He picked her up and wobbled as he straightened. “You wanted to be in the bath with me earlier today, darling, did you not? Well, now you get your wish.”

Once the amethyst tub had been filled, Titus climbed in fully clothed. He washed the blood from Fairfax’s feathers, then recited the password. The next instant, he was sitting in a different tub, an empty one, his clothes and her feathers perfectly dry.

“Welcome to where I am supposed to go to school,” he murmured.

The former monastery was a place of solitude and contemplation, a refuge from the pressures of the throne. It was also used as a site of learning, its clear air and distance from worldly distractions judged helpful to the studies of a princeling.

Titus did spend months here every year between Eton halves, reading, practicing, and experimenting. For someone who must keep secrets, it was a haven, as free from spies and surveillance as it was possible to be these days. There was no indoor staff except for those he chose to bring, and the outdoor staff came only once a week to maintain the grounds.

He climbed out of the tub, as clumsy as a sleepy toddler. One hand on the wall to steady himself, he inched down long, echoing corridors, stopping every minute or so to close his eyes and catch his breath.

Every time he did so, an ominous scene played upon the inside of his lids, of wyverns and armored chariots crisscrossing the sky in a choreography of deadly gracefulness. The vision had first come to him in the Inquisition Chamber, supplanting the image of his mother and her canary, just before a surge of horrendous pain rendered him unconscious.

And now it repeated itself whenever he closed his eyes for more than a few seconds.

Fairfax chirped as he opened the door of the repository. “Yes, I modeled my laboratory after this place. But this is much grander, isn’t it?”

The repository was ten times bigger, its shelves holding every substance known to magekind. He opened drawers and squinted—his headache gave him double vision.

“We are in trouble.” He wished he would shut up, but the truth serum still pulsed in his veins and he was too weak to fight it. In any case, she would not remember a thing once she resumed human form. “I am afraid I have not convinced the Inquisitor of anything except my willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the truth from her.”

Fairfax trembled in his hand. Or perhaps it was just him, shaking.

He poured an array of remedies down his gullet, followed by two bottles of tonics. They tasted like water that had been left out for a fortnight, thick with growing scum. He had not bothered to make them less disgusting, thinking he would be manly enough, in times of necessity, not to quibble over such minor details as flavor and texture.

He was wrong, as evidenced by another trip to the water closet to vacate the contents of his stomach.

Stumbling back out, he collected Fairfax from the counter where he had deposited her and headed for a different section of the repository, leaning against counters along the way to preserve his strength.

“I need to turn you back,” he said, showing Fairfax a glass vial of white granules he had located. “You would have turned back on your own sometime during the night, but better you do it while I am still lucid.”

He counted out three granules. She reached eagerly toward them. He blocked her beak. “No, not now, unless you plan to appear naked before me. Wait, that is your plan, is it not?”

He meant to leer at her but had to grimace when his head throbbed again.

She pecked hard at the outside of his hand.

“‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’” he quoted. “Never mind. You do not know any Shakespeare, you ignoramus.”

Fairfax in hand, he zigzagged to an adjacent room, where he sometimes slept when he stayed too late in the repository. He pulled out the sheet covering the thin mattress, placed her on the cot, laid the three granules before her, and spread the sheet over the whole cot again, burying her beneath it. His tunic and boots he peeled off so she would have something to wear. The tunic had not entirely escaped his bleeding, but considering the circumstances, it was pristine enough.

“Remember, it will be unpleasant and you will not be able to move immediately afterward. I will wait in the repository.”

She chirped after a few seconds, perhaps trying to make sure he had vacated the premises.

“I am still here, shuffling along,” he answered.

She chirped again. She was most likely telling him to hurry, but he chose to have a little fun with her—there was a severe scarcity of fun in his life. “You are anxious? Imagine how I feel, darling.”

She chirped twice in a row. He wished he did not feel so wretched—carrying on an imaginary conversation with her would otherwise have been a highly rewarding use of his time.

“How can you help? If you will only . . .” He stopped.

He had been trying, with no apparent success, to bridge the chasm between them. But that was not all he wanted, was it? No, he was far more ambitious than even he had realized. He wanted her to . . .

“Fall in love with me.” He heard, loud and clear, the words the truth serum compelled from him. “If you loved me, everything would be so much easier.”

The transformation was horrendous, as if a hundred rodents were trying to gnaw their way out from underneath Iolanthe’s skin.

Afterward, she lay in place, unable to move—and not merely because of her physical feebleness.

The things that boy wanted frightened her.

She should laugh at such ambitions on his part: nothing about him held any romance for her, not his crown, not his black heart, not his beautiful liar’s face.

Yet she trembled inside, for what he wanted was not impossible.

It was not even improbable.

“I am not dead—or about to die,” said Titus in response to Fairfax’s gasp from the door.

She was at his side, her breaths ragged. “Then why are you on the floor?”

He had lost consciousness again after retaking most of the remedies. And it had seemed easier, after he had come to, to simply remain on the ground. “You had the nearest bed. How was the transformation, by the way?”

She did not answer, but only pulled him to his feet and half carried, half dragged him to the cot next door. “Are you sure you are not dying this instant?”

“I am very certain. I will die by falling, not lying comfortably in a bed.”

“What?”

Damn the truth serum still raging through his veins. He should have censored himself—she was no longer a bird. “Make me some tea, would you? Everything you need you will find in the the repository, in the cabinet underneath the globe.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed glance but left, returning a few minutes later with two steaming mugs and a tin of everwell biscuits.

He tried to sit up.

She placed her palm firmly against his chest. “Stay down.”

“How do I drink tea on my back?”

“Have you forgotten who I am?” A globule of tea the color and translucency of smoky quartz floated toward him. “This is how you will drink tea lying down.”

Her expression was somewhere between anger and grief, but closer to which he could not tell. “I can sit up for a cup of tea,” he said.

“Don’t. I was there. I knew what the Inquisitor did to you. I saw you bleed from the ears.”

He sucked in a breath. “You remembered?”

“Yes.”

Before he attempted his first transmogrification, he had read all the extant literature on the subject. Transmogrification was fairly old magic, so even though it had always been frowned upon and at times outlawed, there was no lack of records and studies.

In fifteen hundred years, there had been only two accounts of mages claiming memory from time spent in animal form. Most scholars considered those mages to have been either exaggerating or lying outright.