A sharp, almost metallic smell wafted to her nostrils. No, it couldn’t be. Her agitation must be playing a trick on her.

Something dripped to the floor.

A strangled bleat tore from her throat. She summoned a flicker of fire. Directly across from her, blood poured from the Crucible, forming a blackish puddle that drizzled steadily from her desk onto the floor.

She whimpered again. A second later, she leaped from her bed. With a wave of the prince’s spare wand, she cleared away the blood—all mage girls above the age of twelve knew how to handle blood of this quantity. At least the book itself hadn’t been stained, its pages dry and clean.

A thunderous crash came from her left. Instinctively she threw up a shield—and saved herself from shards of flying glass and the brick that been thrown into her room.

She stared at the brick a moment before stealing to the side of the window. She could just make out two figures behind the house. Her mind had been so much occupied with things not remotely related to school that she had trouble understanding what she was seeing. The prince was bleeding to his death out there, and here Trumper and Hogg wanted petty vengeance.

The next brick shattered the prince’s window. Soon everyone would come running, including Mrs. Hancock. The last thing Iolanthe wanted, on the night the prince had gone to the Citadel to make mischief, was to have him reported as missing from school at the exact same time.

She stunned Trumper and Hogg, who promptly wilted into the grass. Next she applied a levitation spell. When her elemental magic proved insufficient at moving boulders, she sometimes cheated with the help of levitation spells. As a result, her authority over stone remained debatable, but now she could effortlessly suspend two beefy senior boys three feet aboveground and maneuver them into the coppice at the edge of the small meadow.

With a few kicks, she redistributed the glass shards, which had fallen on the floor in a straight line against her shield, into a more irregular pattern. The Crucible in hand, she ran out of her room just as doors began to open up and down the corridor.

“Did you hear that?” startled boys asked one another. “What happened?” “Anyone else hear breaking glass?”

She turned on the lights in the prince’s room and mussed up his cot. Unfortunately, the Crucible was clean as a whistle, with not another drop of blood to give. She picked up a piece of glass shard, cut the pad of her left index finger, and squeezed a few drops of blood on the prince’s sheets. Then she smeared a streak of blood on her own face, shoved the Crucible into the waistband of her trousers—she had yet to change into her nightshirt—and set a spell to keep it in place.

Next, with the door wide open, she bellowed at the top of her voice, “Faster, Titus. Catch those filthy bastards!”

As she’d hoped, Mrs. Dawlish’s boys came running.

Helgira’s knife sliced through Titus’s left arm. The pain stunned him.

“Where is Mathi? Give this man some medical attention.” Helgira caressed him lightly under his chin. “Notice I spared you your wand arm.”

Titus swallowed. “My lady is magnanimous.”

She was already walking away. “I want to see Kopla, Numsu, and Yeri. The rest of you ready the bastion for battle.”

He stared at the furious reddening of his sleeve. He had not thought this through. What would happen to the blood he shed when he used the Crucible as a portal?

Mathi, a plump, middle-aged woman, came forward and pulled Titus to his feet. His hand clamped over the gash in his arm, he followed her to a small room with bitter-smelling poultices cooking over a slow fire. A cot lay in the corner. Unevenly sized jars of herbs lined the shelves.

The moment Mathi turned her back, Titus rendered her unconscious. He caught her with his good arm and laid her down on the cot. Mathi was probably the best healer for miles around, but he still did not want her primitive medicine.

Teeth clenched, he cleaned his wound. Then he took out the remedies and emergency aids he had brought with him, and poured two different vials on his wound and a packet of granules down his throat.

His wound began to close. He threw a battery of spells at his tunic to clean and deodorize it. It would not do to arrive at the Citadel looking and smelling like a massacre.

When he was more presentable, he set a keep-away spell on the dispensary’s door and set out for Helgira’s prayer alcove.

He asked his way toward Helgira’s quarters, using her promise to give him a woman as an excuse. Good-natured winks accompanied his progress for much of the way. Helgira’s handmaidens, however, refused to let him into her personal chambers. So he pulled out his wand and fought his way in.

The prayer alcove was located in Helgira’s bedchamber. He had just crossed the threshold when Helgira crashed in on his heels. There were two alcoves in the bedchamber, both curtained. He had no time to find out which was the prayer alcove, but leaped across her bed to the one that had the more elaborate curtain, muttering the password as he hurtled toward it.

If he chose wrong, he would smash into a three-foot-thick wall and die at the hands of a woman who had Fairfax’s face.

He did not smash into a three-foot-thick wall.

The other end of the portal was, of course, the prayer alcove in Helgira’s bedchamber—in the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible. Had Titus not been running for his life, he would have remembered to be slower and more cautious.

As it was, he flew out of this prayer alcove into the midst of this Helgira’s bedchamber.

This Helgira lifted her wand.

“Watch your feet!” Iolanthe shouted as Wintervale and Kashkari reached the door.

They caught themselves on the door frame and held on as they were bumped from behind by the arrival of Sutherland, Cooper, and Rogers.

But most of the boys had their slippers on and Cooper, who’d come barefoot, had Rogers toss him a pair of the prince’s shoes and trooped in after the others.

Exclamations of disgust and outrage filled the room.

“My God, there is blood,” cried Rogers.

“They’ve injured him,” Iolanthe said. “And I thought it was bad enough they almost brained me.”

More exclamations of disgust and outrage burst forth. “Bastards!” “We are not going to let anybody get away with something like this!” “Did you see who did it?”

“Trumper and Hogg, of course—the prince went after them already,” she said. “They tried to harass me earlier today, but I gave them a sound thrashing.”

“Hear, hear,” said Cooper.

“I’m not going to stand by and do nothing,” said Kashkari, rolling up his sleeves.

As he did so, the tattoo on the inside of his right arm became fully visible. It was not the letter M, but the symbol ♏, for Scorpio, his birth sign in both western and Vedic astrology.

You will best help him by seeking aid from the faithful and bold. And from the scorpion.

Kashkari opened what was left of the prince’s window and hoisted himself onto the windowsill. His action broke the floodgate. Iolanthe had to fight for her turn to go down the drainpipe. Seven more boys followed, two of them climbing out of their own windows; several didn’t even use the drainpipe, but leaped down to the ground, their long nightshirts billowing like sails—before Mrs. Hancock caught someone still on the windowsill.

“Which way did they go?” asked Cooper.

“That way,” said Iolanthe, pointing at a direction opposite the coppice where she had stowed Trumper and Hogg. “Let’s catch them before they get back to their own house.”

Ignoring Mrs. Hancock’s yells for them to come back, she and the boys broke into a run.

When they were some distance from the house, she stopped everyone and divided all the boys into pairs, ostensibly so that they’d have both a greater chance finding Trumper and Hogg and a lesser chance being discovered by the night watchmen.