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.