He nodded, and she scooped up another spoonful of porridge, blowing on it to cool it down, and swallowing it before she spoke. “Has something happened, Anders? You look a little like someone chewed you up and spat you out.”
He hesitated, but Lisabet had been so subdued lately, and he wanted so badly to show her he cared about her worries. If he was asking her to share them, perhaps he should go first, to show her how much he trusted her.
He told her what Drifa had said, and not just about the artifacts. He told her that his mother was gone now, and about the emptiness he felt.
“And you must have been feeling this way ever since the battle at Holbard,” he said quietly. “Your mother’s missing, it must be so hard.”
Lisabet gave a sigh. “It is,” she admitted. “And it’s complicated too. Yes, I’m worried about her and scared for her, but I’m also angry at what I’m pretty sure she’s done.”
“We don’t know that Sigrid did anything,” he tried, but the protest sounded weak, even to him.
“We don’tknow,” Lisabet conceded, “but I think she lit those fake fires in Holbard.”
Anders’s heart sank. “But when we were at Drekhelm, we found a map with the place the fire was lit marked on it,” he pointed out.
“I know,” she agreed, “and at the time, I suspected the dragons of lighting the fires. But now we know they’re fake, I just don’t see it anymore. I think, if anything, the dragons were investigating who lit the fires, because they knew theydidn’tlight them. Can you imagine the Dragonmeet managing to agree on a plan as complicated as creating fake dragonsfire, when they know how to light real fires? They spend all day debating what to have for breakfast, Anders.”
“I know,” he agreed. “I just... I don’t see why she would do something like that.”
“I do,” Lisabet replied with a sigh. “I mean, you told me what the mayor said to you yesterday, and he was right. She does basically want to rule Holbard—all of Vallen if she could. Do you remember the time we both snuck inside her office? You were trying to find out about Fylkir’s chalice, and we ended up locked inside?”
“I remember,” he said, and they both smiled, despite the seriousness and the sadness of the moment. They’d been hiding behind opposite couches, and when their eyes had met, their friendship had really begun.
“Well, she and Ennar were talking then,” Lisabet said, “and my mother was saying that the humans couldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions, that it was up to us to do what we had to do to keep them safe. Now I think we know what she believed she had to do. She had to scare them enough that they’d let her be in charge, and in the end, she might even havewanteda battle, if she thought she could win it. I wish it was different, and I miss her, and I don’t know if she’s safe, wherever she is. But I have to do whatIbelieve in as well. And that means finding a way to get the wolves, the dragons, and the humans to listen to each other. Somehow.”
They were both silent for a long moment, and then she offered him a small smile—and though it was weak, it was real. “Thank you for listening,” she said softly. “Sometimes that’s what I need most of all.”
After breakfast, Anders, Rayna, Lisabet, Ellukka, Mikkel, and Theo gathered around Drifa’s map. They were the six who had used the map to hunt for the pieces of the Sun Scepter together.
“This is just like old times,” Rayna said as she smoothed the map out on the stone and pricked her finger. “We’ve already solved four riddles. We can manage two more.”
She carefully squeezed a drop of blood onto the compass rose.
“We want to find the Mirror of Hekla,” she told it clearly.
The map itself was a beautiful thing, made of cloth woven through with silvery thread that Drifa had somehow forged straight into the fabric. Every artifact was made by both wolves and dragons—the wolves designed the artifacts and created the right combination of runes to tell them what to do, and the dragons forged them in their essence-infused dragonsfire. Drifa had been a dragonsmith, and Felix and Hayn designers. For the first time, Anders wondered if his father had been the one to design the runes that must be engraved onto the silver thread, so small they couldn’t be seen.
As he watched, the intricate knotwork around the map’s edges started to wriggle, changing and rearranging itself until it spelled out letters instead of its closely woven pattern.
“Three blue buttons, one by one.
Only the smallest permits the sun.
Look southwest and you will see
It’s guarded by a single tree.”
Six heads bent over the map, and they studied it together in silence.
“I wonder if it means the southwest of all Vallen or if we figure out the area where it’s hidden, and it’s in the southwest part ofthat,” Theo mused.
“Vallen,” said Lisabet confidently, pointing to the lower left-hand side of the map. “Look here. The Brengun Lakes.”
Anders squinted at where she was pointing. There was a river running from north to south, and three times it swelled out into a lake, then narrowed again. In the center of each of the three lakes was an island, and sure enough, they looked like three buttons on a shirt, one above the other.
“The top one looks smallest,” Rayna said, “though sometimes the map isn’t that accurate. I wonder what it means by ‘permits the sun.’”
“Well,” said Anders, “let’s find out. It’s not far away.”
