The Burning Sky

by Shelly Thomas

  They descended a long flight of circular stairs—the rail coach was parked at the top of a tower. Another set of doors opened, and they walked down a wide corridor with open arches that looked out to a garden terrace that hung several hundred feet above the courtyard below.

  The corridor turned, split, turned again. Now there were attendants everywhere, bowing and scraping as the prince walked by. They went up a few steps, passed a library, an indoor garden with a sculpture fountain in the middle, and a large aviary filled with birds of all descriptions.

  When they finally entered the prince’s apartment, she found it rather sparsely furnished—Master Haywood had a more impressive parlor when he was still at the university. Or so Iolanthe thought, until her gaze landed on the tri-panel screen before the window. Inside each translucent panel, silver-azure butterflies fluttered. As she watched, one butterfly’s color changed into a vibrant yellow, another to a delicate shade of violet, and yet a third an intricate pattern of green and black.

  The butterflies must be made from blue argent, a priceless elixir sensitive to the least changes in the heat and intensity of the sun. The prince paid no attention at all to his incalculably precious screen, but charged past. In the next room she caught a glimpse of an enormous vase of ice roses, their pale blue petals like blown glass. The room after that housed a spinning globe. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a thunderstorm going on somewhere in the tropics, with tiny flashes of lightning. The prince ducked under the moon as he marched on.

  In his bedchamber he stopped to pull off his boots; then they were in an enormous bathroom that boasted a tub carved out of a single block of amethyst, with fittings and claw-feet of pure gold. Steam curled above the tub, petals and herbs floated atop the water—she smelled orange blossom and mint.

  She used to relish long soaks. It had been one of the most enjoyable applications of her elemental power, a gentle fire beneath the tub to keep the water at a constant temperature, while she made elaborate, fanciful sculptures with water droplets in the air.

  The prince set her down and dismissed his valet. The latter left with a bow and closed the door. Leaning against the wall, the prince pulled off his stockings. As he walked toward the amethyst tub, he yanked his shirt over his head.

  He was lean and tightly sinewed. Her little bird heart thudded.

  He glanced at her, his lips curved in not quite a smile. The next thing she knew, his shirt had flown through the air and landed on the cage, blocking her view toward the bathtub.

  “Sorry, sweetheart. I am shy.”

  She chirped indignantly. It was not as if she would have continued to watch him disrobe beyond a certain point.

  “I know you would rather inspect my superlative form, but may I recommend admiring the tapestry behind you instead?” continued the prince. “It is a depiction of Hesperia the Magnificent destroying the Usurper’s stronghold. Rumpelstiltskin himself wove the tapestry. Do you know the nonmages have turned him into a villain in their tales? Poor fellow, they have him forcing some poor innocent to spin gold from straw.”

  A splash of water, then a sigh as he settled himself in the tub.

  She closed her eyes, the absurdity of the situation momentarily overwhelming her. She was a bird in a cage. The prince was stark naked not six feet from her. And the saintly Rumpelstiltskin, who had willed his life’s savings to help indigent children, slandered as a greedy boor.

  He sighed again. “Why am I talking to you? You will not remember anything from your time spent in bird form.” He paused. “I have just answered my own question.

  “Do you know what I did one time? I decided to record my time in bird form. In Morse code—a nonmage means of transmitting messages, with dots and dashes to represent letters. I had it all planned: I would use my beak to punch small holes in the paper to represent a dot, and make scratches with my claw for dashes.

  “Except when I came to, the sheet of paper was in shreds. So much for that idea.” He was silent for a moment. “And you will draw a similar blank come tomorrow.”

  Did this mean he was about to tell her something he wouldn’t normally? Her ears perked—figuratively, since her ears were now feather-covered holes in the sides of her head.

  He laughed softly. “You know, you are almost enjoyable to talk to, when you do not say anything back.”

  She willed the water in the tub to strike him in the face.

  There was a loud splash. “Hey!” He sounded surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “Interesting. You are still capable of elemental powers. But stop—or I will feed you to the castle cats.”

  She struck him again.

  “All right, all right. I take it back. You are almost enjoyable to talk to, even when you do talk back.”

  She wished he would stop speaking—she did not want this glimpse of the kind of rapport they could have had, had things been different.

  Say more, thought a less sensible part of her.

  He obliged. “You know what I should be worried about? Your inability to control air. Lightning is very dramatic, but armored chariots are built to withstand lightning strikes. You need to generate a cyclone to have a chance against them. It is no good when you cannot create a breeze to save your life.”

  Her wings quivered. She was supposed to fight against those machines of death?

  “I should be thinking about new and better ways to break through your block. But I cannot think at all when the Inquisitor is going to question me tonight.”

  She’d never before heard fear in his voice. So he did experience it. Good. It was a sign of madness to not be afraid when one ought to be.

  “The first time I met her face-to-face, I was eight.” He spoke quietly; she had to strain to hear. “My grandfather had died two months before, and my coronation was the next day.

  “When you are born to the House of Elberon, you are trained to act serene and superior no matter what you feel. But the Inquisitor was—she has frightening eyes. I tried, and I could not make myself look at her. So as she spoke, I looked down at my cat.”

  “Minos was actually my mother’s cat, as gentle and sweet as she. After she died, he went everywhere with me and slept in my bed at night.

  “That day he was on my lap. I scratched his head and he purred. At some point he stopped purring. But it was not until the end of the audience, when the Inquisitor rose to take her leave, that I noticed he was—he was dead.”

  The catch in his voice shot her through with a violent emotion she could not name.

  “I wanted to cry. But because she was watching, I tossed Minos aside and said, the way my grandfather would, ‘One would think a cat of the House of Elberon would have more breeding than to die before an esteemed guest. My apologies.’

  “I have only kept birds ever since—birds and reptiles are immune to a mind mage’s powers. And I have been terrified of the Inquisitor ever since.”

  He fell silent.

  She turned around and stared at the tapestry, willing herself to feel no sympathy for him.

  And not succeeding.

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  CHAPTER 14

  TITUS DROVE HIMSELF, ACCOMPANIED BY a phalanx of mounted guards. A team of four Pacific golden phoenixes pulled his chariot—the head of the House of Elberon being the only mage in the Domain entitled to use phoenixes as beasts of burden.

  There was a possibility, thought Titus, that the edict had been set down so that the ruling prince or princess would not be distracted from the task of governing by the need to invent ever more ostentatious ways to show up at a Delamer gala.

  Lady Callista’s spring gala was the worst. One year some idiots decided to arrive in a chariot drawn by hundreds of butterflies, each the size of a handspan. The butterflies began dropping of exhaustion as the chariot approached the landing platform, causing a nasty crash.

  The yea
r before that a group of guests came on turuls—giant Magyar falcons. Another set of lords and ladies brought along a pair of imported Chinese water dragons. As it turned out, turuls and Chinese water dragons despised each other with a white-hot passion. A messy spectacle had ensued.

  Titus’s cavalcade approached the expedited airway, built two hundred years ago during the reign of Apollonia III to facilitate travel between the castle and the capital. Fairfax had been perched on his shoulder, her claws digging lightly into his overrobe. But now he took her in hand and tucked her inside his tunic. “I would hold you,” he said, “but I need both of my hands.”

  Phoenixes were fractious animals and cared not the least for expedited airways.

  “Brace yourself. It will be a hard slam,” he warned her. Probably unnecessarily. As a native of Delamer, she would have daily used the city’s vast network of expedited ways, both on the ground and in the air. And if not daily, certainly more than he, with his upbringing in the mountains.

  The thrust came suddenly. He could not breathe. His lungs grew emptier and emptier. Just when he thought he could stand it no more, the chariot was spat out the other end of the airway.

  The phoenixes cawed harshly. He yanked them under control, reached for Fairfax, and set her on his shoulder again.

  “You all right?”

  She was busy gawking at the city that had been her former home.

  Delamer was one of the greatest mage metropolises on earth, a glittering spread of pink-marble palaces and stately gardens, from the heights of the Serpentine Hills to the edge of the cool blue sea, aglow in the last rays of sunset.

  Its beauty, however, was marred by patches of dense wood that resembled fungal growth from above. Quick pines, they were called: they were not pines at all, but certainly quick, achieving as much height and girth in two years as most trees did in five decades, bred by Atlantis’s botanists to camouflage the blights left behind by death rains.

  A familiar column of red smoke rose into the sky, marking the location of the Inquisitory. The Fire of Atlantis had burned steadily since the end of the uprising.

  The hour of his meeting with the Inquisitor drew ever nearer.

  He turned his face away. They were headed directly into the sunset. The west coast as a whole was rocky and wave-pummeled, especially the stretch along Delamer. Naturally an ambitious, wealthy capital of a great dynasty, full of mages who had enjoyed the balmy pleasures of the Mediterranean realms, had decided to make improvements.

  During the reign of Hesperia the Magnificent, the city built five peninsulas, collectively known as the Right Hand of Titus. The peninsulas were rugged in appearance—so as not to look out of place against the craggy coast—but their seeming roughness hid a wealth of gentle slopes and beach enclaves, around which sprang hundreds of blue-roofed villas.

  Three of the peninsulas comprised some of the most expensive land in all the mage world. One was a beloved public park. And the remaining one, the ring finger, was a princely preserve upon which stood Hesperia’s Citadel.

  The original citadel still rose at the center, but the complex had grown into a sprawling palace with vast gardens, ninety-nine fountains, and dozens of floating balconies.

  Soon the Inquisitor would find Titus on one of those balconies.

  He steered his chariot in the direction of the landing platform. He was not alone: from all points of the sky, chariots converged toward the Citadel. No turuls or Chinese water dragons this year, just the usual assortment of griffins and mock dragons.

  Two young men performed flips and somersaults on a beam held aloft by four massive flights of doves. Beneath the beam hung a swing, with a young female acrobat sitting insouciantly upon it.

  Titus wanted to enjoy the view—a fine view even for a prince. But already he had to work to keep his breath even and his hands steady.

  The young woman recognized him. She pulled herself to her feet and performed a very creditable curtsy. Titus, as befitting his arrogant and ill-tempered public persona, ignored her altogether.

  The path to the landing platform was demarcated with floating torches. Other guests had pulled aside to clear the way for their sovereign. As Titus’s chariot drew to a stop, every single person on the platform bowed.

  Alectus and Lady Callista were at the front of the crowd to welcome him. Titus swept past them without slowing down. But he knew that Lady Callista raised her head from her deep curtsy and regarded him with narrowed eyes.

  Her device had followed him to a London hotel where he had no business being. How would he explain not only his presence, but also his precipitous departure, leaving behind a half-consumed tray of tea?

  Lady Callista caught up to him. “I see you have brought Miss Buttercup, Your Highness.”

  “She is more tolerable company than most.”

  Fairfax chirped obligingly.

  “And how is she enjoying England?”

  “Better than I, no doubt. The very air is noxious.”

  “Does she like school?”

  “School? One of the boys on my floor has a ferret in his trunk. A ferret. Buttercup lives in fear of her life. She is much happier at my mistress’s.”

  Fairfax stopped chirping.

  Lady Callista blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “What do you not understand? Surely you, of all people, know what a kept woman is.”

  “I did not know that Your Highness had such an arrangement.”

  “And why should you? She does not cost me nearly as much as you cost Alectus, and she does not host soirees for me. In fact, she bores me already; I plan to replace her with a livelier girl, one whose tastes in lovemaking are not quite so pedestrian. Now if you will excuse me, I need a drink.”

  He pushed past her before she could summon one of the floating trays of sparkling blue beverages. Almost immediately, he was being bowed to by the prime minister and several not-so-prime ministers.

  “I thought you did not care for such frivolous events,” Titus said to the prime minister.

  “Indeed I do not, sire. But I hear the Inquisitor herself is going to attend, and I hope to speak with her concerning the records,” answered the prime minister. “There has been no progress at all on the talks. Unless we come to an agreement, the Inquisitory will begin to destroy records by the fourth week of June. Ten years of records, most likely including information concerning thousands of your subjects who disappeared after the uprising.”

  “How awful,” Titus said, and brushed past.

  Not that he was entirely unsympathetic, but what did the prime minister think fueled the Fire of Atlantis, the smoke of which rose so steadily from the Inquisitory?

  He was next accosted by the current archmage and her two leading disciples, and a steady stream of matrons who wanted to know whether he would appear at their charitable functions.

  The first young woman to approach him was a beauty witch.

  “Your Highness,” she said with a bright smile.

  “Have we met?”

  “Diana Fairmyth, Your Highness.”

  He was wary of beauty witches; anyone who tried to seduce him could also be spying on him. “What is a girl like you doing at this dreadful party?”

  She laughed. “Oh, is it dreadful? I haven’t noticed yet.”

  “Alas, you are very beautiful, but I see our tastes diverge too much.”

  A few more young women tried, but he dispensed of them with similar efficiency. Then came the one girl he could not dismiss so easily—Aramia, Lady Callista’s daughter.

  She held out her hands to him. “Titus,” she said, “it’s good to see you again.”

  They had known each other many years—Lady Callista had sometimes brought Aramia to the castle so that Titus would have someone his own age to play with. They should have made perfect playmates: she was patient, uncomplaining, willing to try new things. Not to mention that, like him, she had never known her father. But Titus, a demon child in the years immediately after the loss of his mother,
had tormented her instead.

  He locked her into cupboards when they played hide-and-seek, snuck stinkbugs under her blouse when they played outside, and asked her why she was ugly when her mother was so beautiful.

  But she had only shrugged and said, “Maybe my father was not so beautiful.”

  In recent years their paths had not often crossed. But guilt was like a bog. Whenever he did see her, he would realize he was still neck-deep in it.

  He kissed her on both cheeks. “How have you been, Aramia?”

  “Oh, same as usual. You know Mother, still trying to make a swan out of me,” she answered, not managing to be completely dismissive about it.

  She had never been ugly—plain, perhaps, but not ugly. But even otherwise attractive women faded into insignificance next to Lady Callista. He could not imagine what it must be like to live entirely in the shadow of her beauty.

  “But you are already a swan,” he said, trying to cheer her up.

  “I don’t think inner beauty counts for much with Mother.”

  “Who said I was talking about inner beauty?”

  This made Aramia smile. “That is very sweet, Titus, thank you. Would you like some snapberry punch? It’s my own recipe, just a drop of snowmint essence as the secret ingredient.”

  He wished she had not called him sweet. He sank a little deeper into his bog. “You still enjoy tinkering with recipes?”

  “I might as well be useful.”

  Since she could not be beautiful, she meant.

  It was heartbreaking how much she wanted her mother’s approval.

  “I will have a glass.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Let me see what I can do so Mother doesn’t pester you too much.”

  Aramia left to fetch the punch herself. By the time she returned, Alectus and Lady Callista had found Titus. Aramia, true to her word, drew her mother away on the pretense of something that needed the latter’s attention.

  Alectus by himself was easier to take. With the enthusiasm of an overgrown child, he recounted the epic quest that had been his search for a new overrobe, entailing five emergency fittings in the past two days.