“That’s what I thought,” Cimorene said. “Oh, and I got the jinn to give me some powdered hens’ teeth, so we can finally try that fireproofing spell.”

“Good,” Alianora said. “Let’s do it right now!”

So Cimorene got out the spell and the ingredients she had collected, and she and Alianora spent the next hour on various necessary preparations. First they had to boil some unicorn water and steep the dried wolfsbane in it. Then the mixture had to be strained and mixed with the hippopotamus oil and the powdered hens’ teeth. Cimorene did most of that, while Alianora ground up the blue rose leaves and the piece of ebony.

Grinding the ebony took a long time, but fortunately they didn’t need much. When Alianora finally had enough, Cimorene mixed it with the blue rose leaves and more of the unicorn water in one of Kazul’s recently shed scales. Each mixture had to be stirred three times counterclockwise with a white eagle feather. Then Alianora dipped the point of her feather in her mixture and began drawing a star on the floor of the cave.

“Is this going to be big enough for both of us?” she asked, scratching busily at the stone with the tip of the feather.

“I think so,” Cimorene answered. “Don’t try to make it too big, or you’ll run out of liquid and we’ll have to start over.”

Alianora did not run out, though she had used nearly all her mixture by the time she finished. “There!” she said. She sat back on her heels and studied her diagram to make sure there were no gaps, then set her dragon scale and feather aside and stood up. “Your turn.”

“First we have to get into the center of the star,” Cim­orene reminded her. “Be careful not to smudge the lines!”

“Smudge them, after all that work?” Alianora said in tones of mock horror. She lifted her skirts and stepped carefully into the middle of the diagram. Cimorene followed, carrying a small mixing bowl half full of something that looked like brown sludge with a white eagle feather sticking out of one side. “It smells awful,” Alianora said, grimacing.

“It doesn’t matter what it smells like, as long as the spell works,” Cimorene said. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’m ever going to be,” Alianora replied, shutting her eyes and screwing up her face as if she expected to have a glass of cold water poured over her head.

Cimorene plucked the eagle feather out of the bowl and raised it quickly over Alianora’s head before it could drip on the floor. She let four large drops of the brown gunk fall onto Alianora’s hair, then brushed the end of the feather across her forehead twice. She finished by drawing a circle with the feather on the palm of Alianora’s left hand.

“That tickles!” Alianora complained.