“It’s at the other end of the lake!” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Look, blue meets blue, right there!”
He threw himself into wolf form, running the moment his feet hit the ground, excitement coursing through him. It felt amazing to have the grass beneath his paws once again, his nose suddenly picking up the sharp scents of the trees all around them, the delicious salty tang of the sea far below, the hint of wood smoke from some nearby cottage.
He heard Lisabet howl behind him as the two tore along the shore of the lake, and he answered her, joyful. It feltrightto be running with her, stretching his legs and leaping past rocks, swallowing up the distance in no time.
They reached the far end of the lake too soon, and he reluctantly pushed himself back into human form.
Lisabet hadn’t bothered putting her boots back on before she followed him, and now she hopped impatiently from one bare foot to the other as he pulled off his own boots and socks.
“Blue meets blue,” he said, rolling up his trousers and wading out into the water. “It has to be somewhere here along this edge, where the lake meets the sky. It’s obvious from the other end, and that’s the best place for a dragon to land. It’s where Drifa would have landed. The riddle says it’s wedged in tight. That has to mean these rocks.”
Rayna and Ellukka were still running along the edge of the lake in human form, and by the time they reached Anders and Lisabet, the two wolves were well out along the edge of the lake. It was shallow along the rocky shoreline, so it wasn’t hard to wade, but Anders’s spine was tingling with the knowledge that just a few feet to one side of him was an endlessly sheer drop down to the sea.
The two dragons splashed out to join them, both shrieking at the coldness of the water.
For a time, they hunted in different spots along the lake’s edge, and then suddenly Ellukka shouted, “Something’s here!”
Anders hurried to join her, the water surging around his legs with every step. She was bent over a craggy bit of rock that seemed to be part of the cliff face itself, tugging at something fastened beneath it.
“It’s in here,” she said, giving another pull. “But it won’t move.”
Lisabet leaned down to try and get a look at it, but it was underwater. “Maybe it needs to be Anders or Rayna?” she suggested. “You know, her blood?”
“Worth a try,” Ellukka said, panting as she abandoned the attempt.
Anders took her place, pushing his sleeve a little higher up his arm and reaching in to feel underneath the ledge of rock with his fingertips. It only took him a few moments to feel what Ellukka had—a kind of long tube wrapped in what felt like waxed canvas.
He gave it a tug, and with no effort at all, it came free from the place where it was fastened. When he pulled it from beneath the water, the cloth wrapped around it was green and slimy, tied up with string that had threads of silver woven through it, just like the map.
They didn’t even bother wading back to the shore—Rayna helped Anders unpick all the knots, and Ellukka and Lisabet leaned in to see the fabric come apart.
Carefully, Anders and Rayna worked together to peel the package open. The piece of worn wood inside was about as thick as Anders’s forearm, and about the same length. Thin strips of what looked like iron crisscrossed it, set into the wood, and at one end of it was fixed an iron orb, cradled by wooden claws and engraved with intricate runes.
They all stared down at it.
“It’s not very big,” said Ellukka eventually, sounding uncertain.
“I thought a scepter was long,” Rayna said. “Like a staff. This is more like the Sun Stick than the Sun Scepter.”
Anders was underwhelmed as well. He pushed away the feeling that something about this wasn’t right. He handed Rayna the cloth and string, then turned the scepter over in his hands, studying it from every angle. “Anyone have any idea how to use it?” he asked.
“Maybe touch it to the map?” Lisabet suggested, not sounding very hopeful. “There might be instructions? I mean, the map is for finding Drifa’s artifacts, not using them, but...”
They waded ashore and found their shoes (except for Lisabet), and walked up to the other end of the lake in silence. Anders knew he wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy about this. He dug the map out of his bag and set it down on the ground. Ellukka and Lisabet held down the corners with their fingertips to stop the breeze from carrying it away.
Anders crouched down with Rayna by his side and carefully touched the tip of the scepter to the map.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the knotwork around the edge began to writhe and change, just as it had before. Relief sang through him, the tension in his shoulders easing. The mapdidhave instructions.
Lisabet leaned down, squinting, to carefully read out the words that now made up the border of the map.
“From deep within and light on the air,
You’ll find this hiding place straight through
The ice-cold veil of a mountain fair,
Where rót meets rock, as it was taught to do.”
