The Lost City

by Amanda Hocking

  “Of course I didn’t think that,” Pan said. “But you’re the only one who can get us in with the Information Styrelse or a Mästare.”

  Mästares are the prestigious department heads, and along with the Information Syrelse, they were the ones in charge of all the decisions made at the Mimirin.

  She laughed darkly. “You think I’m going to help you waste their time on top of mine?”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on or what I’ve done to make you so angry,” I said.

  “It’s not you,” Pan said wearily.

  “Don’t lie to her, Panuk. It is her,” Sylvi said sharply, then turned her bored gaze to me. “Listen, Ulla, you seem like a fine enough girl, and I know you’re trying to find your family. It’s all noble Oliver Twist crap with you, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Sylvi set her pen down on the desk, then leaned back in her chair. “The Inhemsk Project is the underfunded laughingstock of our society, not only here in Merellä, but throughout the troll world. Most of the trolls don’t think we should be here, and they make damn sure we know that whenever they can.

  “After a lifetime of ostracization for being half-Kanin in the Vittra kingdom, I finally climbed my way to a position of respectability where I am able to really help others and do work that matters,” she continued coolly. “I had to fight every step of the way.

  “And then there’s you.” She looked me over with a derisive grunt, and my stomach rolled. “Who was handed one of the very few internships we are allotted. So instead of getting the most-qualified applicants, we got stuck with you because you’re connected to the Trylle Queen, who is apparently allowed to make decisions for us from her lofty palace thousands of miles away.”

  “I’m not connected to the Queen,” I said, hating how small my voice sounded. “I’m the nanny for a tracker, and I had the qualifications to get in.”

  “Well, then you must have a fairy godmother out there pulling the strings. Either way, you’re not here because you earned it.” Sylvi looked at me with a smug, self-satisfied grin.

  I swallowed hard, taking a brief moment to steel my nerves and gather my wits. I wanted to throw up or cry, but that wouldn’t help anything.

  Plus, she was wrong. About me. Maybe about everything. And I wasn’t about to let her bully me into going away.

  “You don’t know anything about me or my life,” I said, matching her cold confidence with my own. “You know nothing of what I’ve done, where I’ve been, or what I’m capable of. And you may be trying to guilt me into leaving out of some twisted sense of entitlement, but I will not be guilted.”

  Her mask of faux indifference slipped, and her shoulders slacked.

  “Sure, I got help on this leg of my journey,” I admitted. “But I worked hard to get where I am. I spent my days taking care of babies, and my nights studying dead languages, and now I have the linguistic skills to obtain an internship here. A letter of recommendation doesn’t take away from any of that. I came here to find out who I am and who my parents are, and I damn well earned the right to ask that question.

  “Now, you can help me, and I’ll get out of here as soon as possible,” I said. “Or you can walk around with a huge chip on your shoulder, and I’ll draaaaaaagg out my work all summer, making sure to call home to my friends in high places as often as possible, just to make sure that they know exactly how you’ve chosen to perform your job.”

  She stared at me, blinking a few times as her lips pressed into a thin line. Finally, she said, “Okay. What is it that you think I can help you with?”

  “I want to know why a specific document was blacked out and what the significance of it might be,” I said.

  “Sure.” She smirked. “Would you like the Hope Diamond to go along with that? Maybe the horn of an extinct rhino?”

  “We knew that you wouldn’t have the answer, but you’re the only way that we can get a meeting with somebody who might,” Pan clarified.

  “You want to see a Mästare?” Sylvi looked at him with her eyebrows arched. “You want to waste what might be your only audience with one on this girl?”

  Pan crossed his arms over his chest. “Our job here is to unite families and tribes, to find out how we’re connected and who we are. So, yeah, I’m going to help do that any way I can, and I would hardly call doing my job a waste of time.”

  “Okay.” She leaned over the desk and picked up her pen and a scrap of paper. “Tell me what specifically the document is pertaining to, as much as you can.”

  I repeated the limited information I had about the tax document and Orra Fågel. As I spoke, Sylvi scribbled it down in jagged handwriting.

  “All right,” she said once I’d finished. “I’ll put in a call and see if I can set something up with a Mästare.” Then she glanced at Pan. “If you’re really insistent on doing all of this, you might as well take her up to the Tower of Avanor. It’s tedious and most likely futile, but if there’s anything that’s public for you to find, it’ll be in there.”

  I smiled thinly at her, but she didn’t look at me again. “Thank you.”

  “Sure. Now get the hell out of my office.”

  “Wow,” Pan said, once we were safely in the hallway, far out of Sylvi’s earshot. “You know, I read through your paperwork, but I didn’t see that you were adopted by royalty.”

  “I was never really adopted at all, but I’m blue-collar through and through,” I clarified. “The family I nannied for, the dad worked for the Queen. He put in a good word for me and cashed in a few favors because I worked my ass off helping his wife and taking care of their six kids.”

  Pan’s eyes widened. “Six?”

  “Yeah. Hanna—the girl you met last night—is one of them, so technically I’m still working even when I’m not working.”

  “You really are dedicated,” Pan said.

  “Thanks,” I said with a laugh. “But the moral of the story is that I don’t actually have friends in high places, and I am qualified for my internship—Finn doesn’t have enough clout to pull that off. So I deserve to be here as much as anybody else, and I wasn’t about to let her push me out.”

  “Color me scarily impressed.”

  “I thought it was impressively scared?”

  He grinned at me. “I’m more impressed than scared.”

  “So,” I asked as we walked together, “where is the Tower of Avanor, and what is it?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  19

  Avanor

  The Tower of Avanor was—according to Pan—the tower of our ancestors. It was in the northeast corner of the Mimirin, rising far above everything around it, making it the highest point in all of Merellä.

  The tower itself was relatively narrow, with enough room for a thick spiraling staircase around the sides, and that was basically it. The stairs themselves were split up with long landings on a very low incline, and stone bookcases were built in against the wall, curving along with it.

  “Alai,” I said in awe as I gaped at the rows and rows of books that lined the tower. “This is insane.” I slowly climbed the steps, running my fingers along the spines.

  Most of the books were bound with soft Tralla leather, made from the Tralla workhorses in the north. The leather was rare, since Trallas were revered and illegal to slaughter, so it could only be harvested when the animals died of natural causes. Their leather was prized not only because of its scarcity but also because of its durability and its distinct velvety texture.

  “It’s all lineage?” I asked.

  “Yep. Down in the offices we call this the ‘begats.’ You know like, Odin begat Thor, Thor begat Magni.”

  I looked back over my shoulder at him, where he followed a step or two behind me. “Is that all it is? Just long lists of parentage?”

  “Sorta, but with a bit more info.” Pan grabbed a random book off a shelf, and I stepped to where I could peer over his shoulder. He flipped through the pages—thick papyrus with rough de
ckle edges.

  On the top of each page was the stamp of a Mästare, asserting that they had individually confirmed every line of information on that particular page. Beneath that were columns, filled with meticulous type.

  Pan ran his finger down the page and explained, “It’s organized by birth date, then it has the name of the troll, followed by their tribe, the city they were born in, and their parents. In a lot of these, especially the older ones, there are a few blanks.” He tapped one of the names near the bottom—Lars Nomen-Valko. “Nomen-Valko is one of the surnames given if the parents are unknown.”

  “Yeah, I know what a Nomen is.” I swallowed hard. “I grew up in Iskyla.”

  Nomen was the generic name given to abandoned orphans who hadn’t been left with a family. Each tribe had their own distinct hyphenate: Nomen-Brun for Omte, Nomen-Valko for Kanin, Nomen-Blár for Skojare, Nomen-Rautt for the Vittra, and Nomen-Grönn for the Trylle.

  All my identification and paperwork had been done by Finn and Mia, using the name I had given them, the name I had adopted from the couple who raised me. But they had never actually given me their name, which meant that in these books, if there was a record of me at all, I would just be another anonymous Nomen.

  “Yeah, I suppose they’re pretty common up there.”

  “What do they do when the birthday isn’t known?” I asked.

  I knew what I’d done—or rather, what Mr. and Mrs. Tulin had decided to do, with me. We never really celebrated much, but every year they would acknowledge the day that I’d been left with them—the thirteenth of October in 1999. But I didn’t know what the actual protocol was.

  “They take a guess on the birth year when necessary, and then for convenience and organization, they put them all under January first,” he said.

  “Am I in one of these books?”

  He nodded right away. “Yeah.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I could say it’s because everybody’s in here, but the truth is that I looked.” He gave me an uncertain smile. “I thought there might be something in there that could help.”

  “Is there?”

  “Not really.” He put the book back on the shelf. “Come on. You can see for yourself.”

  Pan led me up the steps, always scanning the spines embossed with their cryptic Dewey-decimel-esque number system. He grabbed a thin book bound in a charcoal-blue fabric and hurriedly flipped through.

  “Here you are,” he said once he landed on the right section, and then he handed the book over to me.

  Birth Date Name Mother Father Tribe Location Alias

  1 Jan 1999 Nomen-Brun, Ulla Unknown Unknown Omte Iskyla Ulla Tulin

  I read it again, and again after that, and then once more. As if reading it over and over would somehow make the information expand, or as if my mother’s name had been printed in disappearing ink and any second it would materialize on the paper. But it never did.

  “That’s it,” I said finally. “That’s all there is to know about me.”

  “Oh, come on, Ulla.” Pan bumped his shoulder against mine, futilely attempting to get me to lift my eyes from the line about me. “This was only what was submitted to the officers when they did a census at the turn of the millennium. You’re more than a line in a book. Nobody can fit an entire lifetime into twenty words or less.”

  “You’re somebody.” I closed the book and looked at him. “So that means you’re in one of these.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Show me.”

  He leaned back, appraising me for a moment, then smiled crookedly at my request. “All right. Don’t get excited, though,” he warned as he headed back down a step. “It’s even less informative than yours.”

  “How is that even possible?” I asked dubiously.

  “More of the info is inaccurate or incomplete.” He grabbed his book off the shelf, and within seconds he’d found his entry and handed it over for me to read.

  Birth Date Name Mother Father Tribe Location Alias

  28 Feb 1998 Soriano, Panuk Elliot Human Unknown Kanin Unknown Unknown

  “Panuk Elliot Soriano,” I read aloud. “That is an interesting name combo. Are you like a Kanin-Inuit-British-Italian Viking?”

  He laughed. “Something like that.”

  “The incomplete parts seem obvious, but which parts are inaccurate?” I asked.

  “My mother has been present my whole life, but they didn’t bother to put her name there because she’s human. My father . . .” He paused and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, that’s more complicated, but they refuse to do a blood test that would confirm it. I’ve been able to test against extended family members to confirm I’m related, but the kingdom refuses to let me make a real comparison with him.”

  “Why not?” I pressed.

  “Because he’s high-ranking and they didn’t want to sully his good name by admitting that he had a kid with a lowly human.” He kept his eyes downcast as he spoke.

  “The good news is that you’re more than just a line in a book,” I said gently.

  He managed a half smile then. “Exactly.”

  I turned my attention back to all the books, rising high above me and far below. “I wish I had more time to go through these.”

  “Why don’t you spend the rest of the day up here?” Pan suggested.

  “What about Calder? Shouldn’t I be doing work in the archives?”

  “After the way Sylvi talked to you today, I feel like you deserve a day off.”

  “Wouldn’t I get in trouble?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Sylvi won’t want to deal with it, at least not today. But this is probably the only chance you’ll get for a free day with access to the Tower of Avanor, so I suggest you take it while you can.”

  I looked again at the books, filled with line after line of information I needed to comb through. “Challenge accepted, then.”

  “Great. I can go stop by the archives and let Calder know you won’t be in when I head back down to the office.”

  “You aren’t staying?” I asked, looking over at him in surprise.

  “Can’t. I have some pressing paperwork that won’t staple itself.”

  “It sounds scintillating.”

  He smirked. “You better believe it. But if you give me a few hours, I’ll be able to come back and give you a hand.”

  “No, I don’t wanna bother you—”

  Pan cut me off with a wave of his hand. “If it was a bother, I wouldn’t offer.”

  “All right. Well, I’ll be here, then,” I told him with a smile.

  “I’ll see you later. Good luck,” he called over his shoulder as he headed down the stairs, and I turned to plan out my research.

  Erring on the side of caution, I decided to cast a very wide net. Since I was born in 1999, I went on the assumption that the latest my mother could’ve been born was 1985, with 1949 being the soonest. Odds were that that was too broad, but I didn’t want to miss her.

  I made myself a little study area next to one of the few windows in the Omte section. There was a wooden bench built in under the large arched window between the bookcases, and I set the small stack of the first few books (1949–1956) beside it. It was significantly warmer up here than it was down in the bowels of the archives, so I rolled up the sleeves on my shirtdress and unbuttoned an extra button, hoping that would cool me somehow.

  I took my notepad and pen out of my oversized hobo bag, and then I spent the next several hours scouring the books for every “Orra” I could find, then writing all the information available down on paper.

  3 April 1952 Holt, Orra Omte Sintvann

  28 July 1954 Ecklund, Orra Kanin Doldastam

  5 March 1958 Lund, Ora Vittra Ondarike

  18 December 1961 Winge, Orra Omte Sintvann

  21 September 1966 Lykke, Oralie Vittra Mörkaston

  16 July 1967 Gribb, Orra Omte Fulaträsk

  9 January 1969 Fågel, Orra Omte Fulaträsk

  30 Jun
e 1970 Strom, Aura Skojare Storvatten

  I had even expanded to include variations of spellings and tribes outside of Omte, because the truth was that I couldn’t rule anything out. Still, my heart skipped a beat when I finally came across the name “Orra Fågel.” That’s the name I had seen on the blacked-out Omte form, the one that Calder assured me belonged locked up in the vault.

  Her parents had been listed—Osvald and Anne Fågel—but there was nothing more. Without their birth dates, it would be difficult for me to find them, and there was still no real proof that the Fågels were related to me at all.

  That had been the culmination of my work that morning. Three hours of reading and searching, and I’d only come up with that short list by the time Pan came back.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Pan asked as he approached me.

  “Okay. But it would be a whole lot easier if there was a database.” I moved a stack of books aside to make room for Pan.

  “Yeah, it really would,” he agreed as he sat down beside me, his thigh brushing against mine on the narrow bench. “But you try convincing a group of old dudes who sit on an ancient board obsessed with tradition to make a change. They’re convinced that if we go online, we won’t be able to use magic like we do here, and then the humans would finally stumble upon all our secrets.”

  “Are they right?”

  “We can’t really be sure, since they won’t even let us try it out,” Pan said. “Maybe they are. We have historically had a very difficult time merging our abilities with technology.”

  “Yeah, I have found that my superior strength has only really been a detriment to technology. And I’ve got the replacement costs for three phone screens to prove it,” I said dryly.

  “Did you find any leads yet?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell at the moment.”

  “Let me see what you’ve got.” He leaned over, his shoulder pressing against mine so he could inspect my notepad. “That Fågel sounds familiar. Aren’t they Omte royalty or something?”

  I shook my head. “I grew up mostly with the Kanin and Trylle tribes, so honestly, my Omte history is pretty shaky.”