“The walls?” Fione frowns, the mechanical cacophony of her cane transforming into a crossbow echoing precisely. “Lucien, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, squeezing my hand as if for support. “We have to hurry.”

The stairs blur, the walls blurring faster, and we finally level out to the floor. Except…there is no floor. It’s glass, all of it, clear and fine and yawning into the sky. Clouds shuffle below the glass floor, slow and lazy and heavy with gray rain, night birds cutting double V’s before disappearing into the water mist of the clouds and dipping back out again. Faintly, I can see green fields below, marked pale for wheat and roads.

Cavanos. Cavanos directly and miles below us. It’s a terrifying and decadent floor of a room, but the only other things in the space itself are stone walls and torches. I blink into the nighttime gloom; there’s something like rows in the very back walls, carved deep and lined with an unmistakable upright pattern in fading colors. Books. Just a handful. A whole room, and just these books.

“Those look important,” I lilt.

“Yeah, but that’s—that’s a long fall!” Malachite gulps.

“It might be a trap,” Fione says. “Can you teleport us across, Lucien?”

“Not without alerting the High Witches to exactly where we are,” he says.

“Don’t they already know?” I press, but the prince says nothing. “Could you fly across it as a crow?”

“A solid plan,” he agrees shortly. “Until I needed to bring a book back with me.”

“Let me check the perimeter for trap switches—”

“There’s no time,” Lucien interrupts Fione. “We have to move, now.”

Lucien tries the glass floor with one boot, and when it stays, he instantly darts across, pulling me along. I can hear Fione’s boots following us, but Malachite hedges.

“Luc, seriously—”

“If it makes you feel better, Sir Bodyguard,” I call out over my shoulder, “you pass out before you ever hit the ground.”

“It doesn’t, actually,” I hear him mumble and draw his sword, but the unsteady clip of his shoes joins us across the glass. Fione is the first to reach the books, skimming the spines with her fingers.

“Written in Old Vetrisian,” she marvels. “These—all of these are at least a thousand years old.”

“Can you translate what’s inside?” I ask.

“With Lucien’s help.” She nods. “Some words and structures are passed down only through the royal family.” Her little fingers reach for a book, pulling it out gingerly and opening the cover. “Remarkably well-preserved, too.”

“Magic,” Lucien asserts, head tilted as he reads other spines, “tends to do all kinds of remarkable things.”