The Perilous Sea (8 page)

It was the story she and Titus had decided upon, to explain her likely hasty departure from school one of those days.

“Not much longer for me, either,” said Titus. “I have enemies at home and they have their eyes on my throne.”

This caused a collective intake of breath, the loudest from Cooper, naturally.

“There won't be a coup, will there?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

“Who knows?” Titus shrugged. “There is all kinds of intrigue going on behind my back. But you do not need to worry, Cooper. What is mine, I keep.”

Cooper swayed a little. For a moment Iolanthe thought he might tip over from the combined effect of cognac and excitement—this must be one of the few times Titus had addressed him without ordering him to vacate the premises.

But Cooper righted himself and the boys turned to Kashkari, who signaled for the bottle. “If we'd had this conversation before I went home for the holiday, I'd have turned up my hands and said, Sorry, boys, there isn't much in my life I can honestly complain about.”

He took a swig of the cognac. “But then I went home and arrived just in time to celebrate my brother's engagement. And as it turned out, my brother is going to marry the girl of my dreams.”

Iolanthe was shocked, not so much by the specifics of Kashkari's revelation as by the fact that he chose to divulge something so intensely private. Granted she had met him only months ago, but nothing she knew of him had indicated in the least that he was the sort to be open about his heartache.

“My God,” murmured Cooper. “I'm so sorry.”

“My sentiments exactly.” Kashkari smiled grimly and raised the bottle. “Here's to life, which will kick you in the teeth, sooner or later.”

 

The Queen of Seasons' summer villa sat on a narrow peninsula that sliced into a deep, glacier-fed lake. The sun had just climbed over the peaks that ringed the lake; the water was almost the exact same shade as the luxuriant ivy that climbed over the creamy walls of the villa.

Titus stood on the terrace that overlooked the lake. Overhead, from the trelliswork of the pergola, trailed tendrils of green vine and clusters of honey-colored florets.

A beautiful venue, whether bathed in sunrise or moonlight. No place could ever be perfect enough for Fairfax, but this one came close.

“And they lived happily ever after.”

He came out of the Crucible to the much more mundane surroundings of the laboratory. After he and Fairfax had pushed and shoved the heavily inebriated boys back up the cliff to the house, he had come to the laboratory to work. The boys anyway were not going to get up before noon, and he wanted to finish making the new entrance as soon as possible.

Life was uncertain, his particularly.

He yawned. It was now almost nine in the morning. He exited the laboratory to an abandoned barn in Kent. From there it was a quick vault back to his room at Baycrest House.

Fairfax was there, waiting for him, flipping the pages of a book she had pulled from the bookshelf—in deference to his rank, Titus had been given the best room in the house, with a private bath, a wide balcony that looked out to the sea, and two shelves full of leather-bound volumes.

“Is it ready yet?” she asked. She meant the new entrance into the laboratory.

“Almost. I have to wait about twenty-four hours, and then I can complete the final step.”

“I miss the Crucible,” she said. “It must have been at least three months since I was last inside.”

After the Fourth of June, he had moved his copy of the Crucible to the laboratory to avoid confiscation by Atlantis. There was another copy in the monastery in the Labyrinthine Mountains, but they had neither of them been able to visit the monastery over the summer.

“It will not be long now.”

“Did you have to shovel out bushels of flower petals?” she teased.

Barrels. “No comment.”

“Well, I am not going for the decor, in any case.”

“Now you tell me.”

She grinned. “Go to sleep. You look tired.”

He fell backward onto the bed. “I am getting old. I used to stay up all night and look better for it.”

“Your mirror lied,” she said, drawing a blanket over him.

He took her hand and kissed the pads of her fingers. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

“What can I say?” she said, her voice growing fainter. “This damsel loves rescuing princes in distress.”

He smiled as he fell asleep.

 

And when he woke up, he was still smiling.

He had dreamed of the two of them on the terrace of the Queen of Seasons' summer villa. But instead of kissing, they had been sitting on the ornamental parapet, and she had been telling him a long and involved joke.

He had laughed himself awake—though now that he had his eyes open, he could not remember what she had said.

The next moment her voice came through the window he had left slightly open. She was outside, talking to Cooper. Her exact words were blurred by the wind and the surf, but it was enough to know that she was nearby, not only safe but in high spirits.

He sat up, and his hand pressed into something hard on the bed—the book she had left behind. A small, ornate clock on the windowsill caught his attention: fourteen minutes after two o'clock.

Interesting. It was the exact time mentioned in his mother's vision that saw him witnessing the feat of elemental magic that would change the lives of everyone involved. Because of that vision, whenever he was at the castle, he used to lie down after lunch and have Dalbert call him at precisely fourteen past two, so everything would be, to the letter, what had already been ordained.

He stepped onto the balcony, to a bracing breeze from the sea. On the horizon, a storm gathered, but here everything was still sunny and mild—or as mild as it could be for the beginning of autumn on the North Sea. Below, Cooper and Fairfax played a game of croquet on a patch of lawn. They both waved as they saw him. He nodded very regally.

“Will you join us, Your Highness?” called Cooper.

Titus was about to answer when his wand suddenly warmed. The warming was rhythmical, one moment hot, one moment normal—the wand was relaying a distress signal. And not just any distress signal, a nautical one, specific to seafaring vessels.

There was a mage ship nearby?

“Give me a few minutes,” he told Cooper.

He scanned the sea, but there were no vessels out and about. Fairfax, too, was searching. She would have felt the distress signal in his spare wand that she now carried in her boot.

He set a far-seeing spell—and reeled. Five miles out, in the middle of the North Sea, sailed an Atlantean vessel. It was not a warship by any means, but looked much bigger than a patrol boat. A skimmer—meant for pursuit at sea.

What was it chasing?

Several seconds passed before he located the dinghy fleeing from the skimmer.

He reeled again as he recognized the only passenger in the dinghy: Wintervale.

CHAPTER
7

The Sahara Desert

WHATEVER THE CONTRAPTION COMING UP
behind, it was big and moving fast.

Titus turned to the girl. “Can you break through stone?”

Doubt crossed her face, but she only said, as she extinguished the mage light that lit their way, “Let's see. Hold on to me.”

He wrapped his arms about her. They descended through several feet of sand, and then, more slowly, into solid bedrock, which fractured underfoot, the debris flowing up and out to allow them passage.

Just in time for the contraption to sweep overhead, scraping the bedrock like a giant metal comb. The teeth of the comb were only an inch and a half apart—no way for them to slip through.

“How fast do you think it is moving?” asked the girl.

She brought back the mage light. Belatedly he realized that he still had his arms around her. He let go. “Ten miles an hour, or thereabouts.”

But the well she had made was so narrow they still stood nearly nose to nose. Her skin was blue-tinged in the mage light; a smear of rock dust across the ridge of her nose looked like tiny specks of lapis lazuli.

“The search area is one mile in radius,” she said. “The dragnet would need six minutes to go from center to periphery, and six minutes to return to center. Depending on how far we are from the center, we can go for five or six minutes before we meet it again.”

He shook his head. “The brigadier said there is an outbound dragnet as well as an inbound one. They will likely meet at the halfway point and switch directions. So it will be only two to three minutes, if that, before the sweeper comes back.”

She frowned. It would be inefficient, not to mention dangerous, for them to stop every couple of minutes to drill a hole.

“In that case, I'd better tunnel beneath the surface of the bedrock. Can you crawl for nearly a mile?”

“I can, but we do not need to. We can levitate each other.”
5

She looked almost impressed at his idea. “Let's do that.”

She excavated a horizontal passage four feet from the top of the bedrock and crawled in on her stomach. He, behind her, entered feet first and face up, until the soles of their boots touched. They levitated each other a few inches off the floor of the passage. A small river of rock debris began to flow underneath them, toward the back. Every fifteen seconds or so, he pushed against the walls of the tunnel and propelled them forward.

They made steady progress as the sweeper scraped back and forth overhead. When half an hour had passed, she enlarged the tunnel somewhat for them to sit and rest. He drank greedily from the waterskin she handed him, surprised by how thirsty he was, even though the tunnel was as cool as a cellar.

His watch measured distance as well as time. He showed her that they had moved about a half mile from where they first sank down below the surface of the desert.

She nodded. “You all right?”

His wound hurt, insistently and noticeably. But compared to the agony earlier, the pain was nothing. “I am fine. You?”

She appeared surprised by the question. “Fine, of course.”

Next to her, a tiny sphere of water appeared, spinning lazily midair as it grew fatter. These days elemental mages were more likely to be the entertainers at birthday parties than anything else. Her powers, on the other hand . . .

“You were going to show me something, before the dragnet caught up with us,” he said.

“Oh, that.” She pulled a card out of her pocket and held it toward him.

He examined the card.
A. G. Fairfax
. “Do you mind if I call you that?”

She shrugged. “Go ahead.” The cool challenge came back into her eyes. “Should I address you as Your Serene Highness?”

“You may announce a prince as such, but you address him as only ‘Your Highness,' ” he said. “For example, ‘Your Highness, it has been a privilege to crawl through a cramped, airless tunnel with you.'”

She scoffed, but without rancor. The water sphere had grown large. She took the waterskin from him, refilled it, and put it back into her bag. He realized only when she glanced up and their eyes met that he had not looked away from her this entire time.

“Your Highness,” she said, her tone half-mocking, “may I have the honor of excavating another half mile of passage for you?”

“But certainly,” he answered, handing back her calling card. “When we are on the throne again, we shall remember and reward your loyalty and devotion.”

She shook her head at his pomposity, but he could see by the tilt of her lips that she was amused. And it startled him that in the midst of all the danger and uncertainty, he felt a leap of pure delight at having made her smile.

 

They found out the next minute that they could not levitate each other again.

“The levitation spells we used earlier were probably close to wearing off when we stopped—we would not have noticed since we were only three inches off the ground,” said the boy who might or might not be a prince. “If that were the case, a quarter-hour wait would be required. Which means we can try again in about”—he glanced at his watch—“seven minutes.”

He was still in pain—he held himself carefully to avoid unnecessary movement. People reacted differently to pain: some wanted sympathy and help; others preferred to suffer alone, to not have witnesses in their hour of affliction. He was probably the latter kind, the kind who became bad-tempered when faced with an insistent do-gooder.

Or . . . “Did you think I was the one who injured you?”

He seemed amused. “That is only occurring to you right now?”

“Why should it have occurred to me sooner? I didn't do it.”

He raised a brow. “You are sure about that?”

The question stumped her—she had no way of knowing for certain, did she? If he had harmed her protector, then she could see herself exacting vengeance. But on the other hand, his was not a wound caused by elemental powers.