Elementals: Battle Born

by Amie Kaufman

  Hayn nodded. “Sigrid was a squad commander back at the time of the last great battle, and though she pushed the pack toward war, I don’t believe she was the cause of it. She was just a symptom of something much larger.”

  Anders glanced across at Lisabet, who was studying her shoes with a miserable expression.

  “That wolf will never settle for peace,” Tilda said with a sigh. “You mark my words. But Hayn’s right. The elementals—and now the humans too—don’t need Sigrid to find a way to fight. Perhaps we were wrong to hide up here in the mountains. Perhaps we should have done more.”

  “You’ve done it now,” Anders said. “You’ve repaired the artifacts for us.”

  “We’ve picked a side, all right,” Kaleb agreed. “Now make sure you win.”

  Tilda was absentmindedly collecting their empty milk glasses as they all spoke, when she paused and leaned in over Kaleb’s shoulder to take a closer look at Anders.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. “What’s that around your neck?”

  “They’re Drifa’s and Felix’s old augmenters,” said Hayn. “Both the children have one.”

  But Tilda shook her head. “They’re more than that,” she said, gesturing to Anders. “Give it to me for a minute.”

  Anders pulled his augmenter off over his head and passed it to her. He was surprised how urgently he wanted it back, though, like it had become a part of him. He was used to having it around his neck now.

  “This is a key,” she said, turning it over in her hand and passing it to Kaleb, who nodded confirmation.

  “A key to what?” Rayna asked.

  “No idea,” said Kaleb. “Do you want anything else, or are you leaving now?”

  “This has been a lot of company for one day,” Tilda said, pressing one hand over Kaleb’s mouth to silence him.

  In the end, Tilda said that she would drop Hayn back near the town camp so the children could head straight to Cloudhaven. Not that she knew where they were going—she didn’t ask, and they didn’t mention it.

  They were grateful for the extra time to fly, though. They had a lot of work to do on their final plans, and according to Leif and Hayn, they had to be ready by tomorrow. That urgency was bearing down on all of them, and Anders and Lisabet climbed up onto the girls’ backs in tense silence.

  The flight was longer than it needed to be, because a direct line would have taken them far too close to New Drekhelm for anyone’s comfort. Instead, they dipped south to avoid it, flying over the Great Forest of Mists.

  Glancing down over Rayna’s shoulder, Anders remembered the first time he had run through the forest, the time he had tumbled into the river, to be pulled out by Lisabet. It had been the moment that had cemented their friendship forever. He looked across at her where she was hunkered down on Ellukka’s back to stay out of the wind, and wished he knew the right thing to say, that he could take away her worries and her guilt over her mother.

  Dusk arrived long before they reached Cloudhaven, turning the mist beneath them a golden pink. By the time they reached the rocky spire itself, night had long since fallen, and the sky above them was scattered with silver stars. They’d napped while the dragonsmiths and Hayn worked, and Anders was glad of it—no doubt most of their friends would be asleep by now.

  Bryn and Det were sitting by the archway through to the entrance hall, talking quietly and keeping watch for the four of them, and Anders waved as he slid down Rayna’s side. A tiny dark shadow—Kess the cat—jumped out of Det’s lap and came running over to greet them.

  Anders leaned down to run one hand along her silky back, but Rayna twisted her head around, hitting him with a blast of hot dragon breath as she rumbled impatiently at him.

  “Sorry, Kess,” he whispered. “Just a minute.”

  No sooner had he pulled his sister’s harness away than she threw herself into human form, grabbing for his hand.

  “Anders, I’ve got it!”

  “Got what?” he asked, but she was already towing him toward the entrance, Lisabet and Ellukka hurrying to keep up.

  “It’s a key!” Rayna crowed. “Bryn, just the dragon I need!”

  “Welcome home?” said Bryn, her brows raised.

  “Rayna, what’s going on?” Anders tried, as she pulled him through the arch.

  “It’s a key,” Rayna repeated, and he gave up, simply following her. There was no point in arguing with Rayna when she was in a mood like this. It was best just to hope she wasn’t leading him headlong toward anything too disastrous.

  “Are we going somewhere?” Lisabet asked.

  “You’d better come, you’re clever,” Rayna decided. “And Bryn, we need you. Ellukka and Det, you two tell everyone we won’t be long. I don’t think.”

  “You’d better not be,” Ellukka replied. “We have a war to stop.”

  “I think,” said Rayna, “this might be almost as important.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THEY WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO HEAD INSIDE CLOUDHAVEN without being part of a large group, and four was not a large group. But Rayna had let go of Anders’s hand and was already hurrying ahead, so there was nothing to do but run after her.

  As Anders jogged along the hallway, though, his ears were straining, listening for noises, for any sign that an artifact warrior might be on the move.

  Rayna took the turns quickly and confidently, and he realized where she was leading him just a few moments before the final corner brought them to their destination.

  She came to a halt, the others panting behind her, in front of the huge stone wall that had blocked their way when they had asked Cloudhaven how they could reach Drifa. The same text as always was still glowing at them, the words in Old Vallenite and the mysterious code.

  The blue letters made no more sense than they ever had. Anders looked at Rayna, and she pulled her augmenter off over her head.

  “Bryn, remember how you said that if we were going to decode the message on the wall, we need a key?” she said.

  Bryn nodded, her brow creasing in confusion.

  “Well,” Rayna said, grinning, “you were right. Only I think what we need is an actual key. We met two dragonsmiths last night, Tilda and Kaleb, and—”

  “You met Tilda and Kaleb?” Bryn gasped. “They’re hidden in the mountains, they never let anybody land there, how did you . . . ?”

  “Leif told us the way,” Rayna replied.

  “You saw Leif?”

  “We have a lot to catch you up on,” Rayna admitted. “And we will, as soon as we’ve done this. Tilda and Kaleb told us that our augmenters were keys, but they didn’t know what for. I think they might belong here. Drifa herself said we’re descended from the founders of Cloudhaven, and these augmenters used to belong to her. Sounds to me like it could unlock a door at Cloudhaven, and this is the only one we haven’t been able to open.”

  The other three sprang to life, working quickly to search every inch of the stone wall. Anders ran his fingertips carefully over its rough surface, desperate to hurry but careful to make sure he didn’t miss even the smallest opening.

  It was Lisabet who called out first. “Here,” she said, pointing urgently to the spot, and stepping back so Rayna could reach it.

  It was a small, vertical slot, concealed in the shadow of a craggy piece of rock. Rayna turned her augmenter to match it and pushed it in.

  It fit perfectly.

  They all looked up at the rock wall, waiting for something to happen. But nothing changed.

  “But it fits,” Rayna protested, “that’s the keyhole. Why isn’t it working?”

  Now, though, it was Anders’s turn to have a hunch. He hurried down to the other end of the wall, searching at the same height. And sure enough, there was a matching keyhole.

  He pulled his augmenter off over his head and, holding his breath, pushed it into place.

  With a grinding noise, the glowing letters immediately began to change and shift, moving about on the rock wall. Whenever they met, they seemed
to bounce off each other, like a crowd of people all trying to hurry in different directions, nobody willing to give way.

  Eventually, though, a pattern began to emerge. The letters formed lines and clustered together into words.

  “This is Old Vallenite,” Bryn said, backing up and beginning to mutter to herself as she worked out the translation.

  The other three danced, jumping up and down on the spot, unable to contain their celebration.

  “I think I can translate it,” Bryn said eventually. She haltingly began to read the words from the wall, line by line, first reading each in Old Vallenite, and then translating it.

  “I am Cloudhaven.

  I was made by the first of the dragonsmiths.

  I will be known by the last of the dragonsmiths.

  I will stand against wind and rain, against battle, against the shaking of the earth.

  Those who have been granted my protection may roam me freely.

  But only those with the keys of my founders may open this final door.”

  As she finished reading, a door began to form at the base of the huge stone wall. Lines of blue light glowed around its edges, and when its outline was complete, it opened with a soft click, swinging inward to reveal a staircase beyond it.

  They all gazed at it in silence, and eventually Bryn spoke. “Should you go down there?” she asked. “I know you have to find out, but is it safe?”

  “There’s a bigger problem than that,” Anders said, still looking down the stairs. “Leif and Hayn said the dragons, the wolves, and the humans are getting ready for another battle. We don’t have long to use the staff and the mirror. But if things go badly, this might be the only chance we ever have to find out what happened to our mother. And it’s not just for us. I think . . . I think it might be important for everyone to know. Her disappearance was mixed up in the start of the last great battle.”

  “We’ll be back as quickly as we can,” Rayna said.

  “Let everyone else stay asleep,” Lisabet said. “Whatever happens tomorrow, we’re going to have a big day. We napped at Tilda and Kaleb’s—we’ll make sure we’re back up here by morning.”

  “We?” said Anders.

  She looked across at him. “You don’t really think I’d let you two go alone, do you? We’d better hurry.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you when the sun comes up,” Bryn promised. “Right now, I’m going to run all the way back to the entrance hall, just to be sure I don’t meet any unfriendly artifacts. You three go. Find Drifa.”

  They watched her to the corner, and then the twins retrieved their augmenters, hanging them around their necks once more. Silently, the trio began to descend the stairs, moving slowly at first, and then gathering speed as they became more confident.

  They were about twenty stairs down when the door above them swung shut with a click.

  Anders’s heart stopped for a moment as he stood there in the dark. And then the soft greenish-blue glow of the paths that led them around Cloudhaven began to emanate from the walls.

  So down and down and down they went, seeming to descend the stairs endlessly until Anders’s feet hurt and the muscles in his legs ached. But they couldn’t leave this mystery unsolved. The path that had promised to show them Drifa’s location had led them to this wall. Drifa was down here somewhere, and though she had told them not to come, they could do nothing else.

  Eventually, Anders began to wonder how they were going to get back up again. Even if they climbed all the stairs—and he was beginning to think they were descending all the way down to ground level—would they be able to open the door from the inside?

  But his thoughts were interrupted by a distant noise. He couldn’t quite tell what it was, only that he had heard something, and he knew by the sharp turning of Rayna’s head and the way Lisabet paused that they had heard it as well.

  They continued down, but they moved more slowly now, careful to keep their footfalls silent. He trailed one hand along the cool rock beside him, wishing he could communicate with Cloudhaven more clearly. Wishing it could tell him what was waiting for him.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they emerged through an archway into the largest cavern Anders had ever seen. At first, he didn’t know what he was looking at. Then, by the dim light that glowed from the ceiling, he began to understand.

  He was seeing row after row after row of artifact warriors, all standing to attention, staring straight ahead. There were hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, the rows stretching away as far as he could see. The air vibrated with the same tingle that Anders always felt when an artifact that he was holding activated.

  “What is this place?” Rayna whispered, but Anders had no answer.

  Lisabet pointed up at the ceiling, keeping her voice as soft as she could. “Look, there are hatches up there. Remember when you locked the warrior in that room, and then it vanished through that trapdoor in the floor? This must be where it ended up.”

  They waited in silence for a little, but there was no sign of life anywhere. So eventually, they began to creep forward.

  Every part of Anders was on edge as they made their way between the warriors, but none of them stirred or gave the slightest sign that they knew the children were there.

  Lisabet nudged him, and when he looked where she nodded, he realized that some way away, perhaps at the center of the room, there was a brighter glow. There was something there.

  They altered course toward it, still keeping their footfalls silent, every sense awake and searching for danger.

  The temperature began to drop as they approached the middle of the room, and the wolf in Anders knew without question that this was an ice wolf’s work.

  With matching intakes of breath, the twins stopped short as they saw what was causing both the cold and the glow. A step behind them, Lisabet bumped gently into Anders, then gasped.

  In front of them was a huge block of ice, nearly a hundred feet high and a hundred feet across. Suspended at the very center of it was a dragon, a deep red with glorious bronze undersides to her wings, reared up on her back legs as if to breathe flame at someone.

  Anders stared. It couldn’t be . . .

  Could it?

  “It’s her,” Rayna breathed. “It has to be.”

  All their lives, the twins had wondered about their mother. Where she’d gone, why she’d left them. Until they’d found Cloudhaven they’d always believed she’d died in the last great battle, but a tiny part of Anders had still dreamed of meeting her.

  He could scarcely believe that she was here, right in front of them. So close, yet impossible to touch.

  Lisabet squeezed his hand gently. “What are those?” she whispered.

  When he tore his attention away from where his mother was encased in the ice, he saw what looked like ropes—they seemed to be attached to Drifa, emerging from the ice block and snaking away into the dark. But when he crouched to look at one more closely, he saw that they were made of metal.

  He followed it from its source out into the dark, and discovered that it stretched in a perfectly straight line, a long row of artifact warriors standing on top of it.

  Then Anders knew what he was seeing.

  “She’s powering them,” he said softly. “Our blood has essence in it, and the essence in hers is powering the artifact warriors.”

  “But she can’t be controlling them,” Rayna protested. “They attacked us. She’d never do that.”

  “No, I don’t think she is,” Anders said. “She couldn’t have frozen herself in the ice. Someone did this to her. The question is, can we get her out?”

  “I’ll follow one of the ropes to the end,” Lisabet volunteered. “See if there’s anything I can learn about it.”

  “Be careful,” Anders said.

  “Oh, don’t worry, if one of the warriors moves, you’ll hear me screaming about it.”

  She slipped off into the darkness, and the twins stood side by side, each absorbed in their own thoughts.<
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  Anders lost track of time, but he was just beginning to wonder where Lisabet was when a voice broke the silence behind them.

  “What are you doing down here?”

  He spun around, Rayna a moment behind him, and found himself face to face with Sigrid—the Fyrstulf, the head of Ulfar, the leader of his pack, and Lisabet’s mother.

  She looked almost as she always had, with her very white skin and her pale-blond hair. But her Ulfar uniform was filthy, and there was a smear of dirt across one cheek, a hint of wildness in her eyes.

  The children stared at her in disbelief.

  Sigrid.

  All this time spent wondering where she was, wondering if she was alive at all, watching Lisabet try to hide her own fears while they all worried about what her mother was going to do next . . . and here she was beneath Cloudhaven itself, standing next to the twins’ mother and telling them to explain themselves?

  Something inside Anders exploded, a swirling mix of surprise, anger, and fear pushing to the surface. “What are we doing here?” he echoed. “What are you doing here? Did you do this to Drifa?”

  “I needed her power,” Sigrid said, glancing past them at Drifa without a trace of guilt. She spoke as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The artifact warriors are the answer, and she was an incredible dragonsmith. Her blood can do things nobody else’s could. The warriors can fight for us. I’ve already been teaching them to attack.”

  “Is that what they’re for?” Anders asked, feeling like someone was squeezing his chest. There were thousands of the warriors all around them. “Were they designed to fight?”

  Sigrid waved a dismissive hand. “The founders had no imagination. They’re for assistance. Maintenance. Whatever they are required to do. Now, they are required to fight. They can move anywhere within Cloudhaven—I can’t get through the door at the top of the stairs, but they allowed me glimpses of you. And more to the point, the warriors can march out into Vallen with enough power.”

  “How could you?” Rayna asked, her voice breaking. “Is this where Drifa’s been all this time?”