“Forgive me, my lady. My lady’s beauty stole my sense.”
Helgira laughed. Her voice was high and sharp, completely different from Fairfax’s.
“I like this one—such pretty words. Very well, henceforth I grant you the privilege. But know this: I always exact punishment for any transgression.”
With that, she unsheathed the knife at her belt and brought it down on him.
Iolanthe, sitting on her cot in the dark, almost screamed. It was as if someone had slashed her with a knife. She gripped her arm. There was no blood, but the pain was still there, making her grit her teeth with it.
What was happening? Could she possibly be sensing the prince’s pain again?
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.