This was no instantaneous transportation. Iolanthe kept dropping. She screamed for a while and stopped when she realized that no air rushed past her to indicate speed. She might as well have been suspended in place, only thinking that she was falling because there was nothing underneath her.

Suddenly there was. She thudded onto her bottom and grunted with the skeleton-jarring impact.

It remained pitch-black. Her hands touched soft things that smelled of dust and faded lavender—folded clothes. Digging beneath the clothes, she found a lining of smooth, stretched leather. The solid material under the leather was probably wood. Wary of making any unnecessary sounds, she did not knock to find out.

She continued to explore her new surroundings. Action kept fear—and jumbled emotions—at bay. If she tried to make sense of the events of the afternoon, she might howl in bewilderment. And if she thought about Master Haywood, she’d crumble from panic. Or pure guilt.

He had not been deluded by merixida. He had not even exaggerated. And she had chosen not to believe him.

Leather-covered walls rose shoulder height about her, ending in a padded, tufted leather ceiling: she was inside another trunk.

The trunk seemed tightly closed. She decided to risk a flicker of fire. It shed a dim, coppery light that illuminated a sturdy latch below the seam of the lid.

The implication of the latch was discomfiting: it was for her to keep the trunk shut. To either side of the latch was a round disc of wood, one marked with an eye, the other, an ear. Reconnoitering was clearly recommended.

She extinguished the fire in her palm—its light might give her away—and felt for the discs.

The first one she found was the ear hole, which conveyed only silence. She moved to the peephole but likewise saw nothing. The room that contained her trunk was as dark as the bottom of the ocean, without even the telltale nimbus of light around a curtained window.

Wherever she was, she seemed to be completely alone. She found and released the latch. Placing her palms against the lid of the trunk, she applied a gentle pressure.

The lid moved a fraction of an inch and stopped. She pushed harder and heard a metallic scrape, but the lid did not lift any higher. Frowning, she put the latch back and tried again. This time, the lid moved not at all. So the latch in place prevented the trunk from opening. What had caused the trunk to open only a crack after the latch had been released?

The tips of her fingers turned cold. The trunk was secured from the outside.

A second vault in such a short time unsettled even a steed as disciplined as Marble. She screeched as they materialized above the Labyrinthine Mountains, her eyes shut tight in distress. Titus had to yank the reins with all his strength to avoid crashing into a peak that suddenly reared in their path—the constant motion of the mountains meant that even one as familiar with them as he must always take care.

“Shhhhhh,” he murmured, his own heart pounding hard at the near miss. “Shhhhh, old girl. It’s all right.”

He guided her higher, clear of any summits that might decide to sprout additional spurs. She obeyed his commands, her prodigious muscles contracting with each rise of her wings.

Beneath him, the Domain stretched in all directions, the Labyrinthine Mountains bisecting the island like the plated spine ridge of a prehistoric monster. To either side of the great mountain range, the countryside was a fresh, luminous green dotted by the pinks and creams of orchards in bloom.

You are the steward of this land and its people now, Titus, Prince Gaius, his grandfather, had said on his deathbed. Do not fail them as I did. Do not fail your mother as I did.

Had he known then what he knew now, he would have told the old bastard, You chose to put your own interests above that of this land and its people. You chose to fail my mother. I hope you suffer long and hard where you are going.

Quite the family, the House of Elberon.

Since the Inquisitor already knew he had visited the location of the lightning strike, there was no more need to be stealthy. As the castle came into sight, he wheeled Marble directly toward the landing arch at the top.

Marble cried plaintively at his dismount. He gave the rubbery skin of her wing a quick caress. “I will have the grooms take you for more exercise. Go now, my love.”

Strong winds buffeted the pinnacle of the castle. Titus fought his way inside and sprinted down two flights of stairs into his apartment.

He greeted the usual huddle of attendants with a snarled, “Am I ready to depart yet?” and waved away those still foolhardy enough to follow him.

The apartment was vast. Even with the aid of secret passages, it still took him another minute to emerge in the globe room, where a representation of the Earth, fourteen feet across, hovered in midair.

With a swish of his wand, doors shut, drapes drew, and a dense fog rose from the floor. Only the air between the globe and his person remained transparent. Carefully, he touched the half pendant he still wore to the globe. His fingers brushed against something hot and grainy—the Kalahari Desert, probably.

A pulse passed between the pendant and the globe. He drew back and looked up. A bright red dot appeared on the globe, a thousand miles east northeast of where he stood—and very much in the middle of a nonmage realm.

To limit the influence of Exiles, Atlantis had placed a chokehold on travel between mage realms and nonmage realms. Most portals would have been rendered useless. The girl’s trunk must employ startlingly unusual magic—or someone had made sure a loophole had been left open for it.

She could have been taken anywhere. But Fortune smiled upon him today, and her current location was within twenty-five miles of his school. With luck, he would find her within the hour.

Waving away the fog, he summoned Dalbert, his valet and personal spymaster. He must leave immediately, before the Inquisitor put more agents on his tail.

“Your Highness.” Dalbert appeared at the door, a middle-aged man whose round, pleasant face hid a ferocious talent for intelligence gathering.

He had supplied facts and rumors to Titus in a timely and discreet manner for the past eight years, keeping his master apprised of everything that went on in the Domain and around the world while looking after Titus’s personal comforts. The prince, however, had never taken Dalbert into his confidence.

“There is a train getting into Slough in twenty minutes. I plan to be on it. Make it happen.”

“Yes, sire. And, sire, Prince Alectus and Lady Callista await below. They request an audience with Your Highness.”

The regent and his mistress resided in Delamer, the capital, and rarely called upon Titus’s mountain keep.

Titus swore under his breath. “Show them into the throne room—and have Berman exercise Marble.”

Dalbert hurried off. Titus took himself two levels below, shrugging into a day coat as he went. He rarely entered the throne room except on the most public of occasions—it was ridiculous for him, essentially a puppet, to be in a room meant to symbolize the justness and might of his position. But today he wished to get rid of his visitors fast, and the throne room discouraged small talk.

The ceiling of the throne room rose fifty feet on two rows of white marble pillars. The obsidian throne was set upon a waist-high dais. Titus walked past it to the arched windows. Beneath him was a drop of a thousand feet to a ravine cut by a blue, glacier-fed river. Beyond, purple peaks shifted like slow waves.

Alectus and Lady Callista appeared on two of the four low pedestals that transported audience seekers from the reception room to the throne room.

Alectus was the youngest brother of Titus’s grandfather, a handsome, morally flexible man of fifty-eight. Lady Callista was a beauty witch—the greatest beauty witch of her generation. Of the last three hundred years, it had been argued.