She shrugged.
He glanced at her, then bent to pour water into a teapot. For a moment he appeared strangely normal—young and sleep-tousled—and it made her acutely unhappy.
She looked away from him. Unlike her room, which had been carefully decorated to convey Archer Fairfax’s colonial upbringing, his was plain except for a flag on the wall, which featured a sable-and-argent coat of arms with a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn occupying the quadrants.
“That is the flag of Saxe-Limburg.” He pointed to a map on the opposite wall. “You will find it as part of Prussia.”
A golden tack, embossed with the same heraldic designs as the coat of arms, marked a tiny squiggle of land. She walked past the map to the window, lifted the curtain a fraction of an inch, and looked up.
The armored chariots were gone.
“They left at quarter past two,” he said. “And they are probably not coming back—an order from Atlantis supersedes an order from the Inquisitor.”
She resented that he’d read her thoughts.
“Give me that, would you?” He pointed to a small, plain box on his desk.
She handed the box to him. She thought he’d open the box, but instead he put it away in a cabinet that contained plates, mugs, and foodstuff before handing her a cup of tea.
The tea was hot and fragrant. How did he learn to make a perfect cup? When he’d been a junior boy, had he too carried luggage, lit fires, and cooked for senior boys?
She refused to ask him any personal questions. They drank their tea in silence. He finished first and inspected her, while she pretended not to notice it.
“Good,” he said. “Except for the cuff links.”
He showed her what cuff links were on his own sleeves. Pesky things: she’d thought them part of the previous day’s shirt.
When she looked up from her cuffs, he was still studying her. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You are to always tell me the truth.”
“The truth as it relates to our mission. I am not obliged to inform you of my every thought, just because you happen to ask.”
“You snake,” she said.
“What can I say? Prince Charming only exists in fairy tales. And speaking of fairy tales—”
From a bookshelf next to the window, he lifted a small stone bust, pulled out the volume beneath, and set it on his desk. The book looked very old. The leather binding, once probably a brilliant scarlet, had faded to a reddish brown. The gold embossing on the title had smudged away almost entirely, but she managed to make out the words A Book of Instructional Tales.
“This is the Crucible,” he said.
“What is a Crucible?”
“I will show you. Sit down.”
She did. He took a seat on the other side of the desk and placed his hand on the book.
“Now put your hand on the book.”
She followed his direction, half-reluctant, half-curious.
He was silent for more than a minute—must be quite the long password. Then he tapped the book with his wand. Her hand was suddenly numb to the elbow. Something yanked her forward. She opened her mouth to shout as the desk rose to meet her forehead with alarming speed.
She landed on her knees in tall grass. The prince offered her his hand, but she ignored him and pulled herself to her feet. All about her was a large meadow bathed in early morning light. At one end of the meadow, the beginning of rolling hills covered in a dense forest. At the other end, a good several miles away, a castle on a high knoll, its white walls tinted rose and gold by the sunrise.
“So it’s a portal, the Crucible.”
“That is not how it is used. Everything you see is an illusion.”15
“What do you mean, illusion?”
It could not be. She scooped her hand into the tall grass. Small, white, five-petaled flowers nodded in the morning breeze. The blades of grass were rough against her skin. And when she broke a blade and brought it to her nose, the smell was the fresh and mildly acrid scent of plant sap.
“It means none of this is real.”
A pair of long-tailed birds flew overhead, their feathers iridescent. A herd of cattle masticated near the edge of the meadow. Her hand was wet with dew. She shook her head: she could not accept that all this was make-believe.
“If you walk ten miles in any direction, you will find you can go no farther—as if this world is but a terrarium under a giant bell jar. Since we do not have time to walk ten miles . . .”
He led her a hundred yards to the north and pointed toward the eastern horizon. “That is Sleeping Beauty’s castle—you will battle dragons there someday. Do you see the second sun?”