Just like the larger battle, it had begun with myths and lies, but now there were real hurts to be forgiven. And though he hoped against hope they could be, in his heart, he wondered if it could ever happen.
At lunch, Anders and the others took no chance that Nico and Krissin could sit next to them again and stop them from working on the riddle. Mikkel and Rayna ran to fetch food, and they met the others in the big map room that Anders and Lisabet had discovered the first day they’d broken out of their locked bedroom.
The huge map of Holbard was still there, taking up one whole wall, and as he looked at the markings on it, identifying Ulfar Academy, the site of the port fire, and other places besides, Anders felt the chill of an impending battle looming over him. He forced his mind back to the riddle and took his place with the others around one end of the long table.
“Let’s hear it again,” said Lisabet, who was helping Theo unload the stack of books he’d brought with him. He was still trying to figure out exactly what the Sun Scepter did, besides something that presumably had to do with heat—after all, it was named for the sun—and he was not having much luck with his research.
Anders swallowed his bite of his sandwich and recited the words.
“Where the sun greets herself at every dawn,
And the stars admire themselves at night,
Where blue meets blue the whole day long,
The scepter’s head is wedged in tight.”
Everyone was quiet. “Um,” said Ellukka eventually. “Where do you start with one of these things?”
“First line,” said Lisabet practically. “The sun at dawn.”
“So somewhere in the east,” Anders said. “That’s where the sun comes up. She can’t be greeting herself anywhere else, except where she is.”
Everyone turned to look at the big map of Vallen, which illustrated all the details of the island, from pools and lakes all the way up to mountaintops, with almost perfect accuracy.
“I wonder what it means by ‘greets herself,’” Rayna mused.
“Some kind of mirror?” Mikkel tried. “There have to be two of you for you to greet yourself.”
“I think it has to be,” Lisabet agreed slowly. “In the next line, it says it’s somewhere the stars can admire themselves. You admire yourself in a mirror, don’t you? Theo, is there... ?”
Theo was already standing up with a sigh. “I’ll find a book on famous artifact mirrors,” he said, trotting out of the room.
Everyone sat in silence while he was gone, eating their lunch and staring at either Drifa’s map or the map on the wall, occasionally breaking the quiet to murmur one of the lines of the riddle to themselves. Theo returned and started leafing through the pages of his newest book, frowning.
“What does ‘blue meets blue’ mean?” Anders said eventually. “I’m trying to think of—I mean, I suppose it’s two blue things.”
“What kind of things are blue?” Lisabet asked quietly, seeing the thoughtful frown on his face.
“The sea, the sky,” he said. “Maybe it’s somewhere along the east coast?”
Ellukka dropped her sandwich. “I know the place!” she said, shoving her chair back and hurrying around to the big map of Vallen. “Thereisa place where the sea meets the sky, and it’s over here in the east! I’ve been there with my father, and I was practicing a story about it a few months ago in school!”
She snatched up a pointer that was clipped into a rack beside the map, and used it to point at a spot near the very top of the eastern coast. Just off the coast, a string of islands looked like it had been dropped into the sea, and below, where her pointer was tapping, was a patch of blue named the Skylake.
“It’s a huge lake,” she said. “It sits at the top of very high, very sheer black cliffs—that’s why it’s called the Skylake. Because it’s so high up compared to the sea. And if you’re there on the right kind of day, the water is so perfectly still, it acts like a mirror.”
“Good,” said Theo, closing the book on mirrors and reaching for his sandwich with visible relief. “Because I was getting nowhere.”
“You could see the sunrise in it,” she said. “Or the stars at night, if you flew over the top.”
“Do you think we need to go there on a perfectly calm day?” Mikkel asked.
“No,” said Anders. “It doesn’t say ‘when,’ it says ‘where.’ So we just have to go to the place where it happens, not on the day it does.”
“This has to be it,” said Rayna. “We should go on our rest day tomorrow.”
Mikkel groaned, lowering his head to thump it gently on the table. “Please get home before dark this time,” he said. “Seriously, we’re begging. Theo and I are going to completely run out of excuses.”
