54

Exile

My head throbbed as I ran down the steps. Somewhere, I heard a door slam, and I glanced back over my shoulder. By the time I reached the Inhemsk Project main offices, I was out of breath, but I never slowed.

“Ulla!” Pan jumped up from his desk when I came in. “What happened?”

“Are you okay?” Dagny asked at the same time as Pan.

“Get your stuff.” I leaned over, resting my hands on my thighs, and tried to catch my breath.

“You’re bleeding!” Dagny gasped.

She stepped toward me, like she meant to inspect the wound on the back of my head, and I straightened up to deflect her concern.

“I’m fine, but we gotta go now,” I said more authoritatively. “I’ll explain later. But make sure you grab everything you want to see again. Shit. And Elof. He should come with us.”

“Wait, are we being kicked out?” Dagny asked.

I shook my head and winced at the pain in my skull. “I don’t know.”

Pan, for his part, had been gathering up his stuff, and he came over to join me.

“Well, why else wouldn’t we come back?” she asked.

“Because it’s not safe!” I shouted, in fear and frustration. “Ragnall’s the leader of the Älvolk, Tuva is his daughter, and they’re working with Illaria to cross the bridge.”

Dagny opened her mouth, then thought better of it and went over to shove her laptop in her bag. She got all of her things together in a hurry, and the three of us walked very quickly out of the Mimirin. I glanced back at the ancient building looming behind us, and I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

Pan took my hand, holding it as we walked through the winding streets.

“What are we going to do?” Dagny asked.

“I don’t know. Ragnall said he’d kill me if he saw me again, and he and Illaria are dead set on crossing that bridge,” I said. “I have to get out of Merellä, and we have to warn somebody that has the power to stop this.”

“Well, you’ve got friends in high places,” Dagny said. “Isn’t Hanna’s dad close to the Trylle Queen? And Bryn is the Kanin King’s guard, right?”

When we got to the apartment, the three of us scrambled. Pan took the Jeep back to his place to load up his stuff and find pet care for Brueger, and Dagny took the landline first to call Elof. While she did that, I raced up to my loft to grab all the stuff that mattered most to me.

As Dagny candidly told Elof about the situation, I worried that Ragnall might be listening. But then I remembered the Ögonen were probably reading our minds, so it didn’t matter. I had to assume that everything we said and did inside the walls of the citadel, Ragnall and the Älvolk knew about.

I wondered if Mästare Amalie knew the truth. Or had she been duped by Ragnall like the rest of us? It didn’t really matter right now, I supposed. There were far worse things to worry about.

Pan returned about five minutes before Elof showed up. Elof had only brought along a laptop and a satchel bag with some clothes.

“Elof, we’re not coming back,” Dagny reminded him as she forced her steamer trunk suitcase closed. When she finished, she carefully set her bow and arrows, safely stored in a leather quiver, on top.

“I’ve got what I need,” Elof assured her, and patted his satchel. “Everything else is replaceable.”

“Did you know that Ragnall was the Älvolk chieftain?” Pan asked him.

Elof shook his head. “No. I never had any indication. But he didn’t interact much with me either. He seemed to have disdain for troglecology in general.”

I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder. “Is everybody ready then?”

Dagny took one last forlorn look around the apartment. “Yeah. I think so.”

We loaded up the Jeep, and Pan drove us out of Merellä. I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the seat.

“Don’t you wanna see the city one last time?” Pan asked softly. The vehicle slowed, and I knew the guard post at the gate out of Merellä had to be coming up soon.

“No,” I said.

Nobody else said anything more until we were beyond the walls, and the air felt easier to breathe.

The song had come back, a dull buzz gnawing through my killer headache. It wasn’t at full volume yet, but it was enough that I knew it was the enn morgana fjeurn on ennsommora orn playing on an infinite loop inside my skull.

“Now, why is it that we can never go back?” Elof asked, speaking deliberately. “I don’t think I got the full breadth of the situation.”

“The leader of the group that held us hostage and tortured us for a month is the leader of the Mimirin institution and basically the entire city of Merellä,” Dagny said, her tone exaggeratedly flat and monotone. “He attacked Ulla and threatened to kill her, and he plans to open the bridge to hell.”

“It’s not hell,” I corrected her, and I opened my eyes finally to see the thick forest of towering firs and hemlock trees surrounding us. “It’s just somewhere different, a world we’re not acclimated to.”

I remembered reading about the bottom of the ocean in Mr. Tulin’s nature magazines. The pictures made it look like a desolate hellscape with alien monsters. Like the angler fish with its horrific mouth of spiky teeth. I was terrified of the ocean after that, but Mr. Tulin told me that I needn’t fear. Their world was a paradise for them and they were happy to be there.

“Just because their world isn’t for us doesn’t mean it’s worth any less or any more than ours,” Mr. Tulin said. “Life—all life—is worth something.”

“We have half a tank of gas, and I’m heading east,” Pan said. “Any ideas on where I should go?”

“My family’s in Ningrava,” Dagny said. “It’s just a small Kanin village on Newfoundland island, but it’s a fairly welcoming place. For a Kanin village.”

“I have a home in Ondarike in Colorado. You’re welcome to stay with me, if you’d like,” Elof offered. “We can make a game plan from there.”

“I’m going to Sweden,” I said. “You all go wherever you like, but I need to go back to Áibmoráigi to stop the Älvolk.”

“Ulla, you can’t go up against them alone,” Pan said incredulously. “We basically already tried that before, and it did not work out so well for us. We’re not soldiers.”

“I do dödstämpel and archery,” Dagny interjected, referring to the intense form of martial arts she practiced for self-defense.

“That doesn’t change the fact that the Älvolk held us in a cage for a month, and we couldn’t get free,” Pan said.

“I’m not planning to go alone.” I looked down at my phone and the full service bars at the top. “I’m going to call Finn and then I’ll call Bryn, and we’ll get backup from the kingdoms. They need to stop this just as much as we do.”

“I have contacts in the Vittra,” Elof said. “They can lend a few troops, I’m sure.”

Everyone was quiet for a minute. The way Pan’s hand was twisting on the steering wheel, I knew he was especially anxious.

“Should I book flights to Sweden then?” Dagny asked.

I looked over at Pan. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You oughtta know better than that by now, Ulla,” he said with a crooked smile. “We started this together, we finish this together.”

I reached over and squeezed his hand.

“So four seats?” Dagny asked.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Pan and I have to make a stop first.”