“How’s Lisabet?” Viktoria said eventually.
“She’s fine,” Anders said, heart sinking. “I promise she’s safe.”
They were quiet again. He waited, hoping against hope they might have something more to say.
“We want to be,” said Sakarias eventually. “Your friends, I mean. We care about both of you, and so do the others—Jai, Mateo, Det. But it’s hard.”
Viktoria nodded. “Right now, we’re in the middle. We’ll carry Hayn’s message—”
“And miss dinner,” Sakarias reminded them, sounding more like himself for a moment.
“And get in all kinds of trouble if we can’t sneak back in,” Viktoria continued. “But we’re doing it because Hayn asked us to. We’re trying to trust you, Anders, but...”
She trailed off and shrugged, and Sakarias didn’t contradict her.
Anders had a lump in his throat that made it hard to swallow. He knew that even this was more than he deserved—his friends still felt exactly like he used to about dragons, and as far as they knew, he’d betrayed them.
And they wereright, that was the worst part of it. Even if it was to avoid a greater, much worse battle, hehadfought against them.
Even if he’d been fighting to keep everyone safe, they were the ones who’d fled, injured and afraid. It was a lot that they were even here.
“Thank you for trying,” he said quietly. “I’ll prove you can trust me. Please just keep trying to believe. You should go, though, before it gets even later.”
“Good luck,” said Sakarias. “I hope you’re not doing something we’ll regret helping with.”
“Tell Lisabet to be careful,” said Viktoria. She moved around to Sakarias’s injured side to shield him from being jostled by the crowd, and after a moment, the two of them slipped into the sea of people. Soon, they were just two more shadows in the dim lanterns hanging outside the shops and houses.
Anders hurried back into the alleyway to help the others down, and together they slipped outside the gate, keeping their heads bowed in the dark to avoid the notice of the guards who still stood watch there, calling out to draw attention to their wanted posters.
“We can take off much closer to the city,” Ellukka said, once they were clear and making their way along the road outside the walls. “Nobody will see, there’s not much moonlight. I can’t wait to be in the air, this place is freezing.” She looked much weaker than she had that morning, after a long day exposed to the cold of the city, and away from the underground lava of Drekhelm.
“We should look at the map first,” Lisabet said. “Just in case there’s anything we need from the city before we go. We’re so late, we’re bound to be in trouble anyway, five more minutes won’t be the worst of it.”
They walked a little ways along the road that led to the distant ford, but with the crowd thinning as the night drew on, it was easy enough to find a gap in the people and slip off the path. They found a spot behind a large rock, and Anders pulled out the piece of cloth, unfolding it and setting it on the ground.
It was a map of Vallen, almost exactly like those he’d seen in class, or on the wall in the map room at Drekhelm, with a compass rose in the top right corner, and intricate knotwork drawn all around the edges. It had been inked directly onto the cloth.
The cloth itself was shot through with silvery thread, the metal Drifa had forged woven straight into the fabric. That must be how its magic worked—all artifacts required metal, and the magical fire of a dragonsmith, and Anders could only imagine that the wolf-designed runes must be engraved on the thread itself, unimaginably small.
“Well, it’s a map all right,” said Rayna, poking at it with one fingertip. “Nothing happens when I touch it. How do we let it know we’re Drifa’s family?”
It still felt so odd, to hear it out loud. Anders studied the map in the pale moonlight. Apart from being made of cloth, rather than paper, it looked perfectly ordinary.
“Blood,” said Anders. “That’s what worked with the purse. Perhaps after such a long time without anyone touching it, it needs help waking up.”
“Good idea,” said Rayna, unpinning the brooch that held her cloak shut and pricking her finger without hesitation. She held her fingertip over the compass rose and gently squeezed it until a drop of blood fell onto the circle at the dead center of it. “I want to find the location of the Sun Scepter,” she said clearly.
At first, nothing happened.
“There!” said Ellukka after half a minute, pointing at the knotwork around the map’s edges. And sure enough, when Anders looked more closely, the beautifully drawn border was writhing, changing, rearranging itself.
“It’s making letters,” Lisabet whispered, leaning in to study the words that now made up the map’s border. Slowly, she began to read them aloud.
“Where the sun greets herself at every dawn,
And the stars admire themselves at night,
Where blue meets blue the whole day long,
