"I wouldn't dream of it," Therandil assured him. "And my Wish is to defeat a dragon and win his princess's hand in marriage!"
The Jinn waved a dark hand over Therandil's head. "There! When next thou dost fight a dragon, thou shalt surely defeat him. And thou?" he said, turning to Cimorene.
"I could use some powdered hens' teeth," Cimorene said.
The jinn blinked in surprise, but he waved his hand again, his face a mask of concentration. Then he bowed and handed Cimorene a fat brown jar. "There's thy desire. Farewell!" With an elaborate salaam, the jinn dissolved back into a cloud of smoke that poured back into the copper jar from which it had come. Cimorene leaned over and plucked the lead stopper from the end of Therandil's knife. She jammed it back into place and heaved a sigh of relief.
Therandil was not paying attention. "What did you want something like that for?" he asked, looking at the jar of hens' teeth and wrinkling his nose in distaste.
"I don't believe I shall tell you," Cimorene said, putting the jar carefully into one of her apron pockets. "It has nothing to do with you."
"Nothing to do with me? I like that!" Therandil said indignantly.
"I'm going to marry you, just as soon as I beat that dragon of yours."
"I don't think you're going to beat Kazul," Cimorene said in a considering tone.
"But that jinn just said-" "He said that if you fight a dragon, you'll defeat him. But Kazul is a her, not a him," Cimorene pointed out.
"And you ought not to be trying to rescue me anyway."
"Why not?" Therandil asked truculently.
"Because there are other princesses who've been captives of dragons for much longer than I have, and they have seniority," Cimorene explained.
"Oh," said Therandil, looking considerably taken aback. "How do you know?"
"They came to visit and told me all about it," Cimorene said. "I think you should try for Keredwel. She's from the Kingdom of Raxwel, and her hair is the color of sun-ripened wheat, and she wears a gold crown set with diamonds. You ought to get along with her very well."
Therandil brightened perceptibly at this description but said, "But everyone expects me to rescue you."
"As long as you defeat a dragon and rescue a princess, no one will care," Cimorene said firmly. "And Keredwel will suit you much better than I would."
"Are you sure her dragon isn't female, too?"
"Positive," Cimorene said. "Gornul 's cave is two down and three over.
If you follow the path outside, you can't miss it. He ought to be there now, and if you leave right away, you'll be able to get everything settled before dinner."
"All right, then," Therandil said. "As long as you're sure you don't mind."
"Not at all," Cimorene assured him fervently. She saw him to the mouth of the cave and pointed him toward Gornul's cave, then returned to the kitchen. She gathered up the jars and bottles she had been planning to check, except for the copper jar with the jinn inside, and took them back to the treasure vault. Then she fetched an ink pot, a quill pen, and a sheet of paper from the library and began writing out a warning to attach to the copper jar. She didn't want anyone else to open it until the eighty-three years were over and the jinn could go home without killing anyone.
She was just finishing when she heard Alianora's voice calling from the rear of the cave. "I'm in the kitchen? she shouted. "Come on back!"
"You're always in the kitchen," Alianora said when she poked her head through the door a moment later. "Or the library. Don't you ever do anything but cook and read?"
"Look at this, Alianora," Cimorene said, handing her the warning she had been writing. "Do you think it's clear enough?"
"'Warning: This jar contains a jinn who will kill you if you let him out too soon. Do not open until at least one hundred and five years after the date when the Citadel of the Yellow Giant was destroyed,'" Alianora read aloud. "That's, let's see, eighty-four years from now. It seems clear to me.
You'd have to be pretty stupid to ignore a warning like that."
"Maybe I ought to show it to Hallanna and see what she says," Cimorene said, frowning. "I wouldn't want anyone getting into trouble by accident, just because I didn't make it plain."
"It's plain, it's plain," Alianora said. "Cimorene, what on earth have you been doing? How do you know there's a jinn in this bottle?"
"Therandil," Cimorene said, waving a hand expressively. "I was looking through some of the bottles from Kazul's treasure room, to see if any of them happened to have hens' teeth in them, and Therandil came in and wanted to help."
"And he opened it?" Alianora said. "Oh, dear."
"Exactly," said Cimorene. "But it came out well in the end. I think I've gotten rid of him for good. I sent him off to rescue Keredwel."
"You did? What if he doesn't beat Gornul?"
"Oh, he'll win. The jinn gave him a wish, and he wished to defeat a dragon." Cimorene looked apologetically at Alianora. "I suppose I ought to have sent him to rescue you, but…"
"That's quite all right," Alianora said hastily. "Getting rid of Keredwel will help a lot. And after everything you've told me about Therandil, I don't think I'd want to have him rescue me."
"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 lue 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.