The Perilous Sea

by Thomas,Sherry

  She barely recognized the deafening scream as her own.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER ♦8

  England

  WINTERVALE’S ENTIRE PERSON SHOOK. HIS lips moved—whether with curses or prayers Titus could not tell. And he kept looking back, at the enemy ship closing in on him.

  Titus swore. Five minutes ago, if anyone had asked him, he would have said that Fairfax was the only one for whom he would risk anything. But he could not simply let Wintervale fall into Atlantis’s grasp, not when the whole thing was unfolding before his eyes.

  He took a deep breath. But before he could vault, Wintervale spun around and pointed his wand at the skimmer.

  The surface of the sea seemed to shudder. Then it turned eeriely calm, like a sheet that been stretched perfectly flat across a mattress. The next moment, Titus had the strangest sensation that the sea was caving. But it was: a whirlpool was forming, enormous currents of water churning around a central eye.

  The skimmer, caught by the edge of this maelstrom, attempted to navigate its way out. But the maelstrom expanded with terrifying speed, its eye ever deepening and widening, exposing the actual seafloor hundreds of feet below.

  The skimmer fell into this colossal crater. Immediately, the maelstrom ceased its rotation. All the water that had been spun outward rushed back in, crushing the skimmer under its volume and weight.

  Titus clutched the railing. He stared, agape.

  “Fairfax, what are you looking at?” came Cooper’s voice. “It’s your turn.”

  Fairfax, had she caused the maelstrom? But she was gazing up at him, her expression as stunned as he felt.

  “Play your turn, Fairfax,” he said, a reminder to her that she must keep playing her part.

  He retreated into his room and reapplied the far-seeing spell. The displacement of that much water had caused violent waves, tossing Wintervale’s dinghy about. Wintervale seemed not to notice at all. His arms were wrapped about the small mast, his face wet with seawater—or was it tears? And his expression was one not of confusion, but of wonder and incredulity, as if he knew exactly how the whirlpool that swallowed his pursuers had come about, but simply could not believe it had in truth happened.

  A particularly large wave buffeted the dinghy. The next one capsized it entirely. Titus gritted his teeth and vaulted. As expected, he landed in the frigid waters of the North Sea, the cold like shards of glass.

  Blind vaulting—paradoxically named, as one blind vaulted with one’s eyes wide open, using only visual clues as a guide, rather than personal memory—was notoriously inaccurate. He could have rematerialized a mile away. But fortunately, in this instance, he was only a hundred feet or so from the upside-down dinghy.

  Wintervale surfaced, gasping and flailing.

  “Levo,” Titus shouted, swimming toward Wintervale, not daring to vault again for fear of finding himself farther away.

  Wintervale screamed at being suddenly airborne. He thrashed, turning over and over a few feet above the waves, as if he were rotating on a spit.

  The waves battered Titus. But at least Wintervale, held above water, could not drown. Titus’s muscles protested as he fought toward Wintervale. Fifty feet. Twenty-five feet. Ten feet.

  “Titus!” Wintervale shouted. “Thank goodness. Fortune is no longer spitting in my face.”

  Titus closed the last few feet of distance between them, grabbed Wintervale’s arm, and vaulted them both to the shingle beach beneath Sutherland’s uncle’s house.

  Wintervale promptly vomited.

  Titus waited until he was done, kicked pebbles over the mess, and led him ten feet away. Wintervale crumpled to the ground. Titus crouched beside him, cleaned him with a few spells, and checked his pulse and pupils.

  “What were you trying to do?” Wintervale rasped. “You know I can’t vault more than half a mile.”

  “Unless you could swim five miles to land, vaulting was our only choice.”

  Wintervale was already shivering.

  “Wait here.” Titus vaulted to his room, grabbed a towel and a change of clothes, and vaulted back down. “You need to change out of those clothes.”

  Wintervale’s fingers shook as he tried to undo the buttons of his jacket.

  “Exue,” said Titus.

  Wintervale’s jacket flew off. As Titus repeated the spell, Wintervale’s waistcoat and shirt also made themselves scarce.

  “Smashing spell, that,” stuttered Wintervale, his teeth chattering.

  “The ladies agree with you,” said Titus.

  He turned around before doing away with Wintervale’s trousers. Then he vaulted back to Baycrest House to change out of his own sodden clothes, scanning the sea for signs of other Atlantean forces as he did so. A familiar knock came at his door as he was buttoning his new shirt.

  Fairfax.

  “Come in,” he said, shrugging into another waistcoat.

  Her face was pale as she closed the door behind her person. “What’s going on? Where’s Wintervale?”

  He thrust his arms into a jacket. “On the beach, changing his clothes. I will find out what is going on.”

  She came closer. “Are you all right?”

  He thought it a strange question until she took his hand: he was shaking without being aware of it.

  “Must have been the cold—the water was freezing,” he said, extracting a vial from the emergency remedy pack in his luggage.

  But as he spoke, he was thinking not of the frigidness of the sea, but of those moments just before the nautical distress signal came: rising from his bed, glancing at the clock, noting the time, fourteen minutes after two, then stepping out onto the balcony.

  There was a terrifying familiarity to the chain of actions. And that, as much as his sodden clothes, had made him tremble.

  He pulled her in and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Keep the boys on the side of the house away from the beach. Keep an eye on the sea. And do nothing that would reveal yourself to anyone—do not even think about using your powers to dry those clothes of mine, for instance. If Wintervale is not safe, then neither are we.”

  Wintervale had put on dry clothes but he was still shivering. Titus gave him the warming remedy he had brought.

  “I need to get you somewhere you can rest. Think carefully: Did the Atlanteans know where you were headed?”

  “No,” said Wintervale, his voice hoarse. “They didn’t even know who I am.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Titus was far from assured, but he did not have many choices. “In that case, I will take you up to Sutherland’s uncle’s house.”

  Wintervale blanched. “Please don’t vault me again.”

  Wintervale was in no shape to be vaulted again just now. In fact, he could scarcely stand. Titus glanced at the steep cliff and the rickety ladders, and sighed. “We can do without vaulting.”

  Wintervale was about the same height as Titus, but at least a stone heavier. As Titus started his ascent, Wintervale on his back, he felt like Atlas, carrying the weight of the whole world. “Why was Atlantis chasing you? We thought you were home with your mother.”

  “They weren’t chasing me. And we weren’t at home. My mother and I were in France. In Grenoble.”

  Titus clambered over a protrusion of rocks to reach the next ladder, straining not to tilt backward. “Grenoble?”

  As far as he knew, the town did not host an Exile community of any appreciable size.

  “Do you know who Madame Pierredure is?” asked Wintervale.

  “Old lady who fought Atlantis?” Madame Pierredure had indeed been an old lady, but she had also been the chief strategist for the rebellion in the Juras ten years ago, and had been responsible for a series of brilliant victories. No one had heard of her since the end of that spate of rebellions and insurrections. If she was still
alive, she must be quite ancient. “I thought she was dead.”

  “That’s what we all thought,” said Wintervale. “Then Mother heard news that Madame was in Grenoble. She was keen to see for herself that Madame was still alive—they had known each other back in the day. And she wanted me to come along to meet Madame in person, if the rumors turned out to be true.

  “We traveled under assumed names and stayed at nonmage hotels. Everything was fine until last night, when we had news Madame had arrived at a hotel in centre-ville. We went to a café in the square outside the hotel. Left and right there were mages—we could hear them whisper about Madame Pierredure. That was when Mother stood up and told me we were leaving. She said something felt wrong, that if it was all hush-hush and secret, with news traveling only along trusted channels, then there shouldn’t be nearly as many mages gathered in a place that has very little Exile presence, waiting for a glimpse of Madame.

  “I should have listened to her. But instead—” Wintervale took a deep breath. Titus could almost see him grimacing. “Instead I said we should stay, for the chance to witness something historic. We were arguing back and forth when suddenly she stopped talking and just grabbed me. That was when I saw that mages across the square were dropping unconscious. And then I looked up and saw the armored chariots.”

  Titus tensed. A narrative almost always took a fateful turn with the entrance of armored chariots.

  “We couldn’t vault, so we ran.” Wintervale went on, his voice strained. “Had we gone back to our lodging, we probably would have been all right. But one man in our corner of the square shouted that he had access to a dry dock and could get us to England fast.”

  “About twenty of us followed him to a house on the outskirts of town. We crowded onto a vessel in the cellar. The next moment it dropped into the sea and we all thought we were safe. But not two minutes later, we had an Atlantean frigate behind us.

  “It was all chaos on board. Mother asked where Sutherland’s uncle’s house was—I had told her earlier I was missing the party to be with her. I said it was somewhere north of Hunstanton Cliffs. That was the last thing I knew. When I came to, it was morning. I was on the dinghy and it was sailing itself. I had no idea where I was and Mother . . .”

  Wintervale gulped. “She’s lived through rough times,” he said fervently. “She must be all right.”

  Lady Wintervale was the only other person who knew that one of the “boys” at Mrs. Dawlish’s was the great elemental mage sought by Atlantis. If she were arrested and interrogated . . . Titus could only hope that Atlantis would not think to ask her questions on that particular subject.

  They were almost halfway up the cliff. Titus inched along the narrow footpath that would take him to the next ladder, adjusting Wintervale’s arms so the latter did not inadvertently strangle him.

  With Wintervale’s tale finished, Titus had no choice but to ask the question that disturbed him far more than it should. “Did you make the maelstrom?”

  Wintervale had largely stopped shivering, but now he trembled. “I’m not sure how that happened. The Atlantean skimmer came out of nowhere. One minute I was dozing off and the next minute it was there.” He exhaled slowly—as if trying to push away the memory of the terror. “I panicked completely. All I could think was, if only I were a more powerful elemental mage, I would open up a huge whirlpool right before the skimmer and then I’d be safe from it.”

  The fact that Wintervale was an elemental mage was never the first, second, third, or even fourth thing Titus recalled about him. If I want to make a fire, I use a match, Wintervale had once confessed to Titus. And that had not been false modesty. Spent coals could produce bigger sparks than the glimmers of fire Wintervale summoned. And one would probably die of thirst waiting for him to fill a glass with water.

  Then again, great elemental mages tended to be unexceptional as children, until their powers manifested in adolescence. Titus had thought it was far too late for Wintervale to undergo such a transformation. But obviously he was wrong.

  “So you wanted to make a huge whirlpool?”

  “I did. And the next moment, all this power I’d never felt before just poured out of me and the sea did exactly what I wanted it to do. I guess . . . I guess I’m a better elemental mage than I thought I was.”

  Titus’s arms burned as he pulled up to the next rung. “You might get into Lives and Deeds of the Great Elemental Mages if you aren’t careful.”

  The sound Wintervale made was halfway between a laugh than a sob. “I wish Mother could have seen it. When we still lived in the Domain, she was so unimpressed with my powers she didn’t bother to have me declared. She would—she would have like to see what I was able to do today.”

  “Yes, this changes things,” Titus said slowly.

  Everything, possibly.

  By the time he reached the top of the cliff, every muscle in Titus’s body screamed.

  Fairfax had done as he asked: no one threw open windows to yell in surprise at Wintervale’s sudden appearance. Titus half carried, half dragged Wintervale the rest of the distance to the front door.

  “I am going to vault inside. Wait a few seconds before you ring the doorbell,” Titus told Wintervale. “And if anyone asks why you look like death, tell them it was something you ate on the train.”

  Back in his room Titus pointed his wand at his soles and got rid of any debris that clung to them. The doorbell clanged distantly. He went out to the balcony. Fairfax and Cooper were still at their game of croquet, with Kashkari added as an observer.

  “Look who managed to get out of bed by three,” Titus said to Kashkari.

  “I was out of bed by noon,” said Kashkari, who appeared as if he hadn’t been allowed to sleep in seventy-two hours. “Spent the next two hours on the floor, writhing in agony.”

  “At least you are upright,” said Cooper with rather obscene cheer, considering he drank as much as anyone did. “Sutherland is still moaning under his blanket, as far as I know.”

  Fairfax swung her mallet. The doorbell rang again. She tensed, but she did not say anything.

  Kashkari rubbed his temples. “Is someone ringing the bell?”

  The butler appeared. “There is a caller by the name of Wintervale. Should I say Mr. Sutherland is at home to him?”

  “Yes!” Kashkari and Cooper answered at the same time. Kashkari, swaying slightly, started immediately for the house. Cooper hurried to catch up. Fairfax, after a glance at Titus, followed suit.

  Titus was the last to reach the front of the house, where Wintervale was being warmly welcomed back into the fold.

  “What’s the matter?” Kashkari peered at him. “Have you been drinking too? You don’t look good.”

  “Something I ate on the trip.” Wintervale turned to the butler. “I’d like to lie down for a bit, if you have a bed to spare.”

  “It will take us only a minute to make up a room for you, sir.”

  “You can use my room until then,” Kashkari offered, bracing his arm around Wintervale’s middle.

  Wintervale looked toward Titus, seemingly reluctant to go with Kashkari. But the latter was already moving him along. “Watch your step.”

  “You look like you should take all the rest you need,” Titus reminded Wintervale. Kashkari’s bed was as good a place as any.

  “I’ll go tell Sutherland you are here,” said Cooper as he passed by Kashkari and Wintervale on the stairs.

  Fairfax did not follow them, but came closer to Titus. “I’ll ask for a tray of tea for you, Wintervale,” she spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. Then, in a whisper to him alone, “You want to tell me what happened?”

  She was worried about him, and concerned for the situation. But though she was on edge, she remained very much in charge of herself.

  Whereas he felt like the Atlantean skimmer, caught in an inescapable maelstrom. “There is something I need to check first. Will you keep an eye on Wintervale until I get back?”

  “Of course. What do
you need to check?”

  It felt a betrayal even to speak those words. But he did, because he did not lie to her. “My mother’s diary.”

  Princess Ariadne’s diary sat at the center of the worktable in Titus’s laboratory. He stared at it. Had he made the mistake of a lifetime? Her vision, the one of him standing upon a balcony and witnessing an act of stupendous elemental power—had she meant Wintervale, rather than Fairfax?

  I need to see them again, those entries.

  Everything in him yearned toward Fairfax. In a world of utter uncertainties, she had proven herself to be the strength he could rely on, when his own strength failed.

  But what if she was not the One?

  Please, let it be Fairfax.

  The diary responded—at least to the first part of his request.

  28 September, YD 1014

  The day of his birth.

  A man stands somewhere. He could be anywhere, a mountaintop, a field, or before an open window . All I see is the back of his head and the blue sky beyond. Yet even in so limited a vision, I see—or rather—I feel his shock.

  He is reeling.

  And that was that.

  13 November, YD 1014

  Joy pierced him. The day before Fairfax was born. This had to be a good sign.

  The same vision, slightly expanded. Now I know it takes place at about quarter after two o’clock. Though the time could be deceptive, just as the date had been at Eugenides Constantinos’s bookshop.

  When I used to read all the books about seers I could lay my hands on, almost every one of them had mentioned rubbish visions, those visions that had no significance whatsoever. The mage who always saw what he ate a week into the future, for example.

  I wonder if this is a rubbish vision. Though, of course, even rubbish visions eventually predict something. The mage who saw what he ate stopped having those visions—and one week later he was dead.

  And it is odd that I seem to have this particular vision only when someone is in confinement for childbirth.

  Whose confinement? Who gave birth on the night of the meteor storm?

  He turned the page.