The medica wasn’t the only thing on the floor beneath the living areas in the Älvolk’s underground compound. There was also a dungeon, with thick iron bars and cold stone walls. That’s what I found out when I woke up, sharing a cell with Dagny. Across from us, locked behind their own bars, were Pan and Elof.
The story they’d been told, after Noomi and Tuva found them, put them in shackles, and dragged them down here, was that Illaria had caught me breaking into someplace where I didn’t belong. To restrain me, she’d been forced to knock me unconscious, and now none of us could be trusted, so they’d had to lock us all up.
Dagny recounted the incident while she was sitting on a wooden bunk, and then she mentioned that they had stolen from her. They’d dumped out her backpack when they dropped her here, taken anything of interest, and left her with some of her clothing, a few paper clips, a pen, and scraps of paper.
Apparently they’d done that with Pan as well, but he had gotten the rest of his clothes back. Neither Elof nor I had gotten any of our stuff back at all. Pan had piled up his shirts to make a pillow, and he was sprawled out on the bunk attempting to sleep, while I stood with my face resting against the cold bars, staring down the dark empty hallway.
“So do all your sisters hate you?” Dagny asked.
“It really does seem that way, yep,” I agreed tiredly. “It kinda seems like they were right to abandon me as a baby.”
“No, Ulla, don’t say that,” Pan said, apparently ditching his attempt to sleep.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Dagny said, her tone soft and apologetic. “Honestly, it sounds like your family is all a bunch of selfish jerks.”
“Maybe I’m a jerk,” I said with a tired shrug, and I wasn’t sure if it was true or what I meant anymore. My head still hurt from whatever had happened with Illaria, and I felt exhausted and sore deep within my bones.
It was hard not to wonder what I might have done to deserve this.
“Ulla,” Dagny chastised me. “You’re not a jerk, and you know it.”
“None of this is as bad as it seems,” Elof chimed in, managing to sound a bit more optimistic than the rest of us. “I have a dead man’s code in place.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a fail-safe. If Patrik in Isarna doesn’t hear back from me, I left him with specific instructions to let the Mimirin and the Vittra Kingdom know, and as soon as the Vittra Queen hears her prestigious adviser and scientist is being held hostage, she will work to get us back,” Elof explained. “The Vittra might not be able to find our location, but Indu will eventually leave, to trade, to find his daughters, to make more daughters. The Vittra will make him miserable until he releases us.”
“The Vittra can always be counted on to make everyone miserable,” Dagny muttered.
“No matter what, it seems like I’ll have plenty of time to think about whatever the heck I’m going to do when I get out of here,” I said with a groan. “I blew my internship, I found my family but they’re a nightmare, and I will probably never see Eliana again, which might be for the best because she probably hates me.”
“Eliana definitely doesn’t hate you,” Dagny corrected me. “And we’ll get out of here, and we’ll figure out what is really going on with you. I don’t trust everything I’ve heard around here, and I don’t think you should either.”
“That häxdoktor told me some interesting things about hemosterin and glimocytes,” Elof said. “I think they may know more about blood here than we do back at the Mimirin.”
Dagny stopped her doodling to look up at him. “What do you mean?”
“The blood they gave Pan had glimocytes, a more powerful form of leukocytes unique to trolls, and that—in combination with the dadarud—is what made him so happy,” Elof elaborated.
“I was very happy.” Pan smiled wistfully. “I’m still kind of a little happy right now, honestly, even though this situation is objectively really terrible and I feel so bad for everything that you’re going through, Ulla.”
There was a loud bang at the end of the hall when the door swung open, followed by fast, deliberate footfalls echoing off the walls. The light cast Noomi’s long shadow, so I saw that before I saw her stalking toward me.
Her hair was pulled up the same way it had been yesterday, but she’d forgone the makeup, so the staggered scarred lines beside her eyes were far more pronounced than they had been. Her eyes were more noticeable, too, a pale foggy blue below beneath harsh eyebrows.
She was smiling as she approached, which I immediately took to be a bad sign, and then she reached through the bars and thrust a book at me. “I went through your things, and I took this book for a good laugh.”
It was Johan’s book about Jem-Kruk, and I took it from her tentatively, afraid this was a trick I didn’t understand. “I’m glad that invading my privacy and mocking me is so entertaining to you.”
“You know this is all elk shit, right?” Noomi sneered at me.
I tried to laugh her off. “It’s a fairy tale for kids.”
“No, it’s all exaggerated to make Jem-Kruk sound like he’s some sort of folk hero, but he’s not.” She shook her head forcefully, making her ponytail sway. “He’s a selfish coward, and I easily bested him in hand-to-hand combat.”
“What are you talking about? You know Jem-Kruk?” I asked.
“Of course, I do.” She scoffed at me like I was an idiot. “He was friends with your mother. He visited with her once before she died, back when Illaria still lived here. And all that stuff about Senka, that sounds inflated to me too. Your mother never seemed that brave.”
Dagny came up behind me and asked her, “Are you guys saying that you actually know the characters from this storybook in real life?”
“They aren’t storybook characters,” she corrected sharply. “They’re real.”
“No, wait, go back,” I said, as my mind replayed what she had been saying. “Senka. Senka from that book is my mother?”
“No, I told you. The Senka from this book is a caricature of your mother,” Noomi said. “She was rude and not brave at all.”
“That doesn’t…” I stared down at the worn cover. “This book was written a long time ago, and Jem-Kruk is still young. But in the book, it says he’s the same age as Senka.” I looked up at her. “When were the twins born?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care enough to get into it,” she replied dismissively, and her smile was slowly returning. “Besides, it’s not like you’ll remember any of this anyway.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I will say this about you. Your friends work very fast,” she said, sounding pained to voice even the briefest of commendations. “Father has already gotten word that he is to return you to your home across the ocean. We will let you leave, because we have to, and because Father can never bear to sacrifice one of his children.
“You will go, but you will not remember any of this,” Noomi promised me. “The Ögonen here are very mighty, and they are under Tuva’s command. She will harness their power for the inovotto muitit. The inovotto muitit is absolute agony as the memories are ripped from your mind, and it will make the leat fámus seem like a stroll through a meadow.”
“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked her emptily. “What did I ever do to you?”
“I hate you because you exist,” she said coldly. She tossed my bag into the cell—now empty of so many of my belongings it had become deflated enough to easily fit through the bars—and then she turned and stalked off down the hall.
“Do you still have the pen?” I asked Dagny after I heard the door swing shut again, sounding Noomi’s departure. I started digging through my bag right away, tearing through my clothes, but I couldn’t find my Moleskine notebook anywhere. “They must’ve taken it.”
“What?”
“They’re going to try to make us forget,” I said, and then I had another idea. “I need your pen.”
“Here.” She handed it to me.
I opened the Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir book to a blank page near the back. I didn’t know how much time I had, so I started writing everything I knew I’d want to remember.
Senka is your mother, Indu is your father
Don’t Trust Noomi or Illaria
They’re Your Sisters but they LIE
Áibmoráigi is on the northwest mountain beyond Lake Sodalen
The Woman in the Long White Dress is the waterfall
Find the waterfall, find Eliana
Jem-Kruk might be a liar
You and Pan kissed (and you both liked it)
When I finished, I handed the pen back to Dagny, and she made her own list in the margins of my book.
With that done, we were left to wait, and hope that we’d done enough. That we had left ourselves enough bread crumbs that we’d know what really happened here no matter what Noomi or Illaria or any of the Älvolk had planned for us.