The Immortal Heights

by Sherry Thomas

  “Will it look like this tree?” She tilted her face up for one last glimpse of the green canopy, which was already disappearing.

  “Yes, of course.”

  She glanced back at him. Until this moment, she hadn’t noticed the pajamas he wore. She had seen him half-dressed a few times, but she had never seen him casually dressed. No matter how early she arrived in his room for their morning training sessions in the Crucible, he was always already in his school uniform.

  He returned the light in the laboratory to its normal brightness, and she saw that the pajamas were soft-looking dark-blue flannel, with the top button of the shirt undone. Her heart thudded: she couldn’t look away from the skin that one open button exposed.

  And she didn’t want to. “Kiss me.”

  He took a pretty glass jar from the cabinet. The jar was filled with sweets. He opened the jar and held it out toward her. “Try one.”

  She put a green-striped bonbon in her mouth. And when he kissed her, the bonbon melted with a burst of freshness: mint, basil, and a hint of silver moss. But it was he who made her pulse race: his hands in her hair, the sinew of his arms beneath her fingertips, the scent of Pears soap that still clung to his hair and skin.

  “What do you think?” he asked softly, his eyes dark.

  Her fingers toyed with the second button on his pajama shirt. “Did you make all these yourself?”

  “I stole everything from Lady Callista last summer. Want another one?”

  She placed an iridescent, almost glass-like lozenge on her tongue. It was marble-cool and tasted like it too. She snapped that second button on his pajama shirt open and pressed the pad of her finger against his skin.

  He sucked in a breath—and kissed her so thoroughly that her head spun and the sound of distant wind chimes echoed in her ears.

  “Open your eyes,” he murmured.

  She did so reluctantly and saw that they were standing under a rainbow. And the soft tintinnabulation of wind chimes still vibrated the air, growing fainter as the rainbow faded.

  They were pressed together from shoulders to knees. He touched his lips to her ear, sending a current of electricity through her. “Still think rose petals are a terrible idea?”

  She encircled his wrist with her fingers—his pulse was as erratic as her own. “You, Your Highness, are made of clichés.”

  “Hmm. I take it you do not want me to make it rain hearts and bunnies?”

  “Of course I want to see something that ludicrous!”

  He dug deeper into the cabinet and extracted yet another sphere. “Delectatio amoris similis primo diei verno.”

  Love’s delight is as the first day of spring.

  The sphere split open. No hearts or bunnies emerged, but hundreds of sparkling butterflies did, flitting around in the laboratory, landing on beakers and drawer pulls before evanescing, leaving behind a pastel shimmer in the air and a barely perceptible fragrance, like that of meadow flowers drenched in bright sunshine.

  She half laughed, caught between the absurdly sentimental nature of the tableau and its innate and unabashed sincerity. She laughed again, only to find her eyes stinging once more with tears.

  She cupped his face in her hands. “You didn’t make it rain hearts and bunnies.”

  “Next time,” he murmured. “May I stay here tonight—with you?”

  Her heart rolled over. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “By the way, Your Highness, you lied,” she said, much later, her head on his shoulder.

  He laced their fingers together. “Hmm, shocking. What did I lie about this time?”

  “About there being occupants in one of the rooms of the lighthouse. There’s no one here except us.”

  “A most desirable outcome.” He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. “You are sure that there are no trees on the great lawn of the Conservatory?”

  “None when I lived there.”

  “I will need to pretend some had been planted in the years since you left.”

  She turned toward him and trailed her fingers along his arm. “Have you ever visited the Conservatory?”

  “No, I have only seen it in pictures. On the whole I spent very little time in Delamer. Most of my childhood was in the mountains.”

  “What was it like, living in the mountains?”

  “It was home. For the longest time I did not realize that not everyone lived in a castle—and that not every castle sat on a mountain range that moved. Did you ever get a glimpse of the upper terrace of the castle?”

  The first time she had visited the castle, she had been in the form of a canary. Usually mages retained no memory of the time they spent in beast form, under a transmogrification spell. But she did on that particular occasion, because then they had been linked by a blood oath.

  “Yes, I saw it while you were walking down a corridor with open arches that led onto the terrace. It had a beautiful garden.”

  “It is several hundred feet above the courtyard level of the castle. My mother and I used to stand at the balustrade and pretend that the garden was in the sky, drifting along, because we could see the mountains move. She loved that garden, and I often found her sitting under a vine-covered pergola. That vine gave small clusters of golden flowers, and we used to make circlets of them to wear as crowns.”

  In the teaching cantos of the Crucible, each ruling prince or princess since Titus III had a classroom of his or her own. The inside of Titus VII’s was a garden, with vines knotted into intricate arabesque patterns on the walls, and spreading into a lovely canopy overhead.

  “Your classroom in the Crucible, you made it look like your mother’s favorite spot on the terrace.”

  “I did. We had some wonderful hours there.” He combed his fingers through her hair. “Did you have a garden of your own?”

  “The Conservatory provided housing for faculty members. They were small town houses built in a row. In the front there’s barely enough room for a patch of grass and two rosebushes. In the back the view is nice, but the land drops off too steeply for gardening.

  “But behind the faculty library, there is a garden open only to professors and their families. And in this garden, there is a fountain. When Master Haywood needed to do some work at the library, I would read in a corner of the garden. And sometimes I would play with the water of the fountain and make it look to those inside the library as if it had started to rain.”

  “I always knew you were rotten.”

  “Oh, to the core.”

  They were silent for a minute. The he turned her toward him and kissed her gently. “I wish this night would last forever.”

  “‘A moment of grace echoes in Eternity,’” she quoted the Angelic Canon.

  He cupped her face. “You have been all my moments of grace.”

  Her heart clenched. “Why are you speaking as if this is already our last hour together?”

  “Because our last hour together I might be in no condition to tell you that you are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

  She didn’t want reality to intrude, but reality was always just outside the window, banging. “All right then. Here’s what I have been saving for the bitter end: I have no regrets, none whatsoever.”

  He gazed at her. “Really?”

  “Well, except the raining hearts and bunnies part. I’d have liked to see that.”

  He thought for a moment, then got up, a sheet wrapped around himself, and left the room. When he came back, he had two more snow-globe-sized spheres. And when he had set them off, it rained hearts and bunnies.

  She laughed until she could scarcely breathe. Until tears once again threatened to fall. She pulled him back into her arms and held him tight. “Now I truly have no regrets. Not a single one.”

  Memory returned as it always did, an assault to the mind.

  Titus did not scream. He did not smash the furniture. He did not crumple to the floor, sobbing.

  He lay perfectly still, listened to the soft breaths of h
er peaceful slumber, and wept in complete silence.

  I love you. I will love you until the end of the world.

  CHAPTER 9

  TITUS KNOCKED ON THE DOOR with a seam of light at its bottom edge.

  Soft, quick footsteps moved across the floorboards. The door opened. Kashkari did not appear at all surprised to see Titus, though his jaw tightened—it was not every day that the Master of the Domain arrived before his friend with red-rimmed eyes. He stood aside to let Titus pass, then closed the door and set a sound circle.

  The room’s furnishings were rudimentary. Kashkari offered Titus the only chair and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Were you able to get some rest?” asked Titus.

  His voice sounded strange to his own ears, as if his vocal cords had been badly scratched.

  Kashkari shook his head. He looked worn—an insomniac’s body craved the rest to which his mind could not succumb. “I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. So I’ve been writing letters.”

  There was a finished letter on the table, already in its envelope. “To be sent by Her Majesty’s post?”

  “The British post is very reliable.”

  The reach and efficacy of a realm’s postal service was usually the rough equivalent of the reach and efficacy of its power.

  Kashkari rose and added some more coal to the grate. “And you? I don’t suppose you spoke to Fairfax—or she would be here to see me herself.”

  Instead she was sound asleep, still blissfully ignorant. “No,” Titus admitted. “I could not tell her. I am as much of a coward as you are.”

  Kashkari gave a soft, bitter laugh. “I hate this ability. Hate it.”

  Titus closed his hand around the collar of his coat—he was cold again despite the warmth of the small room. “My mother was a seer and she hated it too.”

  Kashkari had picked up the poker to jab into the grate. At Titus’s words he stilled—then slowly turned around. “When we spoke earlier, you mentioned a death that has long been prophesied. By your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Kashkari’s eyes were wide with dismay. “Fortune shield me. Whose death? Yours?”

  Titus nodded wearily, beyond caring.

  Kashkari gripped the edge of the mantel. “I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.”

  Titus sighed. “My mother could not tell me face-to-face either—left it to her diary to decide when it should be revealed.”

  “Was that why you told me that the person I dreamed about already knew of the prophesied death?”

  “Both Fairfax and I suspected that you had dreamed about me, confirming my mother’s vision. Never in a million years would I have guessed that—” Titus still could not bring himself to speak those words aloud. “Upon my death, Alectus assumes the reins of power and that will be an unfavorable development, but it only worsens the current situation by degrees. Whereas . . . the rippling effect of what will happen to Fairfax was what you were trying to warn me about, was it not, when I walked out on you a few hours ago?”

  Were she to fall into the Bane’s hands, the consequences would be unthinkable.

  Kashkari lifted the poker again and redistributed the coal in the fireplace. “It’s the dominant view among western mage realms that one must never tamper with what has already been seen. But as I told Fairfax a while ago, we of the eastern heritage do not have such a draconian stance on the flow of time. For us, what I dreamed yesterday morning would be considered a shot across the bow, a warning from above.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against that very eventuality. Fairfax should not step onto Atlantis.”

  Titus set his elbow on the desk and dropped his forehead into his hand. “You think we stand a chance without her?”

  That prophecy of his mother’s, that of two young men approaching the Commander’s Palace—had she meant Titus and Kashkari? Fortune shield him, he had come across that vision right after Kashkari had revealed himself as not only a mage, but a mage bent on the downfall of the Bane. And when he had opened her diary that day, he had wanted specifically to know whether she had seen anything about Kashkari.

  “We don’t have Fairfax’s powers, obviously. But we also don’t carry the same liability. If we fail, we are just two more dead mages.”

  In Titus’s mother’s vision, those two young men, whoever they were, had reached the outermost ring of the Commander’s Palace. They were still as far from the Bane’s crypt as a snail in Iceland was from the summit of Mount Everest—but they were closer than anyone had been in at least a generation.

  “Perhaps your mother’s vision was a warning too,” said Kashkari.

  “What? I should not go to Atlantis either?”

  Was it wrong how much he wished Kashkari were correct?

  “Maybe not now. Maybe at a different time.”

  “You forget that I cannot simply lie low—not without ceding the throne to the regent.”

  “But you yourself said that the harm of such a course of action is incremental.”

  Titus sighed. “Compared to the catastrophe of Fairfax falling into the Bane’s hands, I suppose the harm of everything else is incremental.”

  “Then think about it.”

  Titus pressed two fingers against the space between his brows, his head throbbing. “My mother saw two young mages getting as far as the outermost ring of the Commander’s Palace. Are we giving that up too?”

  It was Kashkari’s turn to rest his forehead against the edge of the mantel. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

  Titus rose to his feet, drained. “Debattuimur omni modo.”

  “You can say that again.”

  He took a vial from his pocket. “I brought some sleep remedies. Two pilules are calibrated to give me four hours of uninterrupted sleep. The effect might vary for you.”

  “Will they affect my dreams?”

  “They should not.”

  “Then I will gladly accept them. Thank you.”

  Twenty minutes later Titus was back in the lighthouse, after covering the distance on his flying carpet. Fairfax was still sleeping. He swallowed a dose of sleep remedy, lay down, and wrapped his arm around her.

  She sighed softly in her sleep.

  He laid his head in the crook of her shoulder. While Kashkari talked, it had been easy to accept that prophetic dreams might be no more than warnings. But in the silent darkness, a lifetime of ardent belief in the supremacy of prophecies reasserted itself.

  True seers were never wrong in what they saw. Sometimes, as his mother had, they misinterpreted the significance of their visions. But he had yet to come across an instance where his mother erred in her recording of events. Nor did he have any reason to suppose that Kashkari was any more prone to such mistakes.

  To have an unambiguous outcome already specified, and then to try to prevent just that outcome . . . His mind overflowed with all kinds of spectacular ways for everything to go wrong—and for Fairfax to end up dead anyway.

  He was grateful when the sleep remedy finally manifested its powers and pulled him under.

  A summer day. A clear blue sky dotted by clouds as white and fluffy as spring lambs. Crowds as far as the eyes could see, men in gleaming top hats, women in straw boaters with fluttering pastel ribbons. On the riverbank, boys were ready to launch their boats, boys wearing black-and-white-striped jackets and hats trimmed like a flower seller’s baskets.

  The Fourth of June.

  “Fortune shield me,” Titus groaned. “Not this circus again.”

  “Oh, come,” Fairfax countered cheerfully, poking him in the arm. “Deep down you love it passionately. And you can’t wait to come back each year.”

  “That is not true. Deep down I tolerate it passionately and give thanks that it comes around only once a year.”

  “In either case, you always enjoy yourself. So spare me the— Wait, here comes Cooper. In which case, carry on with your melodramatic moaning, but put some majesty into it. You know he lives to hear you
judge everything as unworthy.”

  Indeed, there was Cooper, with the same round eyes and eager face, except he had acquired a considerable paunch. His trousers, which had not been tailored to accommodate for this extra girth, now hung an inch too short.

  Titus opened his eyes abruptly and stared, disoriented, at the bare, unfamiliar ceiling. The entire room was bare, almost drab: white-painted walls, a desk, a washstand, and a bed with a nightstand.

  It was only as his eyes settled on the other occupant of the bed that all the events of the previous night came rushing back.

  “Good morning,” said Fairfax, smiling a little. It was only a quarter after five, but she was already dressed. She sat against a pair of pillows, a book open on her knees. “How are you feeling, Your Highness, after the most utterly wonderful night of your life?”

  For the first time in his life, he wished he had Kashkari’s gift. So that his dream would come true, a dream in which their lives did not end on Atlantis, but extended far enough into the future for Cooper, who was currently as lean as Titus, to have nurtured a sizable belly with good food and comfortable living.

  He sat up, his heart as heavy as the foundation of the lighthouse. “There is something I must tell you.”

  She flipped a page of the book on her knees—belatedly he recognized it as his mother’s diary, blank as usual. “I thought so. Let’s hear it.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair. “Will you give me a moment?”

  He was not accustomed to facing the day, let alone this kind of a day, in only a set of flannel pajamas. He kissed her on the cheek, left the room, and returned fully dressed, necktie, shirt studs, and cuff links perfectly in place.

  “That bad, eh?” she said, after one look at him.

  The bed had been made during his absence. She now sat on top of the counterpane, his mother’s empty diary still open before her. He tried to gather himself. But how did he find the right words for something like this, even if he had a hundred years and piles of dictionaries as big as the pyramids?

  She waited—and kept turning the blank diary, page after page.