“But then the author goes on, saying that this particular song was found with artifacts relating to a skirmish between a Sami tribe and a Viking clan,” he continued. “They fought over a patch of land where a flower grew. Both groups believed the yellow snowball flower varrarassi had medicinal properties. The Sami won the first battle, but the brutal Viking clan attacked them during the night. Almost all the Sami were killed, and those that were left were chased off the land. The author doesn’t know what became of the Viking clan or the flower.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re thinking the varrarassi is the sorgblomma that the Vittra gave the Älvolk in exchange for us? The morning flower is the mourning flower.”

He nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m thinking, yeah.”

“But how did the flower end up in the hands of the Vittra?” I asked. “And what are the ‘medicinal’ uses?”

“I don’t know the answer to either of those questions,” he admitted glumly.

“The book doesn’t say anything about what the flower can supposedly do?” I asked. I flipped to the next page, which showed a big green dragon under the title “The Dragon Who Ate the Sun.”

A watercolor painting of a long, serpentine dragon—a wyrm, I knew from Liam’s book Dragons of Every Size—weaved between the lines of the short poem. Twenty stanzas told the short tale of a wyrm that ate fire, believing it was the sun, after the giants used a flaming elk heart as bait. Then the wyrm fell ill and died.

“No, the next one is just some weird retelling of the old Norse myths about Jörmungandr,” Pan said with a disappointed sigh. “I’ve been reading through the rest of the book, but only these two were found with the artifacts from the varrarassi flower skirmish, and I haven’t found any that mention a flower in a meaningful way, or hint at what the sorgblomma might be used for besides the vague term ‘medicinal purposes.’”

“So . . .” I set the book back down on his desk and ran my hand through my hair. “We have a song stuck in our heads, in a language neither of us really knows, about a bird and a magic medical morning flower that may or may not have something to do with our missing month.”

He smirked. “Aside from all the alliteration, I’d say you summarized the situation well.”

“But why?” I asked. “Where did it come from?”

Pan looked at me intently, his eyes narrowed slightly. “The daughters of the Älvolk sang it to us when we were with them. It’s one of the only things I remember from our time there.”