Chapter Two

ANDERS WOKE UP BECAUSE HE WAS STARVING. For a long moment he couldn’t work out where he was, staring up at a smooth stone ceiling that looked nothing like his room at Ulfar. Then he realized he couldn’t hear Sakarias mumbling in his sleep or the distant sounds of the city.

It came back to him in a flash: he was at Drekhelm.

He pushed upright, looking around the little room he was sharing with Lisabet, who was still a sleeping lump under her quilt. They were alone, and the room was far too bright. He shoved back his own quilt, hurrying over to the window and peering out.

Behind him, there was a bleary groan of protest from Lisabet as his movement woke her, but he barely heard it. The sun was much too far above the horizon, and his heart thumped an alarm—it was mid-morning. They’d slept much too long, and their chance of finding Rayna without running into anyone on the way was surely gone.

“Whatimesit?” Lisabet mumbled from under her blankets.

“Morning,” he said, his head whirling. “Late morning.” Pack and paws.

He crossed back to his bed, sitting down to pull on his boots, lacing them tight. They had to get moving, do something. They had to try and find a back way to Rayna, to figure out how to keep themselves out of the hands of the Dragonmeet and their threats.

“We’d better hurry,” said Lisabet, pushing off her quilt and hurrying out of bed, over to the door so she could rest her ear against it, one hand on the doorknob.

“There must be more than one way to the infirmary,” he said. “Rayna will . . .” But he trailed off, because Lisabet had the strangest expression on her face.

She stood with her hand on the doorknob, trying to turn it, then trying again. She shoved her shoulder against the door, rattled the knob one more time, and finally gave up, leaning against the door and looking back at him. “It’s locked,” she said. “They’ve locked us in.”

Anders stared at her, a shiver going through him.

They were prisoners.

“We can’t just wait here until they come for us,” she said.

“Agreed. And Rayna would have come for us herself by now if she knew we were locked in. So she doesn’t know, or else they haven’t let her out of the infirmary yet.”

He crossed over to Lisabet, dropping to a crouch beside her to take a good look at the lock. He could see a tiny sliver of the corridor beyond through the keyhole. This lock didn’t look much harder to pick than Hayn’s had been, but he didn’t have so much as a hairpin to try with. He gazed at the metal, trying to think through what he knew of locks.

Neither he nor Lisabet were strong enough to break it, so they needed to trick it somehow. Lisabet pressed her fingers to it, pushing hard, though they both knew it wouldn’t work. Seeing her gave Anders an idea, though.

“Could you freeze it?” he asked. “If you can blast metal with enough cold, it’s not so hard to break afterward.”

“I can try,” she said, closing her eyes in concentration, then slipping down into her wolf form.

Anders stepped back, and Lisabet brought down her paws, casting a quick, thin ice spear straight at the lock. It struck the keyhole, and the metal all around it turned white with frost.

Anders followed it up with the hardest kick he could muster, twisting to stomp the sole of his boot against the lock, driving his heel into it.

The lock cracked but held.

“Again,” he said, and Lisabet cast a second spear, the air in the room turning freezingly, refreshingly cold.

Anders kicked once more with all his might, the shock of it traveling up his leg.

This time the lock came to pieces, and he pulled them free of the door, which swung open slowly.

Lisabet pushed herself back into human form, panting. “Transforming is much harder work than usual in this heat,” she said, grabbing her boots and lacing them up quickly. Meanwhile, Anders stuck his head out into the hallway to check that the coast was clear.

“Let’s try for the infirmary,” he said. “I want to find out where Rayna is.”

“The dragons are going to ask questions if they see us wandering around,” Lisabet pointed out. “They locked us in.”

“Most of them won’t even know who we are,” he replied. “We look just like them when we’re in our human form. And we’re wearing their clothes.”

She hesitated, but he knew she was going to come around. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have helped him break open the door. “Let’s do it,” she agreed.

They made their way quietly out into the hall, keeping on the balls of their feet, ready to move—ready to run—at the first sign of trouble.

They did their best to retrace the path they’d followed with Ellukka the day before, but it proved busy, and soon enough they were obliged to duck into lesser-used passageways, taking each new turn that seemed to lead them in the right direction—or so Anders hoped. The first few hallways they looked down were nothing special—they found more bedrooms, and then a small communal area with nobody in it. The common area had tables and chairs, some couches, some playing cards left out. On the bright side, it also had a bowl full of dark bread slices spread thickly with creamy butter, waiting for hungry dragons to come along. Anders and Lisabet both took a slice in each hand and kept on their way.

It wasn’t until a few hallways later that they discovered the room of maps.

When Anders carefully poked his head through the doorway, the chamber waiting for him was much larger than any they’d been in so far, except for the Great Hall. The walls were plastered with maps, showing everything from small sections of Vallen to the whole of the island—that map took up nearly an entire wall.

A big table ran the length of the chamber, with a dozen seats around it, all facing toward one end of the room.

At that end, a huge map—taller than Anders himself, taking up another whole wall—was pinned up.

It was a map of the city of Holbard, capital of Vallen and home to Ulfar Academy. Around the edges were marked the plains that surrounded the city on three sides, as well as the harbor that bordered it on the fourth.

“That’s a map of home,” Lisabet said, poking her head in beside his.

They both walked into the room, their footsteps audible on the stone as they made their way up to stare at the Holbard map.

“There’s Ulfar,” he said, pointing at the squares that outlined the adult barracks and the Academy. There was a large red cross marking it.

“Why do they need to look at it on a map?” she whispered, sounding as worried as he felt.

They walked along the base of the map, taking in all the landmarks they knew so well. By the docks, there was another place marked with a bold red cross. Anders peered, trying to determine exactly what it was. Suddenly, all the air went out of him. “Lisabet,” he whispered.

She was at his side in a moment. “What is it?”

“Right here, this is where the fire was at the docks. This is the exact place, the exact buildings.”

“Pack and paws,” she whispered.

“Are you lost?” someone said from behind them, in a pointed tone. It was Ellukka’s voice.

They both turned and found her standing beside Mikkel, the smirking boy they’d met on the mountainside the day before with Ellukka and Rayna. Mikkel dipped into a deep, sarcastic bow. “I see our honored guests have been exploring,” he said.

“We’ve been looking all over for you,” Ellukka added.

“You thought we’d be in our room, where you locked us in?” Anders asked pointedly.

Mikkel shrugged. “You’re wolves,” he said, as though that explained it.

Ellukka, despite her irritated expression, actually looked away. Maybe she wasn’t quite as unapologetic as he was.

Lisabet cut across his thoughts. “Why is the site of the docks fire marked on your map?”

Ellukka frowned, walking into the room to stand by them and stare up at the map. After a moment, Mikkel followed. He was tall, with a shock of copper hair, long and curly on top, short on the sides, and had fair skin. He looked a lot like Anders’s wolf friend Sakarias, except that where Sakarias’s eyes were blue and always full of laughter, Mikkel’s were a dark brown—clever, intent, and maybe even unfriendly.

“Right there,” Anders said, pointing. “That’s where a huge fire started just a week ago. It was dragonsfire, I saw it myself.”

“Look,” said Mikkel. “I don’t know what it was, but nobody would have lit a fire in the middle of Holbard. It’s too dangerous.” He sounded sure. “We’d know.”

“Or perhaps they didn’t tell you,” said Lisabet, “because you’re twelve.”

“Maybe someone was investigating the fire,” Ellukka said. “It’s just a map of the city.”

“It’s more than that,” Lisabet replied. “You know it doesn’t look good.”

“What, and you’re looking good right now?” Mikkel snapped. “You just broke down your door and started snooping around Drekhelm.”

Anders stared at him. “We broke out after you locked us in!”

“You’re wolves!” Mikkel replied, voice rising to a shout.

“And?” Anders replied hotly. “That means what, exactly?”

“It means you’re not to be trusted,” Mikkel replied. “And you proved it by prying into our business at the first opportunity you got.”

Anders growled in the back of his throat. “You can’t seriously be arguing that. We went looking for my sister after you locked us in, and can I remind you again that we found a map marked with your attack plans when we did?”

“Look,” said Lisabet, holding up her hands. “I don’t think anyone’s looking good here. Are we really going to stand around debating things like whether locking us in or breaking out was the worse crime?”

Ellukka spoke up. “We came to get you because Leif is ready to see you. You should ask him what this map is if you’re so sure it’s evidence of something.”

Anders’s heart fell into his boots. They’d lost their chance to get away from the Dragonmeet. Now they’d have to face whatever the dragons had in store for them.

But Mikkel was still gazing up at the map, head to one side, as if he was trying to make sense of it too. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing at Ulfarstrat. “The main street?”

Lisabet turned to see what he was looking at. “That’s right,” she said.

Mikkel was quiet for a little before he spoke again. “What’s Holbard like?” He didn’t sound angry or frustrated now. Mostly, he just sounded curious.

“Big,” said Lisabet eventually. “Big stone walls around the city, lots of cobbled streets, and colorful houses. They’re mostly two or three stories high, and they’re all painted pinks and blues and yellows and greens, you name it. The window frames are wood or white, and the rooftops are covered in grass—it keeps the cold out. In spring and summer, flowers grow up there, and it’s almost like being out on the plains. And the city’s on the harbor, so the ships’ masts are like a forest of bare trees when the harbor’s full. There are huge metal arches at the port, wind guards. Wolves and dragons made them together, to keep the ships safe.”

“Artifacts so big a ship can sail under them?” Mikkel whistled, impressed.

“There are all kinds of people there,” Lisabet continued. “From just about every country there is. They speak different languages, they look different, they sell different food and play different music, it’s wonderful. The sea’s right there beside the city, so whatever the weather is, we know about it. Sometimes the rain’s so hard it seems like it wants to drive us into the ground, and sometimes you get a warm breeze that feels like it’s come all the way across the ocean from some other country.”

Mikkel and Lisabet seemed to have forgotten Anders and Ellukka were even there. In that moment, Mikkel could have been any of their fellow students at Ulfar.

At first, when Lisabet had said “big” and mentioned the walls, Anders had thought she was trying to make sure Mikkel understood how well-defended Holbard was. But that wasn’t it at all. Lisabet had seen what Anders hadn’t, or she’d suspected it. The young dragons were as curious about wolves as the wolves were about dragons. They probably had their own scary stories to match the ones Sakarias had told around the campfire, come to that.

It was Ellukka who broke the spell. “The Dragonmeet will be waiting,” she said. “And when I left the infirmary, they were about to let Rayna out, so she should be there to meet us in the Great Hall.”

“Good luck,” said Mikkel, sounding like perhaps he even meant it a tiny bit. “I’m meeting Theo in the gardens. I’ll see you later.”

Anders swallowed, then nodded. He couldn’t wait to see his twin, but he had to focus. Since they’d missed their chance to hide, he had to find a way to stay at Drekhelm without betraying the wolves. At least Mikkel’s words made it sound like the young dragon maybe did expect him to stick around, but the cross on the map was a reminder that there was a lot Anders didn’t know about the dragons.

He had to look after the people he cared about. That was what mattered.

Rayna was indeed waiting for them outside the door to the Great Hall, and as soon as she saw Anders, she hurried over to his side, slipping her hand into his, giving it a squeeze. Her touch was familiar, her skin warm.

Wolves didn’t like hot weather—it made them weaker, made it harder to think clearly—any more than dragons liked the cold. But her warmth didn’t bother him now, just as the bath hadn’t the night before. It was very odd. Perhaps something had changed in the wake of the incredible, impossible silver icefire he’d thrown to end the battle the day before? It had been neither the ice of the wolves nor the fire of the dragons . . . but somehow both.

With Rayna on one side and Lisabet on the other, he followed Ellukka through the double doors into the Great Hall, where the Dragonmeet was waiting. It was a huge room with a high ceiling so smooth he wasn’t sure if it had been carved or if some long-ago lava bubble had somehow created it. Enormous doors, big enough for a dragon to fly through, led out to the side of the mountain, though just now they were bolted closed. Below those, the human-size doors through which his classmates had come were also closed and bolted.

At the other end of the room was a long table occupied by the twenty-five members of the Dragonmeet. Leif, their leader—the Drekleid—was sitting at its head. He had a shock of red hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and ruddy cheeks, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. He was built on sturdy lines, and looked strong and capable. At the moment he wore a serious expression.

Anders had a better chance to study the rest of the Dragonmeet now than he’d had the day before—they were as mixed as the people of Holbard, their clothes practical and comfortable, brightly colored in most cases. Whereas the wolves of Ulfar all wore uniforms, if these people hadn’t been sitting around a table together, Anders never would have known there was anything to connect them. They lacked a sense of . . . pack.

The two youngest looked no older than the final-year students at Ulfar, and they wore slightly friendlier expressions than the others. Anders also saw the man who looked like Ellukka again—he had a heavyset, broad-shouldered build with suntanned skin and a wheat-blond braid, and he was frowning. And beside him was the man who had been most suspicious of him the day before, hard eyes unfriendly beneath unruly black eyebrows, mouth hidden by a bushy beard. He was almost as big as his companion, and even more intimidating.

“Good morning,” Leif said, and Anders stopped inspecting the others, turning his attention to the man who led them. “Anders, Lisabet, we all met briefly yesterday, but once again, these are the members of the Dragonmeet. We are chosen by election. We come together from all over Vallen to discuss the issues most important to dragons, and to decide what action, if any, we should take. I am the Drekleid, the leader of the Dragonmeet, but we are all equals here. I lead the discussion, but I do not make our decisions.”

Anders nodded, fighting the urge to glance at Rayna or Lisabet, or even at Ellukka, who stood beside Rayna as if she were facing the Dragonmeet as well. He thought perhaps Leif was letting him know, with his quiet words, that Anders needed to find a way to appeal to all twenty-five people sitting in front of him, not just their leader.

“Thank you for letting us stay,” he said, and Rayna eased a little closer, pressing her shoulder against his encouragingly—reminding him he wasn’t alone.

“That’s not decided yet,” growled the man with the bushy beard.

Leif replied as if he hadn’t spoken. “As you can imagine, we have many questions for you.”

Anders’s heart was thumping. How was he supposed to answer the dragons’ questions—which would certainly be about the wolves—without being the traitor his friends and classmates already thought he was? It was one thing to hope he could find a home here in Drekhelm. It was another to cause harm or hurt to those back at Ulfar.

And what would happen if he couldn’t? What exactly had the nurse in the infirmary meant when he’d talked about extracting answers?

Lisabet spoke beside him, her voice quiet, and he knew she had the same fear in her mind as he did. “We’ll try and answer.”

“The first,” Leif said, “is how you found us. We have gone to great lengths to conceal Drekhelm—we were forced to move after the last great battle ten years ago, and we do not wish to do so again.”

That, Anders thought he could answer, because there was a good chance the dragons would guess anyway. “We used Fylkir’s chalice,” he said, and a murmur went through some of the adults sitting up at the table.

“An artifact?” an older woman with a thin face asked. “How does it work?”

“You fill it with water,” he explained. “And then float a special needle in it. It acts like a compass, only it points to the largest gathering of dragons in Vallen.”

“And why have you wolves never used this to attack us before?” Bushy Beard demanded.

“We thought it was broken,” said Lisabet. “It was just a week ago that anyone began to suspect that if you took it all the way out of the city, away from the people in Holbard who might have traces of dragon blood, and used it at the equinox, when the magical essence in nature is strongest and when the dragons come together in greatest numbers to celebrate, it might work one more time. And it did.”

“And we stole it,” Anders concluded. “To try and find my sister.”

There was another round of rumbling from the adults, most of whom, Anders knew from the day before, still didn’t believe Rayna could be his sister, since he was a wolf and she was a dragon.

The man with the blond braid who might be Ellukka’s father leaned forward. “And where is the chalice now?” he asked.

Anders and Lisabet exchanged a look—the dragons really weren’t going to like this answer.

“We dropped it,” Anders said. “When Rayna and Ellukka and Mikkel found us on the mountainside. We think our class was tracking us, so they probably found it.”

“So you left a trail,” Bushy Beard said, lifting a finger to point at them. “You showed them the way to attack us!”

“No!” Anders and Lisabet replied in unison. “Of course not!”

“Father,” protested Ellukka from one side, in unexpected defense, but the big man with the blond braid shook his head at her, and she fell silent.

Leif lifted one hand to still the murmurs that were starting again. “If I were going to leave a trail for attackers,” he said mildly, “I’m not sure I’d leave it for an army of twelve-year-olds, and luckily for us, that is what we got.”

“This time,” said a pallid, silver-haired woman farther up the table, her expression grim.

“What will the wolves do?” Leif asked Anders and Lisabet. “Will they be readying themselves for war?”

Anders was torn—how did he answer that? The truth was, he and Lisabet knew that Sigrid was doing exactly that. They’d overheard her talking about her animosity toward the dragons in her study, the need to find them. But if he admitted that, would the dragons just attack the wolves before the wolves could make the first move?

Lisabet answered quietly. “They don’t know enough about you. It’s easy to believe stories—you believe them about us, I can tell. And there have been fires and kidnappings in Holbard. Our class came to rescue us, not to fight. But like you said, we’re twelve. The leaders of the wolves don’t discuss their plans with us.”

Her voice was calm and even. However upset she was about losing the only home she’d ever known, she was doing a good job now of explaining why they should be allowed to stay at Drekhelm.

Finally, one of the two youngest members of the Dragonmeet spoke, the girl. She had light-brown skin and curly blond hair tamed into a messy bun. Her mouth and her round cheeks looked as though they were made for smiling, which made it hard to be afraid of her. “It was only ten years ago, the last great battle,” she said. “Don’t the wolves remember how things were before it?”

“I don’t,” Lisabet replied. “We were only two years old when it happened. But the way I hear it, things weren’t easy between dragons and wolves even then.”

“This is true,” Leif allowed.

Bushy Beard dismissed Lisabet’s words with a flick of his fingers. “Can we get to the point? They’ve proven they’re willing to attack us. They’ve proven they want a war.”

“No,” Anders insisted. They had to make the dragons see that the wolves weren’t all bad, they weren’t what the dragons thought of them. “We only came for my sister.”

“If she’s that,” Bushy Beard scoffed.

“I believe she is,” Leif said quietly.

Rayna slipped her hand into his, squeezing tightly, but the Drekleid didn’t seem inclined to say any more, at least for now.

Ellukka’s father spoke again. “Torsten”—that must be Bushy Beard’s name, Anders realized—“is not talking about the arrival of these children’s classmates. He is talking about the theft. Anders, Lisabet—the wolves who you say came to rescue you stole artifacts from us. One of them was the Snowstone.”

Every face up and down the table was grave now. During the battle, Anders had seen his friends Mateo and Jai disappear into the depths of Drekhelm’s caves, and when the pack had retreated, each of the two wolves had been carrying something in their mouths. Had one of those somethings been this Snowstone? The name sounded familiar, but Anders couldn’t place it.

“What does the Snowstone do?” he asked.

“In the right hands, it can alter the weather,” Leif said gravely.

Anders’s heart thumped. He had heard of it before. He’d seen it in the Skraboks—the records of artifacts—mentioned beside the plate that brought rain. “It makes the weather cold,” he said.

“Yes,” Leif said. “It can cause blizzards, bring hail and snow. In the hands of the wolves, if they can make it work, it could bring cold to Drekhelm. To all of Vallen. That is why we have always kept it safe here. The Fyrstulf can take away the heat we need to transform, and weaken us until we are easily defeated.”

As if the Snowstone were already at work, Anders felt a chill go through him. Sigrid was easily ruthless enough to drive the dragons from Drekhelm, or from Vallen altogether. By now she’d know they had her daughter, and she would be more furious still. It was one thing to convince the dragons they weren’t bad purely because they were wolves, it was another to convince anyone—including himself—that Sigrid wasn’t a danger to the dragons.

Every dragon—including Rayna—would be in danger from the Snowstone. Her hand was warm in his, her presence beside him giving him strength as he answered these questions. He couldn’t bear to think of her in danger again.

No wonder the dragons looked grim. With Professor Ennar back in Holbard, Sigrid would know where to find Drekhelm. She would know where to aim that cold, and where to attack.

“We have nowhere to go if the wolves drive us out of Vallen,” said Torsten quietly. “No other country would welcome us, even if we survived the trip. There isn’t a place in the world that isn’t claimed by some kind of elemental as their territory.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Leif said, but he didn’t sound as firm as usual.

And Anders didn’t feel so certain either.