If even a remote village in desperate need of a schoolmaster wouldn’t retain him, who would?
“You forget,” she reminded him. “The laws are very clear that when a ward turns sixteen, she no longer needs her guardian’s permission for her freedom of movement.”
She could have left him more than six months ago.
He pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a gulp. The sickly sweet scent of merixida wafted to her nostrils. She pretended not to notice, when she’d have preferred to yank the bottle from his hand and throw it out of a window.
But they were no longer the kind of family whose members raged honestly at one another. Instead, they were strangers conducting themselves according to a peculiar set of rules: no reference to his addiction, no mention of the past, and no planning for any kind of a future.
“Then you will simply have to trust me,” he said, his voice heavy. “We must keep you safe. We must keep you away from the eyes and ears of Atlantis. Will you trust me, Iola? Please.”
She wanted to. After all his lies—No, this is not match fixing. No, this is not plagiarism. No, these are not bribes—she still wanted to trust him the way she once had, implicitly, completely.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
She’d never before acknowledged openly that she had only herself to rely on.
He recoiled and stared at her. Was he searching for the child who’d adored him unabashedly? Who would have followed him to the end of the world? That girl was still here, she wanted to tell him. If he would only pull himself together, she would gladly let him take care of her, for a change.
He bowed his head. “Forgive me, Iolanthe.”
This was not an answer she’d expected. Her breath quickened. Did he really mean to apologize for everything that had led her to lose faith in him?
He moved all of a sudden, marching toward the cauldrons while unscrewing the cap of his flask.
“What are you—”
He poured all the merixida that remained in the flask into the light elixir on which she’d slaved for a fortnight. Then he turned around and pulled a mute, openmouthed Iolanthe into his arms and hugged her hard. “I have sworn to keep you safe, and I will.”
By the time she comprehended what he’d done, he was already walking out of the schoolroom. “I will inform Mrs. Oakbluff that you will not be able to perform the lighting of the path this evening, because you are too ashamed that your light elixir failed.”
Iolanthe stared at the ruined light elixir, a flat, mildew-green puddle without any hint of viscosity. Silver light elixir she’d promised Mrs. Oakbluff, but silver light elixir could not be had for love or money at the last minute.
Despair swamped her, a bitter tide. Why did she try so hard? Why bother saving his post when no one else cared, least of all he himself?
But she was too accustomed to brushing aside her self-pity and dealing with the aftermath of Master Haywood’s actions. Already she was at the bookshelves, pulling out titles that might help. The Novice Potionmaker did not deal with light elixirs. The Quick Solution: A Classroom Handbook to Potionmaking Mistakes provided only guidance for light elixirs that emitted a foul smell, solidified, or wouldn’t stop fizzing. The Potionmaster’s Guide to Common and Uncommon Draughts gave her a lengthy historical perspective and nothing else.
In desperation she turned to The Complete Potion.
Master Haywood loved The Complete Potion. She had no idea why—it was the world’s most pretentious doorstop. In the section on light elixirs, beyond the introductory paragraphs, the text was in cuneiform.
She kept flipping the pages, hoping for something in Latin, which she read well, or Greek, which she could manage with a lexicon, if she had to. But the only passages not in cuneiform were in hieroglyphs.
Then, all of a sudden, in the margins, a handwritten note she could read: There is no light elixir, however tainted, that cannot be revived by a thunderbolt.
She blinked—and hastily tilted her head back: she had no idea there were tears in her eyes. And what kind of advice was this? Placing any elixir in a downpour would cause irreversible damage to the elixir, defeating any hope of repairing it.
Unless . . . unless the writer of the note had meant something else, a summoned thunderbolt.
Helgira the Merciless had wielded lightning.
But Helgira was a folkloric character. Iolanthe had read all four volumes and twelve hundred pages of The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages. No real elemental mage, not even any of the Greats, had ever mastered lightning.
There is no light elixir, however tainted, that cannot be revived by a thunderbolt.
The author of those words certainly had no doubt it could be done. The swirls and dashes of the penmanship brimmed with a jaunty confidence. As she looked up, however, the prince in his portrait expressed nothing but disdain for her wild idea.
She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a minute. Then she pulled on a pair of thick gloves and grabbed the cauldron.
What did she have to lose?
The prince was about to kiss Sleeping Beauty.
He was tattered and sweaty, still bleeding from the wound on his arm. She, his reward for battling the dragons that guarded her castle, was pristine and beautiful—if blandly so.
He walked toward her, his boots sinking ankle deep in dust. All about the garret, in the gray light that filtered past the grime on the window, cobwebs hung as thick as theatrical curtains.
He was the one who had put the details in the room. It had mattered to him, when he was thirteen, that the interior of the garret accurately reflect a century’s neglect. But now, three years later, he wished he had given Sleeping Beauty better dialogue instead.
If only he knew what he wanted a girl to say to him. Or vice versa.
He knelt down beside her bed.
“Your Highness,” his valet’s voice echoed upon the stone walls. “You asked to be awakened at this time.”
As he thought, he had taken too long with the dragons. He sighed. “And they lived happily ever after.”
The prince did not believe in happily-ever-after, but that was the password to exit the Crucible.
The fairy tale faded—Sleeping Beauty, garret, dust and cobwebs. He closed his eyes before the nothingness. When he opened them again, he was back in his own chamber, sprawled on the bed, his hand atop a very old book of children’s tales.
His head was groggy. His right arm throbbed where the wyvern’s tail had sliced through. But the sensations of pain were only his mind playing tricks. Injuries sustained in the imaginary realm of the Crucible did not carry over to the real one.
He sat up. His canary, in its jeweled cage, chittered. He pushed off the bed and passed his fingers over the bars of the bird’s prison. As he walked out to the balcony, he glanced at the grand, gilded clock in the corner of the chamber: fourteen minutes past two o’clock, the exact time mentioned in his mother’s vision—and therefore always the time he asked to be awakened from his seeming naps.
In the real world, his home, built on a high spur of the Labyrinthine Mountains, was the most famous castle in all the mage realms, far grander and more beautiful than anything Sleeping Beauty ever occupied. The balcony commanded splendid views: ribbon-slender waterfalls cascading thousands of feet, blue foothills dotted by hundreds of snow-fed lakes, and in the distance, the fertile plains that were the breadbasket of his realm.