“For God’s sake, don’t give him any more.”
“Surely you have something that’ll work,” rasped Wintervale.
Titus looked through the rest of the tubes. Vertigo. Appendicitis. Bilious complaint. Infection-caused emetion. Inflammation of the stomach lining. Foreign extraction.
He picked the last one, an elixir that should cause any harmful substance in the body to precipitate and be expelled.
“Try this and pray hard.”
They must not have prayed hard enough, for Wintervale immediately went into a seizure.
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CHAPTER ♦11
The Sahara Desert
WIND GUSTED, AS FIERCE AS that of a hurricane. Sand obscured the sky and pelted Titus’s person. He and Fairfax were back in the same spot where they had been before she took them below the surface, and thankfully they had not materialized right on top of an Atlantean.
But Titus was disoriented: he thought Atlantis’s own elemental mages had cleared the airspace inside the blood circle, in order to facilitate their search.
“It’s my doing,” said Fairfax into his ear. “I didn’t want us to be seen.”
Except now they also could barely see beyond their outstretched hands.
“Deprehende metallum,” she murmured.
Her wand turned some thirty degrees in her hand. He goggled at her—her spell aimed to detect the presence of metal and the only big, metallic items nearby were the armored chariots. But the idea was just mad enough to make sense. And if he remembered correctly, an armored chariot had landed only short distance away.
He drew a sound circle and outlined a plan of action to Fairfax. She listened, her expression grave.
“You can pilot an armored chariot?”
“It is my understanding that it operates on the exact same principle as a beast-drawn chariot. But that is the easy part.”
Or at least, easy compared to the problem of her survival.
She slowly exhaled. “Let’s carry it out then. May Fortune walk with you.”
“No need to be so noble and stoic.” He squeezed her hand. “Save that for when you are actually dying.”
Which could be in a few short minutes, if everything they had done proved inadequate to preserve her life.
“I am going to be as noble and stoic as I like,” she rebutted, “so that years down the road, you will still grow misty-eyed when you remember that impossibly valiant girl from the Sahara, before you fall face first into your drink.”
Her words were arch, but her hand trembled in his. Suddenly, the idea of losing her became unthinkable.
“And you, by then a toothless crone, will smack me on the back of the head and shout at me not to fall asleep at ten o’clock in the morning.” He pulled her to him and kissed her on her cheek. “You will die, but not today, not if I had anything to say about it.”
They crawled underneath the nearest armored chariot. On the ground, the vehicle resembled a heavy-bellied bird, squat and ungainly. But armored chariots had never been about elegance, only deadliness.
Titus’s shoulders almost touched the boots of a pair of soldiers, who, though they wore protective gear, had their arms raised to their faces to shield against the sandstorm, as Fairfax whipped the desert inside the blood circle into an even greater frenzy.
He did his best to breathe slowly, with control—once he made his first move, there was no stopping until he had carried it through.
Or failed altogether.
She laid a hand on his shoulder, signaling that the sandstorm was as violent as she could make it. He took another deep breath and mouthed, Tempus congelet. Tempus congelet.
The chaos of the scene provided a rare opportunity to apply a time-freeze spell to each Atlantean soldier. This gave Titus approximately three minutes.
He and Fairfax ducked out from underneath the armored chariot, took the soldier’s wands, which were in the shape of an octagonal prism, and hurried toward the armored chariot’s starboard hatch. The seam of the hatch was barely visible, but when they flipped open two small round covers and pushed the Atlantean wands into the protected openings underneath, the hatched opened quietly.
The interior of the armored chariot was suitably austere for a military transport vehicle, all steel sides and titanium ribs. Titus applied the time-freeze spell to the pilot before the latter could turn around.
He and Fairfax climbed into the armored chariot and shut the hatch. Immediately he applied the time freeze to her. A mage under a time freeze was immune to most spells and curses; he hoped it would offer her extra protection against the blood circle. If not, at least it should delay her reaction for a few minutes.
He strapped her into one of the harnesses attached to the fuselage, and sprinted to the pilot, dodging handhold straps that hung from the ceiling. The pilot’s wand was already wedged in an octagonal opening next to the seat.
Before the pilot, rising up from slots on the floor, were a set of reins. Titus wrapped his hands around the pilot’s and picked up the reins and shook them. The armored chariot rose, silent except for the relentless assault of the sandstorm.
He banked and turned the armored chariot’s nose around. The place where Fairfax had signaled her location was at the eastern rim of the blood circle. He pointed the armored chariot southwest.
A glance backward showed Fairfax motionless, looking perfectly normal for someone under a time-freeze spell.
Now it was all a matter of luck.
He pushed the armored chariot to its maximum speed, using the clock by the pilot’s seat to gauge the amount of time he had remaining. At one minute fifteen seconds into his flight, he yanked hard on the reins. The chariot came to a sudden halt and would have thrown him against the viewports if he had not held on to the strapped-in pilot.
He ran back, opened the hatch, unstrapped Fairfax, and dropped her to the ground. Then he closed the hatch, turned the vehicle around, and raced back toward the blood circle, using the gauges on the dashboard to retrace his path exactly. When he arrived, he parked the vehicle in the exact same orientation as earlier, leaped out, closed the hatch behind him, returned the wands to the soldiers, and vaulted.
But when he reached the spot in the desert where he had left Fairfax, she had disappeared.
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CHAPTER ♦12
England
TITUS CRASHED INTO THE LABORATORY and took hold of a vial of granules, each one worth his weight in gold.
Panacea.
When he returned to Sutherland’s house, Kashkari was struggling to keep the latter from choking on his own tongue. Titus took hold of Wintervale’s head and somehow managed to force a double dose of panacea down the latter’s gullet.
The change was instantaneous. Wintervale’s convulsion subsided into mere quivers. Beads of sweat appeared on his brow and his upper lip. He panted, even as a bit of color returned to his face. Within ten minutes, he dropped off into an exhausted slumber.
Kashkari wiped the perspiration from his own brow. “Now that’s German medicine I wouldn’t mind keeping around.”
Titus looked at his watch—they needed to be back at Mrs. Dawlish’s before lights-out. “We had better get him to the railway station,” he said, still panting with afterfright, “or we will miss our train.”
Kashkari gripped the back of a chair, likewise breathing heavily. “We have all these strong backs—getting him there is the least of our concerns. I just hope the movement of the train won’t disagree with him.”
“He will be all right,” said Titus.
Wintervale had enough panacea in him to survive an execution curse, let alone a little rattling from a railway car.
“I hope to God you are right
,” said Kashkari. “I hope to God.”
Iolanthe shared a rail compartment with Cooper and Sutherland, where they played a game of vingt-et-un, betting halfpennies on the outcome of each hand. In the next compartment, the other three boys maintained an unbroken silence—before they boarded the train, the prince had pulled her aside and let her know that Wintervale was under the effect of panacea.
She had nodded and then walked back to Cooper.
Vingt-et-un was the easiest nonmage card game she had played yet, since she had only to worry about the number on her cards adding up as close to twenty-one as possible, without going over. But even so, she begged off from further rounds after they changed trains in London. Leaving the compartment, she stood in the corridor, staring out of the window as the city’s outskirts rushed by, street lamps and illuminated windows growing more and more sparse as they headed into the countryside
A door of the next compartment slid open and closed. Her heart twisted. But the person who came to stand next to her was not Titus, but Kashkari.
“I was sorry to hear that you might leave us,” he said.
It was a moment before she realized that he was talking about the Fairfaxes and cattle ranching in Wyoming Territory.
“All I wanted was for everything to continue as before. But changes come and I can’t stop them.” She glanced at him. “You know how it is.”
Kashkari smiled faintly. “In my case it was more like, Be careful what you wish for. I have always wanted to meet the girl of my dreams.”
“Love at first sight, eh?”
“More like astonishment at first sight.”
“She is that beautiful?”
Kashkari had a faraway look in his eyes. “Yes, she is, but I have always known what she looks like. I was just shocked to see her in the flesh, when and where I least expected it.”
They must have passed a church; the sound of bells tolling was just audible above the rumble of the train. Iolanthe wondered, half in despair, whether there was anything more for her to say than “I’m sorry.” She truly felt terrible for him—and she wished she had something better to offer than tired phrases had no meaning anymore.
Then she was staring at Kashkari. I have always known what she looks like. The girl of my dreams. “Do you mean to tell me, you have literally seen her at night, as you lie asleep?”
Kashkari sighed. “Except my dreams failed to let me know that she would be engaged to my brother.”
Was Kashkari talking about prophetic dreams? “Remember last Half, when you told me that an astrologer advised you to attend Eton? My knowledge of astrology is very shallow, but enough to know that the stars rarely give such specifics. Was the astrologer interpreting a dream for you instead?”
“Good deduction. Yes, he was.”
“What did you see?”
“The first dream had me walking around Eton. I didn’t know where I was, but after I’d seen the same dream a few times, I asked my father about this school in an English river town, with the ramparts of a castle visible in the distance. I drew for him the outline of the castle. He didn’t recognize it, but when he showed it to a friend who’d been to England several times, the friend did, and said it looked like Windsor Castle.
“I didn’t go to the astrologer with that dream—I thought it simply meant I would someday visit the area. But then I started seeing a different dream, of dressing myself in these strange, non-Indian clothes and looking in the mirror. We found out that the clothes were the Eton uniform. That was when we consulted the astrologer, who said my stars claimed that I would spend most of my youth away from home. After the consultation, my mother turned to me and said, ‘I guess now we know where you are headed.’”
“That’s . . . rather amazing,” said Iolanthe, rather amazed.
She didn’t know nonmages dreamed like this about the future, but it was narrow-minded of her to assume that only mages could tap into the flow of time, since visions had nothing to do with either subtle or elemental magic.
“It sounds occult, so I don’t go around telling everyone. I mean, people here are very fond of their séances, but still.”
“I understand,” said Iolanthe.
They were nearing Eton when she remembered to ask, “So . . . does this mean you weren’t in love with the girl of your dreams, only that you kept seeing her?”
She hoped so for Kashkari’s sake.
“I wish.” Kashkari sighed. “I have been in love with her all my life.”
Titus’s knocked on Fairfax’s door. “You there, Fairfax?”
A long silence elapsed before her response came. “Yes.”
A high wall of an answer. Yes, I am here, but you are not welcome.
It was almost lights-out at Mrs. Dawlish’s. One last batch of boys was coming out of the lavatory. Sutherland asked whether anyone had seen his Greek lexicon, which prompted another boy to run to his room and get it. Rogers, whose room was across from Cooper’s, called for Cooper to open his door; when Cooper did, a pair of socks flew across the width of the corridor, along with a “You took off your socks in my room again!” from Rogers.
She had loved this: the ordinariness and silliness of so many boys squeezed into tight quarters. Titus set his hand against her door and wished, yet once more, that he could make time flow backward. “Good night,” he said, hating the futility of it all.
She said nothing.
Down the hall, Kashkari emerged from Wintervale’s room—despite Titus’s reassurance that Wintervale’s condition would not worsen while he slept, Kashkari had elected to remain by Wintervale’s side.
Titus walked over to Kashkari. “How is he?”
“Same. Sleeping soundly, vitals strong—as far as I can tell.” Kashkari hesitated a moment. “Are you absolutely sure you did not give him anything with bee venom as an ingredient?”
“Yes, I am sure,” said Titus, not particularly caring whether Kashkari believed him. “Good night.”
His head throbbed as he walked once more into his laboratory after lights-out. He had a three hundred mile one-time vaulting range and had never yet vaulted enough to establish the upper limit for a personal daily range. But with all these trips to the laboratory in the past twenty-four hours, he might be approaching that boundary.
The collection of remedies that had given Wintervale so much trouble lay on the long table at the center of the laboratory, hastily set down when Titus was on his way to grab the panacea. He preferred to be neat and orderly—he had very little time to lose to disorganization—but he could not handle the otherwise simple task of reshelving the remedies.
He shoved the vials into an empty pouch. The panacea, however, could not be so cavalierly treated. That particular vial he put back into its proper place in the emergency bag he had prepared for her.
He traced his fingers along the strap of the bag, one of the places where he had left hidden messages for her. He had better erase the messages, which dealt not with their task but with sentiments that were easier to set down in writing than to speak out loud. But he did not want to; it would be almost like erasing her wholesale from his life.
Exhaustion washed over him—not just fatigue, but the loss of hope.
He took a dose of vaulting aid to help with his headache, sat down at the long worktable at the center of the laboratory, and opened his mother’s diary. It was the cruelest master he had ever known, but it remained his only trusted guide in an ever-shifting landscape.
February 25, YD 1021
I hate death visions. I especially hate death visions of those I love.
Titus almost closed the diary. He did not want to be reminded of the details of his death, details that made it real and inescapable.
But he could not help reading on.
Or, for that matter, a death that would distress someone I love. But I suppose there is no way around it. Death comes when it pleases and the survivors must always grieve.
He exhaled. It wasn’t his death. Whose was it then?
&n
bsp; Fog, a thick yellowness, like butter that had been dropped in dirt. A few seconds passed before I can distinguish a face in the fog. I recognize the face immediately as belonging to Lee, dear Pleione’s son.
Wintervale.
He is still a young boy, but several years old than he is now, staring out from behind a closed window at the dense, shifting fog that seemed to be pushing against the glass, looking for a way in.
He is in a bedroom. His, perhaps. I cannot tell, as it is furnished with a great deal of somberness, in a style foreign to my eyes.
No sounds inside or outside the house. I begin to think this might be a silent vision when he sighs audibly, a sound too wistful, too heavy with loss and yearning for a child so young, a child who should want for nothing.
A shriek shatters the quiet. Lee recoils, but runs to the door of his room and shouts, “Are you all right, Mama?”
He is answered by another blood-curdling shriek.
He runs into a corridor—it is a fine house, I am sure, but feels too shabby and cramped for someone of Baron Wintervale’s fabulous wealth.
Now he is in a larger, more ornate bedroom. Pleione has thrown herself over the body of her husband. She is sobbing uncontrollably.
“Mama? Papa?” Lee stands by the door, as if afraid to move. “Mama? Is Papa . . .”
Pleione trembles—Pleione who has always been so composed, so in control of herself. “Go downstairs and tell Mrs. Nightwood to take you to Rosemary Alhambra’s house. And when you get there, ask Miss Alhambra to come and to bring the best physician she can find among the Exiles.”
Lee remains where he is.
“Go!” Pleione shouts.
He runs, his footsteps echoing through the corridor.
Pleione returns to her inert husband. Tenderly she cups his face and kisses him on his lips. Her hand trails up and lifts the hair at his temple. I gasped as I saw the faint red dot at his temple, the telltale sign of the execution curse.
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