The Perilous Sea Read online

  Iolanthe had indeed dealt with Lady Wintervale, who had once almost killed her. But then it was also Lady Wintervale who had later saved her—and the prince by extension. “If she is sometimes unbalanced, it is because of her Exile and the death of her husband, not because of anything inborn for Wntervale to inherit.”

  He was silent. Suddenly she wondered whether he had hoped the Kno-it-all gauge’s reading could be his way out of a partnership with Wintervale.

  If push came to shove, she would accept that reason—she trusted herself to keep him alive far better than Wintervale—but she would not be happy with it. She wanted him to choose her because he dared to defy his mother’s dictates from beyond the grave, not because an out-of-date diagnostic tool didn’t know how to assess the mental state of someone under a panacea-induced sleep.

  “You already know I think Wintervale is the last person who should accompany you to Atlantis. But he is temperamentally unsuited for the task, not non compos mentis.”

  He walked to her window and peeked out from the gap of the curtain, as she had done earlier, when he’d arrived to take her to the laboratory. After a minute or so, he looked back at her. “Remember the memory spells we discovered on you this afternoon?”

  “How can I forget?” The shock of it, having her memory shown to be riddled with more holes than a sieve.

  “May I have a look at your memory line again?”

  She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  He recast the spell and the memory line appeared between them, filling almost the entire width of her room, all the colors and patterns making her feel as if she were looking at him through a pane of stained glass.

  “Is there something specific you want to check?”

  “See the subsidiary lines that connect the shapes representing the suppressed memories to the main line?”

  The subsidiary lines were as fine as spider silk. “Yes?”

  “They are green for most of the timeline. But look here”—he pointed at the last set of subsidiary lines that branched out, from the most recent instance of the resurfacing of her memories. “These latest lines are black, which means that the memory keeper has made it so that your memories would no longer resurface.”

  The implication of it was a hard thud in the back of her head. “Am I going to end up like Master Haywood?”

  Master Haywood had become a husk of his former self: because his buried memories had not been allowed to resurface, his subconscious mind had pushed for more and more self-destructive means to attract the memory keeper’s attention.

  Titus dissipated the memory line. “Do you ever feel your mind in a state of ungovernable restlessness?”

  “No. At least, not yet.”

  “Then you still have time. And we will find a way.”

  She laughed, more than little bitterly. “We?”

  He met her eyes. “Of course. You are still the one I love. You are the one I will love until the day I die.”

  She meant to dispute it, to tell him that his avowals were only words without the force of action behind it. But she did not say anything.

  He kissed her on her forehead, gazed at her another moment, and left.

  The next afternoon Iolanthe was in the reading room again, reading Master Haywood’s dissertation. This time, the section on how one could protect oneself from memory spells.

  At the height of memory magic’s popularity, mages tried to achieve a certain amount of immunity against possible attacks. The dissertation listed pages upon pages of different safeguards to prevent or minimize the erasure and rearrangement of memories.

  Iolanthe pinched the bridge of her nose. He knew all this, but had not thought to defend himself—or her—with a few of these safeguards.

  Master Haywood must have trusted the memory keeper as she had trusted the prince, never for a moment believing that a bond such as theirs could be anything but invincible.

  Come to think of it, even if he never thought to be wary of the memory keeper, he should still have sought to give Iolanthe more information, knowing that should the memory keeper be unable to reach Iolanthe, she could be left without vital knowledge.

  What if he had?

  She sat up straighter. In the emergency pack that he had thrust into her hands, just before she left the Domain, there had been a letter. She had checked the letter for hidden writing. There had been none—or at least none that was within her power to reveal.

  But what about the envelope?

  She could not say the password to exit the reading room fast enough.

  Back in the laboratory, someone held her hand.

  The prince. He was watching her, the longing in his eyes palpable.

  You are still the one I love. You are the one I will love until the day I die.

  Almost without thinking, she reached out and lifted a strand of his hair—only to suddenly come to her senses, an electric pain in her heart.

  She got off the stool on which she had been sitting and walked to the cabinet that held those things she had brought with her from the Domain. She found Master Haywood’s letter, and set both letter and envelope on the worktable. “Revela omnia.”

  “I already tried the envelope,” said the prince.

  Of course he would have tried it, he who approached his mission with a no-stone-unturned thoroughness.

  “There has to be more. My suppressed memories only resurfaced every two years. If anything happened to the memory keeper before she could reach me, I would be without facts important to my survival for a long, long time—and I refuse to believe that Master Haywood wouldn’t have prepared for that possibility.” She tapped her finger on the envelope. “Can you make it so that secret writing is only made visible if a revealing charm has a countersign attached?”

  “You could. But then it requires you to know the countersign.”

  She scanned the letter. She did not know the countersign. If he used one, he must have included it in the letter. And if he did so, he would have called attention to it by setting it slightly apart in some manner.

  Her eyes fell on the second postscript. Do not worry about me.

  Could it be? She tried the revealing charm on the envelope again, while silently reciting Do not worry about me as a countersign.

  Immediately new writing appeared on the envelope.

  But only if you are armed with a knife and willing to use it.

  “Try it on the letter, too,” said the prince, his voice full of barely leashed excitement.

  She did, and was rewarded with Oysters give pearls.

  “Oysters give pearls, but only if you are armed with a knife and willing to use it,” she read the sentence aloud. “Should this mean something to me?”

  “Give me a moment.” The prince went inside the Crucible and came back a minute later. “It’s a line from an Argonin play called The Fisherman’s Pilgrimage.”

  Argonin was considered the greatest playwright the Domain ever produced. Iolanthe had studied some of Argonin’s plays at school, but not The Fisherman’s Pilgrimage.

  The line had been given in two parts, as password and countersign. But to what?

  All at once she knew: for something that Master Haywood had reason to trust would always be on her person.

  Her wand.

  Her wand too was stored in the laboratory—it would be difficult to pass herself off as nonmage if she were caught with it. She retrieved it from the cabinet and turned it about in the light.

  It had once been her pride and joy, her wand, a piece of extraordinary craftsmanship. Emerald vines and amethyst flowers had been set onto the surface; the veins of the leaves were composed of hair-thin filaments of malachite, the pistils and stamens of the flowers tiny yellow diamonds.

  A wand especially commissioned for her birth, Master Haywood had told her, to be an heirloom piece. And she had not wondered too much how her parents, both still students, both from terribly modest backgrounds, had managed to afford it.

  But now she knew it was not the Se
abournes who had ordered such a spectacularly costly wand, but the memory keeper, the most untrustworthy person she had ever known.

  Her mother, if the prince was right about it.

  “Oysters give pearls,” she said aloud, and recited the rest silently.

  The wand slid apart. The inlays had been done on a shell, which now detached from the base of the wand to reveal a separate core. Four small objects had been embedded in the core; they were identical looking, pea-sized lumps as black as coal.

  The prince leaped to his feet. “These are the vertices of a quasi-vaulter.”

  The only device known to circumvent a fully established no-vaulting zone—and most likely what had enabled Master Haywood’s disappearance from the Citadel last June.

  “I have been trying to buy a quasi-vaulter on the black market for five years,” the prince went on. “Not a single one came up for sale in all that time.”

  But now she had one at her disposal and would be able to escape from anywhere. Once.

  He picked up the lumps and handed them to her. “The vertices are contact requisite and need to be on your person for at least seventy-two hours before they will transport you. It is quite likely that was already done when you were an infant, but you want to make sure.”

  She dropped them into the inside pocket of her jacket and carefully sealed the pocket shut. “But where is the target?”

  A full quasi-vaulter set came with five pieces, four vertices and a target to be placed ahead of time. She was fairly confident the target wouldn’t be inside an active volcano, but she would have preferred to know where she was going.

  “Somewhere Atlantis cannot find, I hope,” said the prince. “You are making impressive progress, by the way. What do you plan to do should you locate your guardian?”

  Questions of the future hurt—all possible courses of action invariably involved her leaving Titus for parts unknown. “Set him free and go into hiding.”

  “Have you thought of a place?”

  She shook her head. “Time enough to think about that once I manage to actually free him.”

  “Please let me know if I can help in any way,” he said solemnly. “It is still as dangerous as ever for you out there.”

  She wanted to hold his face in her hands and tell him that it was not danger that she feared. No anymore. But she only nodded. “Thank you. I had better go now—cricket practice in twenty minutes.”

  When Iolanthe arrived at practice, to her surprise, Kashkari was already there, dressed in his cricket kit, no less.

  She shook hands with him. “Are you joining us, sir?”

  “According to West, when they drew up the list for the twenty-two, I was number twenty-three. Therefore I will be playing in Wintervale’s place until he is no longer incapacitated.”

  “I’m surprised you were willing to leave his side. How is he today?”

  “I was with him for some time just now. He woke up for a whopping thirty seconds.”

  “That’s something.”

  “That is something indeed. And he seemed to be in good spirits, though he was disappointed not to see the prince.”

  A few other cricket players arrived, followed by a man hauling a heavy-looking black case. The man opened the case and began assembling a contraption—a camera.

  “What’s going on over there?” she asked Kashkari. “Is that Roberts?”

  “That’s Roberts. This is his last year and the third time he’s been chosen for the twenty-two, but he hasn’t made the eleven yet. Rumor has it he’s been talking about having a photograph taken so that whether he is selected for the eleven or not, it would appear as if he had.”

  Iolanthe snorted. “You have to applaud that kind of initiative. Although—” She turned to Kashkari. “Don’t you know whether he makes the eleven?”

  Kashkari could have dreamed about that, for all she knew.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. Never dreamed about the Eton and Harrow games.”

  “What do you dream about then, other than coming to Eton? And have those other dreams come true?”

  “There was one time when I was little, when I dreamed of a birthday cake for my seventh birthday. Mind you, birthday cakes are not the norm. In our family we always made Indian sweets for birthdays. But on my seventh birthday, I was indeed served a western cake with candles blazing on top, just as I’d dreamed.”

  Her younger self would have found his gift fascinating. But now her entire view of seers and visions had been colored with a sharp prejudice. The entire point of life was the ability to make one’s own choices. Foreknowledge of anything—especially the circular kind, such as Kashkari’s presence at Eton because he’d dreamed of it—was terribly limiting and ran counter to the entire concept of free will.

  “But did you want a birthday cake?”

  “I didn’t think so much of whether I wanted a birthday cake. At that point, only another one of my visions had come true—that my grandmother’s old classmate would come to stay with us. So I was far more interested in whether this dream too was prophetic.”

  “Have you ever thought about a different life for yourself? One that doesn’t involve leaving your family to come to Eton?”

  “Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  “Do you regret the path not taken? The dreams, they don’t allow you any choice, do they?”

  “It’s a very Western point of view to see visions of the future as eternal truths chiseled in marble, which must not be tampered with or otherwise disturbed. We view a vision more as a suggestion, one among many different possibilities. After I had a slice of that birthday cake, I asked if I could also have some ladhoos—this dense, round confection that I adored—and lo and behold I was given a plate of ladhoos too. And when it came to Eton, I never viewed those dreams as binding. The question was always, did I want to have this adventure, and in the end I decided, yes I did.”

  “So there were dreams you ignored?”

  “Well, there was one I had more or less decided to ignore, as an experiment, because it had seemed both stupid and utterly insignificant. I’d seen it a few times in the past two years. I would be in the prince’s room at night, with a number of other boys. And then, I would roll up the sleeves of my kurta and climb out of the window and down the drainpipes.”

  Iolanthe started.

  “I wear my kurta only to bed—meaning it was past lights-out. It just didn’t seem like something I would do, climbing out of a window for mischief in the middle of the night. But when the scene unfolded in reality, it had to do with Trumper and Hogg and their rock throwing. Suddenly it seemed like a very worthwhile thing to do, going after them.”

  And by doing so, he had revealed himself to be the “scorpion” the Oracle of Still Waters had spoken about, someone from whom she could seek aid.

  “Was I there in your dream?”

  “You were speaking just before I climbed out the window. I was never able to recall what you said, but yes, you were there.”

  “Gentlemen, I hate to interrupt this engrossing conversation, but practice is about to start,” said West.

  It had been an engrossing conversation indeed. Iolanthe hadn’t even noticed West’s approach. She shook hands with him. “We are drawing a crowd today.”

  West glanced at the dozens and dozens of boys gathered at the edge of the playing field. “That’s nothing. Wait until the Summer Half.”

  “Cooper and Rogers, over there,” said Iolanthe to Kashkari.

  Cooper waved. Iolanthe blew him an exaggerated kiss. Both Cooper and Rogers bent over laughing, as if it were the funniest thing they had ever seen.

  “Does the prince not come and watch you play?” asked West.

  “He has about as much interest in cricket as he has in medieval French grammar,” Iolanthe answered.

  “Is that so?”

  West’s tone seemed casual, but Iolanthe could sense his disappointment—a subtle movement in the set of his jaw, the way he carried his bat closer to his per
son.

  Why should West care whether Titus came to the practice?

  Was he an agent of Atlantis, by some chance?

  This possibility distracted her so much that it was not until they were twenty minutes into the practice that the significance of what Kashkari had said fully made itself understood.

  Kashkari had seen her—or Fairfax, rather—several times in dreams in the past two years, while Fairfax was only supposed to have been absent from school for three months, according to the stipulations of the prince’s otherwise spell that had created and maintained Fairfax’s fictitious identity.

  When Iolanthe had finally turned up, under the name Fairfax, Kashkari would have known that Fairfax hadn’t been absent for a mere three months, but had never been seen in Mrs. Dawlish’s house until that moment.

  No wonder at the beginning of their acquaintance he’d asked Iolanthe so many questions and made her so nervous. He had suspected from the first second that some pieces about Fairfax did not fit together.

  That Fairfax, who was supposed to have lived under Mrs. Dawlish’s roof for the past four years, did not exist until the start of Summer Half.

  Iolanthe kept glancing at Kashkari as they walked back together to Mrs. Dawlish’s. He was possibly even more difficult to read than the prince—and he accomplished it without the haughtiness the latter wore like a suit of spiked armor.

  It amazed her now, behind that gentlemanly amiability, how much Kashkari had kept to himself. Not only his own secrets, but hers too, never revealing anything of his inner thoughts, except perhaps an occasional question that had her flailing for an answer.

  But why was he divulging all these closely held secrets to her? And why now? Was he trying to tell her something?

  Or was it a warning?

  The prince came out of his room as she and Kashkari reached the stair landing of their corridor at Mrs. Dawlish’s. “Our lackeys have our tea almost prepared.”

  They usually had their tea in Wintervale’s room. Now that Wintervale was indisposed, the location had temporarily moved to Kashkari’s room. Iolanthe didn’t want tea, but she also didn’t want to drag the prince back into his room to unburden herself, not with Kashkari already saying, “A pleasure to host my friends.”