“What about ‘Sleeping Beauty’? My first time in the Crucible you said you’d take me to her castle someday to fight the dragons.”

He had deliberately not mentioned Sleeping Beauty. “The dragons there are brutal. I put in the toughest ones as part of my own training. And I still get injured, even though I have been doing this for years.”

“I want to go after supper,” she said.

“You already did two sessions in the Crucible today; you will not be in top form for the dragons.”

Her voice brooked no dissent. “I imagine by the time I get to the Commander’s Palace, I’d be quite tired too. I might as well get used to deploying my powers under less than optimum conditions.”

He wavered. He had no good reason to refuse her, but if she succeeded . . .

He was being irrational. Her first time she would not even get inside the castle’s gates, let alone climb all the way to the garret. He had nothing to fear.

“All right,” he said, “if you insist, we will go after supper.”

A thick ring of tangled briar girded Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The prince pointed his wand and blasted a fifty-yard-long tunnel through the bramble.

The white marble of the castle’s walls, lit by lamps and cressets, gleamed at the end of the tunnel. Inside the tunnel, however, only fantastically shaped shadows flickered. Iolanthe called forth globes of fire to float before her, shining their light on the path.

Her heartbeat was at an almost painful velocity—naturally brave she was not. She took a couple of deep breaths and tried to distract herself. “Why do you put the most brutal dragons here, rather than in a different story?” she asked him.

He blinked, as if the question had startled him. “It is convenient.”

As far as she knew, every story was equally convenient to access in the Crucible. “Is it because you get to kiss Sleeping Beauty afterward?”

She was only joking. Or at least half joking. But he opened his mouth—and said nothing.

She stopped, flabbergasted by his implicit admission. “So . . . you want me to fall in love with you, while you play kissing games with another girl?”

It was the first time she had ever mentioned this particular scheme of his in the open.

He swallowed. “I have never done anything of the sort.”

Since he hadn’t doubled over in pain, she had to accept his answer as truthful. All the same, what wasn’t he telling her?

An unearthly shriek split the night, nearly tearing her eardrums.

“They have smelled us,” said the prince, his voice tight.

Overhead, flame roared, a comet of fire that shed pinpricks of orange through the thick tangle of thorns above. The heat of the flame had her turn her face away and shield it with her arms.

“What are they, exactly?” she asked, forgetting Sleeping Beauty for the moment.

“A pair of colossus cockatrices.”

She’d seen dragons at the Delamer Zoo quite a few times. She’d seen dragons at the circus. And once she’d gone on a safari with Master Haywood to the Melusine Archipelago, to see wild dragons in their native habitats. Still her jaw slackened as she emerged from the tunnel. Standing before the castle’s gates were two dragons with roosterlike heads, whose dimension dwarfed those of the castle’s walls. “Are they a mated pair?”

Colossus cockatrices, wingless, were ground nesters. To protect their eggs, the combined fire of a mated pair, thanks to a process that was still not clearly understood, became one of the hottest substances known to magekind.

The prince didn’t need to answer. The cockatrices before the castle entwined their long necks—exactly what a mated pair did—and screeched again.

An explosion of fire sped at them, its mass greater and hotter than anything she’d ever known. Instinctively she pushed back.

Her shriek nearly rivaled that of the cockatrices. The agony in her palms, as if she’d plunged her hands into boiling oil.

“Esto praesidium maximum!” the prince shouted. “Are you hurt?”

The fire stopped abruptly, barricaded a hundred feet away. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see blisters the size of saucers. But her palms were not even reddened from the heat. “I’m fine!”

“This shield can take two more hits. Should I set up another shield?”

“No, I want to see what I can do.”

The dragons took a fifteen-second rest, then attacked again. She tried to stop the fire from reaching the shield, but failed miserably. The shield cracked, distorting her view of everything behind it.

Fifteen seconds. Attack. The shield blocked the fire, but dissipated in the wake of it.

She reminded herself that she was dealing with illusions. But the stink of the cockatrices, the crackle of the brambles burning behind her, the torch flames that leaped back from the dragon fire, as if in fear—they were all too real.

She threw up a wall of water as the cockatrices screamed again. The water evaporated before the fire had even touched it.

Ice. She needed ice. She was not adept at ice, but to her surprise, a substantial iceberg materialized at her command.

The ice melted immediately.

Changing tactics, she used air to try to divert the fire. But all she did was split the fire mass in two, both halves hurtling straight toward them.

Now she had no choice but to pit herself directly against the dragons.

Ordinary fire was as pliant as clay. But this fire was made of knives and nails. She shrieked again with pain. But was she doing anything to the fire? Was she slowing it? Or did it merely seem to arrive at a more leisurely pace because the agony in her hands distorted her perception of time?

Slow or swift, it swooped down toward them.

“Run!” she yelled at the prince.

For the first time in her life, she fled before fire.

She opened her eyes to find herself back in the prince’s room, seated before his desk, her hand on the Crucible. The odor of charred flesh lingered in her nostrils. The skin on her back and her neck felt uncomfortably hot, as if she’d been out in the sun too long.

The prince knelt before her, one hand clamped on her shoulder, the other on her chin, his eyes dark and anxious. “Are you all right?”

“I—think so.”

He set two fingers against the pulse at the side of her throat. “Are you sure?”

Not at all. “I’m going back in.”

She might not have been born with natural courage, but she did loathe failure.

There was no fire burning in the bramble tangle and no tunnel going through: the Crucible always returned to its original state. The moons had risen, twin crescents, one pale, one paler.

“Does your shield spell have a countersign?” she asked the prince.

He hesitated, as if he wanted to tell her again to save the dragons for another day. I he gave her the countersign. She practiced the spell. When she thought her shield sturdy enough, she blasted a path through the brambles.

Walking through the tunnel, they discussed tactics and agreed that in order to eventually counter dragon fire, she must first achieve safety.

“Let’s both put up shields, mine on the outside of yours,” she said. That way, if her shield proved less than stalwart, they’d still have his for protection.

“Good idea.”

“But if my shield is good enough, then I’ll keep going.”

He nodded. “I will stay on this side and distract the cockatrices—if they alternate their fire between the two of us, it will give you more time to figure out what to do. But for this time, do not go beyond the front steps of the castle.”

“Why?” But then she remembered. “Is it because you don’t want me to see Sleeping Beauty?”

“That is not—”

“Is she pretty?”

“She does not exist.”

“In here she does. Is she pretty?” She disliked herself for the pestering questions, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

“Pretty enough.” He sounded strained.

“Do you enjoy kissing her?”