Birmingham’s voice rang out in the hall, reminding the boys that it was time to prepare for bed. Soon Mrs. Hancock would come around to knock on all the boys’ doors, making sure they were in their rooms at lights-out.
She checked the common room; he was not there. The baths were already locked. Only the lavatory was left.
Wait, she told herself. But half a minute felt like a decade. She swore and made for the lavatory, a facility she used only when it was entirely or mostly unoccupied. It was now shortly before lights-out: the place was not going to be empty.
She took three deep breaths before going inside, and still she almost ran out screaming. The trough was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with boys emptying their bladders—the last thing she wanted to witness, even if it was from the back.
“You want my place, Fairfax?” asked Cooper as he stepped back from the trough, refastening his trousers.
“No, thank you! I’m looking for Sutherland. He has my classical geography book.”
She knocked on the stalls. “You in there, Sutherland?”
“Good Lord, can’t a man visit a privy in peace anymore?” came Birmingham’s grumpy reply from the last stall.
All the boys laughed. Iolanthe contributed her own nervous guffaws and escaped with unholy haste.
On a different night she might not have worried so much—if the prince didn’t have some secret plans brewing, he wouldn’t be Titus VII. But this day they’d faced their nemesis and escaped by the skin of their teeth. He must be dying to find out how she’d pulled off the deed. Not to mention they desperately needed to come up with a coherent strategy, together, to counter the Inquisitor’s next move.
She returned to the prince’s room. There was one place she hadn’t checked, the teaching cantos. The Crucible was on his desk; she placed her hand over it. Once she was in the pink marble palace, she ran to his classroom.
A note on his door said, F, I will be gone for a short while. No need to worry about me. And no need to worry about lights-out. T.
Instead of reassuring her, his vagueness about his destination and purpose made her even more uneasy.
She opened the door—and paused on the threshold. Inside the classroom, illuminated by a dozen torches, woody vines rose wrist-thick from openings on the floor, intertwined in knots and arabesques on the walls, and spread open upon the ceiling. Clusters of small golden flowers hung from this canopy. A bank of French windows opened to a large balcony and a dark, starry sky.
There were no tables or chairs upon the carpet of living grass, but two elegant bench swings set at oblique angles to each other. The prince sat on one of those swings, in his Eton uniform, his arms stretched out along the back of the bench.
“Tell me what I like to read in my leisure time,” he said.
“Who gives a damn! Where are you?”
As if he hadn’t heard her at all, he repeated his demand.
With a pinch in her heart she remembered it wasn’t really him, only a record and a likeness. “Ladies’ magazines, English.”
“Where did you last kiss me?”
The memory still burned. “Inside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
He nodded. “What can I do for you, my love?”
He’d never before called her that. Her chest constricted. Was he saving all such endearment for after his death? “Tell me where you’ve gone.”
“You are, presumably, speaking of a time in my future. I have no knowledge of the specifics of the future.”
“Where is your spare wand?” She hoped she wouldn’t have to take matters into her own hands. But she planned to, as he’d taught her, assume the worst and prepare accordingly.
“In a box in my tea cabinet, the same box I asked you to pass to me before our first session in the Crucible. It will open only at your touch—or mine. Password: Sleeping Beauty. Countersign: Nil desperandum.”
“In an emergency, what should I take from your room other than the Crucible and the spare wand?”
“My mother’s diary, currently disguised as Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde. Password: Better by innocence than by eloquence. Countersign: Consequitur quodcunque petit.
She asked him to repeat all the passwords and countersigns and committed them to memory.
Back in his room, she’d just found his spare wand when Mrs. Hancock called, “Lights off, gentlemen, lights off.”
He’d told her not to worry about lights-out, but she needed a plan, in case his went awry. She could imitate the prince’s voice and then, hoping Mrs. Hancock bought her imitation, turn off the lights, step out, and enter her own room before Mrs. Hancock’s eyes.
Except she wasn’t much of a mimic.
The knock came at the prince’s door. Before Iolanthe could make a sound from her suddenly parched throat, the prince’s voice rang out. “Good night.”
Her heart almost leaped out of her mouth. She spun around. He had not come back. She couldn’t be entirely sure, but the stone bust he kept on his shelf appeared to have answered for him.
“Won’t you turn off your lights, Your Highness?” asked Mrs. Hancock as Iolanthe shoved the wand up her sleeve and grabbed the Crucible and Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde from his desk.
The gas lamp went out by itself. Iolanthe opened the door just enough to let herself out.
“I will be turning my lights off right away also, ma’am,” she said to Mrs. Hancock, smiling.
“See that you do, Fairfax. Good night.”
“Good night, ma’am.”
Her heart still pounding, she turned off the lights in her room, drew the curtain, summoned a smidgeon of fire, and set it in the depression of a candleholder. Sitting down on her bed, she opened the diary first: she’d quickly know whether it had anything to tell her.
What she found terrified—and enraged—her. His mother specifically mentioned Atlantean soldiers and the presence of Lady Callista, known agent of Atlantis. And he’d taken off without so much as a word to her. It was almost as if he wanted to march to his doom.
She stormed into his classroom in the teaching cantos and tersely repeated the answers to the questions meant to ascertain her identity.
“If I need to go to the Citadel, right now, and I have no other means of transportation, what should I do?”
His record-and-likeness frowned. “No other means of mobility at all?”
“None. I am in a no-vaulting zone. And I have no vehicles, flying carpets, beasts of burden, or portals.”
“And you absolutely must go?”
“Absolutely.”
“You may use the Crucible as a portal, but only if it is a matter of life and death, and only after you have exhausted all other options.”
“You told me the Crucible is not a portal.”
“I said it is not used as one. And with good reason. To use the Crucible as a portal requires that a mage physically inhabit the geography of the Crucible. When you get hurt, you get hurt. When you are killed, you die. It is doable, but I advise strenuously against it.”
She wanted to yank him off his swing and shake him. “If you advise strenuously against it, why have you done it yourself, you nitwit?”
He was perfectly unruffled. “I do not believe I have prepared for that question. Rephrase or ask a different one.”
She forced herself to calm down. “Tell me how the Crucible works as a portal.”
“It serves as an entrance into other copies of the Crucible. There were four copies made. One I keep with me at all times, one is at the monastery in the Labyrinthine Mountains, one in the library at the Citadel, and the fourth has been lost.”