Battle Born Read online

  Dedication

  For Kate

  Who’s been listening to my stories almost as long as I’ve been telling them.

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Amie Kaufman

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  COMING TO CLOUDHAVEN HAD BEEN A GOOD IDEA.

  Anders and his friends were sitting together just inside the entrance hall of the dragons’ ancient stronghold, wolves and dragons all in human form. Somehow, impossibly, they were safe—at least for now.

  None of them had spoken much since the Battle of Holbard. They’d just trekked out of town, rested for as short a time as possible, and then flown here to hide, dragons exhausted and wolves shaken. Most of Holbard had been destroyed today, the city left in ruins by the clash of the Snowstone and the Sun Scepter. There had been injuries on all sides.

  Everyone was hurt, and everyone was afraid, and Anders knew the only way out was to convince all his friends to work together—to stop the fighting once and for all. He also knew that the longer he let the silence draw out, the harder it would be to break it.

  “So . . .” When his voice interrupted the quiet, the others blinked and looked up.

  Anders had hoped he would know what to say once he had their attention, but now they were all staring at him, and the words came no more easily.

  “We need to figure out what to do next,” he said awkwardly.

  “We need to get all the way inside Cloudhaven,” Ellukka said immediately, leaning forward. “We’re not safe out here in the entrance hall, we’re too exposed. I don’t know how they’d get up here, but the wolves will be hunting us. They think we attacked the city.”

  “You did attack the city,” Viktoria pointed out stiffly. “We all saw you fly in with that . . . that thing. It put huge cracks in the ground—there was lava!”

  “That was the Sun Scepter,” Rayna shot back immediately. “And we needed it because the wolves were using the Snowstone to cool all of Vallen and attack the dragons. Your Snowstone caused at least as much damage with its ice.”

  “Speaking of dragons,” said Theo, “the Dragonmeet might think the same as the wolves—that we were trying to attack the city. But when we don’t come back to Drekhelm, they’re going to come looking for us. They’re not going to be happy once they realize we’re not on their side.”

  “Then whose side are you on?” Sakarias asked quickly. “Are you with the wolves?”

  “We’re not on anyone’s side,” Anders said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the wave of muttering going around the circle. “Or I mean, we’re on everyone’s side. We don’t want to help the wolves or the dragons attack each other. And we have to stick together. We only have each other now.”

  Seven wolves sat on one side of the circle, four dragons on the other. Plus Kess the black cat, of course, who was currently in Rayna’s lap, batting at the ends of her hair with one playful paw. Of all of them, only Kess seemed to have no worries.

  It was night, and their faces were dimly lit by the row of runes that circled the big room just below the domed stone ceiling. The runes were carved into the rock itself, and they glowed a gentle turquoise.

  Anders ran his gaze around the group, letting it rest on each of them for a moment in turn.

  Rayna was leaning against her friend Ellukka, her head resting on the bigger blond girl’s broad shoulder. Ellukka had months of experience flying, but Rayna had only transformed for the first time a few weeks before, and she was exhausted by the distance she’d covered today, and all the days before as they’d hunted for the pieces of the Sun Scepter.

  Anders saw Ellukka swallow hard. The last they had seen of her father, Valerius, he had been badly injured. The Drekleid, Leif, had been helping him struggle back toward Drekhelm. There was no way of knowing if they’d made it.

  Along the wall from the two girls sat Theo and Mikkel. Mikkel was running one hand through his copper hair, studying the wolves thoughtfully. Restless as ever, Theo was pulling open their bags as the silence drew out. He began to unpack them, taking stock of what supplies they had. The dragons had managed to grab a few things before they’d left Drekhelm. The wolves hadn’t even been expecting the battle, let alone that they would have to flee from it, and they had nothing.

  Next, Anders’s attention shifted around to the wolves. Anders’s old roommates, Viktoria and Sakarias, sat together. Det, Mateo, and Jai sat farther along, quiet and a little wary. For once, none of them had an easy joke to offer.

  Only Lisabet sat by Anders’s side. Just as there were fractures and mistrust between the wolves and the dragons, there were cracks separating the two of them from the rest of the wolf pack as well. Anders and Lisabet had sided with the dragons weeks earlier at Drekhelm, driving away their Ulfar classmates.

  They had done it to save the lives of their friends and the lives of the dragons, but Sakarias’s arm had been in a sling until just recently, and Anders wasn’t sure they were forgiven. It felt like all he’d done since discovering he was an ice wolf was run and hide and fight.

  “If you really want to know what we need to do next,” Sakarias said suddenly, “we need to eat.” A couple of the wolves snickered, breaking the tension for a moment, and Sakarias’s own mouth twitched in a small, tired smile. “I know I talk about food a lot,” he said, sheepish, “but this is going to be a problem really soon. It already is for us, if the dragons don’t want to share what they have.”

  Mikkel sat up indignantly, fixing Sakarias with a scowl. “Of course we’ll share,” he snapped. And just like that, the small smiles were gone. “What do you think, we’re just going to watch you starve while we keep it all to ourselves?”

  Viktoria immediately came to her roomie’s defense. “How are we supposed to know what you’ll do?” she asked sharply. Her parents came from the wealthy west side of Holbard, and she’d always been posher than most of the other students at Ulfar Academy. Now she wielded her icy tone like a blade. “You just attacked our city. Why should we expect you to feed us?”

  “I think,” said Lisabet quietly, “we’d better talk about who did what at the battle just now. And why.”

  Together, she, Anders, and Rayna recounted what had happened over the last few weeks, while Mikkel and Theo started a fire in the big hearth. The entrance hall was a cold and miserable place to sit—it didn’t even have a proper door to the outside, just an open archway that led to the dragons’ big landing pad. The real shelter lay beyond a great wooden door that only Anders and Rayna could pass through. When their friends had tried earlier that day, the floor had crumbled clean out from beneath their feet.

  Mikkel and Theo did their best with the fire, though, and it shed a little warmth. Someone had left wood laid out there, and flint to spark it hanging from a piece of string, as if they expected guests to come along who would need to warm themselves—though the dust everywhere told them that the guests had never shown up.

  It was a complicated story that Anders, Rayna, and Lisabet had to tell, from Rayna’s transformation, to Anders’s and Lisabet’s journey
to Drekhelm, to the wolves joining the Finskól. Then they recounted their discovery that Hayn—the famous artifact designer and one of Ulfar’s teachers—was Anders’s and Rayna’s uncle. That his dead twin brother, Felix, was their father, and Drifa the dragonsmith, accused of murdering him, was their mother.

  They told the wolves how Hayn had doubted Drifa’s guilt and given them her map, which had led them to the Sun Scepter.

  “We needed it to counteract the Snowstone,” Anders explained.

  Jai and Mateo exchanged a guilty glance. They were the ones who had stolen the Snowstone during the skirmish at Drekhelm, though they hadn’t known what it was at the time.

  “Sigrid was using the Snowstone to cool all of Vallen,” Anders continued. “She would have killed the dragons. And everyone was suffering—the wolves might like the cold, but the farmers’ crops were dying, and families without enough fuel were freezing.”

  “So that’s why we hunted down the Sun Scepter,” his sister said. “It was supposed to warm the weather. We brought it to Holbard, so the two could balance each other, and everyone would be safe.”

  All the wolves and dragons around the fire were quiet for a moment, thinking back to the ruins of the city, where nobody had been safe.

  “I guess we brought them too close together,” Anders said. “The lava from under the city and the ice above collided, and both the artifacts exploded. It wasn’t some plan of the dragons’ to blow up Holbard, though. If Sigrid hadn’t been trying to kill them, none of it would have happened. We were just trying to solve the problem she created.”

  “Remind me not to bring you any of my problems,” Sakarias murmured. But he had another small, tired smile for Anders. They had a long, long way to go, but Anders could see the wolves absorbing the story he had told, and he thought perhaps it helped them a few steps along the road to trusting the dragons.

  Rayna brought them to the topic at hand, as she so often did. “Basically,” she said, “Ellukka and—what’s your name? Sakarias?—are both right. We all need to eat, or we won’t be able to do much else. And we need to figure out how to get properly inside this place. We can’t camp out in the entrance forever. It’s freezing, we don’t have anything to sleep on, and if the wind really picks up, it’ll be miserable. It’s not safe, either.”

  “Agreed,” said Lisabet. “The dragons are forbidden from coming here—they have been as long as anyone can remember—and it’s too high for the wolves. But if we can’t go inside then it won’t be much of a hiding place if the dragons decide to break the rules.”

  “Rayna and I will go look for a way for everyone to come inside,” Anders volunteered.

  “And we’ll organize something to eat,” Theo agreed. “Sakarias, you can help.”

  Anders and Rayna took one of the artifact lamps hanging on the wall near the hearth, and left the others behind in the entrance hall as they approached the huge door that led into Cloudhaven proper. It was set on the very far side of the hall, and the room was so large that the conversation of their friends faded behind them into silence, until Anders felt himself no bigger than the specks of dust dancing in the lamplight around them.

  The door was made of dark wood and had no handle. There were rows of metal letters fixed into its surface, reflecting the light of the lamp back at the twins.

  COME NO FARTHER WITHOUT . . .

  ~A TOKEN~

  ~TRUE BLOOD~

  ~TRUE PURPOSE~

  The first time they had read these words, only hours ago, they had been baffled. But at least they’d managed to answer one question, and he and his sister moved confidently. Rayna pulled both her hairpins from her head, her black curls springing out even bigger than before. She handed one pin to Anders, and moving at the same time, with the tiny, engraved runes on the pins facing inward, the twins pressed them into the shallow indentation built into the door for them. A token. Anders’s fingertips tingled as the essence inside the artifacts did its work, and with a soft click the door swung open to reveal a long hallway beyond it.

  One by one, lamps were coming to life all along the hall, illuminating door after door, as well as a stone floor and walls lined with hundreds of long strips of metal that glowed a soft blue green with tiny, intricate runes. The whole of Cloudhaven was one giant artifact.

  True blood was easy now—Anders and Rayna were descended from Drifa, and that seemed to be enough. Anders wondered if perhaps Drifa herself was descended from the dragonsmiths who had originally created this place.

  Just before the twins stepped inside, Anders heard a soft skittering noise behind him, and he turned in time for Kess to leap up into his arms. He tucked her inside his shirt, and there she settled, a warm lump against his skin, purring softly.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a token and true blood taken care of. But what’s our true purpose this time?” He knew that as soon as they asked for what they wanted, a path would light up along the ground, leading them to whatever part of Drekhelm could help them or answer their question. “Finding a way to get the others inside?”

  Rayna nodded, then cleared her throat. “Cloudhaven, please show us a way to allow other people inside you.”

  Anders felt a flicker of hope as the lights dimmed. Come on, he silently urged the walls around him. Help us protect our friends.

  Then the lights came up again, and rather than leading away, the path that appeared began at their feet, completed a circle around them, and then led straight back to where it had started, so they each stood inside a circle of light.

  Anders wanted to scream.

  What were they supposed to do now? How was this guiding them anywhere?

  “Is it broken?” Rayna asked, stamping one foot inside her circle.

  But they repeated the request and got the same result.

  “So we can’t get everyone inside yet,” Anders concluded. “If the dragons show up, our friends will be trapped out in the entry hall with nowhere to run.”

  “Then we’ll have to hope nobody shows up tonight,” Rayna replied. “I guess we could ask about how to make it more comfortable for them, at least. They probably don’t have a kitchen here, or if they do, I would not like to see inside it. The dust is so thick, there can’t possibly be any food left that anyone would want to eat.”

  But a new idea had come to Anders, traveling through him with a quick fizz of excitement.

  “No,” he said. “Last time we were here, we asked about the way to find Drifa.”

  At the time, a path had lit up, but they’d had no chance to follow it, forced to run back and join the others. Now they had the chance to find out where their mother had been all this time.

  Anders had spent all his life wishing he knew more about his parents—never even dreaming he could meet them—and now more than ever, his heart desperately wanted that chance. Their mother would be on his and Rayna’s side, not the side of the wolves or the dragons. He could almost imagine her smile, her advice. It would be such a relief.

  He ached for Hayn to be with them, but their uncle had been imprisoned by the wolves, and had disappeared during the Battle of Holbard. If he was out there somewhere, Anders had no idea how to find him. For now, the twins had to continue on without him.

  Beside him, Rayna spoke. “Cloudhaven, please show us where Drifa is.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. And then all the lamps and the strips of metal in the floor dimmed, until it was almost completely dark. Again the twins waited, and this time when the glow returned, it was concentrated in one long strip of iron along the floor. Pale bluish green, it stretched down the hallway, then turned a corner.

  Anders slipped a hand into his sister’s and used the other to brace Kess against his chest, and together the three of them set off, following the path Cloudhaven had provided for them.

  This was it.

  After a lifetime as orphans, of never imagining they’d even know the names of their parents, were they about to meet one? Was Drifa really here? Was she still hiding aft
er all this time? Why had she never come for them?

  They hurried past door after door, the anticipation building inside Anders until it was almost unbearable. Deeper into Cloudhaven they went, the minutes ticking by.

  Then they turned yet another corner and pulled up short—the path abruptly ended against a wall of solid rock.

  The dead end was covered in row after row of text that glowed a soft blue, but Anders couldn’t understand a word of it, and he knew it wasn’t just because he wasn’t very good at reading. These words simply didn’t make sense.

  He scanned the lines of letters desperately, heart thumping, looking for any kind of clue as to what he and his sister should do next. Beside him, Rayna was whispering under her breath, and he knew she was trying to read it as well.

  “There!” she said suddenly, one finger coming up to point. “That says ‘barda.’”

  Anders craned his neck—she was right. Barda was the word for battle in Old Vallenite, a language that had been spoken centuries ago. Anders and Rayna themselves were Anders and Rayna Bardasen, named after the battle that had orphaned them. Or at least, their rescuers had assumed they’d been orphaned in the last great battle—the twins had been found on the streets as toddlers, after the fighting had ended.

  “Perhaps it’s all in Old Vallenite,” Anders said. “This place is ancient, after all. But we only know two words of it, barda and rót. Bryn taught us that one, remember, when we were solving the riddles to find the pieces of the Sun Scepter.”

  He thought of Bryn, their classmate at the Finskól and a brilliant languages expert—he could picture her now, pushing back her sleek black hair with one impatient hand so she could lean in to frown thoughtfully at some ancient text. Oh, how he wished she were here now.

  “It could be anything,” Rayna replied, gesturing helplessly at the words. “Instructions on how to get through the wall to the other side, another riddle like the ones on the map, or a really good recipe for all we know.”

  They tried pricking Anders’s finger and pressing a little blood against the wall, remembering how this had activated Drifa’s map, bringing it to life and making it obedient to their commands. The wall, however, completely ignored the blood.