The Perilous Sea

by Thomas,Sherry

  He turned her hand in his, staring through the dark at her palm, as if lines he could not even see delineated the events that had led her to this time and place. He raised her hand to his lips. The next moment he realized what he was about to do and dropped her hand in a hurry, embarrassed.

  Another far-seeing spell revealed that what he had earlier thought to be a single squadron of three armored chariots to the south were actually three different squadrons. Now that he was standing at a much higher vantage point, he could see the light flooding from their bellies, illuminating every square foot of desert in their path as they circled, searching.

  They were drawing nearer. He needed to move Fairfax and himself inside the rock formation, or they would be all too visible to that cold, sharp light.

  Most likely, there were other creatures that lived inside the shelter offered by the rock formation. Morning dew that gathered on the underside of stones might provide enough moisture to last a well-adapted creature for days. And when there were lizards and tortoises, there would also be scorpions and snakes. Better that he investigate the terrain, to make sure that he would not put her down on top of a nest of vipers.

  Leaving Fairfax under a tensile dome, he headed toward the rock formation. His breath steamed. The ground beneath his feet was slippery, a layer of sand on top of hard stone. And above, a breathtaking nightscape, the Milky Way slanting across the arc of the sky, a luminous, silver-blue river of stars.

  Against the backdrop reared the nearest of the rock columns. At the top of the column rested a bulbous, impossibly balanced. He stopped and squinted. Something seemed to be swaying on the boulder. A snake? A dozen snakes?

  His blood ran cold. Hunting ropes. Of course Atlantis would have placed hunting ropes in such a place, in probably all such places in a fifty-mile radius, shelters that he would gravitate toward when he realized how difficult it would be to remain hidden in the open.

  He had stopped in the nick of time. The hunting ropes had just begun to stir, sensing his movement. Now he and they were at an impasse. If he moved, they would come after him—and hunting ropes enjoyed speeds far superior to that of a mage on foot. But if he did not move, he and she would both be caught in the glare of the armored chariots’ search lights.

  He ran. Behind him, dozens of hunting ropes dropped down, one solid plop after another. His feet pounded; his heavy breaths filled his ears. Yet still he could hear them slithering, far lighter and faster than any real snakes.

  He slid into the tensile dome just as they reached him. But his safety was temporary. Already they were digging. The ground underneath the dome was hard and compact, but still, it would only be a matter of time before they came up from underneath him.

  He reached for the emergency bag. As he did so, the edge of his hand brushed against something long and flexible. He jumped, a scream rising to his throat, before he realized that it was the hunting rope fastened to Fairfax’s person, their hunting rope, and not about to attack him.

  A quick untying spell and the hunting rope loosened from Fairfax, separated into three lengths. He took one and rubbed it end to end three times. “Bring back a scorpion.”

  The hunting rope shot out of the tensile dome in the direction of the rock formation. All the other hunting ropes that had been climbing over the tensile dome, or trying to dig underneath, sprinted after it.

  What ensued sounded like the ground being whipped with a dozen riding crops.

  His hunting rope, while in pursuit, would not stop trying to reach its objective, even if it had been tackled by two dozen other hunting ropes trying to pin it down and tie it up. The hullabaloo should attract all the other hunting ropes in the area, if there were more of them lying in wait, and keep their attention off him.

  He gripped Fairfax’s hand in relief.

  Only to recoil in alarm as a beam of light came around the rock formation, followed by another, and yet another. Above them, silent and dark, armored chariots cut through the night, like beasts of the deep.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦14

  England

  IOLANTHE WAS STANDING BY WINDOW, peeking out from a gap in the curtain, when the prince came into her room.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s possible I saw someone watching the house from behind some of the trees in the morning. I couldn’t be sure.”

  “I would not be surprised. As far as Atlantis is concerned, I am still their sole lead to your whereabouts. If I were them, I too would have me under watch.”

  It made sense. She stepped back from the window. “Shall we go then?”

  He offered her his arm so she could hitch a vault with him. She bit the inside of her lower lip: she had not touched him since he had broken the news of his mistake in selecting her as his partner.

  But this was life: no matter how dramatic the rift, at some point, the daily mundanities took over again, and they must go on living next door to each other, dining at the same table nightly, and even occasionally, touching each other.

  She set her hand on his forearm and he vaulted them to the interior of a shuttered small building, a locked brewery on the grounds of a country house. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for the butler of an English estate to brew his own ale, especially as the beverage often figured as part of the servants’ compensation. But the current master of the house was a leader of the temperance movement. As a result, the brewing equipment had been scrapped and the facility shuttered.

  Titus gave her the password and the countersign. She turned the handle of a broom cupboard door, and walked back into the laboratory for the first time in months. It looked more or less the same: books, equipment, and ingredients neatly arranged on shelves, with many cupboards and drawers the contents of which she had yet to explore, since she had visited so infrequently.

  Three times in total, in fact: the first time on the day they met; the next time, when he turned her into a canary; the third time, at the end of Summer Half, just before they traveled back to the Domain together.

  She had been incandescent with happiness that last time. They had both been—they had overcome so much and grown so close. She remembered running hand-in-hand with him toward the laboratory, giddy with hope and fearlessness.

  It had been a different age of the world altogether.

  “Fairfax,” he said softly.

  She turned around. Their gaze held for a moment. He looked drained; she, probably worse.

  He set down the Crucible on the worktable. “Here you go. It’s yours for as long as you need.”

  He spoke with such care, as if she were infinitely fragile and one wrong syllable could shatter her. But she was not fragile—she was a wielder of lightning and flames. Someday your strength will overturn the world as we know it, he had once said.

  What was she to do now with all that strength, all that power? Pack it away like an overrobe that had gone out of fashion?

  “And feel free to make use the laboratory any time,” he added, “now that you can get here easily.”

  In time she might become less bitter, but now all she heard was the offering of lesser gifts, as if that might make up for his taking away the one thing she truly wanted. “Thank you,” she said woodenly, “most kind of you.”

  A uncomfortable stretch of silence followed.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, sat down at the worktable, and put her hand on the Crucible. “I’ll be off then.”

  “If you do not mind me asking, what are you hoping to find in the reading room?”

  “The identity of the memory keeper.” The one who had defrauded Master Haywood. Iolanthe had no doubt the woman was involved in his disappearance.

  Titus looked alarmed. “You will not do anything rash, will you? You are still the one Atlantis wants.”

  Just no longer the one he needed. All the nuisance of the fugitiv
e life and none of the satisfaction of actually mattering.

  “I can’t do anything rash until I have the information,” she told him.

  But she did not go directly to the reading room. Instead, she visited the “The Dragon Princess,” one of the most apocalyptical tales in the entire Crucible. Ruins smoldered under a flame-roiled sky; the air was all smoke and ash. High upon the rampart of the last fortress standing, half deafened by dragon screeches, she called down one thunderbolt after another, littering the scorched earth with dead wyverns and unconscious cockatrices.

  An elemental mage was always more powerful in a state of emotional turmoil.

  The effort depleted her—she had never called down so many bolts of lightning in such a short time. Her fatigue wrapped about her, like a cocoon, and made her feel safe, because she was too tired to feel.

  And that was how she made the decision to go to the Queen of Seasons’ summer villa.

  It was a stunning place, ocher roofs and terraced gardens against the backdrop of a steep, rugged massif. Bright red flowers bloomed in stone urns that must be centuries old; fountains splashed and burbled, feeding into a pond from which rose dozens of pale lavender water lilies, their petals held together like hands at prayer.

  The air was fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle, mingled with the sun-warmed, resinous note of the cedar forest that sprawled in the surrounding hills. The temperature was that of a perfect summer day, with enough of a breeze that one was never hot, but also enough heat for a cold beverage to be enjoyable.

  On a terrace shaded by climbing vines, such beverages had already been laid out, along with an assortment of ices. She tried one that looked like a pinemelon ice, and was shocked to realize, as the tart, fresh flavors burst upon her tongue, that it was indeed pinemelon ice, which she hadn’t tasted in years, since it was a specialty of Mrs. Hinderstone’s sweets shop, on University Avenue, just minutes from the campus of the Conservatory of Magical Arts and Sciences, where she and Master Haywood had lived.

  Footsteps echoed from beyond the open doors of the villa. She turned around to see Titus, just about to start down the steps that led to the terrace. He froze as he saw her. Her cheeks scalded; he looked as mortified as she felt.

  After an interminable silence, he braced his hand on the balustrade of the steps and cleared his throat. “How do you find the ice?”

  “Very palatable.” She managed to find her voice. “I’ve only ever had the pinemelon-flavored one at Mrs. Hinderstone’s in Delamer.”

  “When I was in Delamer this summer, I had Dalbert bring me some of Mrs. Hinderstone’s ices to try—since you mentioned the place.”

  She had mentioned it only once, in passing, when they were discussing something else altogether. “Did you like them?”

  “I did, especially the lumenberry flavor. But the pinemelon is nice too.”

  “Master Haywood always had the lumenberry. I preferred the pinemelon.”

  “I was hoping one of them would be your favorite,” he said quietly.

  From what he had told her, it was not difficult to modify details in a story inside the Crucible: one only had to write the changes in the margins of the pages. So it was not as if he had sneaked back into the Domain and smuggled out the ices against all odds. But still something fluttered in her stomach, followed by a feeling of constriction in her chest.

  He had wanted everything to be perfect.

  And it would have been.

  It would have been.

  At her silence, he cleared his throat again. “I was just about to leave. Enjoy your ice.”

  He disappeared on the tail end of those words, leaving her alone in a place where they were supposed to be together.

  She had come because she had not been able to help her curiosity. However difficult the experience might prove, she had wanted to see the place he had prepared for her—for them. Why had he come back? He already knew exactly what he had done with the place.

  Because she wasn’t the only one who wished that the maelstrom had never happened. Who was drawn to the summer villa, despite the pain it would cause, to imagine what it would have been like, had things been different.

  She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  How did one fall out of love without falling apart at the same time?

  The reading room was vast. It might very well be infinite, for all Iolanthe knew: shelves went on until they converged into a single point in the distance. One could walk about and browse. But the prince usually asked directly for what he wanted.

  Iolanthe approached the help desk—an empty station near the door—and said, “I would like everything available on Horatio Haywood from the last forty years.”

  Books populated the shelf behind the desk: compilations of student-run newspapers on which he had served as reporter and editor; journals that published his scholarly articles; the dissertation he had written for his Master of the Art and Science of Magic degree from the Conservatory.

  She picked up his dissertation. There had been a copy of it in their home, which she had tried to read as a little girl and had understood nothing. But now, as she flipped through the pages, her eyes grew wider and wider. She knew Master Haywood’s research specialty had been archival magic, which dealt with the preservation of spells and practices no longer in popular usage. But she’d had no idea that his dissertation revolved around memory magic.

  In the dissertation, Master Haywood traced the development of memory magic and chronicled the remarkable precision of the spells at the height of its popularity. One could erase memories by the hour—by the minute if one really wanted to. And by the outlines of precise, concrete events. Enjoyed oneself enormously at a party, with the exception of a drunken kiss? With one quick wave of the wand, it would be as if the kiss had never happened—the party was now a long, unmarred stretch of outstanding memories.

  She left the reading room reluctantly—there were set times in the day, called absences, when Mrs. Dawlish and Mrs. Hancock counted their boys, to make sure the latter hadn’t gone missing. The prince was still in the laboratory, seated opposite her, flipping the pages of his mother’s diary.

  It was as if a fist had closed around her heart, seeing him spending time with his one true love.

  He looked up. “Did you find anything useful?”

  She was determined to speak normally. “Master Haywood did his dissertation on memory magic, the kind that the memory keeper eventually applied on him.”

  “So he supplied the expertise that was used against him?”

  “Probably.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Do you want to find out whether you have memory lapses?”

  The question astonished her. “Me?”

  He pointed his wand at himself. “Quid non memini?”

  What do I not remember?

  A line appeared in the air, straight and marked at regular intervals, like a tape measure. With a wave of his wand, the line moved closer to Iolanthe, so she could see that it was a timeline, divided into years, months, weeks, and days. About three-fifths of the timeline was white, the rest red.

  She had never seen anything like it. Even Master Haywood’s dissertation had mentioned nothing of the kind. “This represents the state of your memories?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened when you were eleven?” Three days short of eleven, actually. That was when the line abruptly turned red.

  “I learned that I would die young. And I decided to rid myself of the memories of the details of the prophecy, so I wouldn’t be constantly preoccupied with them.”

  You would not die young, not if I—she barely stopped herself from speaking those words aloud. Wintervale would have to keep him alive now, Wintervale who was not known for his ability to remain cool under pressure.

  She said instead, “It’s harmful, isn’t it, to suppress memories for so long?”

  “Depends on how you do it. See those dots?” The dots were black in color and floated above the ti
meline. The first one coincided with the color change of the timeline, the rest were distributed at three-month intervals. “They show how often that particular memory is allowed to surface in my mind. The color and shape of the dots assure me that the exact same memory is excised again each time, and that nothing else has been tampered with.”

  “You worry about people tampering with your memories?”

  “It’s almost impossible for that to happen without my full consent—the heirs of the House of Elberon are protected by many hereditary spells to make sure they do not become unwitting puppets in the hands of others. But I can do it to myself. This tool reassures me that I have not been persuaded to tamper with my own memories and then forget about it.” He waved away the memory line. “Would you like to see the state of your memories?”

  “You believe my memories have been tampered with?”

  Her question seemed to surprise him. “You do not think so? Your guardian is an expert. The memory keeper is another expert. They had a huge secret to protect in you. Between the two of them, it would be almost impossible for you to come through unscathed.”

  For the longest time she had not known that she could control air, but she had thought her ignorance the result of an otherwise spell. Could it have been caused by memory magic instead?

  “Show me, then.”

  He pointed his wand at her. She gasped: the representation of the state of his memories had been a simple line, but hers was an entire mural. There was almost no part of the nearly seventeen-year-long timeline that had not been tampered with. It showed white for only the first few months of her life. Then all colors of the rainbow appeared, some in several gradations. Above the timeline were not only dots, but triangles, squares, and pentagons—all the way to dodecagons. And whereas on the prince’s memory line, the dot that represented his suppressed memory stayed the same size, on her line, the shapes kept increasing in size at every iteration.