At last the latch stilled. But she barely caught a breath before the woman called, “Frangare!”

Frangare was a mason’s spell, used for cleaving boulders in two. The trunk must have been protected: it did not crack open, not even the smallest of fractures.

“Frangare!” the woman cried again. “Frangare! Frangare! Frangare!”

Iolanthe’s fingers were icy with fear. The trunk remained intact. But for how much longer? She tried to vault—and moved not an inch: no self-respecting mage dwellings allowed vaulting within its perimeters.

The woman set down the lantern and clutched the bodice of her dress, as if exhausted. “I forgot,” she said slowly. “He made the trunk indestructible so I could not get rid of it.”

So there was a man about. Could he help Iolanthe?

“On his deathbed he asked me to swear a blood oath that I would protect you as I would my own child, from the moment I first saw you,” the woman said softly. Then she laughed, a sound that chilled Iolanthe’s blood. “He wanted much, did he not?”

The woman lifted her head; her face was cold and blank, her eyes burning with fervor. “For you he gave up his honor,” she said. “For you he destroyed us all.”

Who was this madwoman? And why had anyone believed this house to be a secure location?

The woman raised her wand. The chains slammed back into place around the trunk. Her lips moved silently, as if she were praying.

Iolanthe held her breath. For a long minute, nothing seemed to happen. Then the ends of her hair fluttered. The trunk was shut, she herself was still—how could air move? Yet it moved. In only one direction: out of the trunk.

The woman intended to suffocate Iolanthe right in the trunk.

And air was the only element over which Iolanthe had no control whatsoever.

Titus’s pendant had warmed appreciably as he reached England. It had warmed further after he materialized in London.

Many Exiles from the Domain, accustomed to the urban life of Delamer, had chosen to settle in London, the closest thing Britain had to an equivalent. The girl had likely arrived at the home of an Exile.

The city was in the throes of one of its infamous fogs. He saw well enough with his fog glasses, but no one on the ground could spot him on his flying carpet.

Flying carpets were once the fastest, most comfortable, and most luxurious mode of travel. In this age of expedited channels, however, they had become antiques, much admired but little used. Titus’s carpet, measuring four feet in length, two in width, and barely a quarter of an inch in thickness, was actually a toy—and not meant for any child to ride on, but for dolls.

He flew over the town house of Rosemary Alhambra, the Exiles’ leader, but the pendant did not react further. Next he tried the house of the Heathmoors, considered the most powerful mages among the Exiles—still nothing. He was on his way to the home of Alhambra’s lieutenant when the pendant heated abruptly.

He had just passed Hyde Park Corner. The only mage family who lived nearby were the Wintervales. Surely not. No one in their right mind would entrust this girl to Lady Wintervale.

But as he circled above the Wintervale house, the pendant grew so hot he had to pull it outside his shirt so it would not scald his skin.

Wintervale House was one of the most tightly secured private dwellings Titus knew. Fortunately—most fortunately—Leander Wintervale, the son of the house, was Titus’s schoolmate, and there was a way to access the house from the former’s room at school.

Titus landed on a nearby roof, took off his fog glasses, and rolled the carpet into a tight bundle to carry under his arm. From there he vaulted to his resident house at school. Specifically, into Archer Fairfax’s perennially unoccupied room.

A glance out of Fairfax’s window showed Wintervale and Mohandas Kashkari, an Indian boy and Wintervale’s good friend, behind the house. The rain had reduced to a mist. Kashkari, the calmer of the two, stood in place; Wintervale paced around him, talking and gesticulating.

Excellent—now Titus did not need to devise a way to get Wintervale away from his room. He opened Fairfax’s door a fraction of an inch and peered out.

Many of the boys had returned. A cluster stood talking at the far end of the passage. But they decided to go to Atkins’ to buy some foodstuff and stomped down the stairs.

Once the corridor was empty, Titus dropped the flying carpet on the floor of his own room—after much tinkering he had fortified it enough to carry his weight, but the combined weight of both himself and the girl would keep the carpet grounded. Next he slipped into Wintervale’s room four doors down, squeezed inside Wintervale’s narrow wardrobe, and closed the door.

“Fidus et audax.”

He opened the wardrobe again to step into Wintervale’s room at the family’s London town house. The corridor outside was empty. He made for the stairs. Descending turned the pendant cooler. Ascending, hotter.

He sprinted up the steps.

There was still air in the trunk; it whished softly as it left. But breathing already felt like heaving a boulder with her lungs.

Soon the madwoman would have Iolanthe sealed in a vacuum. Her fingers shook. She looked out of the peephole, searching frantically for something she could use to help herself.

There! On a shelf in the recesses of the attic, among dusty metal instruments, stood one lone statuette of stone.

She could not manipulate ceramic—cooking the earth changed its properties—but she did have power over stone. She elevated the statuette. It hovered a few inches above the shelf. She swung her arm. The statuette smashed into the back of the woman’s head.

The woman cried. Her wand clattered to the floor. She did not, however, lose consciousness as Iolanthe had hoped, but only stumbled until she banged into crates piled against the wall.

Iolanthe hesitated. Should she attack the woman again in the latter’s weakened state?

But the woman already had her wand back in her hand. “Exstinguare.”

The stone statuette turned into dust. “Now what are you going to use?” said the woman, with a chilling smile.

Suddenly the air inside the trunk was so thin Iolanthe became light-headed. It felt as if someone had pushed her face into wet cement. Try as she did, she could not draw a single breath.

Faintly, very faintly, she became aware that something burned against her left thigh. Then everything went black.

As he arrived below the open trapdoor, Titus heard Lady Wintervale speaking.

“What have you done?” Her voice was low yet frantic. “Never again, remember? You were never, never to kill again.”

A blade of fear plunged into Titus’s heart. Lady Wintervale’s paranoia ran deep, and her sanity was not always reliable. Was he too late?

He wrapped a muffling spell about the rickety steps and climbed up. The moment he had Lady Wintervale in view, he pointed his wand. Tempus congelet, he mouthed, not wanting her to hear his voice before the time-freeze spell took effect.

If the spell took effect. He had never used it in the real world.

Lady Wintervale stilled. He darted past her to the trunk.

“Are you there? Are you all right?”

The trunk was as silent as a coffin.

He swore. The chains did not respond to the first few spells he tried. He swore again. If he had more time, he could coax the chains. But there was no time: the time freeze spell lasted three minutes at most. And the girl, if she was still alive, must be let out right away.

He looked about. There was nothing he could use. A moment later, however, he saw that the chains did not go around the trunk all the way, but were instead fastened to plates bolted to the side of the trunk. And the magic that anchored the plates to the trunk was ordinary enough that a stronger-than-usual unfastening cant did the trick.