Ice Wolves (Elementals, Book 1)

by Amie Kaufman

  “Do you have any idea what an idiot I just made of myself?” they hissed. “I didn’t have any distraction ready! Pack and paws, I ended up showing the most famous designer alive Mateo’s marble collection! Hayn had no idea why he was there, and I was all ‘oh hey, look at this one, it has a blue swirl in it.’” They buried their red face in their hands with a groan. “I’m never living it down.”

  “We owe you,” Anders promised.

  “You know you do.” Jai snorted. “What were you doing, anyway?”

  Anders and Lisabet exchanged a long look. Neither of them wanted to lie, but neither of them wanted to tell the truth either.

  “Nothing bad,” Anders said eventually. “I mean, we weren’t supposed to be doing it, but it wasn’t wrong.”

  Jai was silent a long moment, then nodded. “Well, I hope it went well,” they said. And that was it. No more questions.

  Anders was fumbling for something to say, some way to tell Jai that it meant a lot, to have friends—pack—who’d back you up without needing to know the reason why.

  But he didn’t know how to say it, and in the end he was saved by Sakarias, who thumped down beside Jai and started boasting about his double helping of pie, not even noticing as Jai stole a forkful.

  * * *

  Anders tried twice over the next two days to get back into Hayn’s office, to look for more information about how Hayn planned on trying to make the chalice work, or even to search for the chalice itself, but he had no luck.

  The designer might not have known who had broken into his office, but he clearly knew something was up—the lock had been replaced with a much bigger, much more robust version, and there was no chance Anders could pick this one.

  He lay awake at night going over what he’d seen in his mind. Hayn had only written “Can it be made to work?” He hadn’t said it could, or even that he had the chalice. Just that he had an idea.

  Still, Anders couldn’t see what his choices were, except to watch Hayn like a hawk, or to simply make a run for it and head to the nearest mountains alone. After that, he’d have to hope he could find a dragon—any dragon—and somehow use it to track Rayna. While not getting dropped from a great height or roasted alive.

  But there was less than a week left until the equinox, and he was running out of time to make any other choice.

  The third night after they’d broken into Hayn’s workshop, he was watching the designer at dinner. Despite his size, the big wolf moved quietly, making his way through the world without causing anyone much trouble. Tonight, Hayn sat at a table against the wall with several of the professors and a few members of the Wolf Guard.

  Anders was on the far side of the hall, with Sakarias and Mateo chatting about tonight’s dessert from either side of him, and Viktoria, Det, and Jai discussing that day’s class across the table. Lisabet had already left to head to the library—to research something to do with the chalice, Anders was sure.

  Without any fuss, Hayn, Sigrid, and Ennar rose to their feet, nodding good night to the other adults, and walking out of the dining hall together. Only Anders noticed—because Anders was making it his job to watch Hayn as often as he could.

  Without really thinking about it, he murmured a good night to his friends and slipped out after them.

  “I’ll finish this pie for you,” Sakarias called after him.

  Anders kept his footsteps quiet as he followed them into the corridor leading to Sigrid’s office, but there were only a handful of other people around, and he knew in a few moments he could find himself following them alone. And what, exactly, was he going to do? Stand outside her office with his ear pressed against the door? That wouldn’t be suspicious at all.

  He needed a distraction—some way to get them to take the long way around to the office, so he could get there first. He could picture it in his mind’s eye. There was plenty of room to hide behind the couches, if only he could just get a minute’s head start. There had to be something nearby that he could use.

  He knew he should be scared, but all he felt was a rush of determination. What would Rayna do?

  And then he knew.

  He dodged right down a corridor, tearing along it at top speed, then swinging left to circle around to the junction where the class bell hung. If he rang this, every other bell in the school would start ringing madly. Sigrid and Ennar would come to see who was ringing it, no question. And they had Hayn with them, an artifact specialist. He’d have to come too.

  He grabbed the rope of the bell pull, shaking it back and forth, the clapper inside the bell ricocheting off its sides and setting up a deafening ringing that seemed to go on and on and on.

  For a moment he stared up at it, amazed by the sheer volume of sound he’d produced. Then he turned to run for it. He had to get to Sigrid’s office, and hope he could find a way in, before she and Ennar gave up on finding the culprit.

  He knew the office by the tapestry hanging outside it in the hall, the long mural of the last great battle between the ice wolves and the scorch dragons. The hallway was empty, and with his heart in his mouth he knocked gently on the door, just in case she’d gone inside, instead of to investigate the noise. When there was no answer he knocked again, hand shaking, this time pressing his ear to the wooden surface. Silence, except for the fading sound of the bell’s echoes.

  He tried the door handle. Surely it would be locked.

  Except it swung open at his touch, revealing the Fyrstulf’s empty office waiting for him. Wasting no time, Anders slipped inside and closed the door behind him. It was just as he remembered—the shelves were lined with books and artifacts, and the two couches sat along the sides of the office, facing each other.

  He slipped between the left-hand couch and the shelves, and started to work his way along them, examining each artifact in turn, just in case there was something he recognized from all his studies.

  Then the door handle rattled, and he had only a second to duck down behind the couch, pressing himself to the floor, before it swung open and three pairs of footsteps walked inside.

  “I thought I locked that.” Sigrid was speaking, and he could hear the frown in her voice.

  “I suppose you didn’t.” That was Professor Ennar’s voice, and she didn’t sound happy to be there. “But, Sigrid, we need to talk.”

  “We do.” Sigrid sounded grim. “We can’t afford to wait much longer.”

  “Especially after that fire,” Ennar agreed, sinking onto the couch above Anders.

  “I . . . find the fire strange,” Hayn admitted, sounding like he was over by Sigrid’s desk. “It’s such a busy part of town. I can imagine a dragon spy changing back to human form and getting away on foot, but they must have been a dragon to set the fire—the flames were white, it was dragonsfire. In fact, it should have taken more than one dragon. Why didn’t people see them?”

  “It was dark,” Sigrid said quietly.

  “Even so . . .” Ennar murmured.

  “I’ve noticed the humans are protesting the patrols less after the fire,” Hayn said, his tone neutral.

  They were all silent a long moment.

  “The truth matters, Sigrid.” Ennar sounded troubled.

  Anders hardly knew what to make of the discussion. He held his breath, trying to keep perfectly still. He hoped his hunch hadn’t been wrong—he needed them to discuss a way to find the dragons, not just whether Holbard was ready for an attack.

  Sigrid had a growl in the back of her voice when she replied. “What matters is that we are powerful enough to protect Holbard—to protect Vallen—if the dragons come again. When they come again. Ennar, you of all people, a veteran of the battle, our own combat instructor, cannot lose sight of that. And you, Hayn, you know what it is to lose family to those creatures. Do either of you deny there are dragon spies in the city?”

  “We know there are dragon spies here,” Hayn said. “We know we have to be ready for whatever they’re planning.”

  “And it’s not that the fire hasn�
��t helped convince the humans the threat is real,” said Ennar. “It’s just . . .”

  Anders tried carefully to adjust his position, so he could sink down to lie on the floor. His knees were hurting, crouching like this.

  He rested his head on the ground, looking across the intervening rug to where Sigrid’s boots were visible.

  And then he went completely still, his breath freezing in his throat.

  Lying on the ground behind the other couch, Lisabet was staring straight back at him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FROM BENEATH HER COUCH, LISABET widened her eyes as if to tell him to shut up, and he widened his right back to say he already knew that. She was supposed to be in the library! What she was doing here instead, he couldn’t imagine. Apart from hiding, just like he was.

  Sigrid was speaking again. “Tell us about your progress with the chalice, Hayn.”

  Anders went so still he was pretty sure he could hear his own heartbeat. He could only hope nobody else could.

  “I . . . have a theory,” Hayn said. “It’s only that.”

  “If we can make it work, we can attack before they have any reason to think we’re coming,” Ennar said. “Right now, the dragons believe we have no way to find them. They will have become complacent, thinking themselves safe.”

  “They are safe,” Sigrid snapped, frustrated, a hint of a wolf’s growl creeping into her voice. “Because we can’t find them.”

  Anders watched Sigrid’s boots walk over to the wall, and she came into view down the side of the couch, taking a picture off the wall to reveal a safe behind it. All she had to do was look to her left, and she’d see him lying on the floor behind the couch.

  She drew a wrought-iron chalice with a wooden cup from the safe, like a thick-stemmed wineglass made of metal and covered in runes. It looked exactly like the picture they’d seen in Hayn’s book.

  She lifted a jug to pour water into it until it was full. Then she removed what looked like a needle from where it was clipped onto the stem of the chalice and dropped it in, walking over to show the result to Ennar and Hayn. “Useless. It just spins endlessly. It’s supposed to point, like a compass. Tell us your theory, Hayn.”

  “At first,” said Hayn, “I thought it stopped working because the dragons moved the location of Drekhelm, after the last battle. But it was never designed to point to Drekhelm. It pointed to the largest group of dragons in Vallen, and that was Drekhelm. If they’d been somewhere else, it would have pointed there.”

  “Then why did it stop working?” Ennar asked.

  Anders strained for the answer. This was an artifact that could solve everything. It could help him find the dragons’ capital, and find Rayna. Underneath the opposite couch, Lisabet was staring at him.

  “My theory is that a number of factors combined to stop it working,” Hayn said. “It’s become weak, just like many of the artifacts that need maintenance. The essence is fading from it. But it may not have faded completely, which is what we originally assumed. Maybe we were wrong.”

  “What happened instead?” Sigrid asked.

  “I’ve been out to the farthest shelves of the library,” Hayn said. “You know I’ve been going through the old texts for years. My theory is that there’s too much dragon blood in the city. Every month at the Trial of the Staff, we see children who have enough wolf blood to claim the right to test, but they don’t transform. There must be dragon descendants in Holbard too, people who don’t know they have that blood but confuse the chalice all the same, surrounding it with too many weak signals. The same way a compass gets confused if you surround it with too many lodestones.”

  “You mean it’s picking up so many signals, it spins around to try and point to all of them at once?” Ennar asked.

  “Yes,” Hayn said. “That, and it really is starting to break down. It won’t work in Holbard, but I have a theory that if we can get it away from the city, and at a time when the essence will be strongest . . .”

  “The equinox,” Sigrid said.

  “Yes,” Hayn agreed. “And we know almost all of the dragons come together then. That would give the artifact the greatest chance of working and the largest possible target.”

  “We have to try it,” Sigrid said. “And it’s only a few days until the equinox. We can’t afford to let any dragon spies in the city see one of us departing alone. We’ll need a cover story.”

  Anders and Lisabet lay still as Sigrid walked back to return the water to the jug, and the chalice and the needle to the safe.

  Anders’s heart sank, and he shut his eyes as the safe closed firmly. He’d been desperately hoping Sigrid might leave the chalice on her desk. Even giving it to Hayn would have been better—he could have tried to find a way into the workshop.

  “I have some ideas,” said Ennar. But the three adult wolves were walking for the door, and if she said what her idea was, Anders didn’t hear it before the door closed behind them and the lock clicked into place.

  Anders let out a slow breath, rolling onto his back, but both he and Lisabet waited a full minute before they crawled out from behind the couches to meet on the rug.

  “Are we locked in?” he asked, picking an easier question than what are you doing here? to start with.

  “I have a key,” Lisabet said, patting her shirt pocket.

  His eyes went wide. “How did you get a key to the Fyrstulf’s office?”

  Lisabet shrugged, dodging the question. “Bet you’re glad right now I did. Otherwise we’d still be locked in here when she arrived in the morning, and I don’t think she’d have a sense of humor about it.”

  “You’re why it was unlocked when I tried the door,” he realized.

  “I jumped behind the couch when you knocked. I didn’t know it was you until you hit the deck too.”

  Anders swallowed. “Lisabet, what were you doing in here?”

  “I wanted to look on her desk,” she said. “Remember those notes Hayn wrote in the book in his workshop? I wanted to see if he’d written a report for Sigrid.” She paused, then continued more gently. “And why were you here?”

  Anders opened his mouth and closed it again. He’d been over this in his head so many times. He didn’t dare trust Lisabet with the truth about Rayna.

  He wanted to learn about the chalice to rescue his sister.

  Lisabet wanted to learn about it because she thought the same dragons who’d kidnapped Rayna and set fire to the port could somehow be reasoned with.

  Their goals weren’t the same, and he couldn’t afford to have her trying to make friends with Rayna’s kidnappers.

  “I’m still trying to figure out how to find my friend Jerro,” he said. “I thought maybe the Fyrstulf would have some kind of artifact in here I could use. She keeps the Staff of Hadda in her office, so I thought if there were other powerful artifacts . . .” He trailed off to a shrug, hoping she’d believe him.

  “I don’t think so,” Lisabet said, glancing at the shelves. “Most of these are pretty well known. It was a good idea, though.”

  Anders was looking at his friend, but behind him and to his left was the picture covering the safe, and inside the safe was the chalice, tugging at his thoughts. He might not get into the office again, so he couldn’t leave without trying to get to the chalice itself. How, though, with Lisabet watching?

  Without thinking, he turned his head toward the picture, and Lisabet followed his gaze. “They want to find the dragons again,” she said, shaking her head. “Just so they can attack them.”

  “Do you think the chalice really could work?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Hayn does,” she replied. “If anyone knows, he would.”

  “Maybe . . .” He chose his words carefully. “Maybe we could get it out of the safe.”

  She blinked. “You’d help me with that? But you don’t agree with any of what I think about the dragons. Nobody does.”

  “Well, it . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the obvious thing. Of course,
you’re my friend, I’ll help you try and make friends with dragons if you want. Because she was his friend, and using that to lie to her was more than he could bear. “I mean, maybe I can use it to find Jerro. It’s a locator, isn’t it?”

  “Only for dragons,” she replied. “Unless he’s an undercover dragon, it wouldn’t help at all—and even then, it only detects large groups of them.”

  Right. Terrible cover story. He swallowed hard. No matter how flimsy it sounded, he had to somehow try and get the chalice. “Let’s try anyway.”

  She looked at him carefully. “Anders, what’s going on?”

  “I want to find Jerro is what’s going on,” he said, trying to remember Rayna’s tips on being convincing. Don’t blink too much. Don’t blink too little. Keep eye contact. Don’t stare. He was pretty sure he just looked like his face was melting.

  “But the chalice won’t help,” she said again, much more slowly this time, as if she was trying to figure him out.

  “Well, I mean, you want it too,” he said desperately. He couldn’t leave the office without trying. What if he never got back in? “Let’s just see if we can get it out, and we can worry about using it later.”

  “That’s a combination lock,” she said quietly. “And we don’t know the combination.”

  His heart sank to his boots.

  “Anders,” Lisabet said, taking a step closer. “Seriously. What is going on?”

  Warring impulses tugged at him. On one hand, Lisabet was his friend. He knew she cared about him. And if anyone was going to believe Rayna wasn’t terrible just because she was a dragon, it was Lisabet.

  But on the other hand, she was so determined to chase her ideas about dragons that she might use what he told her about Rayna just to prove her point.

  “What would you do?” he asked. “If you got the chalice, and it pointed at Drekhelm, and you could find the dragons?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “What I do know is that if we had peace with the dragons once, it might be possible to do it again, and it doesn’t seem like our leaders want that. The truth matters.” Her hands made fists as she repeated the words Ennar had spoken to Sigrid.