He tapped on his wand. A light flared, shining on a black limb in the grass—the lower portion of a wyvern’s leg.
From the direction of the castle came an unearthly roar. The ground trembled, a vibration he felt in his shins. His heart raced as if it could escape; his breaths overshadowed all other sounds of the night.
Had this been a regular session in the Crucible, he would have hurried forward to find out just what fearsome creature now prowled the castle. But this was real. And he could not afford to end up in pieces all over the landscape.
On his way from Black Bastion to the meadow, he had passed over a market town not too far to the north. If he was not mistaken, it was the setting for “Lilia, the Clever Thief.”
He had not practiced in that particular story in years, but he remembered it opened with the town being terrorized by an untamed wyvern. Not at all what he needed at this juncture, but as nonmages would say, better the devil you knew.
The wyvern would not respond.
Iolanthe had gone up to the costume room next to the ballroom, found a white dress that looked as if it could have been worn in times of antiquity, and slipped it on over her nonmage clothes. Then she’d snatched a black wig from underneath the sleeping wig master and set it on her head with a heavy application of adhesive spells, so it wouldn’t fly away while she was airborne.
She’d read “The Battle for Black Bastion.” She knew that Helgira had put out a call for assistance at some point. She would pretend to be one of the mages coming to aid her.
Her disguise in place, she approached the wyvern with extreme caution, leaped atop it, grabbed onto its skinny, scaly neck, and steeled herself to be violently tossed about.
Only to have the wyvern drool a little.
This was not a problem for which she’d prepared herself. On the one hand, she was thrilled that the prince had used the heaviest spells. On the other hand, she was faced with a comatose steed when she needed a lively one that would fly fast enough to rip off all but the most meticulously adhered wigs.
“Revisce.”
Nothing.
“Revisce forte.”
More of the same.
“Revisce omnino!”
Still nothing. This last was supposed to be a spell that came just short of making the dead walk.
She smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. The next second the wyvern let out a glass-shattering screech and shot up. She screamed and threw her arms around its neck.
The wyvern careened about the great hall with her hanging from its neck. She didn’t know whether it had been traumatized by the prince’s spells or whether it was her weight that made it frantic. Either way, it was doing its best to shake her loose.
She swung one leg up its back. The wyvern flipped upside down. She yelped and lost her footing.
The wyvern, one of the most ferociously intelligent beasts, must have noticed how her legs swung out as it banked a rapid turn. It threw itself at a pillar, pulling away only at the last possible second. She had to yank her legs into her chest to avoid smashing them on the pillar—and losing her grip on the wyvern.
The beast tried again. She tucked herself into a fetal position and cleared the pillar by less than an inch.
All of a sudden she remembered that she now controlled air—how could she have forgotten? Time to make this struggle a little less one-sided.
She willed a gust of headwind. The wyvern was not expecting that. With its wings spread wide, it was pushed by the current to a nearly vertical position.
She hooked her legs around its body—finally, a better perch. Now how to get the creature out of those doors without any reins—not that she knew how to work a set of reins in any case.
Well, the prince kept calling her the great elemental mage of their time. She had better come up with something.
Once the wyvern had leveled, and once she was sure her seat was secure, she hit the wyvern with a hard current that forced it to bank left. Then, a three-pronged approach that more or less hurtled the beast toward the front doors of the great hall.
Her efforts were inexact. The wyvern did head in the general direction of the doors, but it broke through the large rose window above instead, exiting the great hall in a shower of splintered wood and broken glass.
A messy business, rescuing princes.
It must be the fatigue of running five miles at the end of a day during which he had eaten only a handful of biscuits since breakfast. There was no other reason for Titus not to have vanquished the wyvern after a quarter of an hour.
He ducked into an alley. This was not good. Instead of fighting the wyvern, he was running away from it. So he could catch his breath, he told himself. It could not possibly be that he was afraid. Of dying uselessly. Stupidly. Of never seeing Fairfax again.
He crept along the edge of the alley. No sounds emanated from the cowered populace, or the wyvern. He held out his hand to feel his way—the sky had become completely overcast, the night impenetrable. His fingers came into contact with another wall.
He was in a blind alley.
He barely managed to throw up a shield as a stream of fire shot toward him—the wyvern had trapped him. He swore. He had not made this kind of mistake since he was thirteen, a lifetime ago.
“Aura circumvallet.”
The wyvern spewed more fire, but his spell acted as a holding pen for the fire. He shot two jets of flames at the wyvern’s belly. Subtle magic could not duplicate the scale of elemental magic, but he was decent at it.
The wyvern flew up to avoid his fire. He ran. But the beast again blocked his way at the mouth of the alley. He shot two more streams of fire. This time the wyvern was prepared and shielded itself with the outside of its wings. Dragon fire might singe its wings, but ordinary fire lacked the power.
He dove under one wing. The wyvern’s spiked tail came at him. He threw himself to the ground and rolled away. Still the end spike opened a nasty gash on his side.
He screamed in pain. And with that pain came an angry rush of energy. “Flamma caerula.”
A blue sizzle shot out of his wand into the wyvern’s belly. The beast twitched and roared. The momentum of the struggle at last shifted in Titus’s favor. Several minutes later, the wyvern was carrying him toward Black Bastion, while he applied salve to his person to stop the bleeding.
He wished his injury hadn’t happened. If you are cut, you bleed, Hesperia had told him long ago in her classroom. He could only hope his blood wasn’t dripping out of the Citadel’s copy. All those mages in there, looking for the cause of Haywood’s disappearance—a bleeding book in their midst would not go unnoticed.
The wyvern could not fly fast enough for him. He kept looking behind himself, watching for pursuers. Theoretically he knew he had no cause to worry: the knowledge that the Crucible could be used as a portal was passed down only to those in the direct line of succession. But sometimes others in the family gleaned such information by trickery or by accident—the Usurper, most famously.
The weather was turning uneasy. High winds ripped. Shearing currents blew the wyvern left and right. Then came a gust of headwind so vigorous, the wyvern was nearly flipped backward.
Titus flew lower, searching for calmer air. He did not find it. Nor did he find it at a greater altitude. A string of expletives left his tongue, only to be drowned by a roar that shook every bone in his body—the exact same roar that had sent him fleeing from Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
The wyvern screamed. Despite the uncooperative winds, it accelerated, as if driven by sudden fear. Titus pulled the hood of his tunic over his head, covered most of his face with the edges of the hood, and turned around.