The French window slams open, and the wizard bursts forth. His fingers flame red with wrathful magic. The prince grips the stallion’s flanks between his knees and kicks its sides with his soft shoes. A moment later, they are galloping across the lawn under the stars, leaping over marble-bordered terraces, racing past startled-looking groups of statues, toward the ivy-covered wall that surrounds the palace.
The stallion tenses its powerful haunches, stretches its forelegs, and launches into space. As they soar above the wall, the prince passes out of myth and dream and magic, and into the world of story.
Mid-air, Prince Erik felt the stallion change beneath him. Its flanks cooled and stiffened. The wiry mane that whipped in his face solidified into a solid, sculpted ridge. By the time they landed, his mount was no longer a living horse, but a statue.
Erik slipped to the ground. He still clutched the golden bridle, but even that was changing. It had already shifted to a real-world bridle of leather straps and iron buckles. But it then became a tangle of knotted twine, which disintegrated in his hand into random wisps of grass mixed with rotting leaves.
The prince dropped the scraps of the bridle. The horse was undergoing a similar decomposition. The marble statue was shrinking, simplifying, changing its material. For several seconds, it was the merest icon of a horse, a neolithic limestone slab, with eyes, ears and mane represented by incised lines accented with ochre. Then this, too, shrank into a boulder, which crumbled into a pile of rubble.
So much, the prince thought, for the persistence of magic. But he himself was what he had been when he escaped: a half-starved captive, his hair overgrown, wearing rags that threatened to drop from his body. He wondered how long he had been in the wizard’s magical domain. He had read tales of faery prisoners who returned to find the world changed and the companions of their youth grown gray and feeble. He remembered the girl who showed him the door in the wizard’s wall, and from whose house he had stolen the key. If those tales held true, she would be a crone now, and his own existence long forgotten.
It was a depressing thought. She had been a lovely creature, whom he might well have kissed even if he had not been trying to steal something. But she was the only person he knew in this part of the country, and she might help him now, if only for old times’ sake.
The prince surveyed the lay of the land and set out across the hills, keeping the wizard’s wall to his left. He reckoned the Duke’s country villa should be a mile away, or perhaps two.
In point of fact, it was three. But the walking was easy, and the weather pleasant. He recognized the lane that led to the villa, and was soon among the well-kept vines and olive trees of the Duke’s estate. The villa itself loomed among a grove of cypresses, ochre-plastered limestone covered by a tangle of crimson roses.
Prince Erik stepped from the sunlight into the garden. The Duke’s daughter was there, seated on the swing in the gazebo. Her dress was flowing white muslin tied in blue, and she was reading a book.
“Miss Agate,” said the prince.
Agate looked up, sighed, and set her book aside. “Oh, it’s you. I’m more than a little annoyed with you, boy. You stole the garden key, and now I’m the one being punished for it.”
“I didn’t mean…,”
“Oh, never mind what you meant, or didn’t. I don’t think you cared one little bit what happened, as long as you got through that door.” She studied him with a critical expression. “But it looks like you ran into the wizard, so you likely got what you deserved. How long were you there, anyway?”
“Several months, I think.” said the prince. “But it’s hard to tell. There were no windows.”
Agate nodded. “Here, you left last night. Well, that’s magic for you.” She sighed and stood up, straightening her skirts. “We had better tell Father you are back. I don’t suppose you managed to keep the key?”
Erik admitted he had not.
“I guess we can have another made. Though if I were the one deciding, we would simply brick up that damn’ door. Living next to magic is such a nuisance.”
—