Battle Born

by Amie Kaufman

  “We need both?” Anders asked.

  “I’m sure you will,” she replied. “I’ve seen the wolves and dragons try to talk before. You can find both artifacts using my map. If you found the Sun Scepter, you’ll find the mirror and staff easily. I didn’t hide the artifacts I hoped would bring peace nearly as carefully as I hid the weapons.”

  “But you never got the chance to use them,” Rayna said quietly.

  “No,” said Drifa sadly. “We . . . no, we didn’t. And now they’ve been left alone for more than a decade, so they’ll need to be repaired. Take them to the dragonsmiths Tilda and Kaleb. When you were babies, they had an aerie in the hermits’ caves. I doubt they’ve moved. You’ll need Hayn as well.”

  A flash of memory hit Anders—he’d seen those names before. Tilda and Kaleb were listed in the Skraboks, the huge books back at Ulfar that had listed the designers and dragonsmiths of all the greatest artifacts in Vallen. There had been entries for Drifa, Felix, and Hayn as well.

  “Can’t you just tell us where these artifacts are?” Rayna asked.

  Drifa laughed. “Darlings, when I knew the truce was coming to an end, I hid dozens of artifacts we’d made and repaired—more than a hundred. I don’t remember where each one was, but the map will show you.”

  No sooner was she finished speaking than she faded out of sight. Anders gasped, and felt a rush of relief as she slowly appeared once more.

  “Hayn wanted me to give you a message,” he said hurriedly. “He said to tell you that he would have tried to protect you and Felix, if he’d known. And that he’ll be our family now.”

  Drifa pressed a hand to her heart, closing her eyes for a moment. “I wish we’d told him,” she murmured. “He deserved our trust. We would have, in time.”

  “I’ll tell him that,” Anders promised.

  She nodded. “I’m afraid I won’t be back again, my darlings. I don’t have enough essence left in me. Too much is gone.”

  “No,” Rayna murmured, starting forward, then remembering they couldn’t touch. “Tell us where you are, we can find you!”

  “No,” said Drifa firmly. “It’s not safe. I told you there were those who didn’t agree with your father and me, who didn’t want peace. I don’t want to put you in their path if I can help it.”

  “But we need more time,” Anders protested. “We only just met you.”

  “It breaks my heart to go,” Drifa said, tears in her eyes. “I wanted to do . . . well, everything. But I’m so grateful we got to meet. Please tell Hayn I’m trusting him to take care of you. And I know how strong you both are. I’m trusting you to take care of each other, and love each other as much as I love you.”

  And then, reaching one hand out, as though she wanted to touch them, she faded from sight once more.

  This time, she did not reappear.

  When Anders woke, his eyes were wet with tears, and Rayna was sniffling softly, crawling onto his mattress to creep under his blanket and curl up against him. He felt a series of needles sink into his leg as Kess climbed up his body as well, finding a place between the two of them.

  It seemed so desperately unfair, to be without their mother all their lives, to find her, and then to lose her so soon afterward. Anders had wondered who his parents were growing up, but he had never felt the pain of their absence like he did now. Now he could imagine what it would have been like to have Drifa and Felix in his life.

  He didn’t sleep again, but instead lay where he was and waited for the dawn.

  Chapter Nine

  THE NEXT MORNING, ANDERS WAS TIRED—BUT more than that, he felt exhausted inside, as though his heart was tired too.

  As he shuffled along the queue for breakfast, Lisabet fell into step with him. He took a sidelong look at her as Det spooned porridge into their bowls. After the events of last night, he felt like he understood a little more of what Lisabet was going through than he had before. Without a word, he linked his arm through hers and led her outside.

  They made their way across the landing pad, although they stopped some distance short of the edge, still thinking of Sakarias’s fall the day before. As they settled down and dug their spoons in, she gave him an expectant look. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I wanted to talk,” he replied. “Or more, I wanted to listen.”

  “To me?”

  He nodded, and she scooped up another spoonful of porridge, blowing on it to cool it down, and swallowing it before she spoke. “Has something happened, Anders? You look a little like someone chewed you up and spat you out.”

  He hesitated, but Lisabet had been so subdued lately, and he wanted so badly to show her he cared about her worries. If he was asking her to share them, perhaps he should go first, to show her how much he trusted her.

  He told her what Drifa had said, and not just about the artifacts. He told her that his mother was gone now, and about the emptiness he felt.

  “And you must have been feeling this way ever since the battle at Holbard,” he said quietly. “Your mother’s missing, it must be so hard.”

  Lisabet gave a sigh. “It is,” she admitted. “And it’s complicated too. Yes, I’m worried about her and scared for her, but I’m also angry at what I’m pretty sure she’s done.”

  “We don’t know that Sigrid did anything,” he tried, but the protest sounded weak, even to him.

  “We don’t know,” Lisabet conceded, “but I think she lit those fake fires in Holbard.”

  Anders’s heart sank. “But when we were at Drekhelm, we found a map with the place the fire was lit marked on it,” he pointed out.

  “I know,” she agreed, “and at the time, I suspected the dragons of lighting the fires. But now we know they’re fake, I just don’t see it anymore. I think, if anything, the dragons were investigating who lit the fires, because they knew they didn’t light them. Can you imagine the Dragonmeet managing to agree on a plan as complicated as creating fake dragonsfire, when they know how to light real fires? They spend all day debating what to have for breakfast, Anders.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “I just . . . I don’t see why she would do something like that.”

  “I do,” Lisabet replied with a sigh. “I mean, you told me what the mayor said to you yesterday, and he was right. She does basically want to rule Holbard—all of Vallen if she could. Do you remember the time we both snuck inside her office? You were trying to find out about Fylkir’s chalice, and we ended up locked inside?”

  “I remember,” he said, and they both smiled, despite the seriousness and the sadness of the moment. They’d been hiding behind opposite couches, and when their eyes had met, their friendship had really begun.

  “Well, she and Ennar were talking then,” Lisabet said, “and my mother was saying that the humans couldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions, that it was up to us to do what we had to do to keep them safe. Now I think we know what she believed she had to do. She had to scare them enough that they’d let her be in charge, and in the end, she might even have wanted a battle, if she thought she could win it. I wish it was different, and I miss her, and I don’t know if she’s safe, wherever she is. But I have to do what I believe in as well. And that means finding a way to get the wolves, the dragons, and the humans to listen to each other. Somehow.”

  They were both silent for a long moment, and then she offered him a small smile—and though it was weak, it was real. “Thank you for listening,” she said softly. “Sometimes that’s what I need most of all.”

  After breakfast, Anders, Rayna, Lisabet, Ellukka, Mikkel, and Theo gathered around Drifa’s map. They were the six who had used the map to hunt for the pieces of the Sun Scepter together.

  “This is just like old times,” Rayna said as she smoothed the map out on the stone and pricked her finger. “We’ve already solved four riddles. We can manage two more.”

  She carefully squeezed a drop of blood onto the compass rose.

  “We want to find the Mirror of Hekla,” she told it clearly.
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br />   The map itself was a beautiful thing, made of cloth woven through with silvery thread that Drifa had somehow forged straight into the fabric. Every artifact was made by both wolves and dragons—the wolves designed the artifacts and created the right combination of runes to tell them what to do, and the dragons forged them in their essence-infused dragonsfire. Drifa had been a dragonsmith, and Felix and Hayn designers. For the first time, Anders wondered if his father had been the one to design the runes that must be engraved onto the silver thread, so small they couldn’t be seen.

  As he watched, the intricate knotwork around the map’s edges started to wriggle, changing and rearranging itself until it spelled out letters instead of its closely woven pattern.

  “Three blue buttons, one by one.

  Only the smallest permits the sun.

  Look southwest and you will see

  It’s guarded by a single tree.”

  Six heads bent over the map, and they studied it together in silence.

  “I wonder if it means the southwest of all Vallen or if we figure out the area where it’s hidden, and it’s in the southwest part of that,” Theo mused.

  “Vallen,” said Lisabet confidently, pointing to the lower left-hand side of the map. “Look here. The Brengun Lakes.”

  Anders squinted at where she was pointing. There was a river running from north to south, and three times it swelled out into a lake, then narrowed again. In the center of each of the three lakes was an island, and sure enough, they looked like three buttons on a shirt, one above the other.

  “The top one looks smallest,” Rayna said, “though sometimes the map isn’t that accurate. I wonder what it means by ‘permits the sun.’”

  “Well,” said Anders, “let’s find out. It’s not far away.”

  Mikkel nodded. “You go,” he said, his voice teasing. “Theo and I are used to handling everything else.”

  Anders shot him a quick grin, remembering the pair’s elaborate efforts to fool the Dragonmeet into thinking their friends were still somewhere at Drekhelm. “You can eat our dinner if we’re back late,” he promised.

  They packed up some food, found the girls’ harnesses, and launched from the landing pad, leaving behind their friends as they turned southwest.

  When they cleared the fog around Cloudhaven, it turned out to be a bright, sunny day, though it was cold so high up. They left the Icespire Mountains behind them and crossed the Efrivain River, which tumbled along beneath, young and lively at its source up in the mountains.

  They kept to the north of the village of Little Dalven, and soon after that, they saw a new river beginning up in the highlands.

  At first, it was just hints of white water and glints in the sun, hidden in among the rocks. But soon it gathered momentum, and as Rayna tilted her wings to allow Anders a better look at the ground, he saw it snaking down south toward the sea, tumbling through the golden green of the grass on its way to Port Baernor.

  Just as the map had promised, three times it swelled out to make a lake, and each of the three lakes bore an island. The lower two were covered in trees, but the highest and smallest was covered in grass, marked only by a single tree that had grown taller than the highest building in Holbard, stretching its limbs up joyfully toward the sun.

  Anders considered the shade of the two larger islands. That confirmed it. This was the only island that permitted the sun to touch it.

  Rayna and Ellukka obviously agreed, for after a short, trumpeted exchange, the girls began to spiral down, landing side by side on the smallest of the three islands. Anders slid down his sister’s shoulder and tugged free her harness, so she could transform without becoming tangled in it.

  “This is the place,” she said as soon as she was back in human form.

  “And that’s the tree,” Anders agreed. “It’s the only landmark on the island. Let’s start by digging around its roots and see if Drifa buried the mirror there.”

  It turned out that the artifact was only half a foot beneath the surface, wrapped up in a waterproof cloth to keep the dirt away from it. Drifa had been right—the weapons had been harder to find than the artifacts meant for peace.

  Lisabet carefully lifted it out of the hole and peeled the cloth aside, revealing a small, round mirror about the size of a dinner plate, with an intricately carved pattern of runes all around the edges. Some of them looked worn, and the mirror itself was dull, but all four of them leaned over it anyway, squinting at their blurry reflections.

  “I wonder what it actually does,” Anders said as he lifted his head once more. “It . . .” But he trailed away, because he had his answer. Seated around the mirror, and staring at him with amazed expressions, were three other versions of himself.

  “You all look like me,” said one of them in his voice.

  “No, you all look like me,” insisted another.

  “You definitely . . . oh,” said the third.

  “I’m Anders,” tried Anders, “and I’m seeing three of me.”

  “I’m Rayna,” said one of the other Anderses, “and I’m telling you, there are three Raynas right here.”

  “And let me guess,” said Anders, “you two are seeing three other Ellukkas and three other Lisabets.”

  They both nodded.

  “This is perfect,” Anders said, excitement building. “They’ll all look into the mirror, and they’ll all see themselves. Who do they trust more than themselves? Who do any of them think is smarter than themselves?”

  With a soft popping sound, the effect ended, and suddenly he was looking at his friends once more.

  “It didn’t last very long,” Lisabet said, her brow creasing.

  “We’ll have to hope that’s what needs fixing about it,” Anders said. “Maybe the dragonsmiths Drifa told us about, Tilda and Kaleb, can help. She said Hayn could too.”

  “Or maybe the Staff of Reya will do something,” Lisabet suggested. “I wish we knew what it was for.”

  “I just hope it’s in one piece,” said Ellukka, “not four, like the Sun Scepter.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Rayna said, “but let’s eat our sandwiches while we look at the map again.”

  They wrapped the mirror up and set it aside, then laid out the map once more.

  This time Anders pricked his finger, squeezing a drop of blood onto the compass rose and speaking carefully. “We would like to find the Staff of Reya.”

  Rayna tied a bit of cloth around his finger, and as she did so, the knotwork around the edge of the map rearranged itself once more, presenting them with their next riddle.

  “At end of day, it’s always best

  To find a place to take some rest.

  At Dragons’ Home, my place I make,

  And there the staff my blood can take.”

  “What?” said Rayna, blinking at it.

  “Well, by my blood, she means us,” said Anders. “She means her relatives, her descendants.”

  “And by Dragons’ Home, she means Drekhelm,” Ellukka said. “That’s what Drekhelm means in Old Vallenite.”

  Anders’s stomach dropped. “How are we supposed to get into Drekhelm?” he asked. “That place is absolutely stuffed full of dragons, and they all must think we’re their enemy by now, since we haven’t showed up to celebrate what happened to Holbard and offer to do it anywhere else they want.”

  But Lisabet was shaking her head. “I don’t think we have to go to Drekhelm,” she said.

  “But that’s what—” Ellukka began, but she stopped as Lisabet shook her head again.

  “Drifa wrote this before the last great battle,” she said, “and before the last great battle, the dragons didn’t live at Drekhelm.”

  “Oh, you’re right,” Ellukka said slowly. “They moved to Drekhelm because the wolves discovered where Old Drekhelm was.”

  “Right,” Lisabet agreed. “So when Drifa wrote about Drekhelm in this puzzle, she meant what we call Old Drekhelm.”

  Anders considered this. “So we nee
d to go to Old Drekhelm and figure out where she slept? And that’s where the staff will be? Is it as big as New Drekhelm?”

  Ellukka nodded. “Maybe even a little bigger,” she said.

  Anders groaned, and Rayna bit into her sandwich with feeling.

  “At least it’s not full of dragons,” Lisabet ventured.

  “We still have some of the day left,” Ellukka said. “We’d better get going.”

  Chapter Ten

  IT TOOK MOST OF THE DAY TO REACH OLD Drekhelm. They flew northeast, skirting Cloudhaven and flying above the village of High Rikkel, and past the top of Lene’s Pass, which linked the village to Port Alcher down on the coast, before they veered east.

  Anders could feel how tired Rayna was by the time they arrived, the strokes of her wings taking that much more effort, her head a little lower. But she lifted it as Old Drekhelm came into sight.

  High in the craggy peaks in the northmost reaches of the Icespire Mountains, they saw the huge, gaping maw of an opening. Ellukka flew confidently toward it—she had been here before, though long ago—and Rayna fell in behind her.

  They landed in an enormous, dimly lit cave with a cold wind blowing through it. Once more they removed the girls’ harnesses, pushing them off to the edge of the cave and into the shadows in case the wind picked up, and they transformed back to human form.

  “There used to be big doors,” Ellukka said, pointing at the opening to the cave mouth. “This was the Great Hall, just like at New Drekhelm, but they took the doors off and brought them with them.”

  “I suppose it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to make twice if you didn’t have to,” Rayna observed.

  The farthest recesses of the cave were completely hidden in the dark, but Anders could see it was much bigger than the Great Hall at New Drekhelm. For a moment, he imagined it full of people and dragons, lights and even dancing, as they had seen the night of the equinox. And then it was empty once more, sending a shiver down his spine.

  “This place is huge,” Rayna continued. “How are we possibly going to find out where she used to sleep?”