The Perilous Sea Read online

  “No.”

  It would be a waste of time to appeal to his better nature, so she didn’t bother. “Would you like me to signal them where you are?” she asked, as she picked up the nutrition cubes, the remedies, and the waterskins from the sand. “It’s my understanding you can’t move much.”

  The boy bared his teeth. “Your kindness is truly remarkable.”

  “And your gratitude humbling to behold. Now let me in or get ready for Atlantis.”

  Her ruthlessness surprised her. Had she always been such a hard bargainer, or was she but responding to the boy’s cold-bloodedness?

  “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “But I am not letting you in without a nonharming agreement. Put a drop of your blood on the dome.”

  A boy who practiced blood magic—she shivered. A nonharming agreement wasn’t as fearsome as a blood oath, but still, all blood magic was powerful and dangerous, to be entered into only with extreme caution. “Only if you reciprocate.”

  “You first,” he said.

  She took out a set of compact tools she had seen in her satchel earlier, jabbed a slender pick into her finger, and touched the dome.

  It was like touching the top of a giant jellyfish: cool, soft, yet resilient.

  The boy grimaced. From reluctance, she thought, until she realized that it was from the pain of movement to take a pocketknife out of his jacket. He extracted a drop of blood and sent it outward to the dome, which absorbed it as the thirsty soil would soak in water.

  Next thing she knew she was in it to the elbow. She drew back, startled.

  “Hurry,” said the boy.

  The dome was slightly sticky on her skin as she pushed through. Sitting down next to the boy, she willed sand to rise and cover the dome, not stopping until it was pitch-dark inside.

  Thirty seconds later came the soft thuds of armored chariots landing nearby.

  Atlantis, it would seem, knew exactly where to find them.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦4

  Eton College ♦ England

  TWO HOURS AFTER THE INTRUDER had escaped the Citadel, Titus walked through the front door of his residence house at Eton College. Mrs. Dawlish’s parlor, brimming with printed chintz and needlework flowers, was as neat and proper as always. But the walls reverberated with the noise of thirty-five pupils stomping up and down, greeting friends they had not seen since the end of Summer Half.

  A curious weight settled on Titus’s chest, a bittersweet pang: in this house he had spent some of the happiest hours of life. He could almost hear Fairfax’s boastful words and see the gleefully cocky expression on her face.

  He broke into a run, pushing past a gaggle of junior boys clogging up the parlor, and taking the steps three at a time. At the stair landing of the next floor stood a cluster of senior boys—but she was not among them.

  In the split second he took, trying to decide whether to shove those boys aside too, Leander Wintervale turned around and saw him.

  “Did you hear the news, prince?” Wintervale greeted Titus with a hearty slap to the back. “Fairfax made the twenty-two, alongside myself, of course.”

  A long moment passed before Wintervale’s sentence made sense: he was talking about cricket. At the beginning of Michaelmas Half, twenty-two boys were selected as candidates for the next year’s school cricket team. They would split into two teams and play each other all year long. Then the best eleven would be named to the school team come Summer Half, for the pride and glory of facing off against teams from Harrow and Winchester.

  “Does—does Fairfax know?”

  Wintervale grinned. “Fairfax hasn’t stopped boasting about it since he heard the news.”

  Relief tore through Titus, making him lightheaded. She was here. She had made her way back. “Where is he?”

  “Gone to High Street with Cooper.”

  Titus swallowed his disappointment. “What for?”

  “Tomorrow’s tea stuff, of course, or we’d have nothing to eat,” said Wintervale, not noticing any of the emotions that buffeted Titus. “By the way, Kashkari will not be joining us for a few days. Mrs. Dawlish had a cable from him. His steamer ran into some rough weather in the Indian Ocean and he reached Port Said only today.”

  For four years, Titus had paid no particular attention to Kashkari, the Indian pupil with whom he and Wintervale took their afternoon tea—Kashkari was mainly Wintervale’s friend. But a few months ago Kashkari, unbeknownst to him, had played a crucial role in keeping Titus out of Atlantis’s grasp.

  “Port Said,” said Titus. “So he has to put in at Trieste, cross over the Alps, and pass through Paris before he can get here.”

  The whole of the summer holiday was barely enough time for the round trip from England to India and back. Kashkari would be lucky if he got to spend a week with his family in Hyderabad.

  “You forgot to mention the English Channel. It’s the worst.” Wintervale shuddered. “In the first year of our Exile, my father wanted the family to have an authentic nonmage experience. So we crossed the English Channel on a steamer and I puked my guts out something proper. I had a great deal more respect for the nonmages afterward—I mean, the hardship these people endure.”

  Leave it to Wintervale to talk like this within easy hearing of at least half a dozen boys. Words such as “discretion” and “caution” held no meaning for him. He knew enough to not announce outright that he was a mage, but otherwise his inclination was to continually blurt out the first thing that came into his head.

  It was part of his charm, that he was so frank and unguarded.

  “In any case,” Wintervale went on, “Kashkari doesn’t—”

  A chorus of “Fairfax!” and “We heard you made the twenty-two, Fairfax!” drowned out the rest of Wintervale’s sentence.

  Titus gripped the banister and slowly, slowly turned around. But through the space between the balusters, he could only see a huddle of junior boys in their waist-length short jackets.

  He took a step down, then another, then two more. All at once there she was, in a senior boy’s uniform of a crisp white shirt and black tailed jacket, playfully scolding a boy who barely came up to her shoulder. “What kind of question is that, Phillpott? Of course I will be one of the eleven. In fact, West is going to take one look at me and quake in his brogues, because I am going to wrench the captaincy from his grasp.”

  The jauntiness in her eyes, the certainty of her tone, and the innate gentleness as she fluffed the boy’s hair—a fierce gladness swept over Titus. “Are you ever going to acquire any humility, Fairfax?”

  She lifted her head and gazed at him for a full two seconds. “I will, the moment you come into some social graces, Your Highness.”

  Her retort was accompanied by a smile, not the wide grin she flashed for the junior boys, only a slight lift of the corners of her lips. All at once he felt her relief—and behind that relief, a trace of exhaustion.

  His chest constricted. But the next moment, she was beaming again, and poking the arm of the senior boy next to her. “Don’t just stand there, Cooper, say something to His Magnificence.”

  Cooper bowed with a flourish. “Welcome back, Your Highness. Our humble abode is honored by your august presence.”

  Of all the boys in the house, Cooper was probably Fairfax’s favorite, because he was as silly and enthusiastic as a puppy, and because she enjoyed Cooper’s wide-eyed awe at Titus’s princely aloofness.

  Titus upheld that princely aloofness. “One could say my august presence is diminished by your humble abode, but I will not think too closely upon the matter.”

  Fairfax laughed, the sound deep and rich. “Your humility, prince, shines like a beacon in the darkest night,” she said as she ascended the stairs. “We can all only aspire to be so great yet so humble.”

  Sutherland, behind Wintervale, cackled so hard
he almost choked on the apple he was eating.

  She drew up even with Titus. The pleasure of her nearness was almost painful. And when she set her hand on his shoulder, the sensation was all electricity.

  “Glad you made it, Fairfax,” he said, as quietly as he could.

  Now he could breathe again. Now he was whole again.

  When Iolanthe Seabourne came to in utter darkness, naked and in agony, she had not been remotely alarmed: the sensations were par for the course for resuming human form after the effect of a transmogrification spell wore off. Her lack of recollection of the hours she had spent as a tiny turtle also did not bother her—without a blood oath binding her to the prince, there was nothing to preserve continuity of consciousness while metamorphosing from one form to another.

  Titus’s absence, however, brought a sensation of cold completely unrelated to the temperatures of the night. Where was he? It was unlike him to leave her without a blanket for warmth, or a note to explain his movements.

  Had he been taken by Atlantis? Was that why he had to get her away from him so that she wouldn’t lose her freedom at the same time? The roar of her blood was such that her ears rang as she grimly dug around the hut for something to cover herself.

  Her anxiety subsided somewhat after she unearthed changes of clothes, nutrition cubes, and coins in the seemingly abandoned hut. Even better, a student pass issued by a small conservatory somewhere in the northeast of the Domain. She had not been chucked away at a random location in desperation. Something had come up and he needed her out of the castle; without enough time to get her to a proper safe house, he had instead deposited her at a way station.

  Dressed and with half a nutrition cube in her stomach, she stepped outside the hut to investigate her new whereabouts. The castle was no more than three miles away to the north. A far-seeing spell revealed the flag of the Domain, a silver phoenix on a background of sapphire, streaming atop the highest parapet.

  She frowned. If the Master of the Domain was in residence, his personal standard, that of a phoenix and a wyvern guarding a shield with seven crowns, should be the banner flying over the castle.

  Where was he? Her misgivings returned with a vengeance. She must get out of the mountains and find out what was going on.

  The castle was situated near the eastern front of the Labyrinthine Mountains. Theoretically, it should be no more than twenty or twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, from the plains. But when the mountains moved without rhythm or pattern, twenty or twenty-five as the crow flies might very well take a week on foot.

  Provided that she didn’t become hopelessly lost.

  It took her four days, two and half of which were spent thinking she had become hopelessly lost. Fortunately, the closest villages and towns were accustomed to seeing lost hikers stumbling out of the mountains, dirty and disoriented, in desperate need of a wash and a meal.

  The first thing Iolanthe asked for, before a wash and a meal, was a newspaper. It was almost the anniversary of Titus’s coronation and every year, to mark the occasion, a parade was held in Delamer. If the parade was canceled, then he was in trouble.

  But no, the parade would take place the next day, and the Master of the Domain would attend several ceremonies and give out prizes to exemplary students.

  A kindly farmer offered her a lift in his ancient chariot, pulled by an even more ancient pegasus, to the nearest town that had expedited services. From there she was able to catch a translocator to a larger town, which happened to be a hub of expedited highways.

  Being at the hub made her heart palpitate: there could be agents of Atlantis, lying in wait for her. But she had to move quickly—and she was protected by an Irreproducible Charm that made it impossible for her image to be reproduced and transmitted.

  She reached Delamer that evening. The next afternoon, from quite some distance away, she watched Titus pass over Palace Avenue on a floating balcony, flanked by the regent and Lady Callista. He did not wear his grandfather’s sunburst medal, to signal that he was under house arrest or any other type of captivity. But he was encircled by guards and attendants, with barely enough room to breathe.

  She could not go near him while he was thus surrounded. Her only choice was to leave him a coded message in The Delamer Observer, head to Eton, and hope that he, too, would be given permission to go back to that nonmage school.

  Departing so soon—and by herself—was not how she had envisioned her summer. She debated whether to remain in Delamer for some more time, so that she could arrange for a meeting with Titus or find out on her own something of Master Haywood’s whereabouts. But in the end, she decided it was far too risky to stay longer: there was a subtle tension in the mood of the capital; even just standing in line to buy a bit of something to eat, she overheard whispers about agents of Atlantis being particularly active of late.

  To get out of the Domain by instantaneous means required documentations she could not provide. But traveling within the Domain was easy enough with the student pass. By expedited highways and ferries she arrived on the Melusine Archipelago, one of the Domain’s outlying island chains.

  She had learned in the teaching cantos of the Crucible that on the southernmost isle of the archipelago was a secret store of sailboats. The travel restrictions Atlantis had implemented did not prevent nonmage means of locomotion, and a good, fast sloop was sometimes just the way to make an escape.

  Her command of air and water came in handy for the one hundred and twenty miles of open ocean to Flores, one of the northwestern islands of the Azores. From there she bargained a passage on a whaling ship to Ponta Delgada, and at Ponta Delgada she hopped on a steamer to the Madeira Islands.

  She had a choice to remain on Madeira. But when she learned, moments after disembarking, that a French cargo freighter in the harbor would be pulling anchor and setting out for South Africa in two hours, she hesitated only a minute before running to the harbor agent’s office to inquire as to whether the French freighter also took passengers.

  Titus had created a good background for Archer Fairfax, the identity she assumed when she was at Eton, by setting Fairfax’s family in Bechuanaland, a place where other Eton students were unlikely to visit. But that otherwise spell, as effective as it was at school, would disintegrate if agents of Atlantis took it into their heads to discover the exact location of the Fairfax family farm.

  She did not stay long in Cape Town, but she spent her entire time there conducting a fervent campaign of disinformation via a battery of new otherwise spells. Now, should inquisitive agents of Atlantis come through, they would be told that the Fairfaxes had just departed: a distant relative had died and left Mrs. Fairfax a decent sum of money, and the family decided to enjoy their good fortune by getting rid of the farm and taking a trip around the world—without the son, of course, who had to go back to Eton for Michaelmas Half.

  Rather pat, as a story, but then Iolanthe had always imagined these fictional parents of Fairfax’s to be the sort who were lured to Africa by romantic notions, only to become disillusioned that the agricultural life yielded little romance—or profit, for that matter. With an unexpected windfall, they would gladly take off for parts unknown, for the adventure and thrill Africa had long ago ceased providing.

  With her “family” out of the way for the foreseeable future, Iolanthe booked herself a berth on the next Liverpool-bound steamer out of Cape Town. For the next three weeks hope and fear battled for supremacy in her heart. One moment she would be ecstatic at the thought of seeing Titus again, the next minute, overcome by uneasiness. What if he did not come back to Eton? It made more sense, didn’t it, for him to be kept in the Domain and on a much shorter leash?

  The closer she was to Eton, the worse the pins and needles became. Reaching Mrs. Dawlish’s and finding no trace of him flooded her with dread. She escaped the commotion of the house by latching onto Cooper, who was leaving to put in orders for tea stuff on High Street.

  Cooper chattered happily about the other pupils who
had made the twenty-two, especially West, the boy who everyone believed would be the next captain of the school team. Iolanthe heard very little of what he said. She hadn’t traveled nine thousand miles on her own to bat around a little red ball.

  “Can you believe there is only four months left in 1883?” said Cooper as they neared Mrs. Dawlish’s door again.

  “Is it 1883?” Iolanthe swallowed. “I keep forgetting.”

  “How can you forget what year it is?” Cooper exclaimed. “I sometimes forget the day of the week, but never the month or the year.”

  She gathered up the courage to push open Mrs. Dawlish’s door. In the midst of the parlor, surrounded by junior boys, Titus’s voice carried to her. And suddenly she was ready to win a hundred cricket matches, write a thousand Latin papers, and live among dozens of noisy and sometimes smelly boys for the remainder of her life.

  He was back. He was safe. She scarcely knew what she said or did for the next few minutes, until they extricated themselves from the other boys, with the excuse that the prince needed to unpack his things.

  The moment the door closed behind them, he kissed her. And went on kissing her until they were both breathless.

  “I’m so glad you are safe,” he said, his forehead against hers.

  She spread her fingers over his shoulders, over the warm, slightly scratchy wool of his daycoat. Beneath her hands, his frame was spare but strong. “I was afraid they wouldn’t let you out of the Domain.”

  “How did you get out?”

  She touched the top of his collar. His clothes had been laundered with some kind of evergreen essence; the faint fragrance reminded her of the spruce-covered ridges of the Labyrinthine Mountains. “I’ll tell you after you make me a cup of tea.”

  The Master of the Domain started to pull away. “I’ll do it now.”

  But she wasn’t ready for him to leave her embrace yet. She caught his face between her hands. When she’d passed through Delamer, she had bought a pendant with his portrait on it. The whole of summer, she’d only had that tiny image for company. But now she could drink him in—the dark hair, slightly longer than she remembered, the straight brows, the deep-set eyes.