The Morning Flower Read online

  “I didn’t mean anything,” she said hurriedly.

  I laughed, brushing it off. “No, it’s true, but I’ve come around to their ways. It’s been such an adjustment living where Wi-Fi isn’t viewed as a basic necessity.”

  “We do have Wi-Fi here, and I know some Omte that are a little addicted to their social media and crushed-candy games. But it is always an adjustment moving to a new city. The weather, the neighbors, the food,” she said. “Which reminds me. Are you guys hungry?”

  Pan patted his stomach, flat under his slim T-shirt. “I could eat.”

  “Yeah, I’m definitely craving something more than gas-station food,” I added.

  Trolls’ sensitive stomachs and particular dietary needs made traveling and dabbling in human cuisine tricky. We’d mostly been eating some fruit and vegetables we bought at a roadside stand in Texas.

  “Excellent. I thought, to help you get in touch with your Omte roots, I’d cook you guys one of our most common meals—pepper-and-bullhead kebabs with a chadron thistle salad.”

  “That sounds awesome,” I lied with a forced smile. “Thanks.”

  “Why don’t you two relax, freshen up, get settled in, and I’ll get the grill going,” she suggested.

  “Thanks, Rikky.” Pan slowly got to his feet and stretched. “What is the plan for sleeping arrangements?”

  “I don’t have a ton of room here. I thought one of you could take the daybed in my workroom, and the other could take the couch.” Rikky stopped short and her eyes bounced between the two of us. “Unless you’re sharing a bed—”

  “No,” Pan answered quickly.

  “The daybed sounds great for me,” I said, calling dibs on what I thought would be the worst place to sleep, thereby giving Pan the better bed.

  “Perfect.” She smiled. “I thought we’d relax tonight, since it’s so late. And then first thing tomorrow I’ll take you down to the Omte offices to talk to the records officer.”

  “That sounds great,” I said.

  Later on that night, after we’d choked down extra-salty chewy fish kebabs that left my stomach burning and cramping, and after I’d excused myself for the night, I lay on the lumpy bed under a thin sheet, staring at the moon reflecting on the swamp. The screens that surrounded the porch managed to keep the mosquitoes out, but they did nothing to dampen the sound of their buzzing, along with the sound of all the other bugs carrying on outside.

  As loud as the wildlife was out here, it didn’t drown out the sounds of laughter and chatting as Pan and Rikky stayed up late, reminiscing.

  I wondered dimly if this was mad. If I was doing the right thing. But mostly I wondered where Eliana was, and I hoped that she was okay.

  3

  Postkontor

  I didn’t think I’d ever fall asleep, but apparently I had, because I woke up to Rikky knocking on the flimsy storm door that separated the workroom/guest room from the rest of the house.

  “Are you awake?” Rikky poked her head in.

  I ran my hands through my tangles of hair and squinted into the bright morning light that flooded the room. The tools and paint cans stacked on the workbench cast long, cool shadows on the warped floorboards.

  “Uh, yeah, I think so.”

  “I called down to the records office already, and I got us a meeting in an hour.” Her long hair hung in a loose braid over her shoulder, and the mason jar in her hands clinked with ice cubes and dark sun tea. “Do you think you can be ready by then?”

  I nodded and sat up. “Yeah, of course. What time is it?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Almost seven. I’ve got some tea chilling in the icebox if you want any. I’m not much of a breakfast-eater myself, but Pan is scrounging something up,” Rikky said with a meaningful laugh. “You know how he hates to miss breakfast.”

  “Thanks, the tea will be fine,” I said, and she finally left me to get ready.

  I pulled a change of clothes out of my duffel bag and wondered dourly what time she’d gotten up. She and Pan had still been up talking when I finally passed out around midnight.

  Had they even slept at all?

  Not that it was any of my business. Not really. Pan and I were only friends, but I’d thought maybe there was something more to it.

  But now I didn’t know. Maybe I’d misinterpreted his kindness for something else.… Not that any of this even mattered. I had more important things to worry about than some silly crush on a cute guy.

  I wasn’t sure of the Omte’s thoughts on formality or how high-ranked the records officer was, so I decided to play it safe with a business-casual look—a maxi skirt and a dark peasant blouse with light makeup.

  Once I was ready, I went to the main room. Pan stood over the hot plate, the pan sizzling and snapping as he scrambled something in it. His dark curly hair was still wet from a shower, and he wore jeans with a white tank top, revealing the tattoo on his bicep. It was a large clock, drawn with raw Nordic edges, and the numbers were actually various runes. The hour was pointed at the rune Raido—an R-like symbol that stood for “journey”—and the minute hand pointed at the Kaun rune—an < meaning “knowledge.”

  He’d been whistling an old Nina Simone song, but he stopped when I came in and greeted me with a big smile. “Good morning! Are you hungry? I was trying to make a root vegetable frittata with vulture eggs, but it’s definitely turned into more of a breakfast hash.”

  “No, thanks,” I declined, in part because it smelled like burnt leather.

  “Suit yourself.” He turned back to his cooking, then pointed over his shoulder with a spatula. “I left the tea on the table, and there’s mugs by the sink.”

  “You really made yourself at home,” I commented as I poured iced sun tea into an old Dat Dog plastic tumbler.

  He shrugged. “I try to make myself useful. Rikky’s outside feeding the various wildlife she’s adopted.”

  “That explains all the splashing and hooting I heard while I was getting dressed,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, she apparently rehabbed a couple turtles and vultures and I don’t know what else. Now they hang around, so she feeds them and makes sure they’re doing okay,” he explained.

  “That’s very nice of her.” I sipped my bitter tea and looked up through the skylights at the trees blotting out the bright blue sky. “So, are we heading out when you’re done eating?”

  “If you’re not eating, you can probably head out once Rikky is done,” he said.

  I looked at him in surprise. “You’re not coming with us?”

  “Yeah, I talked about it with Rikky, and we thought a two-pronged approach would be best.” Pan clicked off the hot plate and dumped his mushy vegetable/egg scramble into a bowl. “Since you’ll have someone at the Postkontor to help you look into info on your parents, I thought Rikky and I would focus on trying to find out more about Áibmoráigi and where Eliana went.”

  Áibmoráigi is the oldest troll establishment on earth, so it’s sometimes called the First City, but its exact location has been lost for over a thousand years. Various trolls have tried to find it over the years, all unsuccessfully, and stories of it blurred the lines of fact and legend.

  “And since the only info I have about my maybe-birth-mother is that she was last seen in Áibmoráigi, you’re thinking that our investigations will dovetail,” I inferred.

  Pan gave me a lopsided smile. “That is the hope anyway.”

  A few minutes later, Rikky and I headed out on the airboat she kept off the back of her dock, which she assured me was the best way to navigate the swamp that encompassed Fulaträsk. The trip took twenty minutes. It was loud, but surprisingly smooth, with me gripping the bench unnecessarily tightly as she weaved us through the trees.

  In Fulaträsk, the office where all the records were stored was called the Postkontor, and it was a squat stone building sitting atop a small hill. Mossy vines grew up the side, and the vulture gargoyle perched on the stone shingles of the roof made it look like a mausoleum.

&n
bsp; Inside, it was cool and damp, and it smelled vaguely of wet paper, which could not be a good sign for a place that stored records. The Gothic flourishes of the exterior continued on the inside, juxtaposing with practical touches like fluorescent lighting, file cabinets, and dividers to create small office cubicles in the large space.

  A woman stepped out from behind a divider, moving slowly because of her stocky legs and a belly that appeared to be swollen with a late-term pregnancy. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her attire was a lot less than business casual, with a loose flannel shirt left unbuttoned over an alligator T-shirt and a pair of leggings.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I called this morning about an Omte orphan looking for her parents,” Rikky said uncertainly.

  “Oh, right, of course.” She walked over to us. “You must be Rikky Dysta.”

  “I am, and this is Ulla Tulin. She’s the one that needs your help.”

  “Hi, I’m Bekk Vallin.” She shook my hand brusquely. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll see what I can help you with?.” She pointed to the right, toward a small sitting area, where bland pleather furniture was surrounded by several wilting potted plants.

  “Is it okay if I head out now?” Rikky asked me while Bekk grabbed a pad of paper and a pen off a nearby desk.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I can handle this.”

  “Great. Just call me or Pan when you’re ready to be picked up.” Rikky gave me a small wave and left.

  After I sat down, Bekk chose the chair across from me. Once she got settled in, with her pen in hand, she rested her serious brown eyes on me. “So, tell me everything you know about your birth mother.”

  And then I launched into the fragmented story of my parents, which was really a story of myself. What little I knew or suspected about my parents came from what I had stumbled upon or guessed at.

  I told her Mr. Tulin’s version of the night a woman abandoned me at a tiny inn in a frozen troll village, and I glossed over my lonely childhood. I’d gotten to the part where I finally hitched a ride with a traveler who came through when I was fourteen and how she took me to the Trylle capital.

  “Why did you decide to go with that troll?” Bekk interjected. “You lived and worked in an inn. There had to be other tourists who came through that you could’ve left with.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really left about as soon as I felt old enough to, and she was nice, and it seemed like she understood what it was like to not fit in, since she was a blond Kanin.”

  “Really?” Bekk looked up sharply. “I used to know a blond Kanin. She fought in the Invasion of Doldastam.”

  Her expression was hard for me to read, and I hesitated before answering.

  The Invasion of Doldastam had only been five years ago, a bloody conflict that had ended the Kanin Civil War. But while the war had started as an internal conflict within the Kanin, all the other tribes had eventually been pulled in by varying degrees, and only the Omte had backed the losing side. Once it was all over, treaties had been signed and a peace declared, but I had to imagine that the war was still a sore spot for many of the trolls who fought in it.

  I finally decided to answer with the truth. Bekk was here to help me, and I didn’t want to withhold anything from her. Even seemingly insignificant things might help me find my parents.

  “Bryn Aven,” I said.

  Her eyes widened, and she leaned back. “I know Bryn.” Then she shook her head. “Well, I did know her. We fought beside each other, when our Queens forged an unworthy alliance.”

  “It was a complicated time,” I replied carefully.

  Bekk nodded once. “It was.” She blinked, then looked back up at me with a strained smile. “Were you connected with Bryn in any other way?”

  “Not that I know of. We only met because she was in Iskyla looking for someone else.”

  “And then you became friends?” Her thick eyebrows arched high, and I tried not to squirm under her scrutiny.

  My mouth suddenly felt dry, and I swallowed hard before cautiously admitting, “Yeah. We’re friends.”

  After the longest ten seconds of my life, Bekk said, “Good. Any friend of Bryn’s is a friend of mine.”

  “Great!” I said, probably too forcefully, but the relief hit me like a wake. “I mean, yeah. Bryn’s great.”

  Bekk set aside her pad of paper and settled deep into the chair, her left hand absently rubbing her round belly, and she propped her feet up on the coffee table.

  “Bryn’s the only reason the Queen Regent Bodil is still alive,” she said, then quickly added, “Officially, everyone will deny it. You won’t be able to find any documents here about the secret meeting Bryn had with the Queen, before the war, warning her of the dangers of a compromised ally.” Bekk pointed toward the file cabinets and bookshelves. “But I know, and Bryn knows, and most importantly, the Queen knows.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked uncertainly.

  “The name you gave me…” She paused to glance over at the notes she’d taken while I’d been telling her my life story. “Orra Fågel. She’s a cousin to the Queen Regent. I can give you the records we have here, but I can also tell you that all the information available to the public about anyone connected to the royal family will be highly sanitized and censored.”

  I frowned, but I tried to remain optimistic. “Any information at all, no matter how minute, would really be so helpful. I need something to go on.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she said with a sly smile. “I don’t have much to offer you here, but the Queen definitely does. And she owes Bryn—and me, honestly—a lot, but she’s done very little to repay us so far. Talking to a friend and helping her find her family, well, that sounds like a small step in the right direction.”

  4

  Friends

  I spent the rest of the morning going through the scant records that the Omte had on Orra Fågel, but it was just as Bekk had warned me—there wasn’t a lot there. Birthday 1 September 1969, full name Orra Fågel, her high school diploma, and a long list of relatives, both parents and four older brothers, all dead. They didn’t even have her death certificate here. Bekk explained that most royal certificates were kept at the palace, although even she had to admit that the cousin of the Queen Regent barely counted as royalty.

  “Plus, it usually goes the other way,” Bekk said. She closed the drawer of a long filing cabinet, after a fruitless search through death certificates.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Usually it’s a non-royal bragging about alleged distant relations to the crown,” she elaborated. “A third cousin telling everyone how their dad’s death certificate should be kept at the palace with other royalty, but it’s not included, and the crown doesn’t acknowledge them.

  “But this is someone who should be overlooked—no offense.” Bekk glanced at me, and I shrugged. “And she’s all locked up in the palace.”

  “That is weird,” I realized.

  “Kinda.” She grimaced and put her hand on the small of her back. “But Bodil is rather paranoid, even by Omte standards. In her defense, having your most trusted adviser betray you and commit treason will have that effect on you. She really cleaned house after the war, changed up a lot of the staff, relocated records, and reduced public access to information.”

  Even with the concerns about the Queen’s anxiety/paranoia, Bekk was able to deliver on her promise to get me a meeting with her. Before I left for the day, she managed to get through to the Queen Regent’s secretary and set up a meeting for the next day at ten A.M.

  I had taken up enough of Bekk’s time—and I’d already exhausted all resources in the records office—by noon, so I called Pan, and he and Rikky zoomed over on the airboat to pick me up. On the way to her house, Rikky stood at the back of the boat, steering with a lever as we whipped through the trees. I didn’t feel stable standing up, so I sat on the wooden bench seat next to Pan.

>   “How were your adventures today?” I asked Pan, nearly shouting to be heard over the large caged propeller—or fan, as Rikky called it—that powered the boat through the swamp.

  “I don’t know if they were adventures, but I think we had a productive day,” he said.

  “Yeah? Did you find anything about the First City or Eliana yet?”

  He let out a short, tired laugh and ran a hand through his windblown hair. “Not quite yet, no. But I did spend the day knee-deep in musty books reading up on strange superstitions and ancient obsessions.”

  “That sounds intense,” I said.

  “You have no idea.” He leaned closer to me, so he wouldn’t have to shout so much over the fan. To steady himself, he put his right arm behind my back, his hand on the bench on the other side of me so his fingertips grazed my thigh. “They were doing all these weird old rituals you’d associate with the Dark Ages, like seriously demented things. And it’s not even that long ago. Some of it took place in the 1800s, but most of the worst stuff was in the 1960s and ’70s.”

  As he spoke, he moved in closer. My blouse had ridden up some, exposing the skin of the small of my back, and his forearm gently pressed against my bare skin. I tried to focus on what he was saying—it was important and very interesting to me—but when his warm skin touched mine (not an exciting place, sure, but a private one that rarely had skin-to-skin contact with anyone else), it made my skin shiver all down my spine, and my stomach filled with delighted heat. Even though I so badly wanted to listen to him, all I could think about was how his arm felt strong and warm, and how he smelled like summer sun and cedar and something sweet but earthly, like fresh herbs and lemonade. Suddenly the boat lurched to the side. Pan’s arm slid around my waist, catching me just in time to keep me from flying out into the murky swamp. Water splashed up over us, soaking my “nice” clothes.

  “Sorry about that!” Rikky shouted from where she stood behind us. “Animals can jump out of nowhere out here, so it’s best to hang on.”