Ice Wolves (Elementals, Book 1)

by Amie Kaufman

  Anders was quiet for the rest of the lesson, as the conversation slowly came back to life around him. Sigrid’s words kept echoing around his head.

  Death, or exile, for betrayal of the pack.

  Those were the stakes of the game he was playing.

  And he didn’t think he was good enough to win.

  * * *

  At dinner, as the others talked around him, Anders was quiet. So were Sakarias and Viktoria—like him, he thought they were probably wondering where Lisabet was. She hadn’t shown up to eat.

  His plate was full of food, as it was at every meal. This time it was meat and vegetables, fried up and seasoned with sharp, spicy chella that made his tongue prickle.

  “This isn’t strong, this is nothing,” said Det, grinning. “This kind of seasoning would be for babies where I grew up.”

  Det had come from far across the sea, Mositala, Anders learned. Det told him that Mositala had wide plains and high mountains like Vallen, but the sun burned far hotter there. In some places, the grass was yellow, the earth dry. In others, the jungle was lush and green—compared to the island of Vallen, it sounded like it went on forever.

  “Our elementals are different there,” Det said. “Different animals, different elements. But when I turned twelve, I started to get sick. We didn’t think we had any thunder lion blood in our family, but I undertook the changing ceremony anyway, because I was getting sick the way children do when they need to transform, but nobody has helped them make their first change.

  “It didn’t work, of course. But eventually, one of my aunts remembered that my great-grandmother was from Vallen. So, in desperation, my parents put me on a ship and brought me here. And sure enough, when I touched the Staff of Hadda, I made my transformation.”

  “Your great-grandmother,” Mateo repeated. “That’s so little wolf blood, and you still made the transformation?”

  “Sure as I’m here,” Det replied. “It doesn’t matter how many wolves you have in your bloodline, as long as there’s one. That’s enough for the spark to live inside you. After that, it’s up to chance—you’re one of the ones who transforms, or you aren’t.”

  Anders kept his head down, pretending to concentrate on his meal. Someone in his family’s past must have been a wolf, he thought. But it could have been generations back—knowing it brought him no closer to knowing who he was.

  Det forked up another mouthful of vegetables with a sigh. “I miss the warmth, but I can’t imagine being away from the pack now.”

  “Det has great stories from Mositala,” Jai said brightly.

  Det broke into his easy, infectious laughter. “They’re little children’s stories,” he said. “You’re just easily entertained.”

  “Well, they’re good,” said Mateo loyally—he and Jai were roommates with Det.

  “Anything from another place is interesting,” said Det. “That’s why Holbard is such a good place to live. People from all over the world end up here. Every big city has people from all over—it’s the same in Mositala—but Holbard is a trading post like no other. Just look at all of us. Viktoria has stories about Ohiro, where most of her family’s from. Mateo’s grandmother bakes these amazing cookies from Allemhäut.”

  Every head in the group swiveled toward Mateo.

  “What cookies?” Sakarias demanded. “How come Det knows how good they taste? Did you get cookies and hold out on us?”

  “Stories from Vallen are interesting too,” Det said, trying to rescue Mateo. “Anders, were there kids from all over at your orphanage?”

  Anders froze. He knew what Det was trying to do—what all the others were trying to do, with their interested expressions. They wanted to include him. To let him know that at least some of them didn’t care that he didn’t have a family, that they weren’t sure how he connected to the larger pack.

  But he’d left the orphanage when he was six, and the last thing he wanted was attention drawn to where he’d come from. He didn’t want to tell any of his stories about scavenging for food—Rayna’s trick with the fishing pole was clever, but hardly the kind of thing you wanted to draw attention to. Looking around at their encouraging, expectant faces, he groped for something to share.

  “We were from all over,” he agreed.

  They’d all felt like outsiders, much of the time, set apart from everyone else in Holbard who had a family. “We stuck together,” he said, instead of trying to explain that unique kind of loneliness. “We had our own secret language.”

  Of course, that didn’t throw them off the trail at all. He ended up teaching them the signal he’d used to enlist Jerro’s help on the day of his transformation. Soon everyone at his end of the table was making a fist with their right hands and touching their ears with their thumbs.

  Eventually the conversation moved on, but he couldn’t doubt anymore that whatever some of his classmates felt, his friends wanted him to be a part of the pack.

  The wolves and their pack weren’t at all what he’d expected. From the outside, they were all crisp gray uniforms, all the same from their haircuts to their attitudes. But on the inside, he’d discovered something very different. They valued pack, and they valued order, but no two were alike.

  Though Anders and Rayna had often wondered about their parents, Anders barely ever felt like he was missing out. He and Rayna were a team, and they were enough for each other. More than enough.

  But now, he was finding that all this time he had wanted something more. He just hadn’t known it. The feeling of family at Ulfar was hard to deny. The fact that they all managed to be a pack despite their differences only added to the feeling that if he’d had the chance, perhaps he might have belonged here.

  But next moment, a pang of guilt struck him. What was he wasting time dwelling on that for? Belonging here didn’t help Rayna.

  And anyway, what was he thinking? He was lying about who he was and why he was here, and he was a failure as a wolf—he couldn’t even cast an ice spear. The more they knew about him, the less any of them would want him.

  He gritted his teeth, and silently he renewed his promise to his sister. I’ll find you. I’ll get you out of there. I won’t let the dragons hurt you.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTER DINNER, ANDERS HAD HIS MILITARY History homework to tackle. He was too wary of Sigrid not to get it done, and he chose the library as his place to work. He figured that anybody who saw him doing his homework wouldn’t have a reason to question what he was doing there . . . and maybe the library held information that could help him figure out where to locate Rayna. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to read his own textbook, let alone the books in the library, but he had to try.

  Viktoria gave him directions and he made his way there, carefully pushing open the stout wooden doors.

  Long tables ran up and down the length of the library, thick carpets muffled footsteps, and long tapestries hid the stone walls. Shelf after wooden shelf was lined with leather-bound books, their spines etched with gold titles, their smell filling the room with a unique scent that he thought must belong only to places full of pages. Certainly there was something about the air in here he’d never felt before.

  Spiral staircases led up to second-floor balconies, which were lined with yet more bookshelves. Dust motes danced in the last of the evening light that shone in through the tall windows, and Anders had the place very nearly to himself.

  “Can I help you, young man?” One of the librarians looked up from her desk, managing to speak so her voice carried and yet somehow keeping it quiet at the same time. It was a kind of magic that belonged only to librarians, as far as he could tell. She had dark brown skin and dozens of small braids in her hair—the length of which suggested she probably wasn’t a wolf—and a pair of glasses pushed a little down her nose so she could regard Anders thoughtfully.

  As always, there was that momentary pause as he waited for Rayna to answer, then realized she wasn’t there. “I was, uh . . .” He wasn’t any good at doing his own tal
king. “I just wanted to do my homework,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

  “Quite all right,” she said, smiling. “Take a table, and let me know if you need any help finding books.”

  He took his time making his way through the room, soaking up every detail. There were a series of locked glass cases along the wall next to the entrance, and he walked along them slowly, looking inside each one.

  The contents were all artifacts—he knew that much from the runes engraved on them—though he didn’t know what any of them did, or why they were on display instead of being used. He saw a set of metal buttons that looked as if they should be sewn on a shirt, as well as a series of boxes, a metal picture frame with a blank canvas, and other strange shapes.

  He wondered immediately if one of these could be useful to him somehow—if he could use one of them to find a dragon, or fight one. But he didn’t want the librarian to start wondering what he was doing, loitering over the artifacts. Those locks looked like they could be picked in just a few seconds—he’d just need to come back later on, when nobody was around.

  For now he turned away, scanning the library for a place to sit. He’d tackle some of his homework, and then try searching the books for something that might help him—a map, or a diagram—once the librarian was used to him and wouldn’t watch everything he was doing.

  But there was already someone else in the library as well.

  Lisabet.

  She had a book nearly as big as she was laid out on the table so she could lean over it, her freckled face serious as she studied it. She didn’t seem to notice him, and he hesitated, then settled on a place a few tables over. After that afternoon’s fight in the classroom he wasn’t sure if she’d want company, and it suited him not to have any.

  He opened his textbook and took out the worksheet he was supposed to fill out—a simple quiz on the facts in that week’s chapter—his heart sinking as he counted the questions. It was going to take him forever to read the whole thing. What was Sigrid going to say when he showed up with nothing done? Or the students who laughed at him behind their hands? He hadn’t even learned their names yet—hadn’t been brave enough to talk to them. This was impossible.

  He abandoned his plan to try and finish his homework, pushing away from the table and walking farther back into the library. His heart was hammering, and his head hurt.

  He couldn’t even fill out a quiz, let alone search the library for clues on how to locate his sister.

  He turned a corner into an aisle lined with shelves that were each double-height, holding books as big as his torso, bound in dark-red leather. Each one was an oversized reminder of his failures—of the homework he couldn’t finish, and of the fact that he might be surrounded by the very information he needed right now, and he could barely read it.

  The shelves stretched away, dozens upon dozens, blocking out the light from the windows and giving him a safe place to crouch down, out of sight, and bury his face in his hands.

  His eyes were hot, and aching, and though he hadn’t cried in years—not when he and Rayna had lost a week’s worth of food and earnings to bigger children, not when he’d fallen off a roof and nearly broken his arm, not even when Rayna had flown away with the other dragons—now he thought he might.

  He’d come here so full of determination to find a way to search for her, but he didn’t have the first idea where to start, and if the wolves found out she was his sister, anything could happen to him, and he’d lose the chance to help her.

  “Anders?” A tentative voice spoke at the other end of the aisle.

  He scrubbed at his face, leaving his fingers wet, and looked up, blinking in the dim light. Lisabet stood there, watching him uncertainly.

  “I was just coming to get another book,” she said, pointing up at the big leather volumes, and he realized they were the same as the one she’d been reading on the table.

  “Don’t let me stop you,” he muttered, part embarrassed at being caught, part sort of impressed that his day could deteriorate any further.

  “Well, I . . .” She paused, pushing her hands into her pockets. “Okay, that’s not true. I came to check if you were all right. You were sort of . . .” She shifted the way she stood, rounding her shoulders, bending her knees a little, making herself smaller, and he realized that yet again he was watching a human produce a wolf’s body language. She’d understood his mood without him speaking a word.

  “I’m okay,” he said, pushing to his feet, trying to make himself stand up straight. “Headache.” He wondered again how much he was telling the wolves around him without meaning to.

  She shot him a disbelieving look. “Look,” she said. “I’ve been starting to think that . . . I mean, I could be wrong, but . . .”

  He made himself keep his breathing slow and even. What was she wondering? Had she guessed something about Rayna? Had she read that in him, too? Whatever she said, he had to be ready to deny it.

  Lisabet pushed on. “Look, I was just wondering if you need any help with reading.”

  Anders blinked. That wasn’t the question he was expecting. But a moment later he was wary again—would Ulfar Academy keep him if he couldn’t read? Then again, he was a wolf. Did they have any choice? Would they force him into endless extra lessons, taking away his time to find Rayna? He stared at Lisabet, unsure of what to say.

  “If you do need help,” she said, “I don’t mind helping. I want to be a professor one day, it’ll be good practice.” She lowered her voice, walking a little closer. “There’s no need to be embarrassed. But I won’t tell, if you want.”

  Finally, he made himself speak. He did need help reading, if only so he could learn more about dragons, and about where they might have taken Rayna. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”

  They spent the next hour on the Military History homework. Lisabet said there wasn’t time to have a reading lesson and do the homework as well, so she read the chapter out loud, and together they found the answers to the quiz questions. It was quiet and companionable, and by the end of it, Anders found himself almost giggling with her over the names of the long-ago dragons and wolves.

  “Lisabet,” he said as they marked down the final answer. “Can I ask you something?”

  She put down her pencil and turned to face him. “Because I don’t think they’re telling us everything,” she said.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “I know what your question was going to be,” she said. “Why did I fight with Sigrid in class, when she’s the Fyrstulf, and I’m supposed to be quiet and listen?”

  “Um . . . yes,” he admitted. “It was, actually. What do you mean, they’re not telling us everything?”

  “Let me start with this,” Lisabet said. “I don’t think we’re being told the truth about dragons. I mean, I believe the battle happened, and I think maybe we disagreed with them more and more in the years leading up to the last great battle. But everything Sigrid’s saying, Anders, it doesn’t add up—I don’t believe the dragons just attacked the city out of the blue one day. Why would they?”

  Anders made himself nod, wondering where this could possibly lead.

  “And look at all the artifacts we have,” she continued. “Sigrid and the others want us to believe we traded for them despite the fact that dragons are cruel and untrustworthy, despite the fact that they’d rather kill ten of us than help one of us. But why would they have made the artifacts they did? Why would Hadda have forged the staff, if she didn’t want wolves to transform?”

  Anders held up a hand to slow her down, trying to make sense of her words. “Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “You mean Hadda, as in the Staff of Hadda? As in the Trial of the Staff? What do dragons have to do with that?”

  “They made the staff,” Lisabet replied. “They made all the artifacts. Wolves designed them, and dragons forged them.”

  “Hadda was a dragon?”

  “She was,” Lisabet said. “And the artifacts are beginning to break, and with
out dragons we have no way to repair or replace them.”

  Anders was reeling. He’d lived his whole life in fear of dragons, and now Lisabet was saying the wolves had been trading partners with them? It must have been out of fear, or desperation. “Do the rest of the pack know we traded with the dragons for them?”

  “Not the youngest ones,” she said. “But most do. Only nobody ever questions Sigrid.”

  “Well, she’s Sigrid,” he pointed out.

  “Right,” Lisabet said, grim. “But someone has to ask. The artifacts are starting to break, and without the dragons, we have no way to fix them. What if the Staff of Hadda stopped working? Or the amulets?”

  “Well, not having the amulets would be awkward,” he said, earning himself a brief smile. “The staff would be a lot worse.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’m trying to learn about them, but the professors only ever show us some of the artifacts. I need the Skraboks for the rest.”

  “The what?” he asked.

  She gestured for him to follow her, leading him over to where the big book she’d been consulting still lay open on the table. “These,” she said. “And all the ones in the aisle over there. They list all the dragons’ creations.”

  Anders was torn between joy and despair all at once. On one hand, perhaps the Skraboks would tell him about some kind of artifact that might help him find Rayna. On the other, there were hundreds of them. A lifetime of reading, even if he could read as fast as Lisabet.

  There was one artifact to each page, sketched from several different angles, with lines of careful handwriting—or sometimes not so careful handwriting—laying out its uses. Lisabet ran her finger along under the lines to help him follow as she quietly read the contents to him.

  The first page was dated just over ten years ago, and it showed sketches of a pair of telescopes. The description Lisabet read was in neat handwriting:

  Position the first telescope aimed at the view you want to see. You can take the second telescope anywhere you like, and it will show you the view from the first. Particularly useful for keeping watch for incoming ships or watching a road for anyone coming along it. Designed by Hayn and Felix. Forged by Drifa.