“Father Priol, how stands your wound?”

“It’s negligible, I assure you. The first shot merely grazed my shoulder.”

His eyes fluttering open as he gradually regained his senses, Roger dazedly squinted through broken glasses half-slidden off his nose. His heart sank as he made out Father Athand’s prone form. Over him stood half a dozen of their assailants.

“Filthy rotblood!” spat an upperclassman. Turpentine-tinged flames flared on his fingertips.

“No algetic arts,” the director said sharply. “We’ve mastered the situation: I forbid any excesses at this juncture.”

Not content with the Grand Prefect’s subduement, Master Pondrey hurriedly kicked his sword away, earning him a reproachful look from the lyceum’s director, who stooped down to retrieve the weapon. He hefted the sword and examined it lengthwise under the green sepulchral flame, reading the inscription aloud.

“VLEIZSKALER.” Director Priol’s hoary eyebrows rose as he lifted his gaze from the cooling weapon. “Most unexpected. All along, beneath the guise of a battered curio lay a pre-Chivalric runesword…” He thumbed the deltahedral crystal embedded in its hilt, a blue chrysalis whose internal fire had gone extinct. “Fascinating. I imagine you slew your fair share of beasts with this beauty—jararacussus, saurians, basilisks and the like.”

“A dozen of the first, save the one that got away,” responded his vanquished colleague.

The other priest’s smile soured. “Dear me, someone appears to have lost his capacity for subtlety. Adversity, ever the revealer of false sanctity.” He turned over the blade once more and then held it out hilt first to his right, his expression unchanging as he entrusted it to Master Pondrey. “You’ve led us on a merry chase… is what I’d like to say, but that would be an untruth, wouldn’t it? No, we made our preparations well in advance of this day. Even before dy Sanct-Àura came to me, I received a tip from an obliging student several weeks ago…”

When it became apparent this lilting comment would fail to elicit an aggrieved outburst from the Grand Prefect, Father Priol shrugged his shoulders. “Hold him down. Assume he still has a trick up his sleeve, or even several; I wouldn’t put it past him. Base the blood from womb to tomb, as the saying goes.” He then strode over to Roger, causing him to resume his frantic strugglings. “Settle down, boy. Neither you nor your destituted teacher will come to any harm, so long as you behave reasonably.”

“Monsieur le directeur, shouldn’t we go after the princeling?” inquired Master Pondrey.

The lurid light cast by the crypt’s memorial flame played erratically on the bald dome of the director’s head as he shook it in an insouciant negative. “An unnecessary measure.” His jet-dark eyes rested on the immobilized priest. “Really, Esius. Buying time for a child to lose himself in the favaginous depths of the necropole? How irresponsible. I trust you’ll own to the condignity of your pensum. Why forsake honor and dignity both in this manner? The crown prince will be perfectly safe in our custody.”

It was then that something snapped within Roger. His failure to land a single clean blow, Father Athand’s humiliation, the princess’s plight, and a crystal-clear conviction that if Zephyrin were here, they would have been able to put up a stiffer fight—all these considerations coalesced into a burning sense of injustice. An unaccountable heat was kindled in his breast: pure molten energy fought up through his throat to erupt from his mouth.

“LEAVE US ALONE!!!”

The youth holding down Roger fell in a dead faint as his eardrums burst. The crypt’s stone-carven pillars seemed to tremble on their foundations. The director staggered, planting his hand against a wall to maintain his balance. “Prolative casting…! Cover your ears!” he roared. “The boy has an aptitude for prytanic wordcraft!”

But he needn’t have worried, for the one most surprised by the word of power was its evoker. When it became clear there was to be no follow-up to the first sonic assault, several of the older boys worked up the courage to approach the curled up figure as he hacked for breath, clutching his throat as if it were raw from hours of screaming. Snarling as he drew back his lips and heel, one of them furiously kicked him in the abdomen.

“Stop that!” Corentin called authoritatively. “Can’t you see the boy’s spent? He has the aptitude but no training. He’s no threat to us now.”

The upperclassman scoffed but did as requested. Roger struggled a moment longer, then ceased when it was apparent his efforts were in vain.

A boot firmly affixed to his back, his cheek flattened against the crypt’s cold stone ground, his mouth bound by cloth, Roger could only listen as the upperclassmen and teachers regained their composure, conversing at their leisure as they awaited the retrieval of their target. The voices of the director and the king’s nephew sounded not half a dozen paces from where he lay.

“… a hylophagous whorl to stop a bullet’s flight. Most intriguing. Young Tenéval’s talent, if I recall. Do its properties extend to mana?”

“The spell is aetherovorous, of course,” Corentin answered shortly.

“ And you acquired mastery over it within a single term. Very well done, Monseigneur.”

The young duke received the priest’s praise indifferently. “I will not bear that title much longer. My uncle’s deposition is imminent: a new king, a new line of succession… a new Cygnon.” This last word recalled his attention to the matter at hand. “Is it possible that my cousin has evaded his pursuers in the dark?”

“Have no fear, Your Highness,” said the priest smoothly. “Our agents are stationed at all the exits. It will not be long before your cousin is safe and sound—”

“Even if he’s a priest, you should disobey him!” Roger cried out hoarsely in a muffled voice, unable to overhear without protestation a moment longer. He groaned as the boot pressed down with more force and a hand reached down to tighten the crude gag.

Corentin looked down at Roger with a strange expression. “Disobey him? My friend, I hate to see you encumbered by so crass a misunderstanding. It is not I who serve Director Priol, but he who does my bidding.”

To this revelation there was no possible answer. Speechless, Roger simply lay prone, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that among the instructors and peers he had so much respected, only a handful—if that—had all this time shared his deepest held beliefs.

He might then have lapsed into unresponsive dejection, but a commotion roused him from his stupor. A man’s voice called out: from the tone it seemed as though something had gone awry, and as he stepped out of an adjoining passageway, confusion was apparent on his face even in the obscurity. Roger heard the shuffle of footsteps as Corentin and several others gathered around him.

“Well? Have you caught him?” Corentin’s voice.

“Yes, but…” The man again.

A pause. And then: “What—that’s not Roland, you fool! Who… Sophia?!”

“Lento.”

A broad, droning blast sent Master Pondrey off his feet. He hadn’t finished howling his agony before the princess turned her attention to the slack-jawed upperclassman standing adjacent to Corentin, repelling him with an effulgent deluge of mana. Slow-moving but incontestable, her attacks crashed upon the constitutionalists like a numinous tide.

Had he not known any better, Roger would have affirmed for all the world that it was Zephyrin come to rout their captors. But what mattered his rescuer’s identity, if it meant the villains would be thwarted? “Sophia!” he cried joyously. And yet, as the pressure on his back subsided, he had to scramble to dodge a stray shaft of pure energy himself, the slender figure paying him no mind as it mercilessly wracked otherworldly destruction upon a threat deemed universal.

“I don’t know the way out,” stated the girl matter-of-factly. “So I decided to come back. Andante.”

Shafts of silver-streaked crimson incandescence tapered down to needle-thin beams and swiveled from left to right, inflicting imperceptible havoc on clumsily woven wards, the protective spells coming undone at their first contact with the princess’s incisive rays. An instructor swore as he frantically tried to rally his neglected mana reserves. “Form up! She can’t possibly handle all of us at—”

“Andantino.” In contradistinction to her calescent assaults, Sophia’s gaze was cool, her voice calm.

The director took a backward step, nearly falling over in the process, panic overt in his expression and voice. “A heptamerous array? How—”

He was drowned out by the princess’s most powerful spell yet. The matrix of spherules emanating from her fingertips formed a kaleidoscopic corolla, iridiscent orbs pulsing intensely in the air before they began revolving in an incandescent wheel. Sophia’s eyes closed, as if she were listening to a concerto played only for herself: then the swirling bodies reduced the proximity of their orbits, and like a sunbeam striking a crystal, generated a beam that flew with incalculable velocity straight at Father Priol’s heart.

The merest glancing shot of the unified beam might have killed him had Corentin and Loris not chosen to oppose their might to hers, flooding the crypt with their mana as they strove to counteract the royal daughter’s magic and fight her to a standstill. But, inflamed by a betrayal no less odious than obvious, in her wrath the princess merely increased the revolutions of her improvised spellwork. “Concinnitation,” she breathed. The colors grew more vivid, the relentless droning in the air more oppressive.

“Sophia! Cease this madness!” Corentin’s face was aureoled by his uplifted blond locks, the maelstrom of crackling magical energy inundating the crypt with fervent refulgence such that the frenetically wavering everlasting flame seemed a frail candleflame in the wind, on the verge of being snuffed out by a mighty gale impossibly present in the city’s bowels.

“You want to hurt my brother and Papa and Mama!” cried the princess, not ceding an iota of her hold over power to persuasion. “I won’t let you get away with it! Allegretto!!”

Dragging the Grand Prefect to the best of his ability, Roger had only enough time to shelter the unconscious old man and himself behind a rock formation before the world was lost to white-hot luminescence.