In the distance, obscured by rising dust, an army of giants advanced, as if an entire mountain range was scudding across the plain. The ground beneath Iolanthe’s feet shuddered. Boulders wobbled; pebbles hopped like so many drops of water on hot oil.

The wall that she had been building, from quarried blocks of granite originally intended for a temple, would have enabled the townspeople to attack the vulnerable soft spots atop the giants’ skulls. But the wall was nowhere near completion.

The giants bellowed and banged enormous hammers against their shields. She’d already stuffed cotton into her ears, but the clangor still startled her. Ignoring the din as best she could, she focused her mind on the next block of granite. It didn’t look particularly impressive in size, but it was five tons in weight. With the greatest difficulty, she’d managed to roll a three-ton block end over end to the base of the wall. But she couldn’t even lift a corner of this block off the ground.

The prince had assigned her three stories. In one, she needed to produce a cyclone to protect a poor family’s crops against a blizzard of locusts—but she could only come up with breezes. In another, she was to part the waters of a lake to rescue magelings who’d been stranded at the bottom in an ever-shrinking air bubble—had it been real, she’d have lost a great many magelings on her watch. And the wall—this was her sixth attempt at erecting the wall; she had yet to stop the giants.

Now when she woke up in the morning, the pain in her hands extended all the way to her elbows. She tried not to imagine what it would feel like when that same swollen sensation took over her entire body.

She kept on doggedly at her task until a giant hefted the very same granite block above his head and hurled it into the marketplace, setting off a long chain of screams.

She sighed. “And they lived happily ever after.”

No more giants. No more boulders. Instead of the deafening roar of battle, rain fell steadily and softly. She was back in the prince’s room and—

His hand was clamped over hers on the Crucible. His head rested on his other arm, his face turned toward her, his eyes closed. In the gray, watery light, he looked as tired as she felt. And thin, his face all angles. Granted, his was a remarkable bone structure—chiseled, one might say—but no one so young should be careworn to the point of gauntness.

Without quite realizing what she was doing, she reached out and touched his cheek. The instant her fingertips came into contact with his skin, she snatched her hand back. He did not react at all. She licked her lower lip, reached out again, and traced a finger along his jaw.

When she drew her hand back this time, she saw a note by his elbow.

I am in the reading room.

The teaching cantos consisted of more than classrooms. On the ground floor it also had a large library, referred to as the reading room. He’d been spending every spare minute there.

She looked back at him, this beautiful and just slightly warped creature. “I don’t care what the visions say,” she whispered, “I will not let you die. Not while I have a breath left.”

He was in the stacks, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, three books open before him in a semicircle, another dozen in a tall pile to the side.

Iolanthe picked up the book at the top of the pile. Her eyebrows nearly met her hairline at the title, How to Kill a Mage at Five Miles: A Primer on Distance Spell-Casting. “I have been wondering what you read in your leisure time.”

“A bit of light fare,” he said without looking up, “before I get back to Magical Properties of a Still Beating Heart.”

She smiled down at the top of his head. “So what are you looking for?”

“Something that will let me put the Inquisitor into a permanent coma. She will awaken. She will put me under Inquisition again—without you by my side. My only hope is to find a way to attack while her mind is extended and vulnerable.”

How quickly she’d hardened—she barely blinked at his answer. “You’ll be in the same room with her. How will How to Kill a Mage at Five Miles help?”

“I like reading it—something I cannot say for books dealing with mind magic. And that is a tongue-in-cheek title, by the way. Distance spell-casting is a perfectly legitimate target-hitting sport in many mage realms.”

“So the book doesn’t teach you to kill?”

“It is like archery. If you strike someone at the right distance and speed, your arrow will kill, but that is not why English ladies enjoy it at their country house parties.” He took the book from her. “How was the wall, by the way?”

“Not built.”

He shook his head. “Not good. You must be able to take on the Bane, and I must be able to take on the Inquisitor.”

That, in a nutshell, was their problem. “I can go back in again after supper, but now I need to write my critical paper.”

“Can you write me one too? It does not have to be good.”

“I’ll bet most other fugitives from Atlantis don’t have to write two sets of critical papers.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

Her heart slipped from its mooring, as it always did when he smiled. “Only this once. And you owe me.”

As she turned to leave, he said, “English household management magazines.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That is what I read in my leisure time.”

“You like household management?”

“I like the authoritative answers the magazines give. Dear Mrs. So-and-So, all you need to have hair that shines like the moon is to mix olive oil and spermaceti in a proportion of eight to one and apply liberally. Dear Miss So-and-So, no, you will not wish to serve soup at your wedding breakfast. One or two hot dishes if you must, the rest should be cold.”

Solvable problems, that was what he liked. The pleasure of ordinary concerns. The resolute lack of real danger.

Someday, she thought. Someday.

Iolanthe felt like a seed after a good long spring shower, soaked to bursting—yet somehow unable to break through her shell. Her capacity for elemental magic might be grand, but her ability stubbornly refused to improve.

At least the latest news offered some consolation. After a brief interval during which she’d seemed on the verge of consciousness, the Inquisitor had slipped deeper into her coma.

Iolanthe settled into a familiar cadence of classes and sports, a rhythm she had dearly missed in Little Grind. Sometimes it was almost possible to believe she was living only a slightly skewed version of normal life.

With the lengthening of the days, lockup happened much later in the evening, and boys were allowed outside as long as one last shimmer of the sun still remained above the horizon. For hours every day, she pitted herself against the boys on the pitch—where she could apparently do no wrong.

This athletic prowess earned her a ridiculous level of approval. She had always been careful to fit in wherever she went. But it was more than a little ironic that she had never been as popular as a girl as she was now as a boy, as someone who bore little resemblance to the real her.

This particular evening, after practice, many of the boys stayed behind to watch a game between the two best school clubs. Iolanthe packed up her gear and started toward Mrs. Dawlish’s. She enjoyed the camaraderie of her teammates, but she was always the first one off the pitch at the end of a practice: as much as she refused to believe the prophecy of the prince’s death, somehow it felt more ominous when she was away from him.

Kashkari fell into step beside her. They walked together, discussing a Greek assignment that was due in the morning. She remained somewhat wary of Kashkari, but no longer felt nervous in his company—he was most likely not a spy of Atlantis, only a shrewd and observant boy.