The Perilous Sea Page 4

  She rubbed a finger across his lower lip. His eyes grew dark. He pushed her against the wall and kissed her again.

  “So . . . cream or sugar in your tea?” he asked after a few minutes, his breaths uneven.

  She smiled and rested her cheek against his shoulder, her breaths as ungoverned as his. “I have missed you.”

  “It was a mistake for us to go back to the Domain together. I should have realized that when agents of Atlantis could not locate you here at school, they would come to believe that you must still be in the Domain. I should have known they would watch me relentlessly.”

  She laid a hand on the front of his jacket. “It wasn’t your fault. We were both lulled into a false sense of security.”

  He took her hand in his. “Of course it was my fault. My task is to keep you safe.”

  “But I am not meant to be kept safe,” she said, rubbing the pad of her thumb along the outside of his palm. “I am meant for fearsome risks and epic clashes. Remember? It’s my destiny.”

  He leaned back, surprise written over his face. “So you believe it now?”

  After all the harrowing and marvelous events of the previous Half, how could she not? “Yes, I do. So don’t apologize for not guarding me every second of the day. I am but walking the path I am meant to—and a little danger here and there serves to keep my reflexes sharp.”

  Wonder came into his eyes—wonder and gratitude. He touched his forehead to hers again, his hands warm on her cheeks. “I am so glad it is you. I cannot possibly face this task with anyone else.”

  At the catch in his voice, unexpected tears stung the back of her eyes. They would be at each other’s side until the very end—she cherished that certainty even as she feared it. “I’ll keep you safe,” she said softly. “Nothing and no one will take you away from me.”

  Because it was far too early in the Half for actual crying, she added, “Now make me some tea and tell me all about how terrible it was to spend your summer in the same opulent palace as the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  And delayed the tea-making some more.

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  CHAPTER ♦5

  The Sahara Desert

  THE PAIN BURNED THROUGH THE boy’s flesh. He clamped his teeth over his lower lip, not sure whether he was trying to keep quiet or remain conscious. It did not help that the dark beneath the makeshift sand dune was thick and impenetrable—it made him think that all he had to do was close his eyes and sweet oblivion would be his.

  “I’ve set a one-way sound circle so no one can overhear us,” came the low, slightly scratchy voice of the elemental mage he could not get rid of. “Now I’m going to amplify outside voices.”

  Instantly a gruff voice boomed in the boy’s ear. “—sibility, Brigadier?”

  “We will have our elemental mages clear as much of the area as possible, to improve visibility,” answered a woman. “A one-mile radius has been set. Man the stations and start the dragnet. One regiment from the center out, two from the periphery in.”

  Part of him wanted to turn himself in—Atlantis would give him something to dull the marrow-rotting pain. But the desire to remain free was so great, it was almost primal.

  It was the only thing he knew.

  Not his name, not his past, not a single event that might shed light on how he came to be in the middle of a desert, badly wounded, only this: he could not allow himself to be captured by Atlantis or its allies, or all would be lost.

  The calls and shouts were now only those of soldiers obeying orders. The elemental mage countermanded the earlier spell for voice amplification. An abrupt silence descended, still and suffocating.

  The boy weighed his scant options. Without any memories, he could not vault away, even if he had the vaulting range to put himself beyond this radius Atlantis was establishing. Were he able to see to any distance, then he could blind vault. But with the sandstorm obscuring everything, that too was out of the question.

  If only he had had the presence of mind earlier to ask the elemental mage to punch a tunnel of clear air in the sandstorm, then he would have been able to distance himself from that torrent of suspicious solicitude.

  He had been almost entirely convinced that the elemental had been responsible for his injury. Who else would be so close at hand, if not an enemy? Who else would continue to prowl at the periphery of his dome, despite his express wish to be left alone?

  The elemental mage’s fear of Atlantis could have been an act. The blackmail to get under his dome certainly could have been a feint for finishing him off. The elemental mage’s willingness to give the first drop of blood, however, had taken him aback.

  There was so much one could do with voluntarily offered blood. Only a fool—or someone with no absolutely no ulterior motive—would have dared to do what she did. Now, from an almost certain enemy, the elemental mage had become an unknown in the equation.

  “Did you hear their plan of action?” said the elemental mage.

  He grunted an answer.

  “I’m going below the surface—it’s what I should have done in the first place, instead of getting involved in any kind of blood magic.”

  “Then why did you not?”

  “I’m sure you always think lucidly and from every angle when there are armored chariots bearing down on you,” the elemental mage said, her tone arch. “In any case, my earlier failure to consider this particular alternative is your good luck. I can take you below with me.”

  The offer stoked his suspicions anew. Was the elemental mage a bounty hunter of some sort, concerned that a cash prize might be spoiled by Atlantis’s arrival on scene? “Why do you insist on clinging to me?”

  “What?”

  “You always pushing your company on me.”

  “Pushing my—have you been raised to walk on by when there is a severely wounded mage lying on the ground?”

  “So asks the one who engages in blackmail.”

  The elemental mage muttered something under her breath. “I guess you’d prefer to stay here then. Goodbye and long may Fortune shield your most charming self.”

  He could not see in the dark but he could feel the sand to his right shifting—the elemental mage was sinking down. “Wait.”

  “What do you want?”

  He wavered for a moment. “I’ll come with you.”

  A nonharming covenant was not as airtight a bond as a blood oath: nothing prevented the elemental mage from turning him over to a third party that wished him ill. But under the surface, where there were no third parties, he should be safe enough.

  “Are you sure? I might take it as permission to further push my company on you.”

  The elemental mage’s voice dripped with sarcasm. Reassuring, that: he vastly preferred someone who wanted nothing to do with him. “I suppose I’ll have to endure it for the remedies.”

  The elemental mage burrowed beneath him, the movement causing a wave of agony. He ground his teeth and concentrated on modifying the tensile dome into a normal, mobile shield, which should keep a bubble of air around them and prevent sand from falling onto his back.

  The elemental mage wrapped one arm around his neck and hooked a leg behind his knees. They began to sink, sand excavated from underneath flowing up either side of the shield to the top.

  “And how do you know my remedies aren’t poisoned?” said the elemental mage as they descended.

  “I assume they are.”

  “I look forward to applying them to you then.”

  They sank more rapidly. Something was not quite right. The elemental mage had seemed rangy of build, but with their torsos pressed tightly together, he did not feel nearly as much skeleton as he’d anticipated. In fact . . . in fact . . .

  He sucked in a breath—and hissed at the pain that shot through him. But there could be no doubt abou
t it. “You are a girl.”

  She was unmoved by his discovery. “And?”

  “You are dressed like a man.”

  “You are dressed as a nonmage.”

  He did not know that. When he had come to, he had been lying on his back, hot sand digging into the open wound on his back. It had been all he could do to turn onto his stomach and build the tensile dome—he had paid no attention to what he wore. And later, when he needed a sharp implement, he had simply tried a pocket, without thinking about whether mage attire would have a pocket at that particular place.

  The whole thing was becoming more incomprehensible by the minute. Waking up in the middle of a desert, injured, with no idea how he had come to the place was bad enough. Now nonmage clothes too?

  They stopped.

  “Bedrock in three feet.” She slipped out from underneath him.

  His nails dug into the center of his palm, fighting against the fresh, searing pain brought on by her movement.

  A clear, blue mage light grew and spread. “I am going to look at your wound. You’ll be a burden to me if you can’t move on your own.”

  With the nonharming covenant in place, she could not do anything to worsen his condition. Still, unease seized him at the thought of being more or less at her mercy. But he had no choice. “Go ahead.”

  She cut away his clothes and sprinkled a cool, fragrant liquid onto his wound, the rain that doused a raging wildfire. He heard himself pant—from the blessed reduction of pain.

  “Now I need to clean the wound,” she warned him.

  Innumerable particles of sand had dug into his flesh. It might be a literal bloodbath to take them all out. Dread roared in his head; he clenched his teeth and said nothing.

  The pain returned, sharp and tearing. He swallowed a scream and braced himself for more. But she only sprinkled more of what must be tears of the Angels on his back.

  “It’s done,” she said. “I removed all the grains of sand at once, since we don’t have much time.”

  He would have expressed gratitude, if he were not shaking too much to speak.

  She applied layers and layers of various ointments, dressed his wound, and offered him a handful of granules. “Gray ones for strength. Red ones for pain—otherwise you’ll still hurt too much to move.”

  He swallowed them whole.

  “Stay where you are for a minute, for everything to take effect. Then we must get going.”

  “Thank you,” he managed.

  “My, words I was convinced I’d never hear from you,” she said.

  She checked and double-checked all the labels as she put the remedies back into her bag, with the care of a librarian reshelving books according to a particularly rigid reference code.

  Now that he knew she was a girl, he was astonished that he had thought her a boy until they had been pressed together from shoulders to knees. Yes, there had been the man’s clothes, the short hair, and the somewhat gravelly voice, but surely . . . He could only shake his head inwardly at the potency of assumption.

  She glanced up, caught him staring, and frowned—she had a rather fearsome frown. “What’s that cold thing inside your clothes?”

  He was only just beginning to become aware of a chill against his heart, which he had hardly noticed earlier, when the pain from his back had crowded out all other sensations. Gingerly, he put one hand under his jacket. His fingers came into contact with something ice-cold.

  An attempt to move it chafed the back of his neck. That something was a pendant. He yanked the cord from around his neck.

  The pendant was the shape of half an oval. The other half was clearly missing. Where was it? Who had it? And did the temperature of his half of the pendant indicate that the other half was far, far away, perhaps on a different continent altogether?

  He sat up and examined his ruined clothes—jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. According to the labels sewn into the seams, they had been made by a tailor of Savile Row, London.

  He found the pocketknife he had used earlier, engraved with a coat of arms that had a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn in the quadrants. The waistcoat yielded a watch, made of a cool, silver-gray metal, engraved with the same coat of arms. The jacket’s inside pocket contained a wallet—and again the same coat of arms.

  Inside the wallet was a negligible amount of nonmage currency, British, by the looks of the coins. But more importantly, there were several cards, all with the same coat of arms yet once more, and on the other side, the words H. S. H. Prince Titus of Saxe-Limburg.

  Was he this Prince Titus? What kind of place was Saxe-Limburg? There was no mage realm by that name. And as far as he knew, not a nonmage one either.

  She handed him a tunic from her satchel. He destroyed the ruined clothes, stowed the pendant inside the wallet, and shoved the wallet and the watch into his trouser pockets. A hot, unpleasant sensation tore across his back as he lifted his arms overhead to pull on the tunic, but it was ignorable.

  She tossed a waterskin his way. He drank nearly half of the contents of the waterskin, gave it back to her, and pointed at the broken strap of her satchel. “I can repair that for you.”

  “Go ahead, if it will make your conscience feel better.”

  He rejoined the two halves of the strap. “Why do you assume I have a conscience?”

  “Indeed. When will I stop being such a bumpkin?”

  She enlarged the space in which they found themselves and stood up. “Linea orientalis.”

  A faint line appeared underfoot, running due east.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked, a better question than Where are we? He did not want to betray the fact that he had no idea of their location.

  “The Nile.”

  So they were in the Sahara. “How far are we from the Nile?”

  “What do you think?”

  A cool challenge was in her eyes. He realized that he enjoyed looking at her—the arrangement of her features was aesthetically pleasing. But more than that, he liked the assured way she carried herself, now that she no longer bothered to be nice to him. “I do not know enough to tell.”

  At his admission, she cast him a speculative look. “We are seven hundred miles west of the Nile.”

  “And how south of the Mediterranean?”

  “About the same.”

  That would put them approximately a hundred, a hundred twenty miles southwast of the nearest Bedouin realm, one allied with Atlantis, no less. The armored chariot must have taken off from an Atlantean installation in that realm, which would explain how they managed to arrive on the scene so fast.

  But why? Why would Atlantis come racing? Was it for the same reason that he would rather endure any amount of pain than be caught?

  He rose to his feet—and would have wobbled if he had not braced himself with a hand against the sand wall, which felt almost damp against his skin.

  “Can you walk?” she asked, her tone bordering on severe.

  “I can walk.”

  He expected her to say something cutting, along the lines of how she would gladly leave him behind if he could not keep up. But she only handed him a nutrition cube. “Let me know when you need to rest.”

  An odd sensation overcame him: after a moment or two he recognized it as embarrassment. Mortification, almost. There was still a chance, of course, that everything about her was a pretense. But it seemed more and more likely that she was simply a very decent, even compassionate, person.

  He took a bite of the nutrition cube, which tasted like lightly flavored air. “I guess this is also poisoned, like your remedies.”

  The corner of her lips lifted slightly. “Of course.”

  She excavated along the line she had made, maintaining a moving space just large enough for them to walk abreast. The air he breathed was cool and slightly moist. The sand that crunched beneath his feet had a barely perceptible sheen of wetness. Overhead and to either side of them, sand flowed backward, making him feel a little dizzy. Making him feel as if he were in a
submarine boat, navigating in the dark depths of a strange ocean.

  A quick test told him that they were ninety-three feet below the surface. A mobile dome—even an adamantine dome—could not hold up under the weight of so much sand. Only the girl’s elemental powers kept them from being buried alive.

  Her face was almost blank with concentration, her eyes downcast and half closed. Her hair was blue-black in the mage light and the cut of it made him notice her bone structure and her full lips.

  She glanced at him—he had been staring. He turned his attention to his wand instead, whch he recognized it as a replica of Validus, Titus the Great’s wand. Upon entering adulthood mages typically chose to commission original designs for their wands; before that, they were often given wands that were copies of those once wielded by legendary archmages.

  So nothing there, other than that he was probably still underage and that someone in his family admired Titus the Great.

  “Does that tell you who you are?” she asked, her chin pointing toward his wand.

  The significance of her question did not escape him. Does that tell you who you are? She assumed that he did not otherwise know his own identity. Which was quite true but hardly the conclusion someone would come to, from knowing him for all of a few minutes, unless . . .

  Unless she also did not know that about herself.

  He handed over one of the cards from his wallet. She examined it carefully, front and back, murmuring spells to reveal hidden writing. But it was what it was, an ordinary nonmage calling card.

  “Do you have anything that tells you who you are?” He asked the same question in return.

  She looked up for a second, as if realizing that she might be giving something away of herself, reached into her trousers pocket—and went completely still. He heard it too. Something was coming up from behind them, something big and metallic, scraping the bedrock as it approached.

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