die by falling, Titus had once told her. And so she had prepared. He was not going to die by falling, not while she was with him, not while she was the great elemental mage of their time.
“West, brace yourself.” With a levitating spell she transferred a flailing West to the vacant spot left on Titus’s carpet. “Kashkari, untether my carpet.”
“Done!” said Kashkari.
She zoomed down to where Titus hovered in midair, kept aloft by her updraft, and pulled him onto her carpet. “Revivisce omnino! Revivisce omnino!”
He showed no reaction; his face still bore that expression of pained surprise. She gripped his wrist—no pulse. She put her ear on his chest—no heartbeat.
She could not believe it. She could not accept it. Surely he had been only stunned, not killed.
“Don’t you dare die! Not now! Don’t you dare, Titus!”
Kashkari, now floating beside her, tried spells of his own. Nothing, nothing at all.
Blood pounded in her ears. They must do something and they must do something fast. The Crucible kept no dead. Titus would be expelled from the Crucible if they couldn’t think of something.
But what? What?
She gripped Kashkari’s arm. “How do distance spells kill? How?”
“By instantly stopping the heart. But I can’t think of any spells that would start the heart beating again.”
Neither did she know of any such spells. Despair swallowed her. Violently she shook Titus by the shoulders—as if that would help. “Come on! Come on!”
“May I—may I offer a suggestion?” said West.
His carpet, still suborned to Kashkari’s, had brought him down. She stared at him. What ideas could he possibly have that would be of any use?
West swallowed. “My father is a professor of biology at King’s College, and he does experiments on the effect of electricity on muscle stimulation. You can command electricity. Can you try and see if that would get his heart muscles to contract?”
Iolanthe stared at him one more moment. What kind of arrant nonsense was that? But beyond that fraction of a second, she did not hesitate.
She gathered a ball of lightning in her hands and aimed the sphere of electricity at Titus’s chest. Once. Twice. Three times.
His tunic smoked. She waved away the smoke and put out the sparks. Kashkari already had his hand on Titus’s wrist, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“There’s a pulse!” he shouted. “Fortune shield me. There is a pulse!”
Now it was Kashkari whom Iolanthe stared at in disbelief. How was it possible? How was that at all possible?
“Don’t just sit there,” Kashkari ordered. “Put some air into him, damn it!”
Of course. Of course. She pried apart Titus’s jaw and forced a current into his windpipe. He coughed and half sat up, a look of utter confusion on his face.
Tears filled her eyes. She kissed him madly, but very, very briefly. “Let’s go. Let’s go!”
The entire world inside the Crucible was burning. They flew through smoke and fire, with Fairfax holding the worst of both at bay.
When they arrived at Black Bastion, its occupants were running about in a frenzy, and they had little trouble gaining access to the portal. They also managed to leave Black Bastion in the monastery’s copy of the Crucible without much ado.
There was the unpleasant question of where they would find themselves once they exited the Crucible, and Titus ought to prepare for that. But he simply could not pull himself out of his utter amazement at being alive.
Every other minute he would turn to Fairfax and ask, “Are you sure that I am still on this earth? Are you sure this is not the Beyond?”
She would simply smile and kiss him again. Though around the fifteenth time he asked, she said, “I rather think we’d all be cleaner in the Beyond.”
It was true they were all in a state of appalling grime—the soot on her face had streaked from where her tears had run down. Worse, there was a gash on her arm and another one on her side, and she could not even tell him what had happened—or when.
He turned to West, probably also for the fifteenth time, and said, “If ever there is anything the House of Elberon can do for you, let me know.”
West stammered for a bit, before he cleared his throat and said, “I’d still be stuck in that horrible place if all of you hadn’t come. So I’d say we are even.”
As Sleeping Beauty’s castle—and the moment of truth—drew near, Titus fell silent, wondering if the worst was still to come. Fairfax placed her hand over his. “We’ll