After they’d eaten, the dragons stayed gathered around the fire, each taking a turn to use the bath, their smiles growing as they got the heat all the way into their bones. Meanwhile, Anders and Lisabet took a lamp each and started hunting for the next piece of the scepter, hoping it might be inside the house itself. Now that they’d seen the island, it didn’t seem possible Drifa would have risked hiding anything on the smooth expanse of grass outside. After two discoveries, they knew what they were searching for—a cylinder about the length of their forearms, wrapped in waxed canvas, tied with string.
“I’m hoping the main trial was getting here,” Lisabet said, as she looked under the bed frame in one of the bedrooms, while Anders searched the high shelves. “And now it’ll just be a matter of looking.”
“I think so,” he agreed. “She wasn’t trying to make it impossible for us to find them. Just difficult for anyone who didn’t have a clue. It should be somewhere in here.”
They were nearly ready to give up when finally they reached the laboratory at the back of the house. It had a fireplace, but it hadn’t been lit, and they could see their breath in the air. Lisabet started going through the equipment on a square table, and Anders held up his lamp, studying the shelves, trying to put himself into the mind-set of a dragon. Where would his mother think was a good place to hide something?
Then he took a closer look at the fireplace. It wasn’t just a fireplace—it had metal hooks set into the wall around it, ready to swing pots of different sizes out over the flame, to heat or melt whatever was inside. That was as close to a forge as Anders had seen so far inside the house. And Drifa had been a dragonsmith.
He tried to picture her at work here, but he didn’t know what she’d looked like. Judging by how he and Rayna looked, and the stories that she’d been half Mositalan, she’d probably had about the same brown skin as they did, and black hair too.
She would have been strong if she was a smith. If he’d gotten his tallness from their father, perhaps Rayna had gotten her shortness from their mother.
He wondered if his father had ever been here, or if Hayn had visited this place. Would a dragon have brought them there? Maybe even Drifa?
He pulled the biggest pot away from the wall, easing its hook around so the pot swung back and forth. What kind of thing went in it? Metal? He held up his lantern to take a look inside, and he stared as he realized something was still in the pot.
It was a very familiar shape.
“Lisabet, I’ve got it!”
He reached inside, closing his fingers around the wrapped-up piece of the scepter, and pulled it out triumphantly. His mother had left it just where she’d worked, of course.
He and Lisabet ran through to the main room where the others were waiting, and they greeted him with cheers when he held it up. Quickly they untied the string and revealed another piece of the wooden scepter, wrapped in bands of metal as the others had been, engraved with runes.
They unfolded the cloth map and laid it out on the floor, the silvery threads glinting in the firelight. Anders touched the newest piece of the scepter to the map, and they watched as the knotwork drawn around the edge wriggled and twisted and formed new words.
As always, Lisabet leaned down to read them out.
“The final piece is hidden high,
Concealed in the forbidden sky.
By name it is the safest place,
But know you well that danger waits.”
“The final piece! We were right!” Rayna said, scooping up Kess and holding her aloft like a trophy until the cat meowed indignantly to be let down.
“We’re nearly there!” Ellukka agreed, leaning down to read the words for herself.
But Anders was quiet, and eventually the others noticed, one by one turning to him with questioning eyes.
“I know where it is,” he said. “It’s somewhere high up, in the sky. Somewhere we’re forbidden to go. We’ve heard its name plenty of times—somewhere that sounds like it should be safe. A haven. Cloudhaven.”
They all stared at him in silence.Cloudhaven. The legendary home of the first dragonsmiths, the highest point in Vallen.A place all dragons were forbidden to go, though nobody knew why.
“‘But know you well,’” Rayna whispered, “‘that danger waits.’”
Chapter Fourteen
THE NEXT MORNING THEY WERE ALL UP EARLY,preparing to leave. Anders had the same feeling as he’d had when they’d left Flic Waterfall—that there was so much here they could still discover, so many more stories that could be told. But they’d have to come back another time. Now there was no time to waste in getting to Cloudhaven.
“It’s a dangerous route,” Ellukka said. “We’ll fly across the Uplands—that part’s all right, it’s mostly just shepherds out there, and I’m pretty sure they’re used to seeing dragons from time to time—but then we have to cross the Icespire Mountains. We’ll have to go high. It’ll be long, windy, and cold.”
“And north of Drekhelm,” Mikkel said, with a grimace. “If they’re keeping a lookout, there’s a chance they’ll spot us.”
“We can’t afford to take a longer path,” Rayna said. “Not when we know they’re probably already looking for us.”
