“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.
I’d been reaching back to grab my duffel bag, but his bag was sitting beside mine, unzipped, and a flash of metal caught my eyes. Resting right on top of the clothes were two daggers, and I reached in and picked one up.
“What do you have these for?” I narrowed my eyes at him and held up the dagger for him to see. “These are the Kanin daggers you were given when you became the Queen’s guard.”
It had been a large ceremony in the palace. I’d been standing as near to the front as I could get, on my tiptoes to get a glimpse of it. They were beautiful daggers, with long sharp blades and ornately carved handles of silver and ivory.
“They’re for protection,” he replied gruffly. “And they’re the only things I still have from being a H?gdragen, so I’d like it if you stopped playing with them and put them back.”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry.” I leaned back over the seat and put his dagger safely back in his bag, then grabbed my own duffel before sitting back down. “I was just getting my own bag anyway.”
“What for?”
“I don’t trust that you know where you’re going, and I’m hoping there might be something in here that could help,” I replied as I unzipped the bag.
“I already told you. I’ve been to Fulatr?sk before,” Konstantin said, sounding indignant. “I went with Mina on a peace-keeping mission years ago, and I never forget how to get anywhere.”
“As reassuring as that is, the sun is starting to set”—I gestured out the window at the amber skies showing through the branches of the willow trees that lined the road—“and I’d like to get where we’re going by nightfall.”
“That’s a great idea, but if you packed a buncha maps to the troll capitals, you should’ve let me in on that sooner,” he said with sarcasm dripping from his voice.
“I didn’t.” I dug through my bag, pushing through the clothes I’d picked up from thrift stores and garage sales over the last few days. “I didn’t even pack this bag. Ridley got everything together.”
As I moved a pair of jeans, the cell phone fell out of the pocket. I stared at it for moment, once again finding myself trapped under the tantalizing possibility of calling Ridley. It was a prepaid phone, so it was virtually untraceable, and I would do almost anything to be able to call Ridley and hear his voice and find out he was okay.
But I knew I couldn’t risk it. It was still too soon, and if anyone in Doldastam found out I’d contacted him, he would be in serious trouble. Assuming that he wasn’t already locked up for helping me escape in the first place.
“Who’s Ridley?” Konstantin asked. “Wait. Wasn’t he like the Rektor or something?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I brushed him off, since talking about Ridley still felt far too painful, and I buried the phone back in the bag. “But this looks like a standard bag for new trackers, which means that they pack it with a few emergency essentials, including a handbook . . .”
Finally, I unzipped a pocket hidden at the bottom of the bag and found the handbook. Since this bag was going out into the human world, we tried to keep the handbook as hidden as possible, in case the bag fell into the wrong hands. But it was a nice asset for trackers out on their first few jobs because it had tips and tricks, along with important information for them to remember.
It also had rundowns on all the other tribes in case you ran into them (which wasn’t completely unheard-of, especially when tracking changelings in popular destinations like New York City or Chicago).
“Aha!” I held up the book to show Konstantin, but he seemed less than impressed.
“Does that have an address in it?” he asked with an arched eyebrow.
“Let me find out.” I tossed my bag into the backseat, and then I got comfortable, sinking lower so I could prop my bare feet up on the dashboard with the handbook spread open on my legs.
The first few sections were all things to help trackers do their jobs better, and I flipped through them quickly until I got to the parts about the tribes. When I saw that there were only a couple pages on each tribe, my heart sank.
It didn’t help that the top quarter of one of the pages on the Omte was a detailed sketch of their emblem—a brown-bearded vulture, staring at me with small black eyes. There were a few basic facts about the Omte, and finally, at the bottom, I found a sentence that seemed remotely helpful.
“The Omte capital of Fulatr?sk is located in the wetlands in the human state of Louisiana,” I read aloud. “Fulatr?sk has an estimated population of six thousand, making it the second most populated capital of the five tribes. They live under the rule of their King and Queen, Thor and Bodil Elak, who reside in the palace there.”
“That must be an older printing,” Konstantin commented when I’d finished reading.