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I caught Eirene reading from my diary.

  It shocked me to no end.

  I had always believed Eirene one of the most honorable mages I had ever met. But she refused to even give me a reason for her snooping.

  My confidence is shattered. Am I so terrible at judging character? Am I surrounded by mages seeking to betray my trust?

  He had checked the roster of his mother’s staff at the time of the diary entry, but had found no one by the name of Eirene.

  27 March, YD 1016

  This vision again.

  Nothing new, except now I am convinced the man in the vision is a very young man, perhaps a boy still. I cannot say why I think so, but I do.

  9 July, YD 1018

  A wider view of the young man. As whatever phenomenon that staggers him unfolds, his hands grip the railing of the balcony, his knuckles stark white.

  Titus remembered this, gripping the railing in stupefaction at Wintervale’s maelstrom.

  And the term, railing. Could the marble balustrade that encircled the grand balcony outside his bedchamber high in the castle be called a “railing”? And had his hands been anywhere near the balustrade when Fairfax’s lightning had come down?

  He could not recall at all.

  His heart pounded with dread.

  13 April, YD 1021

  The day after his mother learned that he, and not she, would be the next sovereign of the Domain, when she realized that her own death was imminent and that this particular vision, long thought of as insignificant, was actually anything but.

  I have been waiting for this vision to return. Thankfully I did not have to wait too long.

  Finally I see the young man’s face. I’d suspected that it would be Titus, but now I know it is. He appears to be asleep at first, his hand over an old book—my copy of the Crucible or something else? Now he rises, checks the time, fourteen minutes after two, and walks out to the balcony.

  But what does this all mean? I feel as if I should know it but I do not.

  17 April, YD 1021

  The very last entry. It would fill two entire pages, front and back, then snake around all the margins. Only the first few paragraphs would deal with the actual vision. The rest consisted of instructions to Titus, what he should do, what he must learn, and how he was to accomplish this impossible task that she had realized would be his.

  He had come hoping to vindicate Fairfax’s place in his life. Now all he wanted was for there to be no more details that would tilt the balance in Wintervale’s favor. As long as nothing forced him to conclude that it must be Wintervale, he would go on believing that his destiny lay with Fairfax.

  I wish so much of this vision was not from the back, for I love looking upon my son’s face in the moments before the elemental phenomenon shakes him. Yes, I know now that it will be an elemental phenomenon and I know now what a dreadful turning point it will be.

  Has already been.

  But until then, he smiles, my son, his face bright with joy and anticipation.

  It was all Titus could do not to scream.

  He had not smiled before Fairfax’s lightning had come down—had emerged from the Crucible aching and grim. But before Wintervale’s arrival, he had been dreaming of Fairfax.

  And fool that he was, he had grinned from ear to ear in utter happiness, when everything was about Wintervale. And had always been.

  He closed the diary and buried his face in his hands.

  So quiet, almost unnoticeable, the sound of dreams splintering.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦9

  The Sahara Desert

  TITUS FELL ONTO THE JAGGED chunks of rocks that lined the bottom of the tunnel. The contact drove flares of bone-scraping pain into his back. He clenched his teeth, hooked his boots with Fairfax’s, and yanked her back a few inches. “What is wrong?”

  She panted as if she had been very nearly strangled. “I don’t know. When I moved forward a moment ago, it was as if . . . as if spikes were being pounded into my ears.”

  The kind of levitation spell they used was not one that required constant attention. For it to suddenly fail usually implied that the mage who wielded the spell had lost consciousness. But she had not. He could only imagine what kind of actual agony had caused her mind to recoil like that.

  “Is it better now?”

  Her voice was unsteady, bewildered. “Much, much better, after you pulled me back. I feel—I feel almost fine.”

  Not a timed curse, then, or a reaction to toxic substances in the air.

  “Can you widen this tunnel enough for me to get past you? I want to see whether I come across the same thing.”

  When she had done as he asked, he maneuvered himself to the spot where she began screaming, then past the spot. Nothing at all happened to him.

  Thinking perhaps it was because he was feet-forward, he turned around and went headfirst. Still nothing.

  “No?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Her breaths echoed in the cramped space. “Let me try again.”

  “It may not be a good idea.” Though he would have probably chosen to do the same.

  Her jaw was set. “I know. And sorry about dropping you on your back earlier.”

  “I was fine.”

  He made sure he had a hand around her ankle as she crawled forward. The moment she screamed again, he yanked her back. She trembled, her face ashen.

  Now he knew why Atlantis was in no hurry. “The one-mile radius is a blood circle.”

  “What is that?” For the first time there was fear in her voice.

  “Advanced blood magic. It will kill you to venture out of the circle.”

  She swallowed. “Then you had better go. Take the water, take—”

  He interrupted her. “You forget that I could be the one who constructed the blood circle.”

  She blinked. Not cynical enough, this girl. They knew nothing about each other, except they had ended up at the same place and the same time, with one of them hurt—of course they could be mortal enemies.

  “If that is the case,” he went on, “I can break it.”

  Mortal enemies or not, she had provided crucial help for him. And he wasn’t about to abandon her in her hour of need.

  Perhaps he wasn’t cynical enough either.

  Hope flared in her eyes; but it extinguished quickly. “Atlantis would have tried much harder if they knew that the blood circle wouldn’t be able to pen me in.”

  “Maybe they do not know that I am here.”

  He clambered back to where the blood circle must be and took out his pocketknife. With a bead of fresh blood in his palm, he thrust his hand at the unseen boundary. “Sanguis dicet. Sanguis docebit.”

  Blood will tell. Blood will show.

  No tingling or sensation of heat on his skin, which he would have expected to feel if he were the one responsible for the blood circle.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She extinguished the mage light. In the ensuing darkness, something glimmered faintly before his eyes, an almost transparent wall.

  “Does that count as a reaction?” she asked.

  He drew his hand back; the darkness became complete. He thrust his hand forward; again the wall appeared, a phosphorescent latticework. “I did not construct the blood circle, but it would seem I am related to the person who did.”

  Blood magic had first developed to ascertain kinship. Any voluntarily given drop, no matter to what other purpose it had been put, could still attest to consanguinity.

  “Does that mean you can still break the circle?” Her voice betrayed a vibration of excitement.

  “No, I will not be able to. I might be able to weaken the circle, but that could simply mean you are killed a bit more slowly if you try to breach it.”

  In the darkness there was only the sound of her rapid breaths. He called for light. A blue
luminescence suffused the length of the tunnel. She sat with her wrists on her knees, her face shadowed.

  “It is too early for despair,” he said. “We have hardly exhausted all the options.”

  Her teeth sank into her lower lip. “You know more about blood magic than I do. What do you suggest?

  “First I want to see whether you are related to the person who set the blood circle. It would help if that person has no claim of kinship on you.”

  She extracted a drop of blood and sent it floating toward the blood circle. Whereas his blood had been immediately absorbed by blood circle, the tiny floating sphere of her blood bounced off like a pebble striking a tree trunk.

  That he was related to the one who had set up the blood circle and she not at all raised uncomfortable questions. But he didn’t bother to ponder those questions—it was not as if he was unaware of the possibility that they had wished each other harm before the memory spells had taken away their pasts.

  “Iure cognationis,” he said in Latin, and offered another drop of his own blood to the blood circle. “I ask that the blood circle harm not one who matters to me.”

  It was standard language, yet it felt strangely true: the girl mattered to him.

  “That should have reduced the potency of the blood circle somewhat. I can put you under a time freeze, which should further protect you. Is there anything you can do to boost your chances of survival? Any remedies that can counteract traumatic injuries brought on by the mage arts?”

  She ran her fingers over the top of satchel, then her expression brightened. “I have panacea in here.”

  His eyes widened—panacea was extraordinarily difficult to come by. “Take a triple dose.”

  She extracted a vial, counted out three small granules, and swallowed them. “So now that you have weakened the blood circle, you put me under a time freeze, and shove me past?”

  “I wish it were that simple. Should you survive, you would still be in critical condition. And I cannot bore through rock, so—”

  A loud crack, like a boulder splitting in two. They looked up: the ceiling of the tunnel was fracturing. When she had unknowingly tried to cross the blood circle, she must have signaled her precise position.

  And now Atlantis had found her.

  “Grab everything,” he shouted, lunging toward her.

  He took her by the arm and vaulted just as the top of the tunnel pulverized.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦10

  England

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG, IOLANTHE WAS certain of it, the sense of foreboding a hard weight upon her chest.

  But what was wrong?

  On the solid, four-poster bed in Kashkari’s room, Wintervale snored softly. Kashkari sat in a chair by the bed, a finger sandwich from the tea tray Iolanthe had asked for in hand, reading a novel titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. He had given a book called Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to Iolanthe, but she had set it down after the first few lines about a “mysterious and puzzing” phenomenon at sea.

  She moved about the room, examining the densely patterned pewter-on-blue wallpaper, straightening the knick-knacks on the mantel, and tucking the duvet more securely around Wintervale’s feet. His forehead was damp but cool. His eyelids fluttered at her touch, but he slept on.

  It always surprised her that Wintervale was not taller than the prince—he seemed to take up so much more room: he never stood in a doorway but with both arms over his head, his hands on the lintel; his speech was always accompanied by much animated gesticulating; and no matter how much Mrs. Dawlish complained, he continued to slide down banisters and land with huge thumps that reverberated in the entire house.

  In a way, he was one of the most rugged, manly-looking boys in the entire school. But at the same time he was also far more childish than the prince, Kashkari, or even someone like Sutherland. Hardly surprising: as long as he remained a child, he wouldn’t have to deal with the heavy expectations of being Baron Wintervale’s only son.

  It had always been there in Wintervale, the fear of being all too ordinary, of being nothing and no one compared to his father. But now he no longer needed to worry. Now he had revealed himself to be a wielder of the kind of elemental powers she could marvel at.

  If only his accomplishment hadn’t made Titus, probably the most nerveless person she knew, act so strange and jittery.

  She walked to the window and used a far-seeing spell to scan the gray waters of the North Sea. At the approximate location where Wintervale had created the maelstrom, wreckage bobbed on the choppy waters, but thankfully no bodies—or body parts. And no armored chariots circled overhead, ready to turn their gaze upon the Norfolk coast.

  Sea Wolf. That had been the name of the Atlantean skimmer, painted in Greek—ΛABPAΞ —white letters against the steel gray of the hull. The ship had gone down so fast; the crew probably hadn’t even had time to transmit a distress signal.

  A quiet knock came at the door. She turned to see Titus slipping into the room.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” answered Kashkari, setting aside his book. “He said it was something he ate, didn’t he? But his stomach doesn’t seem to bother him, as far as I can tell. On the other hand he is clammy and his pulse is erratic.”

  Titus glanced at Iolanthe and her unease surged. Kashkari might not see it but Titus was shaken. No, stricken. She was reminded of the time the Inquisitor suggested that his mother was but using him to fulfill her own megalomaniacal needs.

  Titus took Wintervale’s pulse. “You two want some fresh air? We can have a maid come sit with him for a bit.”

  “I’m all right,” Kashkari answered. “I can always open the window if I need some air.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Iolanthe.

  Titus led the way out. They took a path that skirted the promontory to a ledge underneath an overhang, which could not be seen from the house. Below the sea surged—the storm clouds were encroaching upon the coast, the salt-scented breeze cold and insistent. He drew a double-impassible circle.

  Without waiting for her to prompt him, he recounted what had happened to Wintervale in Grenoble: the trap that had been set by Atlantis, the flight from the square, the dry dock that launched a vessel directly into the North Sea, the Atlantean frigate that appeared almost immediately thereafter.

  Throughout the recital, his voice remained completely flat. This was not how one told a triumphant story. Wintervale was a sworn enemy of Atlantis, and a boy whose enthusiasm and amiability belied a deep fear of failure. Today, facing the most perilous moment of his life, pursued by the very enemy that had driven his family into Exile, he had risen to the occasion as few could.

  Titus should rejoice, to have such a powerful new ally at hand, and yet he looked like a man condemned.

  A nameless fear twisted inside Iolanthe.

  “Lady Wintervale must have stunned Wintervale in order to send him away for safety,” said Titus. “But Atlantis found him—and the rest you saw.”

  “Had I been Lady Wintervale, I would have disabled the distress signal on the lifeboat,” she said, trying to sound normal. “That was probably what allowed Atlantis to track Wintervale down.”

  Titus’s throat moved. “Would that she had remembered to do so.”

  He spoke quietly, but the vehemence in his words was a punch to her gut. She could hold herself back no more. “There is something you are not telling me. What is it?”

  All at once he looked haggard, as if he had been traveling on foot for months and months, and could scarcely remain upright. She lifted a hand to brace him before she realized what she was doing.

  “Just tell me. It can’t be worse than leaving me in the dark.”

  He gazed at her a long moment, the way one would at the dearly departed. Dread strangled her.

  �
��When we read my mother’s diary after my Inquisition, do you remember the entry that mentioned my standing on a balcony, witnessing something that would shake me profoundly?”

  His words seem to reach her from a great distance, each syllable faint and tinny. She nodded, her neck stiff.

  His eyes were on the storm clouds that turned everything in their path gray and dreary. “I had always assumed that she meant the balcony outside my bedchamber at the castle. Whenever I was at the castle, after lunch, I would lie down and use the Crucible—because that was what she had seen in the vision, me waking up with my hand on an old book that might be the Crucible. And I always had Dalbert call me at fourteen minutes past two, the time she had specified in her vision.

  “And so it was on the day we met. I was awakened at fourteen minutes past two. I walked out onto my balcony. And barely a minute later, your lightning.

  For some reason, the fact that he had it timed to the minute filled her with horror. Or perhaps it was the way he spoke, like an automaton, as if he could only get the words out by pretending they had nothing to do with him.

  With them.

  “This afternoon,” he went on, “I woke up at exactly fourteen minutes after two, and walked onto a balcony.”

  She stared at him. Had she somehow drunk as much cognac the night before as Kashkari? She was unsteady on her feet, and all ash and grit inside her mouth. “Do you mean to tell me that your mother’s prophecy actually referred to Wintervale, and not me?”

  Her voice, tentative and thread-thin, barely sounded like her own.

  He nodded slowly, still not looking at her.

  Her voice shook. “You are sure?”

  He stood still, his expression completely blank. The next moment he was on his knees, his hands over his face. Shock burned through her. This was a boy who had held himself together even in the midst of an Inquisition. But now he was falling apart before her question.

  Numbness spread in her, gray and wooden. She did not understand anything at all. How could Wintervale be the Chosen One when it was up to her to brave the dangers, defeat the Bane, and keep Titus alive throughout it all?