“I think we should go see her as soon as the sun comes up,” he said. “And find out.”
As the evening drew on, the only noise in their room was the slow trickling of the water in the clock, and the occasional soft click as a tube filled up completely, and the hands ticked on to show another quarter hour, draining out the water to start again.
Every so often he checked to make sure Lisabet was still awake, and she always was. Eventually the clock had counted off the hours they’d been told to wait, and it was late in the afternoon, almost a day and a half since they’d last woken up. They left the blinds open so the morning light would wake them, and each climbed under their quilts.
Anders waited for sleep to take him. The mattress was luxuriously soft, and the quiet trickle of the water lulled him. Against all the odds, and in defiance of every story he’d ever heard growing up, this was the most comfortable bed he’d ever slept in. Sleep tugged at his eyelids.
Whatever tomorrow held, he’d have to be ready to fight. If Rayna could hide them, that would buy them more time to learn the Dragonmeet’s intentions and try to make a plan. If she couldn’t, he’d have to face down the Dragonmeet and do something he’d never imagined he’d want to—he’d have to find a way to convince the council that he and Lisabet should be allowed to stay at Drekhelm.
Chapter Two
ANDERS WOKE UP BECAUSE HE WASSTARVING.For a long moment he couldn’t work out where he was, staring up at a smooth stone ceiling that looked nothing like his room at Ulfar. Then he realized he couldn’t hear Sakarias mumbling in his sleep or the distant sounds of the city.
It came back to him in a flash: he was at Drekhelm.
He pushed upright, looking around the little room he was sharing with Lisabet, who was still a sleeping lump under her quilt. They were alone, and the room was far too bright. He shoved back his own quilt, hurrying over to the window and peering out.
Behind him, there was a bleary groan of protest from Lisabet as his movement woke her, but he barely heard it. The sun was much too far above the horizon, and his heart thumped an alarm—it was mid-morning. They’d slept much too long, and their chance of finding Rayna without running into anyone on the way was surely gone.
“Whatimesit?” Lisabet mumbled from under her blankets.
“Morning,” he said, his head whirling. “Latemorning.”Pack and paws.
He crossed back to his bed, sitting down to pull on his boots, lacing them tight. They had to get moving, do something. They had to try and find a back way to Rayna, to figure out how to keep themselves out of the hands of the Dragonmeet and their threats.
“We’d better hurry,” said Lisabet, pushing off her quilt and hurrying out of bed, over to the door so she could rest her ear against it, one hand on the doorknob.
“There must be more than one way to the infirmary,” he said. “Rayna will...” But he trailed off, because Lisabet had the strangest expression on her face.
She stood with her hand on the doorknob, trying to turn it, then trying again. She shoved her shoulder against the door, rattled the knob one more time, and finally gave up, leaning against the door and looking back at him. “It’s locked,” she said. “They’ve locked us in.”
Anders stared at her, a shiver going through him.
They were prisoners.
“We can’t just wait here until they come for us,” she said.
“Agreed. And Rayna would have come for us herself by now if she knew we were locked in. So she doesn’t know, or else they haven’t let her out of the infirmary yet.”
He crossed over to Lisabet, dropping to a crouch beside her to take a good look at the lock. He could see a tiny sliver of the corridor beyond through the keyhole. This lock didn’t look much harder to pick than Hayn’s had been, but he didn’t have so much as a hairpin to try with. He gazed at the metal, trying to think through what he knew of locks.
Neither he nor Lisabet were strong enough to break it, so they needed to trick it somehow. Lisabet pressed her fingers to it, pushing hard, though they both knew it wouldn’t work. Seeing her gave Anders an idea, though.
“Could you freeze it?” he asked. “If you can blast metal with enough cold, it’s not so hard to break afterward.”
“I can try,” she said, closing her eyes in concentration, then slipping down into her wolf form.
Anders stepped back, and Lisabet brought down her paws, casting a quick, thin ice spear straight at the lock. It struck the keyhole, and the metal all around it turned white with frost.
Anders followed it up with the hardest kick he could muster, twisting to stomp the sole of his boot against the lock, driving his heel into it.
The lock cracked but held.
“Again,” he said, and Lisabet cast a second spear, the air in the room turning freezingly, refreshingly cold.
Anders kicked once more with all his might, the shock of it traveling up his leg.
This time the lock came to pieces, and he pulled them free of the door, which swung open slowly.
