The Perilous Sea Read online

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Dedication

  To Donna Bray, who is simply the best

  Contents

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  About the Author

  Also by Sherry Thomas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  CHAPTER ♦1

  THE GIRL CAME TO WITH a start.

  She was being pelted with sand. Sand was everywhere. Beneath, her fingers dug into it, hot and gritty. Above, wind-whipped sand blocked the sky, turning the air as red as the surface of Mars.

  A sandstorm.

  She sat up. Sand swirled all about her, millions of sepia particles. By reflex she pushed at them, willing them to stay away from her eyes.

  The sand stayed away.

  She blinked—and made another pushing motion with her hand. The flying particles receded farther from her person. The sandstorm itself showed no signs of abating. In fact, it was worsening, the sky becoming ominously dark.

  She had power over sand.

  In a sandstorm, it was much better to be an elemental mage than otherwise. Yet there was something disconcerting about the discovery: the fact that it was a discovery; that she’d had no idea of this ability that should have defined her from the moment of her birth.

  She also had no concept of where she was. Or why. Or where she had been before she awakened in a desert.

  Nothing. No memory of a mother’s embrace, a father’s smile, or a best friend’s secrets. No recollection of the color of her front door, the weight of her favorite drinking glass, or the titles of books that littered her desk.

  She was a stranger to herself, a stranger with a past as barren as the desert, every defining feature buried deep, inaccessible.

  A hundred thoughts flapped about in her head, like a flock of birds startled into flight. How long had she been in this state? Had she always been like this? Shouldn’t there be someone to look after her if she didn’t know anything about herself? Why was she alone? Why was she alone in the middle of nowhere?

  What had happened?

  She pressed two fingers against her breastbone. The pressure inside made it difficult to breathe. She opened her mouth, trying to draw in air faster, trying to fill her lungs so that they wouldn’t feel as empty as the rest of her.

  It was a minute before she gathered enough composure to examine her person, praying for clues—or outright answers—that would tell her everything she needed to know about herself. Her hands were not forthcoming: a few calluses on her right palm and little else of note. Pulling up her sleeves revealed blank forearms. A look at the skin of her abdomen likewise yielded nothing.

  “Revela omnia,” she said, surprised to hear a deep, almost gravelly voice.

  “Revela omnia,” she said again, hoping that the sound of her own speech might trigger a sudden cascade of memories.

  It didn’t. Nor did the spell bring to light any secret writing on her skin.

  Surely her isolation was only an illusion. Nearby there must be someone who could help her—a parent, a sibling, a friend. Perhaps that person was even now stumbling about, calling for her, anxious to locate her and make sure that she was all right.

  But she could hear no voices carried upon the howling wind, only the turbulence of sand particles hurtled about by forces beyond their control. And when she expanded the sphere of clear air around her, she uncovered nothing but sand and more sand.

  She buried her face in her hands for a moment, then took a deep breath and stood up. She meant to start on her clothes, but as she came to her feet, it became obvious that she had something in her right boot.

  Her heart somersaulted when she realized it was a wand. Ever since mages realized that wands were but conduits of a mage’s power, amplifiers that were not strictly necessary to the execution of spells, wands had turned from revered tools to beloved accessories, always personalized, and sometimes to a silly degree. Names were woven into the design, favorite spells, insignia of one’s city or school. Some wands even had their owners’ entire genealogy engraved in microscopic letters.

  She would dearly love to see her family history laid out before her now, but it would be more than good enough if the wand had a In case of loss, return to ______ inscribed somewhere.

  The wand, however, was as plain as a floor plank, without any carvings, inlays, or decorative motifs. And it remained just as bare when examined under a magnifying spell. She had no idea such wands were even made.

  An oppressive weight settled over her chest. Loving parents would no more give a child such a wand than they would send her to school in garments made of paper. Was she an orphan then? Someone who had been discarded at birth and brought up in an institution? Elemental magelings did suffer from a higher rate of abandonment, since they were so much trouble in their infancy.

  Yet the clothes she wore, a knee-length blue tunic and a white undertunic, were of exceptionally fine fabric: weightless yet strong, with an understated gleam. And though her face and hands felt the heat of the desert, wherever she was covered by the tunics she was perfectly comfortable.

  The tunics did not have pockets. The trousers underneath, however, did. And one of those pockets yielded a small, rectangular, and somewhat crumpled card.

  A. G. Fairfax

  Low Creek Ranch

  Wyoming Territory

  She had to blink twice to make sure she was reading correctly. Wyoming Territory? As in the American West? The nonmage portion of the American West?

  She tried several different unmasking spells, but the card provided no hidden messages. Expelling a slow breath, she put the card back in her trouser pocket.
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br />   She had thought all she needed was a name, the tiniest of clues. But now she had a name and a clue, and it was worse than if she’d had no insight at all into her past. Instead of staring at a blank wall, she was looking at a single square inch of tantalizing color and texture, with the rest of the mural—the people, places, and choices that had made her who she was—remaining firmly out of view.

  Without meaning to, she slashed her wand through the air, all but growling. The swirling sand retreated further. She sucked in a breath: eight feet from where she stood, a canvas tote lay half-buried in the sand.

  She launched herself at the bag, yanking it out of the sand. The strap was broken, but the bag itself was undamaged. It was not terribly big—about twenty inches wide, twelve inches high, and eight inches deep—nor was it terribly heavy—fifteen pounds or thereabouts. But it was quite remarkable in the number of pockets it had: at least twelve on the outside, and scores upon scores inside. She unbuckled a large outside pocket: it held a change of clothes. Another of similar size stored a rectangle of tightly packed cloth that she guessed would expand into a small tent.

  Pockets on the inside were carefully and clearly labeled: Nutrition, each pack one day’s worth. Vaulting aid: five granules at a time, no more than three times a day. Heat sheet—in case you require warmth but need to remain unseen.

  In case you require warmth.

  Would she have addressed herself in the second person—or was this evidence that someone else had been intimately involved in her life, someone who knew that such an emergency bag might come in handy someday?

  Thirty-six pockets of one entire interior compartment were stuffed with remedies. Not remedies for illnesses, but for injuries: everything from broken limbs to the burn of dragon fire. Her pulse quickened. This was not a camping bag, but an emergency tote prepared in expectation of significant, perhaps overwhelming danger.

  A map. The person who had meticulously stocked the bag must have included a map.

  And there it was, in one of the smaller exterior pockets, woven of silken threads so slender they could barely be discerned with the naked eye, with mage realms in green and nonmage realms in gray. At the top was written, Place the map on the ground—or in the body of water, if need be.

  She lay the map flat against the sand, which, with the heat of the sun blocked by the turbulent sky, was rapidly losing its warmth. Almost immediately a red dot appeared on the map, in the Sahara Desert, a hundred miles or so southeast of the border of one of the United Bedouin Realms.

  The middle of nowhere.

  Her fingers clutched at the map’s edges. Where should she go? Low Creek Ranch, the only place she could name from her former life, was at least eight thousand miles away. Desert realms typically didn’t have borders as tightly secured as those of island realms. But without official papers, she would not be able to use any of the translocators inside the United Bedouin Realms to leapfrog oceans and continents. She might even be detained for being somewhere she shouldn’t be—Atlantis didn’t like mages wandering abroad without properly sanctioned reasons.

  And if she were to try nonmage routes, she was about a thousand miles each from Tripoli and Cairo. Once she’d staggered to the coast of the Mediterranean, assuming she could, she would still be at least three weeks from the American West.

  More words appeared on the map, this time above the very desert in which she was stranded.

  If you are reading this, beloved, then the worst has happened and I can safeguard you no more. Know that you have been the best part of my life and I have no regrets.

  Long may Fortune shield you.

  Live forever.

  She passed her hand over the words, barely noticing that her fingers were trembling. A dull pain burned in the back of her throat, for the loss of the protector she could not recall. For the loss of an entire life now beyond her grasp.

  You have been the best part of my life.

  The person who had written this could have been a sibling, or a friend. But she was almost entirely certain that he had been her sweetheart. She closed her eyes and reached for something. Anything. A name, a smile, a voice—she remembered nothing.

  The wind shrieked.

  No, it was her, screaming with all the frustration she could no longer contain.

  The sandstorm shrank away, as if afraid of what she might do.

  She panted, like a runner after a hard sprint. About her, the radius of clear, undisturbed air had increased tenfold, expanding a hundred feet in each direction.

  Numbly she spun around, searching for what she dared not hope to find.

  Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Then, the silhouette of a body in the sand.

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  CHAPTER ♦2

  The Domain ♦ Seven Weeks Earlier

  “HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE TITUS the Seventh,” announced the stone phoenixes that guarded the four corners of the grand terrace, their voices bell-like and resonant.

  Titus stopped at the edge of the terrace, the celebrated garden of the Citadel before him. Elsewhere in the garden, there were informal, even intimate areas, but not here. Here acres of evergreen shrubs had been meticulously trimmed into hundreds of parterres, which when viewed from above formed a stylized phoenix, the symbol of the House of Elberon.

  The evergreens, bred by the Citadel’s master botanists, bloomed late in summer. And every year the color of the flowers changed. This year the blossoms were a deep, vibrant orange, the color of sunrise. Dalbert, Titus’s valet and personal spymaster, reported that he had seen the phoenix emblems on Delamer’s public buildings painted a similar hue of fire, often accompanied by a hasty scrawled The phoenix is aflame!

  The last time the phoenix was aflame, the January Uprising had soon followed.

  In the space between the landscape phoenix’s two upraised wings, a large white canopy had been erected, brilliant in the light of the afternoon sun. Under the canopy, a diplomatic reception was in full swing. Attendants in the Citadel’s gray livery wove between guests in jewel-toned overrobes, offering hors d’oeuvres and glasses of chilled summer wine. A fine, ethereal music drifted on the breeze from the sea, and with it, the sounds of soft laughter and involved chitchat.

  Titus inhaled. He was jittery. It was possible he was responding to the strain beneath the party’s apparent gaiety, but in truth it was, as always, all about Fairfax, his powerful and incandescent elemental mage.

  He descended a flight of wide, shallow steps, and walked the length of a statue-lined avenue, twelve attendants in tow. As he approached the canopy, the entire gathering bowed and curtsied. He might be without any real powers, but he was still, ceremonially speaking, lord and master of the Domain.

  An exceptionally beautiful woman came forward, a smile on her face: Lady Callista, the palace’s official hostess, the greatest beauty witch of her generation, and one of Titus’s least favorite persons on the face of the earth.

  For he aimed to destroy the Bane, Lord High Commander of the Great Realm of New Atlantis and the greatest tyrant the world had ever known, and Lady Callista was very much a servant of the Bane. Not to mention, though he had no concrete evidence to support his suspicion, he had always believed deep down that Lady Callista had been the one responsible for the death of his mother.

  “My lady,” he acknowledged her.

  “Your Highness,” Lady Callista cooed, “we are delighted you could join us. Please, allow me to present the new ambassador from the Kalahari Realm.”

  Titus was quite happy to see visible bags beneath her eyes. Life had not been easy for her since the evening of the fourth of June, when Atlantis’s most prized prisoner had disappeared from the Citadel’s library. In the same library, on the same night, the Inquisitor, one of the Bane’s most loyal and capable lieutenants, had met a sudden and unexpected end.

 
; Lady Callista had the bad luck to be the last person to walk into the library before Haywood’s disappearance. She had also been the one to order a pool of blood in the library cleaned up, when Atlantis would have very much liked to have a few drops of that blood, in order to find out who had been responsible for the death of the Inquisitor.

  As a result, despite her years of service as an agent of Atlantis, she was watched as heavily as Titus, her movements confined to within the boundaries of the Citadel. Moreover, every week she had to meet with Atlantean investigators, each interview lasting hours, sometimes an entire day.

  A distracted and distressed Lady Callista was one less threat to Titus.

  Introductions done, Lady Callista left Titus to chat with the new Kalahari ambassador and those family members who had accompanied him to the Domain. Titus was never completely comfortable in such social situations—he suspected he appeared both stiff and ungracious. If only he could have Fairfax by his side. . . . She knew instinctively how to put people at ease and he was always much more relaxed in her company.

  It should have been an idyllic summer in the Labyrinthine Mountains for them—watching the shifting of the peaks, exploring hidden waterfalls, perhaps even sneaking up to the phoenix aeries in the highest ridges, in the hope of seeing a fiery rebirth. Not that they weren’t going to work hard: their plans had included hundreds of hours of grueling training, just as many devoted to the mastery of new spells, not to mention a covert undertaking to find out where her guardian had ended up after disappearing from the Citadel’s library. But the most important thing was that they were going to be together, as much as possible, every step of the way.

  From the moment he stepped out of the rail coach that served as his private translocator, however, it became apparent that he would be watched every second of his holidays. A terrifying thing to realize, when he had her concealed on his person, in the shape of a tiny turtle, under the effect of a potion that lasted no more than twelve hours.

  He managed to smuggle her out of the castle in a nerve-racking dash, leaving her, still in turtle form, inside an abandoned shepherd’s hut. He meant to go back later to escort her to the safe house he had prepared, but ten minutes after he returned to the castle he found himself whisked off to the Citadel, the Master of the Domain’s official residence in the capital city, from which he could not escape to the mountains with either ease or secrecy.