Titus leaned against the shelf, unable to support his own weight.
The doors of the library opened again. “Won’t you care for some refreshments, my Lord High Commander, Madam Inquisitor?” said Lady Callista.
She held the large tray herself, sauntering toward the Bane and the Inquisitor.
“We have only just now enjoyed your bounteous banquet—my compliments to you, Lady Callista, the Citadel has the world’s finest cooks. We might need a little time to recover our appetites.”
The Bane was the ideal guest, honey-tongued and suave, not at all what Titus had expected.
“If only we’d had a little more notice of my lord High Commander’s visit, we’d have put on a more suitable feast.”
The Bane probably had not arrived until the Inquisitor sent news that she had failed to secure Iolanthe Seabourne with her ambush. Between the two of them, they were determined not to fail again.
“I will set the tray here,” said Lady Callista, “and let my lord High Commander and Madam Inquisitor continue their preparation.”
She withdrew. Not a minute later an Atlantean soldier entered and, two steps inside, knelt. “My lord High Commander, Madam Inquisitor, we have the detainee Horatio Haywood.”
The Oracle had foretold that Haywood would not remain long in Atlantis’s grasp. Did it mean Titus must be the one to whisk him to freedom? But then who would kill the Inquisitor? He could not do both at once.
The blood oath called for him to do his utmost to help Fairfax in her goal of freeing her guardian. He clenched his teeth.
The duration of the time-freeze spell decreased steeply when more than one mage was on the receiving end. What would last three minutes on one person would last only thirty seconds covering three mages. And if he had to cover four mages, he’d have at best ten seconds.
Would that be enough time to drag Horatio Haywood to the Crucible and disappear inside?
Haywood shuffled in with two guards. Four mages to cover. Titus’s wand shook. Did he dare? Would his gallantry get himself caught, and result in Fairfax being yanked out of her bed in the dead of the night?
Titus saw his wand lifting. He could not believe what he was about to do. One. Two. Thr—
Haywood vanished before his eyes.
CHAPTER
IOLANTHE HUFFED WITH IMPATIENCE.
Sleeping Beauty’s castle did not look terribly distant from the meadow, but to reach it on foot, even running at full speed, took far too long. And she’d already wasted enough time earlier, looking for a safe spot, worrying about the Crucible possibly bleeding again, before finally realizing that at this hour of the night, the Crucible could bleed a bucket and no one would notice a book lying in long grass.
But as the castle drew nearer, her impatience turned to fear. The thought of facing the wyverns alone turned her lungs weak—and the single moon in the sky was a relentless reminder that this was no make-believe. But she had to have a steed. Either that, or walk an entire day to reach Black Bastion.
At the edge of the briar forest, she saw the tunnel the prince had left behind. So he had been here. Had he got a wyvern too?
No roars greeted her ears as she sprinted through the tunnel. No warning streams of fire passed overhead. Even the air didn’t stink as much. At the other end of the tunnel she saw why. The colossus cockatrices were gone, the pylons anchoring their chains snapped.
She hesitated only a moment before she resumed running. The doors of the great hall were wide open. She entered firing shield spells before her, but nothing attacked her. Only one wyvern was inside, slumped on the marble floor.
Its chest rose and fell. Either it was sleeping, or much more likely, the prince had blasted it unconscious.
She was faint with relief.
Now she could worry about surviving Black Bastion.
It took Titus a stunned second to realize what had happened.
Tempus congelet, he mouthed the time-freeze spell.
The entire Citadel was a permanent no-vaulting zone. With Haywood’s disappearance, the library would be searched from top to bottom. He must get out this moment.
He sprinted. Fast. Faster. Still somehow not fast enough, like running from monsters in nightmares. And then he was out of the stacks, and in the midst of a bizarre tableau of frozen mages.
Still running, he pointed his wand at the Inquisitor. “Mens omnino vastetur!”
It was the strongest, most illicit spell of cerebral destruction he’d been able to find, not the execution curse. Likely he would regret his leniency later, but he was not a murderer. Not yet.
When he skidded to a stop before the stand that held the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible, he was scarcely two feet from the Bane, who looked fifty years old, not two hundred. His features were confident, attractive—and familiar, somehow.
There was no time for the usual long password into the Crucible. Fortunately, he did not need to utter it, when the Crucible was already held open, so to speak. “I am the heir of the House of Elberon, and I am in mortal danger.”
The next instant he was back in the meadow, under a night sky that was rapidly disappearing behind the clouds. Upon its hill Sleeping Beauty’s castle glowed, eerily phosphorescent.
He panted with relief. But the air he breathed in—he grimaced at the pungency of it. Blood. He murmured a spell for light. Almost at once he saw a thin, sharp stake that had been pulled out of its mooring, a length of chain attached to it.
The stake that he had used to keep Helgira’s wyvern waiting for him. He increased the intensity of the light and broadened its radius. Something dark lay on the grass. He ran toward it and stopped in his tracks, his stomach twisting. It was not a whole wyvern, only one bloody wing, crumpled like an old jacket.
Wyverns were terrifically agile creatures, both in body and in mind. They had vicious teeth, vicious claws, and vicious spikes—and could fly for hours at speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour, with bursts of more than one hundred forty miles an hour. Titus could not think of a single beast both swift and brutal enough to hunt wyverns.
Yet one had.
He began to run toward Sleeping Beauty’s castle. He needed another steed right away. With Haywood’s disappearance, Atlantis might very well not wait until morning to come after him. He must get back to school as soon as possible, let Fairfax know what had happened, entrust the Crucible to her, and hide himself in the Crucible until such time as she could move him somewhere safer.
He could only pray his own copy of the Crucible was not such a perilous place as this one was proving to be.
The ground sloped up. He ran harder to maintain speed. His legs protested. His lungs too. In the nearly pitch-dark night, the thick, rich smell of wyvern blood continued to linger in his nostrils, feeding his nausea.
He stepped on something at once hard and soft. Instinctively he leaped away. The smell of blood intensified. He had been hot from running; now he was cold, his perspiration beads of fear rolling down his neck.
He tapped on his wand. A light flared, shining on a black limb in the grass—the lower portion of a wyvern’s leg.
From the direction of the castle came an unearthly roar. The ground trembled, a vibration he felt in his shins. His heart raced as if it could escape; his breaths overshadowed all other sounds of the night.
Had this been a regular session in the Crucible, he would have hurried forward to find out just what fearsome creature now prowled the castle. But this was real. And he could not afford to end up in pieces all over the landscape.
On his way from Black Bastion to the meadow, he had passed over a market town not too far to the north. If he was not mistaken, it was the setting for “Lilia, the Clever Thief.”