Anders nodded slowly. “That could all happen,” he admitted. “But if we do nothing...”
Mikkel held still for an agonizingly long moment. And then, finally, he raised his hand too.
“All right,” said Rayna quietly, much more serious than usual. “Good. Should we go hunt for it?”
“What, right now?” Mikkel asked.
“Why wait?”
“It’s not that easy,” Anders replied. “There are guards outside the storage rooms, and Valerius already caught me in there once.”
All eyes turned to Ellukka, who raised both her hands defensively. “Sparks and scales, don’t look at me,” she said. “You think I can get my father to do what I want? Try being raised by him, he’s strict!”
“I can see how he really crushed your spirit,” Lisabet replied dryly, and Rayna giggled, breaking the tension that had gathered around them.
Remembering Rayna’s mistrust of Lisabet the day they’d arrived, Anders could scarcely believe they’d come so far in just a week. But then again, Rayna was quick and clever, and if she’d been watching Lisabet, she’d have seen the other girl was the same, and a friend worth having.
They talked for a while about the best way to sneak past the guards, and in the end, they decided that an old-fashioned diversion was their best hope.
“It’ll have to be me,” Ellukka said, with a resigned huff. “My father’s their boss, they’ll come running to see what’s up with me, and that’ll give you a chance to get inside. If they’re back at their posts by the time you need to leave, we might need to get creative, but there’s no way of predicting how long you’ll need to hunt, so there’s not much use in planning how to get you out.”
“And nighttime is best,” said Theo, who spent more time than anyone in the storage caverns. “During the day there’s often someone looking for something or working with the books. Like Rayna said, there’s no reason to wait, and this is the best chance to avoid running into anyone.”
“I think I know what Ellukka can do,” Rayna said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Anders and Lisabet, you’ve seen one of these mirrors, so you’ll have to look for it, and you’ll need Theo to help you search. If I can have Ellukka and Mikkel, I can... Anders, do you remember that time at the fish market?”
Anders’s eyes widened. “Oh no,” he said, lifting one hand to cover his mouth.
“Oh yes,” said Rayna, grinning.
Half an hour later, Anders crouched in the shadows with Theo and Lisabet, watching the two guards standing outside the artifact storage caverns. Ellukka had wandered by a few minutes earlier to ask the two men a question, and while they were distracted with that, Rayna and Mikkel had silently crept along one of the tunnels approaching the guards. There, they’d carefully turned the dials that controlled the nearest wall lamps, dimming them to almost nothing.
That made a dark spot where Anders and his two companions could hide, giving them a clear view of the guards, so they could creep past them as soon as the watchful dragons left their posts. The students were only about thirty feet away, and they could make the run in a few heartbeats once Rayna gave them the chance.
And Anders was very certain Rayna was going to give them the chance. The fish market fiasco had been one of her finest hours, a chaotic plot that had fed half the street children of Holbard for a week. It had been one of the only times they’d teamed up with others, and Rayna had been fearsome in command.
“What’s she going to do?” Theo whispered, sounding a tiny bit worried.
“You’ll see in a minute,” Anders promised. “Just don’t worry if you hear any screaming.”
“Screaming?” Lisabet echoed, shifting beside him, and he put his hand on her arm to stop her from standing up.
And then it began.
There was a faint scuffling noise up the wide passageway to the left of the guards, which descended toward the right on a gentle slope. You barely even noticed the angle when you were walking, but for Rayna’s present purposes, it was perfect.
The scuffling stopped, and then a loud, banging, scraping noise began, the sound of wood thumping against rock, and Ellukka started screaming, the sound somehow both muffled and echoing all at once.
“What the—” Lisabet began, but she got no further.
A barrel went rolling by the guards at top speed, Ellukka’s blond braids whipping wildly at one end—she was wedged tightly inside, turning over and over as the barrel flew along the hallway down the slope.
A second later Mikkel started yelling, and his barrel flew down in hot pursuit, with Rayna bringing up the rear, waving her hands in the air gleefully. “Barrel race!” she shouted to the startled guards, who stared, then took off after her at a run.
“Quick,” said Anders, springing up like he was starting his own race and sprinting down the hallway to the cavern doors. He hauled them open, hurrying inside, with Lisabet and Theo right behind him.
“Barrel races?” Theo said, pushing the doors shut. “Seriously?”
The first time Rayna had tried this, Anders had been inside one of the barrels, Rayna in the other, and they’d gone straight through the middle of Holbard’s busy fish market. Fish had gone flying in every direction, and by the time the angry stallholders had retrieved the twins and heard Rayna’s dramatic, tearful version of their story—that older children had forced them into the barrels, that she’d been afraid for her life, that oh, her poor, weak brother might have died of fright!—the rest of Holbard’s street children had made off with as much fish as they could carry.
