“Thinking about how you will slack off during your training?”
The oath called for her to do her utmost.
She grimaced and straightened, saying nothing.
He could not afford to have her bottled up like this. Much better that she took it out on him periodically.
A thought occurred to him. “I know you want to punish me, so here is your permission. Do your worst.”
“I will only punish myself.”
“Not when you have my consent. Think about burning me to cinders every minute of the day, if it pleases you. And as long as you do not actually kill me, you can think and mete out whatever abuses you want.”
She snorted. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that I am allowed to defend myself. You want to hurt me? You have to be good enough.”
She looked up at him for the first time, her eyes alight with speculation.
“Go ahead, try it.”
She hesitated a second, then her index finger moved in a circle. The fireball transformed into a firebird, shot high in the air, and swooped down at him.
“Fiat ventus.”
The firebird’s wings beat valiantly, but could not advance against the air current generated by his spell.
She snapped her finger and the firebird quadrupled in size: she took all the fire from the fireplace.
“Ignis remittatur.”
His spell sent the fire back to the grate.
Her eyes narrowed. “And what would you do now, bring out the old shield charm again?”
The entire room was suddenly ablaze.
“Ignis suffocetur.” The fire went out, suffocated under the weight of the spell.
He flicked a nonexistent speck of ash from his sleeve. “There is more than one way to snap a wand, Fairfax.”
She had underestimated him.
He was cunning and ruthless. But she’d failed to perceive that he was also a mage of great ability. An elemental mage’s fire was not easy to divert by subtle magic, and yet he did it effortlessly—without even the aid of a wand.
You seem to have prepared a great deal for this. She’d had no idea how much. He was not a normal boy of sixteen, but a demi-demon in a school uniform.
“You are no match for me yet, Fairfax. But you will be, someday. And the more diligently you train, the sooner you can penalize me at will. Think about it: the fearful look in my eyes when I beg for mercy.”
She was being very adroitly maneuvered. He wanted her to slave for his goal, holding out his debasement as a carrot before her. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted only to—
She yanked sharply away from any thought of freedom.
“Please leave,” she said.
He pulled out his wand. “Ignis.”
A small fireball blazed into being. He waved it toward her. “Your fire, Fairfax. I will see you in the morning.”
CHAPTER 10
THE LAVATORY WAS NOT, THANKFULLY, as nasty a place as the prince had led Iolanthe to believe. Still, one look at the long urinal trough and she resolved to visit as infrequently as possible.
The corridor, like the rest of the house, had walls papered in ivy and roses. The lavatories and the baths occupied the northern end. Directly opposite the stair landing was a large common room. South of the common room were the individual rooms for the sixteen senior boys—fifteen senior boys and Iolanthe.
She and the prince occupied two adjacent rooms at the southern end of the floor. Across from their rooms was a smaller common room reserved for the house captain and his lieutenants. And just north of the prince’s room was the galley where the junior boys did some of the cooking for the senior boys’ afternoon tea. As a result, she and the prince were isolated from the rest of the floor.
As he’d intended, no doubt.
A seam of light shone underneath his door. Memories came unbidden: herself in the dark, looking up at the window of her room, yearning for the light. For him.
She reentered her room, closed the door, and dressed. The evening before, she’d disrobed with excruciating care, extricating the shirt studs, studying the attachment of the collar, and making sure she could duplicate the same knot with her necktie. She did not go to bed until she’d managed the serpens caudam mordens spell seven consecutive times.
No trouble with it this morning: the figurative serpent that was the binding cloth bit into itself and tightened to the limits of her endurance. The rest of the clothes went on easily enough. The necktie refused to look as crisply knotted as it had earlier, but it was acceptable.
When she was done, she checked her appearance in the mirror.
She’d always thought that if one looked carefully, it was possible to detect the cynicism beneath her sunny buoyancy. Now there was no need to look carefully at all. Mistrust and anger burned in her eyes.
She was not the same girl she had been twenty-four hours ago. And she never would be again.
The prince knelt before the grate, already dressed. At her entrance, he pulled a kettle from the fire.
“Did you sleep well?”