When he was done, he looked expectantly at Titus. Titus, after a moment of hesitation, clapped. It was good music.
The prince—who would someday have no music, no child, and only tatters of his youthful dreams—graciously inclined his head, acknowledging the applause.
“Now, Your Highness,” said Titus, “I would like to ask you some questions about Atlantis.”
CHAPTER 
20
IN THE DISTANCE, SWORDS, MACES, and clubs bewitched by the Enchantress of Skytower continued to hurtle toward Risgar’s Redoubt. Titus went through a cascade of spells to lock, steady, amplify, and focus his aim. The missiles must be struck down when they were more than three miles out, beyond the outer defensive walls of the redoubt. The moment they crossed over the walls, they would dive to the ground to wreak havoc on lives and property.
It was enjoyable, the repetition of the spells. It would have been meditative had his aim been perfect. But his success with moving objects hovered stubbornly at 50 percent. He would hit a few targets in a row, then miss the next few.
“That’s it for this flock,” shouted the captain. “Eat something quick if you need to. Visit the privy. The next flock will be here in no time.”
Fairfax appeared next to him on the rampart, paying little attention to the soldiers rushing about. “Sorry it took so long. Rogers’ verses were in terrible shape.”
He had heard an Eton education described as something that taught boys to write bad verses in Latin and just as awful prose in English.
“You ought to charge a fee for your help.”
“Next Half I will. You wanted to see me?”
He always wanted to see her. Even when they were both in the Crucible together, the sad truth was that they saw far too little of each other, with most of her time spent in the practice cantos, and most of his in the teaching cantos.
He took her elbow and exited the Crucible. “Remember what I told you about the rupture view?”
She nodded. “The image of wyverns and armored chariots you saw in your head when I interrupted the Inquisitor.”
“I cannot be completely sure, but after speaking to my grandfather, I think it is the outer defenses of the Commander’s Palace in Atlantis.”
“The one in Lucidias?”
Lucidias was the capital city of Atlantis. He shook his head. “That compound is called Royalis—it used to be the king’s palace, when Atlantis still had kings. The Commander’s Palace is in the uplands. My grandfather had a spy who managed to send back a message in a bottle that traveled a thousand miles in open ocean. He indicated the rough location of the palace and noted that it had several rings of defense, one of wyverns, one of lean, swift, armored chariots, and another of huge chariots that carried dragons.”
“You didn’t mention dragons being carried.”
“No, my view was too brief to notice all the details. I knew fire was coming out from some of the chariots, but I did not know what was producing the fire. It makes sense—several of the dragon species with the hottest fires either cannot fly or cannot fly well. By putting them on aerial vehicles, Atlantis can better exploit their fire.”
She rose from her chair, went to his tea cabinet, and pulled out the small bag of chocolate macaroons he had recently purchased on High Street. Slowly, she ate three macaroons, one after another.
“It sounds as if you mean to tell me we will have to go to the Commander’s Palace. Would it not be to our advantage to lure the Bane out to a less hostile location?”
He extended his hand toward her—he needed something to fortify him too. “What do you think of our chances at this less hostile location?”
She placed a few macaroons on his palm. “Next to nil.”
He took a bite of a macaroon. “And you think so because?”
“He is invincible. He cannot be killed—or so mages say.”
“And they are right—for once. Twice the Bane has been killed before eyewitnesses. Once in the Caucasus, where mages are experts at distance spell-casting. The second time when he was on the subcontinent to quell an uprising.
“In both cases, he was said to have been destroyed—brains and guts all over the place. In both cases, by the next day he was walking around, right as rain. And in both cases, the Domain sent spies to verify the accounts; they returned baffled because the witnesses were telling the truth.”
She fell back into her seat. “He resurrected?”
“Or so it seems. That was the reason my grandfather was interested in the defenses at the Commander’s Palace. If the Bane was truly invincible, he could sleep in the open and not fear for his life. But the Bane does fear something. And so does the Inquisitor—or she would not have been thinking about the defenses of the palace, which are vulnerable to great elemental powers.”
She bowed her head.
Sometimes, as he lay in bed at night, he imagined a future for her beyond her eventual confrontation with the Bane. A popular, well-respected professor at the Conservatory of Magical Arts and Sciences—she had mentioned the goal several times in the school records Dalbert had unearthed for Titus—she would try to live a quiet, modest life.
But wherever she went, thunderous applause would greet her, the great heroine of her people, the most admired mage in her lifetime.
It was a future that did not include him, but it gave him courage to think that by doing his utmost, perhaps he could still make it come true for her.
Tonight, however, that future was dimmer and more distant than ever.
She lifted her face. “Is it over the Commander’s Palace that you would fall?”
To his death, she meant.
He swallowed. “It is possible. My mother saw a night scene. There was smoke and fire—a staggering amount of fire, according to her—and dragons.”
“Which stories in the Crucible have dragons?”
“Half of them, probably. ‘Lilia, the Clever Thief,’ ‘Battle for Black Bastion,’ ‘The Dragon Princess,’ ‘Lord of the—’”
“What about ‘Sleeping Beauty’? My first time in the Crucible you said you’d take me to her castle someday to fight the dragons.”
He had deliberately not mentioned Sleeping Beauty. “The dragons there are brutal. I put in the toughest ones as part of my own training. And I still get injured, even though I have been doing this for years.”
“I want to go after supper,” she said.
“You already did two sessions in the Crucible today; you will not be in top form for the dragons.”
Her voice brooked no dissent. “I imagine by the time I get to the Commander’s Palace, I’d be quite tired too. I might as well get used to deploying my powers under less than optimum conditions.”
He wavered. He had no good reason to refuse her, but if she succeeded . . .
He was being irrational. Her first time she would not even get inside the castle’s gates, let alone climb all the way to the garret. He had nothing to fear.
“All right,” he said, “if you insist, we will go after supper.”
A thick ring of tangled briar girded Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The prince pointed his wand and blasted a fifty-yard-long tunnel through the bramble.
The white marble of the castle’s walls, lit by lamps and cressets, gleamed at the end of the tunnel. Inside the tunnel, however, only fantastically shaped shadows flickered. Iolanthe called forth globes of fire to float before her, shining their light on the path.
Her heartbeat was at an almost painful velocity—naturally brave she was not. She took a couple of deep breaths and tried to distract herself. “Why do you put the most brutal dragons here, rather than in a different story?” she asked him.
He blinked, as if the question had startled him. “It is convenient.”