“I need another book from the council room,” Barinon told her then sent her off to find Spells and Bindings.

As she hurried down the hall, she couldn’t help but notice the thundering footsteps of the dragon. It was still coming for them and Barinon seemed to be only focused on the one spell. After all that time thinking over what went wrong with the spell when the other mages died, she thought she could understand. Still, she was worried the dragon would get to them before they could finish. Would she and Barinon be able to take on such a creature? She knew she had to focus. She shoved down her worry. They would deal with the dragon when it got to them.

The corridor was a long one but at the end of it was the council room. She glanced at the table. Another footstep and then a roar. The dragon must be frustrated at being slowed like that.

The book was in a stack with four others on top of it. She grabbed all five of them and hurried back to the mage’s study.

“Good. We have to hurry.” Another footstep. “It’s getting closer.” She thumped the stack of books down on the table. They were heavy.

“It’s the one on the bottom,” she told him.

As he flipped through the pages of Spells and Bindings he explained what they were about to do. “We have to bind the spell back to the princess where it belongs. If we try to shrink it when it isn’t attached to anything, it may try to grow again. We can’t risk that, so this is where we start.”

“But won’t the dragon mess up that spell, too?”

“No. We were changing too much with the dragon inside the spell. This is just a tiny change, but it will be the difference between having the spell expand as it did before and being able to shrink it. Also, it’s a different type of spell.”

Hailey nodded, hoping he was right.

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Barinon and Hailey moved as quickly as they could manage through the castle and back to the princess’s room. Barinon made a glyph that Hailey had seen in the book. He bound the spell to the princess and she could see it move, see that the princess was at the center of it. For good measure, he ran the test again to make sure that it was bound to her. Hailey clutched at his arm while he moved through the spell.

“I’m going to need your magic for this one,” he told her.

“I’m ready,” Hailey said, feeling nothing of the sort.

The pink room seemed such a strange place to work the magic that would wake almost the entire castle. Hailey found tears coursing down her cheeks as she felt the magic working. This was the last bit of her old life that had still existed and now it would change as quickly as she had when Sequana bound her to the well. Her own magic was flowing into Barinon and from there into the spell. Sweat broke out on his forehead, shining against his dark skin.

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Hailey watched the princess as she felt the spell begin to pull inwards. Barinon’s arms remained outstretched as if he were trying to encircle the spell in his arms. He stood like that until his arms began to tremble. Hailey tried to hold up the one that she was grabbing with her hands.

Screams rang through the castle. It was her people and they were waking up. What she had always feared and desired was happening. She focused on the magic, closing her eyes. They should all be free. Every on of them. Then there was a crash as the dragon smashed its way into the castle. They had to hurry. Finally, she could see the edges of the spell, could see it start to shrink in on itself. The death spell and the preservation spell bound together and finally resting over the princess. A small dome encircled the princess. Then it became even smaller. Hailey wondered if he could shrink it so that it wouldn’t matter anymore, but Barinon stepped back from the spell gasping.

Her hand fell away from his arm. Anyone could safely enter the castle now, and anyone could leave. People were running and screaming. “We’ve got to get to that dragon before it kills anyone else.

Esmerelda slept and while she slept, she had more dreams than a person should have any right to. She knew she should wake, but she couldn’t manage it, no matter how much she tried. She remembered someone moving her back inside. The sun had been bright on her eyelids and then she was in the shade of the castle.

And then she had stayed here. She remembered now, it was a girl who had moved her and covered her up. She had built the fire and uncovered her when it was too hot. Was that Hailey? She thought it was.

Something was changing now. She began to scream. She was walking from something terrible, something she didn’t want to remember. She gasped and coughed. Everything hurt. She had been lying on the wooden floor in the dying room. She groaned and pulled herself up. There were a hundred people in here, all screaming or sleeping or pulling themselves up. They looked at each other. A man sat across from her. “What happened,” he said. His voice was scratchy.

She just shook her head. They needed water and food. They needed to know what was going on. She knew she had slept for a long time, knew she hadn’t been able to wake, but she didn’t know how long that was. Was Hailey even still alive? Or Margaret or Bruce or any of the people she had known.

She stood on shaky legs and something huge smashed into the castle. A cloud of dust encircled them and she began to cough. She pulled herself up on stiff legs and hurried to the doorway. The boom, boom, boom of something was coming closer. She looked back at the room of people. They were standing now and coming to the doorway.

“What is it?” A woman asked her.

“I don’t know,” Esmerelda said, and then she saw it, coming down the corridor. It barely fit. She ran to the other side of the room, just as the dragon smashed the wall in. It didn’t fit in the corridor, not really and so now it was smashing the walls in so that it could get where?

People screamed. They had been living a moment ago and now they were crushed by the stones that made up the walls. She coughed and gasped for air. “I’m getting out of here, she told the people around her. That was a dragon.