I dozed off on the couch while rereading Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir. I’d already read through it three times on the long flights, but I wanted to read it again. Any hint or mention of Jem-Kruk’s friend Senka held such heavy significance now that I knew that Johan might’ve been making real references about my mother. I scoured the book, reading between the lines for any insights.

But I had been more tired than I thought after my archery lesson from Dagny. I barely made it two pages and I was out. I woke up a few hours later with a crick in my neck, and ringing in my head was the last phrase I’d read in the book—the suns will set in the green sky when the good morning becomes the violent night.

The nice thing about Merellä was that the magic seemed to block out that infernal ballad of the flowers and birds. While it was a nice reprieve, it was also rather disconcerting. The cloaking enchantments didn’t keep out the average old earworm, like Taylor Swift’s latest song, but they did this.

Which meant the song was in my head because of more psychokinetic reasons. Was it a side effect of one of the spells the Älvolk had done? Or had someone cursed me with it on purpose? But why would anyone want me to hear that damned song all the time?

It had an obvious parallel to the sorgblomma—the mourning flower the Älvolk had gotten. But the lyrics didn’t really tell me anything about what to do with the flower or what it was capable of.

A bird and a flower fall in love, but the bird flies away for the winter. The flower cries so much, the meadow becomes a lake. Which could maybe be a reference to Lake Sodalen that was near Áibmoráigi, according to the note I’d left myself during the Lost Month.

After all that crying, the flower dies, and the bird comes back. When he sees the flower dead, he freaks out and plucks all his feathers out, so he bleeds to death on the meadow. Then other flowers bloom in the field.

And that’s it. A song about a tragic romance between a weeping flower and a bleeding bird.

Those were more apt names, anyway, than summer bird and—

“—morning flower,” I heard Indu’s voice saying, and I shivered.

Suddenly, I remembered something from the Lost Month. The first night we were there, we’d been invited guests of Indu, before he had snapped and locked us all up. But earlier that night, the Älvolk had held a dinner for us in a dark medieval dining hall lit by a hundred candles.