understand what happened,” said Master Haywood dazedly.
“The explanation is obvious. By the time Aramia was born, I’d been in that hospital nursery for six weeks. The night nurses might not recognize Aramia, but they must have recognized me, figured that I’d been somehow put in the wrong bassinet, and switched us back.”
“So there is nothing deceptive about my memories after all,” Master Haywood said slowly. “I was a man raising my schoolmates’ daughter, whom I loved above all else. That was all true, every bit of it.”
She squeezed his hand. “Yes, that was us. That is us.”
He squeezed her hand back. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am for Jason and Delphine Seabourne, that their daughter has turned out to be everything they could have possibly wanted in a child.”
“Because you did everything right by me. Never forget that.”
A watery light shone in his eyes. “I didn’t. But I will never forget you said that—it makes everything worthwhile. Everything.”
Her vision too was growing misty. She leaned forward and kissed him on his cheek. “We’ll—”
She whimpered at the hard pressure Titus’s hand exerted on her shoulder. He was staring at Mrs. Hancock, who was—who was—
Mrs. Hancock glowed, as if she had turned into a giant lightning bug. She gaped at her hands with their faintly poison-green luminescence, her mouth wide open, her eyes terrified.
Master Haywood scrambled to his feet. “I don’t think it was just truth serum Atlantis gave her. This looks like the work of a beacon elixir.”
He gripped Iolanthe by the arm. “Get out your carpet! You must get as far away from—”
Mrs. Hancock erupted into a beacon of light that shot high into the sky, glaringly visible even against the bright background illumination of the Lucidian night. The same light swirled about her, encasing her as if in a tube. Her face was frozen in a scream of horror.
“Go! Go now, all of you!” cried Master Haywood. “She is already dead. Move!”
“But where?” shouted Amara.
Kashkari shook open his carpet. “Away from that!”
“That” was a floating fortress, charging toward them with the speed of an armored chariot.
They fled in the opposite direction from where they had been headed, the sanctuary of the security-lax college now a hopeless mirage. Iolanthe’s carpet had been subordinated to Amara’s, the latter being the fastest and most experienced flyer among them. But even with their carpets advancing at a dizzying speed, the floating fortress was already on top of them.
Worse, its edges were extending downward. It was going to physically confine them in a place where they could not vault, where once penned in, they had no way of getting out.
Her heart pounded like the pistons of a steam engine that was about to overheat. Was this it? Was this the beginning of the end?
She ripped off chunks of the hillside and aimed them at the floating fortress. Volcanic rock produced very satisfactory thunks against the underbelly of the juggernaut, but had no practical effects whatsoever.
The floating fortress was now exactly above them, its speed identical to theirs, its edges halfway to the ground. Amara banked hard and reversed their direction. But the floating fortress, the size of a city district, matched their movements without the least hesitation.
“Kashkari, head in a different direction!” Titus ordered. “I will do the same.”
The floating fortress ignored their attempts at creating confusion and stuck with Amara, Iolanthe, and Master Haywood.
Iolanthe jerked at the sudden pressure she felt on the strap on her shoulder. But it was only Master Haywood digging in her emergency satchel. He shook open her spare carpet, embraced her with one arm, and kissed her on her cheek. “I love you.” To Amara he shouted, “Get out from underneath the fortress!”
Then he was on the spare carpet, dashing up toward the floating fortress itself.
“What are you doing?” Iolanthe screamed.
Whatever he intended would only get him killed.
His receding figure began to glow, much as Mrs. Hancock’s had done. “No!” Iolanthe screamed again. What had Atlantis given him during his time in the Inquisitory?
Impossibly, the flying fortress too began to glow. For a moment, her mind refused to comprehend what she was seeing: a last-mage-standing spell, enormously destructive because it was powered by a voluntarily given life.
Master Haywood’s voluntarily given life.
The entire floating fortress glowed orange, with cracks of red showing through. It wobbled and slowed, even as its edges continued to descend. Iolanthe forced herself to concentrate. The tailwind she summoned flung them forward; Amara barely hung on to her control of the carpets. They