Battle Born

by Amie Kaufman

  A few minutes later they had everything inside, and everyone except the two medics and Pellarin gathered around the fire. They set themselves up nearby, where they could still join the conversation. Bryn and Jai had broken open one of the boxes and were handing around slices of thick, sticky fruit bun with frosting on top that stuck to Anders’s fingers. They cut up Rayna’s giant fruit tart as well—she’d made Sam hold it the whole way home, refusing to leave it behind even though it wouldn’t fit into their bags.

  The food seemed to make a difference to everyone’s morale, and Anders noticed there were fewer suspicious looks just at this particular moment. Unless he counted Sakarias, whose attention was focused on Ferdie—he didn’t seem to like him talking quite so much with Viktoria.

  “Let’s take turns reporting,” Anders said. “Sak, you go first. Anything happen here while we were gone?”

  Sakarias turned his attention away from the medical team and shook his head. “All quiet here,” he said. “Cloudhaven behaved itself. We thought we heard something somewhere inside the mountain, but then it stopped. And not all of us heard it. It might have been nothing.”

  Anders thought of the room full of mechanical structures he’d seen the night before. Maybe it had been one of the machines?

  “I guess we’ll keep our ears open,” Lisabet suggested. “It might have been nothing, but it might have been something.”

  Then she, Anders, Rayna, and Mikkel reported on their trip to Holbard. Lisabet showed the others the big stack of books she and Mikkel had retrieved from the ruins of the Ulfar library.

  “With any luck, there’ll be something in here that helps us understand how Cloudhaven was built, and how to control it,” Lisabet said. Her face was even paler than usual, and her words were clipped. She’d loved their school library, and Anders could tell how much it had hurt her to see it destroyed.

  Anders and Rayna explained how they knew Sam and Pellarin, and they talked about what they had seen in the city. Sam joined in for that, and all the wolves’ faces grew graver and graver as they came to understand just how serious things were back at their home.

  “So almost everyone’s outside the city in the camps now?” Mateo asked. “What about the wolves? Are they there too? If everyone’s blaming them, like you said, is it safe for them to be where everyone else is?”

  Sam shrugged. “I haven’t been to the camps,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re with everyone else. I think, if they’re in a pack, the wolves will be safe wherever they are. People might blame one or two wolves, but nobody’s going to confront the whole Wolf Guard.”

  “The wolves aren’t the only ones with problems, though,” Anders said quietly. He tried to explain what else he’d seen, that as the dragons and wolves had fought over Holbard, and over who would control the climate of Vallen, they had left every human in the city without a roof over their head, without any certainty about what would come tomorrow.

  Then it was Ellukka and Theo’s turn. They’d come back from Drekhelm with all the books Theo had wanted, but they explained how they’d managed to bring back three Finskólars as well.

  “The class was taking turns keeping a lookout,” Ellukka said.

  “Well, some of the class,” Theo corrected her.

  Anders exchanged a glance with his sister, and he knew they were both wondering what would have happened if the Finskólars who didn’t like them had been keeping a lookout instead.

  “It was actually quite interesting,” Isabina said, rousing herself from her current daydream. Her brown curls were as wild as ever, and as usual, she had a smudge of black grease from one of her inventions on her white cheek. “There were some fascinating cloud formations. I was just classifying them, when suddenly I saw Theo drop out of the bottom of one. So I transformed straight away and flew up to join him. We all landed a little way down the mountain, which was safer, and swapped stories.”

  “Then she came to find us,” Bryn said. “It’s a mess back at Drekhelm. Half the Dragonmeet is blaming the other half of the Dragonmeet for what happened at Holbard. Some of them still think that you were fighting for the dragons, and they’re waiting for you to come back and join them again. Others are sure that you were never fighting for the dragons, and that you’re traitors who need to be caught.”

  “How’s your father, Ellukka?” Lisabet asked. There was nothing but concern in her voice, and Anders admired her compassion, as he had many times before.

  Ellukka’s father, Valerius, had mistrusted Anders and Lisabet from the first time he’d met them. He had made their time at Drekhelm difficult over and over again, but he still loved Ellukka with all his heart. In the battle over Holbard, he had been injured protecting her.

  “He’s all right,” Ellukka replied, her relief written all over her face. “He’s still injured, but he’s going to be fine.” She glanced down at the last pieces of her bun, her voice dropping. “He’d probably be finer if he knew I was all right too,” she admitted.

  There was nothing anyone could say to make her feel better, and after a moment, Theo spoke, although gently. “Leif’s wondering where we are as well,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Bryn agreed. “To be completely honest, I think he wanted us to find you and join you. Only the fact that none of the Dragonmeet can agree with any of the others—as though they ever did—has stopped them from doing something stupid.”

  “How can we be sure he wanted that?” Theo asked.

  “Well,” Bryn replied, grinning, “most of these supplies were stacked in his office, and he left the door wide open. Then he called Ferdie, Isabina, and me in to talk to us. He said at a time like this, it was important not to stop learning, and gave us a book he thought we might find interesting. It was all about a small group of warriors who managed to win a war against a much larger army.”

  “It would make sense,” Anders said. “He’s the one who sent us off after the Sun Scepter in the first place, more or less. He never actually said we should do something, but he sort of . . . made it obvious.”

  The conversation drifted on, and those who had come to Cloudhaven first explained to the others about their difficulty getting inside. The afternoon was already growing chilly, and a cold wind was sweeping in through the open archway that led out to the landing pad.

  “We have to get the rest of you properly inside, past the wooden door,” Rayna said. “There’s hundreds of rooms in there. Some of them must be bedrooms, and we’ll be able to get warm as well. And we’ll be much safer if anyone shows up looking for us.”

  Viktoria and Ferdie finished with Pellarin, who was dozing lightly.

  “We’ve cleaned his wounds and seen to his leg,” Viktoria said. “Ferdie’s supplies are very good.”

  “So’s your splinting technique,” Ferdie replied as he accepted a piece of fruit tart from Sam. At least, thought Anders, the medics are getting on. And maybe even doing a better job together than they could have apart.

  “Pellarin will sleep for now,” Viktoria said. “It would be much better if he could rest somewhere more comfortable. That’s not possible though, is it?”

  “No,” said Anders. “Really, we have the same challenges as we did before, and maybe some extra. We need to find a way inside Cloudhaven, so we’re safe. Then we need to find a way to make everyone else in Vallen safe. We need to clean up the messes we’ve made. It doesn’t matter that we were trying to stop the Snowstone from killing the dragons and harming the humans. We’re still responsible for what happened to Holbard. So from finding Jerro right up to figuring out what to do about the city, we . . .”

  “We need to fix everything,” Rayna agreed.

  The thought of climbing a mountain that high was enough to silence everyone.

  Eventually, it was Jai who broke the silence, rising to their feet. “Well,” they said, “if we’re going to do all that, a sticky fruit bun might not be enough. We should probably start with dinner.”

  So Jai and Det got to work bossing ar
ound assistants and starting work on a meal, and Anders and Rayna headed inside Cloudhaven proper one more time.

  Anders’s job was to go to the wall that concealed the way to their mother and copy the words down for Bryn to try and translate. Rayna’s job—which he didn’t envy—was to try and draw at least some of the designs inside the mechanical room for Isabina, in the hope that she might recognize them or understand how to work them. If only Sakarias had been able to go inside—he could bring anything to life with his pencil. Instead, he tried to explain techniques to Rayna for observing one piece of the room at a time and sketching what she saw. The stronghold seemed willing to light up more than one path for them at once, and he was grateful for that.

  The third path it had shown them—the one that had led directly to their own feet when they had asked it to help them bring the others inside—neither of them had any idea how to investigate. They simply had to hope that Lisabet, Theo, and their helpers would find something in the books they’d retrieved.

  Anders sat in front of the rock wall and put his mind to copying down the words. It wasn’t easy—Anders had to concentrate extra hard to understand most writing, and when all the words were in a different language, some of them even containing different letters than the ones he was used to, the task certainly didn’t get any easier. He checked and double-checked and triple-checked each letter and each word to make sure all his copying was right.

  He was about halfway through, and starting to daydream a little bit about what might be coming for dinner, when he thought he heard a noise just around the corner. It was like one rock clicking against another. Then there was a soft shuffle and another click.

  “Rayna?” he called. “You can’t be done already. No way.”

  When there was no answer, he lifted his head and looked along the hallway. There was nobody there.

  “Rayna?” he tried again, raising his voice.

  Then a third time, much louder. “Rayna! Are you there?”

  He heard a very distant shout of reply. “What?”

  No question. She wasn’t close. Not just around the corner. She was still off at the mechanical room.

  “Never mind,” he yelled, and studied the corner again, his pulse kicking up. “Cloudhaven,” he said quietly, “is somebody else here?”

  Nothing happened.

  He considered his words and tried a different way.

  “Cloudhaven, could you lead me to someone who’s here right now, who’s not me and not Rayna?”

  The lights dimmed, and then the path that he had come to expect lit up once more. But it didn’t lead away toward the corner where he had heard the noise. It led straight into Drifa’s wall.

  “Well, I already knew that,” he muttered.

  Still, he was sure he’d heard something. So he levered himself to his feet and made his way along the hallway up toward the corner, silently wondering what, exactly, he was going to do if it turned out there was an enemy there.

  But when he reached it, trying to walk as though he had confidence, standing tall, shoulders squared, there was nobody there at all.

  “Guess I was hearing things, Cloudhaven,” he said. “And I guess now I’m talking to a giant pile of rocks in the sky. This is going well.”

  With a sigh, he turned and walked back to his work, picking up his notebook so he could finish off the second half.

  When he was eventually done, he took the long way out, checking in on his sister first. She was muttering feverishly to herself, and he wasn’t sure how to tell her that her picture looked like nothing so much as a cobweb made by a demented spider, the scratchy lines that were meant to depict wires spinning out in every direction to every corner of the page.

  “Looks good,” he said instead, and patted her on the shoulder. “Do you need a hand?”

  She waved him off. “I’ll see you out there.”

  So Anders headed back out to where his friends were hopefully researching and cooking and checking on their patient.

  They were indeed all hard at work. Jai and Det were commanding a group of wolves, dragons, and Sam the human, pulling together a meal that smelled absolutely amazing.

  Lisabet and Theo had all the others helping them. They already had a dozen books open, and were crawling back and forth across the floor, comparing paragraphs and arguing with each other in quiet voices. They didn’t look like they’d had any breakthroughs yet, but if they were stopping to read parts of the books, Anders hoped that meant they might be relevant.

  Lisabet had always been famous among the wolves for her love of the library, and Theo had been studying research and archiving at the Finskól. Ellukka had been studying storytelling, and Mikkel history, and the two of them were also nose-deep in books, hunting for information about how Cloudhaven worked.

  He stood for a moment before he approached the little camp, just watching. Mateo was holding three books open at once for the others, one with each of his hands and one with a foot. At least they were all talking to each other—wolf, dragon, and human—and working together a little bit. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Anders delivered his notebook to Bryn, who promptly buried herself in it, ignoring him and everyone else. Anders was no scholar, though, so as Bryn settled herself down by the fire to begin work on the arduous translation, he presented himself to the cooks to see what he could do.

  It was much later that night, after food and a little more work, when they all reconvened to talk about what they should do next.

  “I think we’re starting to get an idea of how this place works,” Lisabet said, “but it won’t be fast, and we can already tell there are going to be some dead ends. Dragons have been forbidden from coming here for as long as we can remember. If Drifa came here, then she was breaking the rules. Cloudhaven’s ancient, and so are the books about it. Only a few of us can work at once—there aren’t enough books for everyone to research.”

  “Is there anything the rest of us can do?” Sakarias asked. “I don’t just want to sit here and do nothing, not with everything that’s happened.”

  Sam was sitting beside Pellarin, who had woken long enough to have a small meal and was now fast asleep again. Anders saw Sam shift, as though he wasn’t sure whether he should speak or not.

  “We could . . . ,” Sam began, then paused. His black hair was falling into his eyes, desperately in need of a cut, and there was nowhere to wash at Cloudhaven apart from the ice-cold water in the tiny sink of their one little washroom. (“We’re lucky someone thought about whether visitors might need bathroom facilities at all,” Sakarias had pointed out.) So Sam still had dirt daubed across his cheeks, more smeared than cleaned by his efforts at tidying himself up. He looked thin, but to Anders, he didn’t look young. Anders knew how much experience Sam had had on the streets. He knew Sam was used to fending for himself. In a way, Sam was like Anders and Rayna, older in experience than any of the wolves or dragons here.

  “Go on,” said Anders when it seemed no one else had noticed Sam thinking about speaking. “Did you have an idea, Sam?”

  Sam nodded, and the others turned their attention to him. “I was thinking about the camps,” he said. “Almost everyone from Holbard is outside the city, in the camps, but they must be a mess. They won’t have any shelter. I’m not even sure if they’ll have enough food. How could they possibly have found a way to look after that many people this quickly?”

  “And your brother might be there,” Rayna pointed out. “Jerro must be somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Sam agreed, “and I want to find him. I want to find him very badly. But there’s more to it than that. Maybe you could help the Holbard refugees. There must be a lot of injuries. You have people here who have trained as medics.”

  To Anders’s surprise, it was Viktoria who spoke up. “We have people trained as medics,” she corrected him. “You’re here too, Sam. You’re one of us. And I think we should do it. Pellarin will be okay tomorrow without us.”

  Sitting beside her, Fe
rdie nodded, his usually cheerful face grave. “We’re doing what we can,” he said, “but mostly, Pel just needs to sleep. And wait.”

  “Then let’s go to the town camp,” Anders said. “Maybe we’ll find Jerro. Maybe we’ll find people who need medics. Maybe we’ll find some other way we can help. I want to do something, not just sit here.”

  “I’ll take you,” Ellukka offered.

  “And I’ll come too,” Rayna said.

  “Viktoria and I can both come,” Ferdie said, and Sakarias looked at him just a moment too long.

  And so it was decided. In the morning, they would head to the camps.

  They settled down to a much more comfortable rest, thanks to the quilts and blankets that Ferdie, Bryn, and Isabina had brought with them.

  As he had the night before, Anders stared at the embers as he drifted off to sleep. This time, he felt a little more hopeful. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but he was ready to find out.

  Chapter Four

  THE NEXT DAY, THE SIX OF THEM—ANDERS, Rayna, Ferdie, Viktoria, Ellukka, and Sam—made the long walk from their safe landing place into the camp outside Holbard.

  It felt a little like the slow horror of coming into Holbard proper and beginning to understand how much damage had been done. But if anything, the town camp shocked Anders more. It was strung out along the banks of the Sudrain River, perhaps an hour’s walk from the ruins of Holbard. Seeing the state of it now, he understood why nobody had made it as far as the village of Upper Vadobrun. He could hardly believe they’d made it this far.

  The camp was chaos. Nothing was laid out in a way that made sense, salvaged belongings strewn around like debris from a shipwreck. The grass had already been trampled into mud, and everything was dirty. People had made shelters from whatever they could, stringing up cloaks or sheets of canvas, leaning salvaged doors and planks against each other, or simply sleeping out in the mud and in the open, piling their belongings together and guarding them carefully.