dust on the floor.
“Look here,” he said, “these cracks, they’re a square.”
“He’s right,” said Mateo. “This is a trapdoor. This piece of rock, it should lift out somehow.”
But try as they might, they couldn’t work out how to budge it. It didn’t have a ring sunk into it, and the crack around the edge was too narrow for even the smallest ofthem to get their fingers inside, so it was impossible to imagine the artifact warrior wedging its giant hands in. If this was where the warrior had gone, then it must have had some way to open the trapdoor that they couldn’t understand.
“I have a question,” said Mikkel as they puzzled over it. “Even if we could open this trapdoor, is that really what we want to do? I mean, if we’re right, the warrior’s down there. Are we sure we could win a fight against it?”
And the truth was, nobody was sure of that at all.
In the end, they locked the door again, retreated back to the fire, and made new rules. No one was to go inside Cloudhaven except in a large group. Nobody was to sleep in the bedrooms inside Cloudhaven. They would retrieve the mattresses and drag them out to lay them around the fire, sleeping in the entrance hall, as they had done at the beginning. They would make sure guards were always awake and on duty.
Nobody complained.
Soon Ferdie was singing as they set up the new camp, and Sakarias chased some of the smallest children around the fire, eliciting squeals of delight.
They all made the best of it, and Anders was so proud of them for that. But deep down, he felt they had taken yet another step back. This place had felt a little safer, likea base from which they could try to make everywhere else safer as well. And now it wasn’t safe at all.
It made him ask himself if anywhere they went, if anything they did, would ever be enough. And he didn’t know the answer to his own question.
Chapter Seven
THE NEXT DAY,ANDERS WAS ONE OF THE MEMBERSof an expedition to the camp outside Holbard.
He was looking forward to it, in part because it would be a chance to see Hayn in person rather than just speaking to him through the communicator mirror.
But he had another idea as well. Before he left, he traded some of his clothes, swapping with the others until he was dressed in the fanciest-looking outfit he could manage. Rayna looked him up and down admiringly, then snickered. “You look like someone rich,” she teased him. “Just goes to show, looks can be deceiving.”
Lisabet was watching him, though, frowning faintly. “You know what else he looks like,” she said. “He looks a little like a boy who was on a wanted poster just recently. We’ve been keeping a low profile around the camp until now, but dressed like that, you’ll draw more attention. Ifyou’re going to do that, you should take precautions.” She went up on her toes and pulled Ferdie’s knitted hat from his head, walking over to pull it on over Anders’s curls. “That’s a little better,” she said. “The posters weren’t up for long. You don’t have to look that different.”
Anders hoped she was right, and gave the hat an extra tug to pull it down a little farther as they prepared to take off.
Hayn had hiked out to the meadow to meet them where they usually landed—or, more likely, he had transformed into a wolf and enjoyed the run instead—and they all had a chance to talk to him as they made their way back in toward the camp. He slung an arm around Anders’s shoulders and found something to say to each member of the group.
