The cave paused, considering this.
Smoke fogged the sky, the smell of torch flames rising. The cave beamed its light into the distance, on the twin armies riding towards them.
“I suggest you make your decision quickly,” said Tedros, with an eye towards Uma. “Given impending company, your true love may not last long enough to see the end of our bargain.”
The cave’s sands hardened.
“Enter,” he snarled.
Tedros clasped his mother’s hand, pulling her into the Cave of Wishes. The moment he stepped into the portal’s light, he felt the drop in temperature, the air cool and sharp. From inside the cave, he glanced back one last time, at Agatha, his princess looking helpless and scared, the same way Tedros looked whenever she went chasing after his quests without him.
Sand poured over the door like a tomb being sealed.
Then he and his mother were alone.
FIVE MINUTES, TEDROS thought.
Any more than that and Agatha and the rest would be at risk.
Guinevere stumbled, gripping on to Tedros’ arm. “Careful,” she breathed, “there’s a step.”
Tedros lit his fingerglow. “Lots of steps.”
A crooked staircase made out of sand spiraled down into darkness, beyond what the prince could see. He slid his boot onto the first step, sand crumbling. With each step, the footing seemed more uneven, like a rocky shoreline. Guinevere tripped again.
“You okay?” Tedros said.
“Go ahead,” she said, limping. “I’ll meet you at the bottom.”
Tedros put his arm around her and guided her, step by step.
It was strange to be here with her. When they’d made the plan at the pub, she’d seemed the right choice to brave the cave with him. If he’d taken Agatha, she would have questioned his every move. Sophie would have been worse. And everyone else, he didn’t feel comfortable with, not the way he did with his mother, which was ironic, given he’d spent the last ten years thinking her a disloyal witch. And yet, now that he was alone with her, there was an odd tension between them. Not anger or resentment. That was gone from his heart, his mother’s sins forgiven. It was something else. Vacancy. Emptiness. As if they were two strangers, any bond between them imagined.
Then, in the cast of his glow, Tedros glimpsed something embedded in one of the steps: a gold coin. As he swept his glow downwards, he saw why the stairs were so uneven, each of them laden with treasures: polished jewels, glinting rings, at least four crowns, and more gold than Tedros had ever seen, coins and talismans and goblets, scattered and fossilized deep into the sand. For a second, Tedros was baffled . . .
Then he saw the skulls.
Scores of them, hanging off the staircase by ropes of tightly packed sand, some attached to their skeletons, others severed at the neck or shoulders or ribs, like a gallery of warning. These must be the seekers who’d come to this cave and hadn’t made it back out, leaving the treasures from their wishes behind.
“They made mistakes,” said Guinevere nervously.
How? Tedros wondered. It was the Cave of Wishes. You ask your three wishes and hurry away with your plunder.
Then again, when it came to magic, there was always a catch.
They went faster now, Tedros moving his glow off the remains of wishers past and keeping the light on the bounties of each step, one by one, until they reached the bottom, a small cellar of sand. Given the corpses along the way and the famed power of the lamp, Tedros was expecting obstacles to finding it or at least some kind of test . . . but instead, there it was, lying on its side on the floor of the cave, copper in color, tarnished and scratched up, like an old trinket in an attic. There was nothing else down here except a dirty, broken mirror, leaning against a wall.
Tedros studied the lamp, its tip poking out of the sand, like an elephant’s trunk. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?”
A thunder of hooves echoed outside.
“Hurry, Tedros,” said his mother, watching the cave walls quake.
Tedros grabbed the lamp, rubbing sand off its surface with his palm.
Nothing happened.
Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Rub the lamp? Tedros rubbed it harder, against his elbow, his chest, then with both hands at the same time—
The lamp glowed fire red, scalding his fingers; Tedros yelped and dropped it to the sand. In the lamp’s reflection, he spotted a pair of yellow eyes glaring right at him. Red smoke lashed out of the lamp, building high over Tedros’ and his mother’s heads, a thick mist, murky and ragged at the edges, a man’s torso with a tiger’s head and the golden eyes Tedros had seen in the reflection, now fixed on him and Guinevere. In fairy tales, genies were friendly, comforting creatures, solid in body, but soft in spirit. But this genie was hazy in body, harsh in spirit, and very clearly not his friend.
“Three wishes,” said the genie, the same stark voice they’d heard outside. “But to exit the cave, you’ll need the secret word. A word I cannot speak myself without being condemned to eternal pain. So you may not use one of your wishes to procure it. And if you die in this cave by your own incompetence . . .” He glanced at the skulls of all the men who had. “. . . then the princess you’ve brought as my gift is still mine.”
The catch, Tedros thought. He knew it seemed too easy.
Guinevere frowned. “But how do we—”
“One question. That’s all you get, plus your three wishes,” the genie cut off. “Use your question wisely. Any further questions will be taken out of your wishes.”
Guinevere bit her tongue.
“Tell me what you were going to ask,” Tedros whispered, careful not to phrase it as a question.
“How to find the secret word,” said his mother.
“That’s your question, then,” the genie prompted.
“No. Everyone must ask how to find the secret word,” said Tedros. “And yet, there’s a hundred dead bodies hanging in this cave? It’s a trap. We need to ask something else.”
“Cleverer than you look,” the genie remarked, tiger eyes gleaming. “If you had asked, I would have told you ‘it’s a secret’ and you’d be no better off than before. Now ask your question. I care little about what becomes of you. Only your friends outside. One friend, rather, soon to be mine.”
For a split second, Tedros wanted to ask the genie what was happening to Agatha . . . then stopped himself. The last thing Agatha would want was for him to waste his question on her. He needed to focus on why they were here: the plan to beat Japeth and keep his princess alive. He glanced at his mother, hoping she was working out the secret word—
Guinevere wrung her hands. “What would Lance do?” she whispered to herself.
Tedros almost laughed. He’d forgotten who his mother was. She’d dumped his gallant father for the chauvinist brute that was Sir Lancelot. Lance, who swept her off her feet and let her live a highland fantasy, devoid of real responsibility. Now his mother was still lost in the fantasy, waiting for her knight to save her.
It’s why Tedros had chosen the girl he did. He didn’t want one like his mother. He wanted an equal.
That free feeling he’d had on the dunes evaporated. Suddenly he missed his princess.
What would Agatha do?
Tedros stifled a smile. Maybe he was more like his mother than he thought.