A dull throbbing in his head. A ringing in his ears like nothing he had ever experienced. Roger sucked in a lungful of stale air, then another. He propped himself up on his elbow, groaned, then looked about himself, squinting.

He held still for some time, merely absorbing the coresonant thrums in the cramped hemispherical enclosure of the crypt, reverberations heard less than felt in one’s viscera, as if an outsized bow of mast-like dimensions were being scraped across an even more ludicrously proportioned instrument, the echoes pervasive and ineluctable.

With immobility bringing about no change in his situation, Roger eventually scrabbled for his glasses, miraculously brushed them with his fingers. He put them on, then laid his hands on the massy stone shielding him and dared to look out and observe the magical duel.

Distorted as the scene was by his cracked spectacles, he needed some time to descry Sophia through the multicolored whirlwind; with much more rapidity he then made out Corentin. The young duke was standing a dozen paces from her, taut with tension but slowly gaining the upper hand in their bout, coruscating lineaments disappearing into the void cradled by his palms.

Behind him stood the director, unsleeved arms held out, phalanges ablaze with conflagratory weavings, aspect and eye transmogrified to druidic intensity, hollowness of cheek cast in sharper relief by the frenzied fluctuations of his spells. Loris flanked the priest, framing his own magic into intricate configurations to lend his own support; of Master Pondrey and the other instructors and upperclassmen, Roger saw no trace.

But they needed not be present for him to discern Sophia’s peril. Her magic twisted upon itself in being swallowed by Corentin’s nullifying whirlpool, and the convulsions of entrapped magic awoke in Roger a recollection of an outing with his father on their estate in Aléria—the piercing scree from on high, the javelin-like dive from the azure, the serpent writhing in a hawk’s dull bronze talons against trailing wisps of cloud before being borne further out than the eye could follow.

This struggle too was one doomed for failure.

“It’s over, Sophia! Give up! Give up now, before you’re seriously hurt!” called Corentin over the humming energy. The princess gave not her cousin the reassurance of an answer, of pleading for reprieve, but the strain growing more evident by the minute on her slick brow surely had the effect of convincing him that victory was within his grasp. The princess would be seized; then, the matter of the crown prince would be dealt with.

Neglected by the combatants, burning with shame as he huddled behind the mineral mound sheltering him and the Grand Prefect from the roaring onslaught, Roger wracked his mind for a solution. Should he leap into their midst and provide a distraction? It was too risky— what if Sophia herself was surprised, and her control wavered?

He had no confidence of replicating that strange incantation that had clawed its way out of his throat unbidden, Roger thought in a paroxysm of discouragement, and compounding his misery further still was the sight of the Grand Prefect laying mute and unresponsive just near him. No: had he simply imagined it, or had the priest’s fingers twitched—

A flaring emanation whipped Roger’s attention drawn back to Sophia as she continued to strive against Corentin and the director, her lips compressed and her face glistening with the sheen of exertion. The crimson and silvern filaments threaded by her fingers seemed to come undone, the rippling spellwork to falter in its revolutions. At that moment Loris d’Arx took a step forward and loosed a dartlike projectile formed of mana; she cried not aloud, yet stumbled noticeably, blood pouring freely from her shoulder.

“Stop!” said Roger loudly, and his voice coincided with Corentin’s angered exclamation. But the young duke’s ire at his friend’s interference discouraged in no way his assault, which at last seemed on the verge of attaining its object. The princess would fall, and once subdued and captive, the Father Director would deliver her to the king’s enemies…

Princess Sophia drew down her chin to stare at the floor, a curiously blank expression on her face, as if at pains as to how formulate her surrender. Seeing her disarrayed and bleeding, Roger felt as though his heart had been riven in twain. He slumped his shoulders and closed his eyes.

As the princess’s breathing grew more and more labored and the stream of magic outflowing from her hands reduced to a mere colorless trickle, Roger shut out the world and launched an interior appeal with all his heart: Mother, we entrust ourselves to you! Please, help us!

“There she is! There, just ahead!”

Zephyrin swallowed hard, then took another step. That was what he had to concentrate on. But if the heaviness in his limbs was something he could push out of his mind, more onerous was the nausea. Magical backlash—the natural consequence of drawing too deeply on one’s reserves, as he had so extravagantly done. For the first time in many weeks came to his mind the image of Mari and Judoc, and how his parents would surely find reasons to be displeased with his actions today…

A crack like the breaking of a dropped panel of glass sounded. Behind him and the drummer-boy on whose shoulder he heavily leaned, Zephyrin saw the untrained officer still covering their deliberate advance but with a ward no longer intact. It had deflected two glancing shots; Zephyrin couldn’t affirm with certainty that it would withstand a third.

But the queen was nigh. He had only to hold out a few meters more; a few meters more, and the asterite would replenish all his power…!

In the heart of the tumult Queen Adelaide-Estelle stood composed, even as a terrorized maid in tears dug her nails into her arm and sought to draw her from the frontlines. Choosing that moment to release the drummer-boy’s shoulder and stagger forward of his own power, Zephyrin came close enough to see the queen conferring animatedly with a platinum-haired man and a handful of her aides, who renewed their entreaties that she withdraw along with the majority of the troops.

Queen Adelaide-Estelle suffered only a few words of anxious petition before stamping them down energetically. Gesturing to the rebel-occupied riverbank, she exclaimed, “Captain dy Llegellion, I beg you, help me rally the men! Now is our chance to rout them once and for all!”

The man looked intensely uncomfortable. “Your Majesty, we have already succeeded beyond what could be reasonably hoped. By damaging the bridge, the rebels undermine their own cause: we have simply to pull back and hold out until reinforcements relieve—”

He stopped mid-speech, both the soldier and his sovereign’s wife taking notice of Zephyrin at the same moment, his eyes mistrustful, hers inquiring. Fighting back the mental fog induced by fatigue, Zephyrin forewent all preamble. “Your Majesty! The asterite! Please—I need it back, now! With it I can raise another barrier and lead us all to safety!”

As he waited, it seemed to Zephyrin that the world itself hung in suspense for the queen’s answer. Her lips opened, closed, then parted again with agonizing slowness. Uncomprehending, the queen’s expression was all the more stomach-dropping for its guilelessness. “The asterite?” she repeated bemusedly. “That—why, I gave it away.”

Zephyrin weighed the words in his mind, appraised their smooth, resistless meaning. For all that, he failed to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation. Simply put, they defied all logic. He wondered if, all along, since coming to the capital he had been the prey of a fever-dream. “You… did what? Who—”

He had not time to utter another word before an explosion of unprecedented force rocked the bridge.

Roger failed to grasp the implications of what it meant that the princess had reached into the homespun shirt of her disguise and pulled out a luminous gem. He still didn’t understand even when she closed her fingers around the throbbing stone, and luminous rays filtered through her fingers uncontrollably, like the rays of a miniature sun. He would understand in the otherworldly, intellect-defying moments that followed.

“Pretissimo.”

On the verge of extinction, the princess’s wheel of magic revived, accelerated, spun until the monochromatic flow resolved once more into bursting concatenations of color, a mandala unfolding petal-like to gush prismatic fire. Brilliance propagated in the darkness, searing torrents of mana ramifying as they coursed through and down the necropole’s manifold egresses, losing themselves in the subosseous strata supporting Lutesse.

But ancillary, lambent cataracts also rose, rose irrepressibly upward, shearing through the ossuary’s supporting pillars, carving through the stalactite-riddled ceiling as if it were wax soft to gouge out profound cavities. The crypt was transfigured: across the floor and upon cranial domes and fleshless grins writhed shadows like exorcised spirits, such that Roger closed his eyes for fear of the unnerving spectacle being unforgettably etched into his memory.

Then, at last, the princess’s fingers fell, as if from an invisible harp; cacophony receded to a merciful diastem; next, the suspense-laden cessation of the magical surge, to which succeeded residual mana’s erratic crackling. None still stood who had thought to apprehend the princess, save Father Priol, who emitted a bloodcurdling scream as he clutched at the stump of his right arm.