“We’ll do our best,” Ellukka promised.
Anders barely heard her. He was too busy staring up at the map.The Skylake.
Solving the riddle hadn’t been as hard as Hayn had warned it would be, but then again, they’d had wolf and dragon friends to help them. And perhaps in some ways, the hardest part was having Drifa’s blood—after all, that was something you couldn’t pretend.
Tomorrow, they’d find out if they were right. And if they were, they’d find the Sun Scepter.
Chapter Nine
THEY SNUCK OUT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,leaving behind a not-particularly-hopeful Mikkel and Theo—though the two boys were less worried about the success of the mission and more worried about their grilling at the hands of Valerius and Torsten, if anyone worked out that the other four were missing. Theo planned to try and speak to Hayn and let him know what they’d figured out, if he could find a time when the archives were quiet enough to slip into the little room where the mirror lay hidden.
For now, he and Mikkel were determined to do their best, and they waved the others farewell, then ran inside to set up the first of their diversions—a study session in Rayna and Ellukka’s room. If anyone came looking for the girls, they planned to say they’d only just gone to find a snack. After all, they must be around if their friends were in their room, right?
Anders kept his scarf pulled up around his face as Rayna soared between mountain peaks. She and Ellukka planned to travel east, flying low across the Sudrain River until they reached the Seacliff Mountains on the coast. From there they would make their way up to the Skylake. The journey would take longer than if they’d flown in a straight line, but there was also less chance they’d be seen from the ground.
The mists of the night before hadn’t yet cleared, and as Anders looked down over Rayna’s shoulder, he saw they were pooled at the base of the mountains like water, nestled in every gully. The Sudrain ran between tall fir trees like a gray-and-white thrashing beast, and eventually the trees thinned out as the Seacliff Mountains rose toward the sky. To his left he could see the Uplands, the broad, grassy plains that nestled between the two mountain ranges, but Rayna never went high enough for him to see the sea beyond them to the north.
It was a crisp, sunny day, with barely a cloud above them—the sky was a pale silvery-blue, the sun slowly rising from the direction they were flying. It grew colder and colder as the mountain peaks rose, and after a couple of long hours, when Anders had tucked himself down inside his layers—even for him this was getting seriously nippy—he felt Rayna start to descend.
He peeked out again and immediately spotted the Skylake.
It wasenormous.
Just as Ellukka had said, sheer black cliffs fell straight to the sea below, and the lake itself somehow nudged all the way up to the edge of the cliff, the silvery-blue waters reflecting the sky, broken only by the occasional gust of wind.
The two dragons circled out to sea, and Anders leaned out far enough to spot the waves dashing themselves against the base of the cliffs in flurries of white foam, before Rayna’s rib cage shook with a rumble beneath him, and he took it as a sign to stop moving his weight around.
Side by side, wingtips almost touching, Rayna and Ellukka wheeled in from the sea to soar the length of the lake toward the hills at the other end. Anders tried to soak up every detail—the rocks along the shoreline, the green-gold grass that ran up to the edges—knowing the scepter might be hidden anywhere around the edge of this huge lake. Or worse, somewhere under the water.
The girls flared their wings and slowed to land, settling on a patch of springy grass at the western end of the lake, farthest from the sea. The rocks that ran all along the edges made this end the obvious place to land, and Rayna and Ellukka picked out spots side by side.
Anders and Lisabet climbed down stiffly, arching their backs to stretch and stumbling until their legs worked again. Lisabet looked a little green around the gills, as she had after the flights to and from Holbard. Anders set down the bag he was carrying so he could properly coax his limbs back to life.
Once they were far enough away, first Ellukka and then Rayna transformed, sinking down almost too fast for the eye to follow, shrinking and shifting until they were humans once more, holding the three-point crouch dragons always seemed to start and end their transformations in.
“It’s been nearly two weeks since we transformed,” Lisabet said, wistful. “We can’t do it at Drekhelm—it’s so hard for me, and if the dragons saw either of us... but I’m starting to feel like I need to. Like an itch, you know?”
And as soon as she said it, Anders felt it too. “Maybe we can today,” he said. “Just for a little.”
“But first,” said Lisabet wryly, “I think we’re having lunch.”
Rayna and Ellukka had already reached Anders’s bag, and were digging inside it for the supplies they’d packed at breakfast. “I’m starving,” Rayna said, pulling the wrapping off a sandwich and shoving half in her mouth.
“Dying,” Ellukka agreed. “Always happens after a long flight. Anders, Lisabet, we’ll be with you in a minute.”
Anders turned to study the lake as the two dragons ate, and Lisabet pulled off her boots and socks, rolled up her trousers to her knees, and waded out into the lake, letting the cold soak into her bones with a happy sigh.
“It has to be the right place,” Anders said. “There’s blue in the sky and in the lake, and you can see what a perfect mirror it makes.”
“Food first,” Rayna said from behind him. “Then quest.”
He laughed, walking back to sink down onto the grass beside his twin as she devoured the second half of her sandwich. He leaned back on his hands, studying the lake. Anders and Rayna had never really left Holbard before their transformations, and everything he’d seen when aloft with her these past few days—the mountains, the plains, Vallen’s jagged coastline—seemed impossibly beautiful.
And, a tiny part of him remembered,not just impossibly beautiful. Also, just plain impossible.The lake was huge, and there was no hint in the riddle about where they were supposed to look for the Sun Scepter. The whole Wolf Guard could search this lake without finding it. With that thought, his good mood vanished like the sun hiding behind the clouds.
He looked up at the silvery-blue sky and squinted against the sun as he mentally traced a path down to the lake itself. From here, you couldn’t even see the jagged rocks at the edge. It just looked as though the water ended in the sky, the two of them melding perfectly together.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright.Where blue meets blue.Theydidhave the clue they needed after all! He didn’t need the whole of the Wolf Guard, he just needed to pay attention to the words of the riddle.
