He flung back the chains, but the trunk lid lifted only a fraction of an inch. What more obstacles stood in his way?
“Aperi.”
The sound of something unlatching. He hoisted up the lid. The girl was slumped over, her face invisible beneath her still-wild hair.
His mind went blank. She could not possibly be dead. Could she?
Reaching inside, he lifted a limp wrist and searched for a pulse. His heart thudded as he encountered a feeble throb in her vein.
“Revisce!”
No reaction.
“Revisce forte!”
Her entire person shuddered. Her head slowly rose. Her eyes opened. “Highness,” she mumbled.
He was weak with relief. But again, no time to indulge. “Hold still, I will get you out. Omnia interiora vos elevate.”
Everything in the trunk floated: the girl, who gasped and thrashed to find herself airborne; her wand; her satchel; and a great many items of clothing that must have been packed before the trunk was closed the first time. Not a single piece of clothing was nonmage. If the trunk had been entrusted to the Wintervales, it would have been before their exile.
He caught the girl, her wand, and her satchel, and let everything else fall back into the trunk. A quick swish closed the trunk. An undo spell set the plates and the chains back into place. Then he was easing the two of them out the trapdoor, with an “Omnia deleantur” tossed behind him to erase his footprints and any other traces he might have left in the dust of the attic.
“Did she hurt you?” he asked at the first stair landing.
“She siphoned all the air from the trunk.”
He looked down at the girl in his arms. Her breathing was labored, but she hung on to her composure remarkably well for someone who had just endured an attempt on her life—or perhaps she was simply too breathless for hysteria.
“Why did she want to kill me?” she rasped.
“I do not know. But she is disturbed—she lost her father and her sister in the uprising. Her husband also died young.”
Back in Wintervale’s room two stories below, he sat her on the bed and opened the opposite window. Fog rushed in.
“What’s that smell?”
“London.”
“London, England?”
He was glad that she had some knowledge of nonmage geography. “Yes. Here. Let me—”
The unmistakable sound of someone arriving in the wardrobe. Lady Wintervale must have come out of the time freeze, found the trunk empty, and summoned her son. Titus shut the window, yanked the girl off the bed, and pushed her flat against the wall in the blind spot behind the wardrobe.
She had the sense to keep still and silent.
The wardrobe opened. Wintervale leaped down. Titus’s heart imploded: the girl’s satchel was in plain sight under the windowsill—he had set it down earlier to open the window. But Wintervale paid no attention to the contents of his room and rushed out to the corridor.
Titus allowed himself a moment to calm down. “Hurry.”
The window was set deep in the facade of the house. He reopened the window and lifted the girl to the ledge. Next, her satchel in hand, he climbed out, closed the window, and latched it with a locking charm.
The fog was pervasive. She was lost in the thick, mustard-colored miasma. He felt for her but only came across a tumble of her hair.
“Where is your hand?”
She placed her hand in his, her fingers cold but steady. “I didn’t expect you’d really come.”
He exhaled. “Then you do not know me very well.”
He vaulted them both.
CHAPTER
VAULTING HAD NEVER BEEN A problem for Iolanthe before, whether on her own or hitching along with someone else. But this particular vault was like being crushed between two boulders. She shut her eyes and swallowed a scream of pain.
At the other end, she stumbled.
The prince caught her. “I am sorry. I knew vaulting might be difficult for you just now, but I had to get you to safety right away.”
He shouldn’t apologize. If they were safe, then nothing else mattered.
They were in some sort of an anteroom. There was a mirror, a console table, two doors, and nothing else. He pointed his wand at the door in front of them. It opened silently, revealing a room beyond with dark red wallpaper, pale yellow chairs, and a large, empty grate before which stood a wrought iron screen with curling vines and clusters of grapes.
He lifted her again and carried her to a reclining chaise. “I might have a remedy for you,” he said, setting her down.
He crossed the room to another door. “Astra castra, numen lumen.”
The stars my camp, the deity my light.
The door opened. He walked into a room lined with drawers and shelves as far as she could see, shelves holding books, shelves holding vials, jars, and bottles, shelves holding instruments both familiar and exotic. A caged canary sat upon a long table at the center of the room. Also on the table were two valises, one brown, the second a dull red.
He disappeared briefly from her sight. She heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. He returned, sat down next to her, and cradled her head in the crook of his arm. The bitter tang of the fog clung to the wool of his jacket.
“That fog,” she mumbled, “is it natural?”
It had been thick enough to cut with a knife, alarmingly yellow in color, and smelly like pig swill.
“There is no magic behind it, but it is not entirely natural either—a consequence of Britain’s industrialization. Here: this is to relieve the effects of vaulting.”
The prince held a vial with a fine midnight-blue powder inside. He took her by the chin, his fingers warm and strong, and tipped the blue powder into her mouth. The flavor reminded her of seawater.
“There is no counter-remedy for suffocation, exactly, but this is good for your general well-being.”
He held out a second vial. The wellness remedy, silver-gray granules, tasted unexpectedly of oranges.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” she murmured.
He was already walking away, back into the room full of shelves.
“What is that room?” she asked.
“My laboratory,” he answered, opening a drawer.
“What do you do there?”
With his back to her, he shrugged. “What anyone does in a laboratory—potions, distillations, elixirs, things of that sort.”
She conducted practicals at the village school for Master Haywood—practicals, in one form or another, were compulsory until a pupil reached fourteen. But it wasn’t as if mages made their own potions at home. Commercial distilleries and potion manufacturers adequately supplied their needs. In fact, many households didn’t even possess the necessary implements to make the recipes she taught.
Was it just princely eccentricity that had him equip an entire laboratory for himself, or was it something else?
The prince came out of the laboratory and closed the door behind him. He was tall and lean—not thin, but tightly built. When she first saw him in her collapsed house, he’d had on a plain blue tunic and dark trousers tucked into knee-high boots. Simple country attire, nothing like the elaborate state robes he donned for his official portraits.
Now he wore a black jacket with a hunter green waistcoat, black trousers, and shoes of highly polished black leather—the jacket was more formfitting than the tunics men wore in the Domain, the trousers, less so.
Her gaze returned to his face. Official portraits were notorious unreliable. But in this case, the pictures hadn’t lied. He was handsome—dark hair, deep eyes, and high cheekbones.
In his portraits he always sneered. She had once remarked to a classmate that he came across as mean-spirited, the kind of boy who would not only tell a girl she looked like a bumpkin but deliberately spill a drink on her. In person he appeared less cynical. There was a freshness to his features, an appealing boyishness, and—as far as she could see—no malice at all.