Through a Tangled Wood
* * *
The king had given her the suite next to Rikkan’s. A door connected the two, a door the servant had broken his silence to point out to her, though she doubtless would have noticed anyway from the faint growls and mutters that issued through the walls. Whether her nearness to the prince was meant as an enticement or a threat, she couldn’t say. The latter, she suspected—it certainly wouldn’t be the king’s only oblique threat. After Rikkan had expelled her from his rooms, the king had peppered his sympathy with more than enough hints as to what awaited her if she failed a second time.
She glanced at the exit that led to the corridor. Unlike Rikkan’s door—which had already been replaced by the time the servant had led her to her rooms—hers had only one lock. Not that the difference did her any good—one lock, plus the guards pacing back and forth in the corridor, trapped her as surely as six would have. The window offered no help; the height had sent her stomach spinning with dizziness the one time she had dared to look. There would be no escape. Her captivity would only end with her success—or with her failure.
The door that connected her rooms to Rikkan’s had no lock.
Marisela would have walked through the door already, and won the kiss she had come here for. If Lucia tried to do the same, no doubt Rikkan would simply send her into the air again—or out the window this time—with his impossible silent magic.
He had done it so casually, as if it meant nothing. A form of magic unknown to the Elders of Qurilan Mari—unknown, perhaps, to every other mage in the world. What kind of brilliance must it have taken, for him to have found the solution to a problem that had stymied the world’s great mages for centuries—and to have done so with no formal training?
She glared at the door.
Marisela would know how to make him want to kiss her.
She shook her head sharply. What was this new resentment, when she had never envied her sister’s talents before? What was this new longing, whispering from the same corner of her soul that drove her gaze to Qurilan Mari every day? Surely, when even the most handsome village boys had held no appeal for her, she didn’t want a kiss from the monster behind that door—from those scaled lips, that fanged mouth. Surely she didn’t crave the attentions of someone whose voice had filled with rage at the very thought of her lips on his—someone who had rebuffed her even knowing, as he had to know, that her kiss would end the horror of his curse.
In any case, it made no difference. He would never let her near him.
How many chances would the king give her before he decided he would be better off with the next most beautiful girl in the kingdom?
She strode to the window. Leaning her hands against the sill, she forced herself to look down. Her stomach flipped at the sight, faint in the moonlight but still more than clear enough, of trees the size of dolls’ toys. An owl flew in lazy circles below her, offering a cruel demonstration of the impossibility of her escape.
Flying.
What had the prince said earlier, about the wind spell?
No. Impossible. Rikkan, in all his brilliance, hadn’t worked out how to modify the spell even after months of work. And she had never worked magic that advanced, had never done anything beyond the simple exercises in that one tattered book.
But how long had it taken her to learn those spells? Two days? Three? Her studies had been stunted, yes, but not from lack of talent. If she had his journals…
Impossible.
Maybe. But more of a chance than she had now.
The muttering on the other side of the door had turned to soft snores. If she was going to take this chance, it needed to be now.
Gently, a fraction at a time, she eased the door open. She paused with every creak, heart pounding in her ears, waiting for the telltale break in the prince’s snores that would let her know she had woken him. But the silence she feared didn’t come. When the door had opened wide enough for her to pass, she squeezed herself through, into the bedroom that led off from the chamber where their disastrous first meeting had taken place.
The bedroom hadn’t survived the prince’s curse any better than the adjoining room had. His claws had torn the mattress nearly to shreds; even as she watched, he raked a new hole into his pillow as he twitched in the throes of some dream. Scraps of robes that reminded her of the king’s—most of the prince’s wardrobe, she imagined—littered the floor, sliced into far more deliberate strips.
The prince gave a soft whimper; his claws dug deeper into the pillow. For a brief instant, the absurd urge to wake him from his nightmare took hold of Lucia. She turned away. She wasn’t here to watch him sleep, and the longer she lingered, the more likely he was to discover her intrusion.
She tiptoed past the bed and out into the next room, until she reached the table of books that had distracted her on her first visit. Her stomach gave another flip, of excitement this time, as she carefully extracted the first journal from the stack.
With the window coverings sealing the room against the slightest sliver of moonlight, the pages showed nothing but a mass of gray lines. After several moments’ worth of frustrated squinting, she risked whispering a brief incantation under her breath. Instantly, the candle at the edge of the table flared to life. She cast a tense glance toward the bedroom, but saw no movement, heard no sounds of waking. Lowering herself to the ruined couch, she opened the journal to a random page somewhere near the middle.
Deciphering the prince’s handwriting—a twisted script that had to be the result of his efforts to write around the claws—took long enough that she feared dawn would come before she had managed to make sense of a single word. But once she figured out that first word, the next one came easier, and the next easier still, until soon she found herself reading the journal as quickly as an ordinary book. And he had written so much. A spell for heating or cooling the air, a spell for breathing water, the beginnings of a spell for invisibility… so many things she had ached for the Elders to teach her, and so many more they had doubtless never thought of.
With reluctance, she wrenched herself from his inventions and began to skim through the remainder of the journal, searching only for references to the wind spell. It didn’t take her long to find. His work on the spell took up the full final third of the journal, his other experiments ceasing as he poured all his attention into finding this one solution. Had he hoped to use it to escape his own captivity?
The rhythmic growl of his snores faded away as she lost herself in the text. Here he had written out the incantation—and yes, there was the part she had been missing, the thing that had caused her spell to fail on that last day behind the bakery. But here he had begun to copy the same words, and then had crossed them out, filling the remainder of the page with indecipherable… no, not indecipherable after all. Those weren’t words. They were pictures. Rudimentary drawings to indicate hand gestures, each movement of the wrists and fingers meant to represent some piece of the magical tongue. On the next page, half the gestures remained the same, while the other half had been replaced by new ones—not just movements of the hand this time, but of the entire body.
But she hadn’t seen him making anything more than the simplest of motions when he had sent her to the ceiling. And performing this… this dance, she supposed she had to call it… would take nearly as much time as speaking the incantation. His spell had taken a bare instant.
The next pages showed her why. Page by page, the gestures grew more abstract, until they showed not movements of the body but of the mind. Symbols. Yes. To perform the spell, he would only have needed to form the symbols in his mind, one after another, each one standing in for a step in the dance. Like so…
The first of his drawings took shape behind her eyes. Then the next. And the next.
The journal slammed shut as a gust of wind, like the breath of a giant, swept across her lap.
She yanked a curtain down over the symbols in her mind. Heart pounding in fear and excitement, she jerked her gaze to the bedroom door.
 
; Still nothing. He hadn’t heard.
A silly grin spread across her face. When had she last felt the urge to smile like that? Not since she had memorized the final spell in her book and realized she had nowhere to go from there. In a brief moment of indulgence, she hugged the journal to her chest.
Then she got back to work.
She followed along with Rikkan’s thoughts, tracing the words with her finger, as he grew from perfecting the spell as it currently existed to modifying it for more ambitious use. She shared his false starts, his aborted hopes, his small successes and larger failures. The more she read, the more she understood, her knowledge expanding at a rate she could almost physically feel. She saw why he had tried this, and that, and that, and she saw why each attempt had failed.
And the more she read, the more convinced she became that he had taken the wrong tack from the start.
He approached spellcraft like a prince. He ordered, and the elements obeyed. For most magic, that approach, combined with his considerable talent, would get him any result he desired. But something like this…
Something like this required a baker’s touch.
Ordering the air to do her bidding wouldn’t be enough. No, she needed to fold one air current into another like eggs into dough. She would remain at the center, a part of the spell yet separate, filling poured into a crust.
She could see it. She just didn’t know how to do it.
Her hands tightened on the book in frustration. If she had weeks or months—or even days—to experiment, she could figure it out easily; she had no doubt of that. But she didn’t even have hours. Once the prince woke, the servant would come to bring her to his rooms again, and her chance for escape would be lost. And if he woke before she had returned to her bed… She shuddered at the thought.
But maybe she had underestimated him. Maybe he had worked with this sort of blending before, and simply hadn’t thought to apply the method to this particular spell. Maybe there was something else in the journal that would tell her how to accomplish it. Without much hope, she began to flip through the book again, back to front, this time paying more attention to each individual page.
Going through the journal felt like stepping into Rikkan’s mind as it flew in a thousand directions at once. A spell to make a flower bloom in an instant. A spell for bathing without soap. A spell for the levitation of small objects, then several intriguing variations, including one with the potential—if it worked—to lift the palace itself from the earth. But nothing involving the sort of intricate combination work she would need for flight.
Here, though—something different from the usual half-finished experiments and flights of fancy. Pages upon pages of crabbed writing, so different from the uncontrolled scrawls that marked the rest of the book. And all of it—she squinted—no, almost all of it in the magical tongue. Most of it meant nothing more to her than gibberish, but she knew this word, and this one, and—
The book fell from her nerveless fingers to her lap.
How had she not seen it? How had she not understood?
Only in the past year had Rikkan gotten the hours of study he craved. Only now, when his father feared him too much to even enter his chambers, much less take away his books. Only now, when no one would dare ask the creature he had become to assume the duties of the prince.
When they had talked about magic together, he had spoken to her almost as a friend, with no trace of anger in his voice. The rage had only come when she had tried to help him. When she had tried to free him from his curse.
The spell followed the ancient patterns, the king had said. The patterns of the nightmarish curses from before Qurilan Mari’s existence.
Her gaze traveled to the pile of books on the table. To the decrepit volume that had to predate Qurilan Mari.
She didn’t need to open it. She knew what she would find. She saw it mirrored in the pages in front of her—in the prince’s tight scrawl, a script too small for clawed hands to have formed.
Prince Rikkan had cursed himself.