The Perilous Sea

by Thomas,Sherry

  Titus dismounted and led the tall-as-a-two-story-house beast to the puddle at the center of the oasis.

  “Assalamu alaykum,” he said to the three men who were still conscious.

  Peace be upon you.

  The older man with the Koran opened and closed his mouth several times, but no words came out.

  A young man in a dusty-red keffiyeh rasped something, but as Titus’s grasp of Arabic was restricted to a few phrases of courtesy, he did not bother to respond.

  Another young man in a brown turban cocked his firearm, but the old man put a hand on his arm. The wyvern drank and drank and drank. When it was done, Titus persuaded it to pull down a date palm branch, so he could cut off a large cluster of dates.

  With another “Assalamu alaykum” to the caravanists, still agape, he urged the sand wyvern to take to the sky again.

  After another hour or so, Titus set down the sand wyvern about a mile away from a low rocky hill. The hill looked barren, but any shade in the desert, anywhere water could condense and collect, played host to life. He sent out the two lengths of hunting rope still in his possession to find the sand wyvern a good supper and crouched down to give Fairfax some water.

  She drank with her eyes closed. “Did I fall asleep again?”

  “With panacea, even when you stop sleeping all the time, you will still sleep a great deal. Besides, you exerted yourself when Atlantis found us.”

  Which could impede her recovery. Ideally it should be nothing but rest for her, until her sleep pattern returned to normal.

  “Did more dangerous things happen after the distance spell-casting?”

  “No to us, but there are some caravanists who will have stories to tell their grandchildren. They will probably weave in elaborate details about the sand wyvern eating half of their camels, while the demonic, horned rider laughed.”

  She tittered. “That does sound like you.”

  “I’m very proud of my forked tail, but I’ll deny the existence of horns to my last breath.”

  Now she half-opened her eyes. “All I see is a halo.”

  “Your compliment made my tail fall off. Now look what you have done.”

  She laughed again, softly. “So did the sand wyvern get enough water?”

  “I think so. And that was pure greed on the sand wyvern’s part—they can go ten days without.”

  “It’d be nice if we could, though I’m not sure I want my skin to look like that.” The sand wyvern was very nearly invisible when set against the desert floor, its exterior resembling exactly a pile of small boulders half-buried in sand.

  “I hate to tell you this, but that is how our skin already looks.”

  She closed her eyes again. “Your looks are no doubt suffering. My beauty, however, is as indestructible as the Angels’ wings.”

  “Well,” he said, “you do look very nice . . .”

  Her eyelashes fluttered.

  “. . . ly shriveled.”

  Her lips curved. “May I remind you that you are speaking to someone capable of smiting you with a thunderbolt?”

  “Is there any point to flirting with a girl who is not capable of that?”

  “So this is your idea of flirting?”

  He cradled her hand in one of his to check her pulse. “Whatever I call it, your heart is beating fast.”

  “Are you sure that is not a residual effect of the panacea?”

  He rubbed his thumb over her wrist. Her skin was as soft as the first summer breeze. “I am absolutely certain.”

  Her breaths quickened. Her lips part slightly. And suddenly his own heart thumped, blood rushing in his ears.

  The next moment he was knocked flat by a returning hunting rope, wrapped around a still-writhing snake.

  She laughed and laughed as he wrestled with the hunting rope, trying to loosen it without getting bitten by the snake, while the hungry sand wyvern growled with impatience.

  With the sand wyvern at last enjoying its afternoon snack, he returned to her side. She was already almost asleep again.

  “Well,” he said, “at least this time we weren’t interrupted by a sand wyvern.”

  “No,” she replied, her voice barely audible. “I thought we might create some sparks together. But now I know nothing we do will ever rival the passionate embrace between a hunting rope and a snake.”

  She fell asleep with a smirk on her face. He looked at her a long time, smiling.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦22

  England

  WINTERVALE’S BALANCE AND MOBILITY REFUSED to improve. A week after he woke up from his long sleep, he still could not stand upright on his own, let alone slide down the banister with a thump and a triumphant whoop, as he used to do.

  To walk to and from classes, to have his meal in the dining room, even to go to the lavatory, always someone else had to accompany him. That someone was almost always Kashkari, who had taken to sitting in Wintervale’s room, so the latter did not need to shout at the top of his lungs if he needed a biscuit from his cabinet or felt like opening his window for a breath of fresh air.

  But that was not the only thing different about Wintervale.

  He had always been more open with Titus than with the other boys, more frank about the frustrations of his life: his fragile mother, his homesickness for the Domain, and, more obliquely, his fear that he would not live up to the great Wintervale name.

  Glimpses of an inner life. Fleeting glimpses, as Wintervale was determined to enjoy himself to the maximum and quite adept—or so Titus suspected—at burying any emotional turmoil beneath a new round of fun.

  The new Wintervale still maintained that outward appearance of bubbly conviviality. But now, when they were alone—infrequently since Kashkari was his near-constant companion—Titus found him to be quieter and more inquisitive.

  His main anxiety was for his mother and Titus was happy to tell him the truth: there was no news on Lady Wintervale. Wintervale also wanted to know what had happened to all the other mages entrapped by Atlantis that night in Grenoble; on that Titus also let him have the truth, which was that Titus did not really know.

  It was when Wintervale asked about the state of the resistance as a whole that Titus fudged his answers. He did not want Wintervale demoralized by the heavy blow Atlantis had dealt the resistance, nor did he want to give the impression that he was personally interested in the developments taking place.

  It was six days after Wintervale woke up that he spoke of the future for the first time, two simple, declarative sentences. “I am going to find the resistance. And I am going to join it.”

  “You cannot walk on your own.”

  The problem baffled Titus. Wintervale could move his toes. His lower limbs most certain had feelings—heat, cold, touch, he felt them all. With support, he shuffled along, effectively enough to reach where he needed to go. But without the strength of another to make up for his own lack of balance, even if he stood with his back against a wall, after a minute or so he would start tipping to one side and not be able to right himself.

  They told everyone that Wintervale had badly strained a muscle, keeping the truth hidden as otherwise Mrs. Dawlish would insist on additional medical attention and Wintervale did not want to be poked and prodded.

  “I don’t need to walk to use my elemental powers,” said Wintervale. “They can put me on a wyvern.”

  “You have never been on a wyvern.”

  “I can learn, after I find the rebellion. You are sure you don’t have any contacts?”

  “I am sure.” At least on this front Titus did not need to lie. His mother had died for her involvement with the rebels; he had no plans to repeat that mistake. “Good luck locating the resistance without getting caught by Atlantis.”

  The look on Wintervale’s face was not so much disappointment as despair—he had survived being pursued
by Atlantis, he had discovered a rare and marvelous ability in himself, and yet he remained stuck at this nonmage school, with no way of finding his mother or contribting to the resistance.

  Kashkari came into the room then, Cooper and Sutherland in tow. Titus slipped out, but Wintervale’s distress stayed with him.

  By nature and by necessity, Titus prepared incessantly for the future. After discovering that all along his mother had meant Wintervale, however, he could not think of the next week, or even the next day without some part of himself recoiling—without Fairfax, what future was there?

  But he could not allow for that dangerous self-indulgence to continue. His personal feelings did not matter—they never had. Only the task was paramount.

  What he needed most, obviously, was for Wintervale to recover his balance and mobility. It was impossible for him to drag Wintervale in his current condition across the breadth of Atlantis to the Commander’s Palace in the uplands—or at least extremely inadvisable.

  At some point he would have to tell Wintervale everything—or at least admit to Wintervale that he, too, was willing to take on Atlantis. But with Wintervale’s history of indiscretion, Titus planned to wait until he absolutely must.

  What he could do in the meanwhile, both to prepare Wintervale and bolster’s the latter’s morale, was to take him into the Crucible. Atlantis already knew about the Crucible. So even if Wintervale inadvertently blabbered about it, he would not alert Atlantis to anything new.

  Before he dared show the Crucible to Wintervale, however, he must purge all traces of Fairfax from the book.

  He sat down in the laboratory and studied her images for a long time, in the illustrations of “The Oracle of Still Waters” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Without those illustrations, after she left the school, he would never be able to see her again.

  He undid the changes he had made and returned the illustrations to their original state.

  As he was about to close the Crucible, he remembered to check “Battle for Black Bastion,” Helgira’s story. And there it was, her face again. He had added her image to the other two stories, but not this one. A quick scan of the log of modifications that the Crucible kept informed him that the image was altered twenty years ago.

  Twenty years ago this copy of the Crucible belonged to his mother.

  Don’t, he told himself. What did it matter now why Princess Ariadne had made the change?

  But he reached for the diary and opened it.

  5 February, YD 1011

  Many times I see a place in my visions and I have no idea of the location. Not this time. This time I immediately recognize the hulking shape of the Black Bastion, one of the most difficult locales in the Crucible.

  It is night, but the fortress is lit with torches. And near the very top of the bastion, upon a balcony that during the day would have a magnificent view, stands a young woman in a white dress, her long, black hair whipping in the wind.

  Is this Helgira?

  Father had wanted me to practice getting into the inner chambers at the Black Bastion in order to use Helgira’s prayer alcove as a portal. To that end I had once dressed up as a serving maid delivering a flagon of wine, but I had been recognized as an imposter almost immediately and had barely the time to shout “And they lived happily ever after” to avoid being hacked to pieces.

  When the vision had left me, I found my copy of the Crucible and turned to Helgira’s story. The illustration shows a woman in her thirties, still handsome but scarred and battle-hardened, nothing like the courtly beauty I had seen on the balcony.

  Who is she then?

  3 September, YD 1011

  It is Helgira.

  The young woman with the white dress and the whipping long hair raises her hands and down plunges the most awe-inspiring bolt of lightning I have ever witnessed, the energy of an entire turbulent sky focused into a singular beam of power.

  Helgira the lightning wielder. There is, was, and has never been any other.

  So this is what she looks like.

  19 September, YD 1011

  I have changed Helgira’s face in my own copy of the Crucible, the monastery’s copy, and the Citadel’s copy—I hope Father would not mind, as he considered the Citadel’s copy his personal copy.

  But now that I have done that, I begin to wonder why I should have seen this vision at all. The deeds of a folkloric character who only exists in fiction—and in the Crucible—are not something that one ought to see in a vision about the future, are they?

  But his mother had indeed seen the future. That had been Fairfax standing on Helgira’s balcony, calling down the lightning that would strike the Bane dead. Dead temporarily, at least.

  Because Princess Ariadne had altered Helgira’s image inside the Crucible, Fairfax had been able to move about Black Bastion freely. And when the Atlanteans had demanded about the girl who brought down the lightning, Titus had been able to shrug and tell them to learn something about the Domain’s folklore.

  Fairfax had been writ large across his life.

  Why then could she not remain the One?

  The lake parted.

  It was an inland sea, actually, so large that the far shores were below the horizon. At its bottom, a group of schoolchildren had been trapped inside an ever-shrinking air bubble.

  Fairfax had spent a good bit of time in this tale, trying to rescue the schoolchildren. She had never completely succeeded. But now, with Wintervale at the task, the deep waters of the lake parted to reveal a muddy, mile-long path to the air bubble.

  Titus shook his head slowly. What could one do but marvel at power of this magnitude?

  He took Wintervale to a different story, “The Locust Autumn.” Wintervale took a look at the locust swarm approaching the field of a poor farmer, and, with a wolfish grin, raised his hands. He summoned such a cyclone, the entire swarm was blown away without a trace.

  In yet another story, he lifted fifty-ton boulders as if they were no heavier than tennis balls and easily constructed a high wall around a town about to be trampled by giants. From the top of the wall, the townspeople attacked the vulnerable soft spots on top of the giants’ unprotected heads, leading to a rousing victory.

  “This is the best feeling I have ever had, in my entire life!” Wintervale shouted at Titus, as giants fell like dominos, making the rampart beneath their feet thump.

  Titus ought to be happy: he had read The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages time and again and Wintervale was most assuredly measuring up. He ought to be relieved, too, that he had made the right choice: other than his inability to command lightning, Wintervale’s powers were in every way superior to Fairfax’s.

  Yet Titus felt . . . uneasy: he had never known what it was like to achieve one’s goal in one giant leap, rather than through years of strenuous toil. He shook his head and reminded himself that he had better enjoy the moment , because the harder part was to come.

  Always.

  Wintervale’s excitement remained unabated as they exited the Crucible. “I can’t even tell you how ready I am to take on a squadron of armored chariots and greet them with these huge boulders.”

  “Which you can only do when there are such boulders lying about.”

  “Or I can yank them off the bones of the earth,” Wintervale enthused. “Imagine if my father had someone like me during the January Uprising.”

  The outcome would have been different, Titus had to admit, at least for some battles. The Crucible in hand, he rose from Wintervale’s cot, on which they had been sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. It had been a calculated risk to bring the Crucible to school, but Wintervale had never vaulted well and Titus was not ready to divulge the location of the new entrance to the laboratory.

  “Mind taking me to the loo before you go?” asked Wintervale.

  Wintervale’s elemental powers had exploded in amplitude, but his bladder seemed to have decreased in size, at least when Titus was around. “Come on, then.”

  Wintervale sprang up, no
t in the direction of Titus’s outstretched hand, but toward the window—and nearly took a header for his trouble. Titus barely kept him from hitting a corner of his shelves. “Careful!”

  Wintervale stood with his forehead pressed against the window pane. “For a moment—for a moment I thought it was my mother.”

  But all Titus saw as he looked out, besides a hawker he had never seen before this Half, was the usual street outside Mrs. Dawlish’s house.

  When Iolanthe arrived at the laboratory, after lights-out, the prince was already there. Or rather, he was in the Crucible, his hand over the book, his head resting on the table.

  Even seemingly asleep, he looked tense and worried. Her heart clenched—she wished she could still help him.

  Then why don’t you? asked another part of her. Even if you are not the great heroine you imagined yourself to be, there is still so much to do.

  But he doesn’t want my help.

  He only said you are not the One. When did he say he no longer needed your help?

  Next to the Crucible on the table was a pastry box with a note underneath. She pulled out the note to read.

  Dalbert told me Mrs. Hinderstone’s shop also sells Frankish pastry, which are very popular with the patrons. These are from Paris. I hope you like them.

  “These” were two cream puffs, a tiny fruit tart, and a mille-feuille, which consisted of alternating layers of smooth pastry cream and buttery puff pastry.

  She almost pushed the box away from herself, afraid its contents would only ever taste of heartache and rejection. But somehow a piece of the fruit tart found its way into her mouth. It was delicious beyond belief—and all she could think of was the care he had always taken with her.

  She laid her hand over his and kept it there for several minutes, before she started the password and the countersign to enter the Crucible.

  In the reading room, Titus sat with his forehead on the cabinet-sized book before him, his eyes bleary.

  “Are you all right?” came Fairfax’s voice.

  He straightened. “I hate to sound like a broken clock but it is not safe for you to leave Mrs. Dawlish’s after lights-out.”