The Burning Sky

elemental mage’s fire was not easy to divert by subtle magic, and yet he did it effortlessly—without even the aid of a wand.

You seem to have prepared a great deal for this. She’d had no idea how much. He was not a normal boy of sixteen, but a demi-demon in a school uniform.

“You are no match for me yet, Fairfax. But you will be, someday. And the more diligently you train, the sooner you can penalize me at will. Think about it: the fearful look in my eyes when I beg for mercy.”

She was being very adroitly maneuvered. He wanted her to slave for his goal, holding out his debasement as a carrot before her. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted only to—

She yanked sharply away from any thought of freedom.

“Please leave,” she said.

He pulled out his wand. “Incendia.”

A small fireball blazed into being. He waved it toward her. “Your fire, Fairfax. I will see you in the morning.”

CHAPTER 10

THE LAVATORY WAS NOT, THANKFULLY, as nasty a place as the prince had led Iolanthe to believe. Still, one look at the long urinal trough and she resolved to visit as infrequently as possible.

The corridor, like the rest of the house, had walls papered in ivy and roses. The lavatories and the baths occupied the northern end. Directly opposite the stair landing was a large common room. South of the common room were the individual rooms for the sixteen senior boys—fifteen senior boys and Iolanthe.

She and the prince occupied two adjacent rooms at the southern end of the floor. Across from their rooms was a smaller common room reserved for the house captain and his lieutenants. And just north of the prince’s room was the galley where the junior boys did some of the cooking for the senior boys’ afternoon tea. As a result, she and the prince were isolated from the rest of the floor.

As he’d intended, no doubt.

A seam of light shone underneath his door. Memories came unbidden: herself in the dark, looking up at the window of her room, yearning for the light. For him.

She reentered her room, closed the door, and dressed. The evening before, she’d disrobed with excruciating care, extricating the shirt studs, studying the attachment of the collar, and making sure she could duplicate the same knot with her necktie. She did not go to bed until she’d managed the serpens caudam mordens spell seven consecutive times.

No trouble with it this morning: the figurative serpent that was the binding cloth bit into itself and tightened to the limits of her endurance. The rest of the clothes went on easily enough. The necktie refused to look as crisply knotted as it had earlier, but it was acceptable.

When she was done, she checked her appearance in the mirror.

She’d always thought that if one looked carefully, it was possible to detect the cynicism beneath her sunny buoyancy. Now there was no need to look carefully at all. Mistrust and anger burned in her eyes.

She was not the same girl she had been twenty-four hours ago. And she never would be again.

The prince knelt before the grate, already dressed. At her entrance, he pulled a kettle from the fire.

“Did you sleep well?”

She shrugged.

He glanced at her, then bent to pour water into a teapot. For a moment he appeared strangely normal— young and sleep-tousled—and it made her acutely unhappy.

She looked away from him. Unlike her room, which had been carefully decorated to convey Archer Fairfax’s colonial upbringing, his was plain except for a flag on the wall, which featured a sable-and-argent coat of arms with a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn occupying the quadrants.

“That is the flag of Saxe-Limburg.” He pointed to a map on the opposite wall. “You will find it as part of Prussia.”

A golden tack, embossed with the same heraldic designs as the coat of arms, marked a tiny squiggle of land. She walked past the map to the window, lifted the curtain a fraction of an inch, and looked up.

The armored chariots were gone.

“They left at quarter past two,” he said. “And they are probably not coming back—an order from Atlantis supersedes an order from the Inquisitor.”

She resented that he’d read her thoughts.

“Give me that, would you?” He pointed to a small, plain box on his desk.

She handed the box to him. She thought he’d open the box, but instead he put it away in a cabinet that contained plates, mugs, and foodstuff before handing her a cup of tea.

The tea was hot and fragrant. How did he learn to make a perfect cup? When he’d been a junior boy, had he too carried luggage, lit fires, and cooked for senior boys?

She refused to ask him any personal questions. They drank their tea in silence. He finished first and inspected her, while she pretended not to notice it.

“Good,” he said. “Except for the cuff links.”

He showed her what cuff links were on his own sleeves. Pesky things: she’d thought them part of the previous day’s shirt.

When she looked up from her cuffs, he was still studying her. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You are to always tell me the truth.”

“The truth as it relates to our mission. I am not obliged to inform you of my every thought, just because you happen to ask.”

“You snake,” she said.

“What can I say? Prince Charming only exists in fairy tales. And speaking of fairy tales—”

From a bookshelf next to the window, he lifted a small stone bust, pulled out the volume beneath, and set it on his desk. The book looked very old. The leather binding, once probably a brilliant scarlet, had faded to a reddish brown. The gold embossing on the title had smudged away almost entirely, but she managed to make out the words A Book of Instructional Tales.

“This is the Crucible,” he said.

“What is a Crucible?”

“I will show you. Sit down.”

She did. He took a seat on the other side of the desk and placed his hand on the book.

“Now put your hand on the book.”

She followed his direction, half-reluctant, half-curious.

He was silent for more than a minute—must be quite the long password. Then he tapped the book with his wand. Her hand was suddenly numb to the elbow. Something yanked her forward. She opened her mouth to shout as the desk rose to meet her forehead with alarming speed.

She landed on her knees in tall grass. The prince offered her his hand, but she ignored him and pulled herself to her feet. All about her was a large meadow bathed in early morning light. At one end of the meadow, the beginning of rolling hills covered in a dense forest. At the other end, a good several miles away, a castle on a high knoll, its white walls tinted rose and gold by the sunrise.

“So it’s a portal, the Crucible.”

“That is not how it is used. Everything you see is an illusion.”

“What do you mean, illusion?”

It could not be. She scooped her hand into the tall grass. Small, white, five-petaled flowers nodded in the morning breeze. The blades of grass were rough against her skin. And when she broke a blade and brought it to her nose, the smell was the fresh and mildly acrid scent of plant sap.

“It means none of this is real.”

A pair of long-tailed birds flew overhead, their feathers iridescent. A herd of cattle masticated near the edge