Fairy Godmother

Elena stopped, and blinked for a moment, eyes dazzled.

It was difficult to say what purpose this room might have served King Stancia; it had no windows, but all the light came from magnificent sconces that had probably held huge, fat candles, but which now supported weirdly glowing balls of green light. But what dazzled her was that around the walls, heaped up as if they stood in a dragon's hoard, was treasure.

There was far, far more of it than there could possibly have been in Stancia's treasury. The heaps were as high as Elena's chest, and there was no order to any of it, except that the heaviest and most massive items were on the bottom. Avalanches of coins, loose jewels, and jewelry, cups, plates, platters, and bowls, boxes and bags, bales of cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver, candlesticks, incense-censors, breastplates, swords, daggers, lamps, bottles —

If it could be made of gold or silver, it was probably in those piles. If it could be studded with precious gems, it was probably in those piles. It reflected the light and dazzled the mind. If it was meant to impress, it certainly did that.

But there was no sense or reason to this display. It was too chaotic to allow anyone to appreciate it. A dragon made a hoard like this to sleep on; why would anything human arrange a room like this, a room that could only serve to excite greed and distract anyone who came here from the person who was supposed to be the center of attention?

Because in a clear space in the middle of the room was a throne, made of solid gold, ornamented with twisting shapes that looked like nothing Elena recognized, and studded with rubies, each the size of a pigeon's egg. The cat was standing to one side of this monstrosity, waving her tail impatiently.

'There!' she mewed. 'Under there!'

'Wait!' Elena said, and thought very, very hard. 'If I don't appear and the Good Pack takes back the castle, look for a man in a metal skin, called Alexander. He'll be able to understand you. Find him and bring him here.'

'All right. I do not like this place. I am leaving.'

And she did, whisking herself out the door, leaving Elena standing by herself in the doorway.

No wonder Sergei had said to look for the heart in a 'throne room.' This was certainly a throne room, although not as Elena understood the term. A 'throne room' was meant to concentrate all attention on the ruler. Here, whoever was sitting in that chair was of minimal importance compared to what was in the room.

She shook her head. Maybe Sergei could explain it later. Right now —

She circled around the throne and came at it from the back, somehow not wanting to approach from the front. Those rubies all felt — however irrational that was — like sleeping eyes. She didn't want them to wake up and notice her.

The back of the throne was plain, unornamented gold. Beneath the throne was a box.

She tried to move it; it was heavier than it looked. She tried again, and discovered that she could make it move, though with great difficulty. Carefully she slid it out, making as little sound as possible. She didn't know if those black spidery things could hear anything from this room, but she didn't want to find out that they could, the hard way. The box was horribly, horribly heavy, and if the floor of this room hadn't been of very slippery marble, she would never have been able to manage it. As it was, she could only ease it out a little at a time, biting her lip with the effort.

She'd been afraid that the box would be locked, but it wasn't — because the lock had, at some time in the past, been broken. The hasp that held it shut had broken off. Not a surprise, really; if someone was foolish enough to make a lock and hasp out of soft gold, it should be no great shock to discover it breaks after very little use....

Which made no more sense than this room.

She opened the lid of the box — and there it was, embedded in gold that filled the box, protected by a steel cage.

'It' was a diamond. A diamond the size of her head.

And inside it, seen through the glittering facets, something the size of her fist, something wet and red, pulsed rhythmically.

Her heart sank.

The diamond was embedded in the box. The box was too heavy to lift. The cage prevented her from smashing the stone, and even if she did, she wouldn't be able to get at the heart immediately —

— and by then, it would be too late. Alexander would have lost the fight. In fact, the only reason she knew that he hadn't was that the Sorcerer would have made short work of Julian and his 'army,' and from the faint sounds penetrating the walls of this room, the fighting was still going on.

Seconds ticked by as she tried her dagger on the steel cage, on the gold, and finally broke the tip off trying to shatter the diamond through the cage anyway. Nothing worked, and she became more and more frantic. Dark magics wove a web around it as impervious as the steel cage, preventing anyone from getting at it without shattering the diamond. She didn't have enough magic to get the thing out —

— or — did she?

Surely the thing was proof against any spell meant simply to remove it from the diamond.

But the Sorcerer had to put it back where it belonged from time to time, and he wouldn't want to bother with dispelling and resetting the magic around it.

Carefully, feeling as if she was wading through sewage, she tried to work her way through the ugly, vicious magic used to protect the heart. Bit by bit, she unraveled the close-woven spells with her mind and identified them — or at least, their purpose. Since she wasn't trying to dispel or break them, the magic left her alone, allowed her to worm her mental probe deeper and deeper into the noisome ball, until finally —

— she touched and identified the last spell.

Which was not a protective spell. Just as she had thought.