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He stood at the nearest table, what looked like a stack of maps unrolled before him. A large one—of Midgard—was spread across the top.
Ruhn strode for his friend, grateful for the break. “What is?” The others followed suit, gathering around the table.
Dec pointed at Avallen on the map, the paper yellow with age despite the preserving spells upon it. “I thought looking at old maps might give us some hints about the mists—you know, see how old cartographers represented them and stuff. And then I found this.”
Athalar rubbed his neck and said, “At the risk of being ridiculed … what am I looking at?”
“There are islands here,” Declan said. “Dozens.”
It clicked. “There shouldn’t be any islands around Avallen,” Ruhn said.
Bryce leaned closer, running her fingers across the archipelago. “When’s this map from?”
“The First Wars,” Dec said, and pulled another map from the bottom of the pile. “This is Midgard now. No islands in this area except the one we’re on.”
“So …,” Baxian said.
“So,” Dec said, annoyed, “isn’t it weird that there were islands fifteen thousand years ago, and now they’re gone?”
Tharion cleared his throat. “I mean, sea levels do rise—”
Dec gave them all a withering look, and pulled out a third map. “This map’s from a hundred years after the First Wars.” Ruhn scanned it. No islands at all.
Across the table, Lidia was silently assessing the different maps. She lifted her eyes to Ruhn’s, and he couldn’t stop his heartbeat from jacking up, his blood from thrumming at her nearness—
“All those islands,” Bryce murmured, “disappeared within a hundred years.”
“Right after the Asteri arrived,” Athalar added, and Ruhn looked away from Lidia long enough to consider what was before them.
He said, “Well, despite its mists, Avallen clearly has had no problem revealing its shape and coastline to the Asteri for the empire’s official maps. Why hide the islands?”
“There are no islands,” Sathia said quietly. “The ones on that first map …” She pointed along the northwestern coast. “We sailed in from that direction. We didn’t see a single island. The mists could have obscured some of them, but we should have seen at least a few.”
“I’ve never seen or heard any mention of additional islands here,” Flynn agreed.
Silence fell, and they all glanced between the three maps as if they’d reveal some big secret.
Dec finally shook his head. Something happened here a long time ago—something big. But what?”
“And,” Lidia murmured, the cadence of her voice sending shivers of pleasure down Ruhn’s spine, “is this knowledge at all useful to us?”
Bryce tapped a hand on the oldest map, and Ruhn could practically see the wheels turning in her head.
“Silene said something in her memories about the island that had once been her court.” Bryce’s face took on a faraway look, as if she were trying to remember the exact words. “She said that the land … shriveled. That when she started to house those monsters to hide the Harp’s presence, the island of the Prison became barren. And the Ocean Queen said islands literally withered into the sea in despair when the Asteri arrived.”
“So?” Flynn asked.
Bryce’s gaze sharpened again. “It seems weird that two Fae strongholds, both islands, were once archipelagos, and then both lost all but the central island in the wake of the arrival of … unpleasant forces.”
Ruhn raised his eyebrows. “I can’t believe you actually told us what you were thinking, for once.”
Bryce flipped him off as Athalar snickered. She nodded decisively. “Team Archives: keep looking into this.”
The others dispersed again to resume their researching, but Bryce grabbed Ruhn by the elbow before he could move. “What?” he asked, glancing down at her grip.
Bryce’s look was resolute. “We don’t have the luxury of time.”
“I know,” Ruhn said. “We’ll search as quickly as we can.”
