The Burning Sky

by Shelly Thomas

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. “Incendia.”

  A small fireball blazed into being. He waved it toward her. “Your fire, Fairfax. I will see you in the morning.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  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?”

  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.”

  “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?”

  The castle obscured most of the second sun, but an edge of it was visible, a pale circle in the sky, the same size and elevation as the sun, but two degrees farther south—no doubt put there to remind bumpkins like her that the Crucible was not real, after all.

  “Think about it. Dreams are not real; but when you are inside a dream, it is real to you. The Crucible operates the same way. Except unlike dreams, it follows the physical and magical principles of the real world. Whatever works out there, works in here, and vice versa.”

  She touched her face. Her skin felt no different than it did in the real world. “Where is my person then?”

  “Our bodies are in my room, probably looking as if we are taking a nap, our heads down on the desk.”

  This was extraordinary magic. “How did you get this book?”

  “It is a family heirloom.”

  He turned toward the castle, pointed his own wand at it, then tossed her a wand. “At the ready.”

  “What did you just do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You pointed your wand at the castle.”

  “Oh, that. I cast a spell to break a window.”

  “Why?”

  “Habit. I used to have trouble getting into the castle because of the dragons. So I broke windows from outside to annoy them.”

  “But that castle is three miles away. How can you break a window from this far?”

  “Distance spell-casting. Use a far-seeing spell if you do not believe me.”

  She did. With the far-seeing spell, the castle was almost close enough to touch—and all its windows perfectly intact. She was about to call him on his bluff when a window blew apart in a shower of glass shards. A low roar rumbled, followed by a huge plume of fire that came from somewhere near the castle gate.

  She scowled. “Are you training to be an assassin? Who uses such spells?”

  “My mother had a vision in which she saw me practicing them. So I learned them.”

  “You should have your psyche examined. Most sixteen-year-old boys don’t follow Mama’s directions so slavishly.”

  “Most mothers are not seers,” he answered simply. “Now, are you ready?”

  “To do what?” She did not like the look on his face.

  “You like flowers? Decapitentur flores. Eleventur.”

  Thousands of white blossoms leaped into the air, impossibly pretty in the liquid light.

  “Your training starts. En garde.” The prince raised his wand. “Ventus.”

  A squall of flowers hit her with the force of thrown pebbles.

  “Divert them,” said the prince.

  She waved the wand in her hand and imagined parting the tide of flowers. All she got for her trouble was a greater battering. Annoyed, she sent out a plume of fire. Immediately, something much bigger smacked her on the upper arm.

  “What the—”

  “Just cow dung. Now concentrate. I should not have to remind you this exercise is for air only.”

  Just cow dung?

  And what did he know about elemental magic? Elemental mages didn’t exercise. They either had an affinity for a particular element or they didn’t. She’d known from the earliest moment of awareness that she could manipulate fire, water, and earth. And she did so, if not effortlessly—earth always required some exertion—then at least easily enough.

  She ducked as a particularly large cluster of flowers careened toward her. “You are going to poke my eyes out.”

  “Do not let me.”

  She sent a huge spray of water his way, only to have it all thrown back at her, followed by a cowpat that hit her solidly in the rib cage.

  She hurled her wand at him.

  He stepped aside. “You have a good arm. Maybe Wintervale will get his wish after all.”

  She wiped her wet face with her hand. “What do you care?”

  “I do not.”

  Her wand flew back at her. Flowers continued to batter her. And they hurt where they hit. She did her best to push them all back at him and pockmark his smug face. But nothing happened.

  His lips moved. Blades of grass, a forest of them, rose straight up. His lips moved again. The blades of grass turned in midair, to point their sharp ends at her.

  Blood drained from her face. The flowers had only hurt. The blades of grass, with their sharply serrated edges, would shred her.

  They sped toward her. Instinctively she threw up a wall of fire to burn them to cinders. He put out her fire. She called for fresh fire. He made a prison for it.

  She commanded the ground about her to rise up into an earthen wall. He shattered the wall before it had reached a foot in height.

  “This is not about thwarting me,” he said.

  “Then don’t try to hurt me.”

  “If you do not feel strongly about it, you will not be able to unblock whatever it is that makes you unable to command air.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to unblock it. Not for you, you rat.”

  The vivisection-by-dull-knife pain of the blood oath came back with a vengeance. She swayed with the intensity of it. But she would not humiliate herself before him by collapsing to the ground. She would not. She would remain standing and defiant.

  The grass scratched her face as she fell.

  She burned with the force of her anger.

  Her hand, of its own will, rose. Her wand pointed to the sky; her mind issued the command.

  Before Titus quite understood what she intended, he had already jabbed his wand above his head. “Praesidium maximum!”

  He had tested this shield against fire, but never lightning.

  The sound of the lightning striking his shield was like that of grinding glass. The force of it was bone-snapping. He could barely keep his arm raised, barely scrape together enough strength to sustain the shield, which gave away inch by inch beneath the brilliant onslaught that made dots dance in his vision.

  He grunted with the strain of keeping his wand aloft. The muscles of his shoulders and arms screamed in pain. He wanted to shut his eyes against the unbearable light.

  How could lightning that came out of nowhere go on and on? How much more could his shield take? He felt it in his humerus, the obliteration of the shield, the cracking and splintering, air returning to being just air, and no protection at all.

  The shield split altogether. His heart rammed up his throat. But the lightning, too, had spent itself. The air sputtered with remnant electricity.

  He had survived a lightning strike.

  “You will need to do better,” he said—and hoped that his voice did not sound as limp as the rest of him felt. “When I went to Black Bastion, Helgira’s lightning killed me outright.”

  She slowly came to her feet. “Helgira’s been dead thousands of years, if she ever lived.”

  “Her tale is one of the training grounds in the Crucible—one of the more advanced ones.”

  Her lips pulled tight. “You can die in the Crucible?”

  “Of course.”

  “With no consequences to your real person?”

  “It is not pleasant. You die in the Crucible, and it will give you a deep aversion to going back to the scene of your death.”

  “You are in the Crucible now.”

  “True, but I have no plans to ever visit Black Bastion again. Someday, though, I might send you there for a battle royal against Helgira.”

  She shrugged. “Just because you fear her doesn’t mean I will.”

  Titus had not slept much the night before, waiting for the armored chariots to depart. As he stared at their barely visible metallic underbellies, he had gone over the events of the day again and again, knowing his actions had crossed a line—and knowing that he would have done exactly the same if he had to again.

  At some poi
nt he had stopped defending himself. She was right: he was a villain who would stop at nothing to achieve his ends. And looking at her now, drenched, dirt-smeared, but unbowed, he realized had further to go yet.

  If anyone could find a way to break a blood oath, she would. He must find some other way of holding her fast.

  Or even better, find a way so that she would not wish to leave, even if she could.

  But he could think of nothing—yet.

  “That is enough for today,” he said, pocketing his wand. “Time for school.”

  It was a sunny morning. Uniformed pupils exited residential houses in a steady stream. Along the way, junior boys clustered around various holes-in-the-wall—sock shops, the prince called them—buying coffee and freshly baked buns.

  He took her to a bigger place, not exactly a proper restaurant but an establishment with two interconnected dining rooms, catering exclusively to senior boys. She ate a buttered bun and observed—it never hurt to know who was popular, who had information to share, and whom to avoid.

  But even as she assessed her new surroundings, she felt herself similarly appraised. This was not new. Ever since they first met, the prince had watched her intensely—after all, he believed her to be the means to his impossible ends. But since their exit from the Crucible, his gaze had seemed more . . . personal.

  “What do you want now, Your Highness?”

  He raised a brow. “I already have you. Should I want anything else?”

  She pushed away her empty plate. “You have that scheming look in your eyes.”

  He turned the handle of his own coffee cup, from which he’d yet to take a sip. “That is terrible. I should only ever sport a condescending look. We never want to give the impression that I am capable of—or interested in—strategizing.”

  “You’re fudging your answers, prince. I want the truth.”

  The corners of his lips turned up barely perceptibly. “I was thinking of how to best hold on to you, my dear Fairfax who would leave me at the first opportunity.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Since when is a blood oath not enough to keep a mage enslaved?”

  “You are right, of course. I should not doubt my own success.”

  “Then why do you doubt your own success?”