“This looks like someone’s study,” Rayna said, drawing him back to the room itself. There were piles of books everywhere, sketches and open notebooks, diagrams and pieces of half-finished artifacts hanging from hooks on the walls and from the high, domed ceiling. The glowing strip of metal that had led them here simply ended at the threshold.This is the room, it seemed to say.It’s up to you to figure out the rest.
“Do you think she came here?” Anders asked quietly. “I mean, she must have once, if she was hiding the piece of the scepter, but...”
“But maybe this washerstudy,” Rayna finished, when he trailed off. “Some of her things were at the cottage, but maybe she worked in lots of different places.”
“We could learn so much about her,” Anders said, the yearning tugging at his heart. “But let’s find the scepter piece first.”
They each took one side of the room, beginning a methodical search through the stacks of books, lifting sheaves of paper to peer underneath them, scanning each pile of artifact parts in the hope of seeing the familiar cylindrical shape, perhaps wrapped in the usual waxed canvas and string. Anders was trying to move as quickly as he could, imagining angry dragons flying through the clouds toward them right now to find their friends waiting outside, but he dared not hurry too much, in case he missed what he was looking for among the clutter.
“Anders,” Rayna said after a little while, a shake in her voice.
“Did you find it?” He looked up.
“Anders,” she said again, still staring down at a spot on a desk.
He hurried over. The object of her attention wasn’t the piece of the scepter. It was a charcoal sketch, executed by someone on a page torn from a notebook. At first, he thought the man in the picture was Hayn—he was big and broad-shouldered, with dark-brown skin indicated by a smudge of charcoal, and a neat black beard along a square jaw. But he was missing the designer’s square-rimmed glasses, and there was something a little different about his face. The dimples were the same, though.
He was standing with an arm around a woman who looked a lot like an older version of Rayna. She wore her hair out, the tight ring of curls almost as tall as it was wide and long. She shared Rayna’s cheeky, unrepentant grin, which the artist had captured perfectly. She had lighter brown skin than the man, and though she was a full head shorter than him, even with the hair, she looked fit and strong, as if she could do anything. The pair of them wore matching necklaces—discs of metal hanging around their necks on leather straps. Each of the discs was engraved with a tight spiral of runes.
“It’s them,” Rayna whispered, her voice so wobbly that Kess mewed her concern, wriggling a paw free of her sling. Anders carefully lifted her out, his hands shaking, and let her settle on Rayna’s shoulders, where she could keep a closer eye on her girl.
“It’s them,” he agreed, resting one fingertip on the sketch. “Felix and Drifa.”
“They look really happy,” Rayna murmured. Then she sniffed and visibly tried to pull herself together. “Put it in your bag,” she said. “We’ll take it with us, we can look at it later. For now, we have to figure out where she put the scepter.”
They both went back to work, and it was only a minute later when Rayna called his name again, this time in delight. “Anders, I’ve got it!”
She was brandishing the last of the four pieces, scrambling to pull off the string and canvas. He ran over to her.
“Put it together,” she said, passing it to him, her other hand lifted to make sure Kess stayed on her shoulders. The cat didn’t know why they were so pleased, but she was celebrating by attacking one of Rayna’s curls.
Anders pulled the other three pieces from his satchel. The top was easy, with its iron orb to mark it, and he quickly saw the order in which they’d screw together, from the flow of the metal strips that wrapped all around it. The thrill of assembling such an important artifact, here in the main workshop where its creator—their mother—had worked, ran through him.
As he screwed the last piece into place, he felt the familiar tingle of the essence awakening inside it. All the runes along it briefly glowed, then subsided. “I can feel how to use it,” he said after a moment, wondering. “I never thought about how you’d activate it, but now I’m holding it, I can tell that it’s... listening, I guess, is the best word. All I need to do is tell it what I want.”
Rayna held out her hand, and he passed it to her. A moment later, her face lit up. “We’re ready to use it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“One more thing,” Anders said, turning back toward the door. “Cloudhaven,” he said, as clearly as he could, though the nerves were making his throat feel tight. “We have another true purpose. We want to find out where Drifa the dragonsmith went.”
For a moment, nothing happened. And then, just as it had before, the glow out in the hallway faded. When it returned a moment later, the path of runes led down the stairs again. Anders and Rayna hurried down them, and when they reached the base, the new glowing path led in an entirely new direction.
“Pack and paws,” Anders whispered. “It’s taking us to an answer.”
Rayna was just drawing breath to reply when Lisabet’s voice rang down the halls in a shout that came all the way from the entrance, raw with panic. “Anders! Rayna! The dragons are coming!”
The twins exchanged a glance that lasted only a heartbeat, and at the same time, lasted forever. Anders asked a question with his eyes. With infinite reluctance, Rayna nodded.
“Cloudhaven,” Anders said. “Show us the way back out again.”
The path faded before them, and the old one sprang up again. They wasted no time in tearing along it, running back to their friends as quickly as they could.
Lisabet and Theo were waiting at the door, leaning through it without daring to set a foot on the flagstones inside. “Quick,” called Lisabet. “Rayna, transform, we need to get your harness on!”
Ellukka was out on the ledge in dragon form when they ran across the huge hall to burst outside, Mikkel pulling her harness on over her head and buckling it into place. Rayna ran to a clear place to make her own change.
“We’ve got the scepter,” Anders called, as he and Lisabet grabbed Rayna’s harness.
“What do we do?” Mikkel called.
