Iolanthe took a few steps closer. It was the Thames River, and Eton College on the other side. “Are we in the English queen’s home?”
“We are.” Lady Wintervale pulled off her gloves and tossed them aside. “Such a hovel.”
The interior of Windsor Castle was stodgy, to be sure, but it felt respectable enough. Then again, the Wintervale estate, before its destruction at the end of January Uprising, was supposed to have rivaled the Citadel in magnificence. “Do the staff know you are here?”
“They do. They think I am one of the queen’s German relatives.” Lady Wintervale sat down in a daffodil-yellow stuffed chair. “Now tell me, how is Lee?”
Wintervale’s given name was Leander, but no one ever called him that—or any variants of it. “He can’t walk by himself, but otherwise he seems fine. He asks about you a lot.”
“What does he ask about me?”
“I . . . He never does it in front of me, so I can only relate what I have heard from His Highness. The prince says Wintervale is always anxious for your news. And he says that he has been glad not to have your news, so he doesn’t have to lie to Wintervale.”
Lady Wintervale placed two fingers against her temple. “And why can’t Lee walk by himself?”
“We don’t know. Would you like me to have the prince bring him here to meet you?”
Lady Wintervale’s head snapped up. “No. No. That would be far too dangerous. Absolutely not. And say nothing to Lee of my presence, you understand? Not a word.”
The woman always made Iolanthe nervous. “Yes, my lady, I understand. Wintervale is not to know you are here.”
“Good. You may go,” said Lady Wintervale, closing her eyes as if she had been exhausted by the conversation. “If you learn anything I should know, come back to this room and say Toujours fier.”
This time the prince was in the laboratory.
“Where were you?” Iolanthe could barely contain herself. “I have been looking for you all over.”
“I was in Paris.”
Paris again. “What were you doing there?”
“Buying things for you, obviously.” He pointed at a bag of pastries sitting on the worktable.
She didn’t think he had hopped across the Channel just for the baked goods, but that was a topic for another time. “I just spoke to Lady Wintervale.”
His expression changed instantly. “How did she escape? Or was she let go?”
Iolanthe’s heart dropped half a foot. “I didn’t ask.”
Part of her was always petrified with fear at being face-to-face with Lady Wintervale, since Lady Wintervale had very nearly suffocated Iolanthe to death when she first came to England. “I was in shock. She vaulted me to Windsor Castle, asked me a few questions about Wintervale, told me not to mention anything of her presence to him, and dismissed me.”
And she had been all too glad to be let go.
“Tell me everything again,” asked Titus. “More slowly this time. Give me all the details.”
She did, as he listened carefully. Then she asked, “Why do you suppose Lady Wintervale came to me, instead of you?”
“She knows I am watched, now more than ever.”
The hawker who always loitered before Mrs. Dawlish’s house, the person who might or might not be hiding in the copse of trees behind—they were but the tip of the iceberg. Some days, when Iolanthe walked to school with the other boys, she could feel the surveillance the entire length of the way.
“And what were you doing on High Street?” asked the prince. “It is not your turn to provide for tea.”
Mrs. Dawlish supplied three meals a day, but the boys were responsible for their own tea, which was in essence a fourth meal. The prince, Wintervale, Kashkari, and Iolanthe took turns buying a week’s worth of teastuff for the entire group.
Iolanthe started. “I completely forgot why I was there in the first place. The tiles.”
She related the incident of the roof tiles, and of the book that fell off a shelf and struck Kashkari. “Too many falling items to be a coincidence. Kashkari thinks they were all for him, the book and the tiles.”
Titus’s face was grave. “Far too many, especially roof tiles. Before I was sent here, mages from the Domain came and improved the house from top to bottom. Have you ever noticed clogged drains, creaking steps, or bad flues in this house?”
She had to think about it. “No.”
When things went smoothly, they did so unnoticed.
“And there would not be, not while I remain here, and perhaps not even for years afterward. So it is quite impossible for roof tiles to have blown off. Those roof tiles would have stayed in place even if a tornado took a running leap at Mrs. Dawlish’s house.”
He opened the bag of pastries, handed her an éclair, and took one for himself. “Anything else I need to know about?”
Something nagged at the back of her mind. It took her a few seconds to realize what it concerned. “West, the cricket player. He seems more interested in you than he has reason to be.”
Titus’s brows knitted. “I am not sure I remember what he looks like. I will come and see at your next practice.”
They spent the next minute in silence, eating. It felt comfortable, almost.
When he was done with his éclair, he looked at her, as if he had come to a decision. “About Lady Wintervale, I actually think it is good news. She knows about you, so if she is not being interrogated by Atlantis, all the better for you. As for West, I do not know enough to fear. But the flying tiles are a different matter altogether.
“They were probably not meant for you—Atlantis wants you whole, not maimed. But anything striking so close to you worries me. Whether the mischief-doer wants to harm Kashkari because he is part of the resistance or because he guards the path to Wintervale, the point is, someone knows something.”
He exhaled. “You should leave. Soon.”
Her heart slowed; perhaps it stopped altogether. “You want me to go?”
“The more I think about the roof tiles, the more it disturbs me. We might all have to go, before too long. Once we part ways, however, I will not be able to help you find your guardian, and I want to—or at least get you close enough.”
Once we part ways.
Something almost choked her--like anger, but not quite. Opposition. She had been resigned to her eventual departure from the school, from his life. But now that he had spoken these very words, that resignation had evaporated like morning mist.
She did not want to go.
She never did.
A quarter of an hour later, olanthe was the first person to walk into Wintervale’s room for tea.
Before Wintervale became the One, she and he rarely spent any time alone—they had always interacted as members of a group. Afterward, she saw no reason for that to change. All the better to keep the buffer of someone else’s, or lots of someone elses’, presence between them. Easier for her to act as if nothing had changed, just another cocky young man who happened to be a bit too big for his britches.
She walked to the fire burning in his grate and held out her hand toward the warmth. “Getting cold.”
“I heard you swatted a flying roof tile today,” said Wintervale from his cot.
Iolanthe shrugged. “Gaining West’s admiration on the pitch. Saving my mate’s life on the way home. Just another day in the extraordinary life of Archer Fairfax.”
The old Wintervale would have guffawed, and then moaned for the rest of the day that he missed such a terrific sight. But the new Wintervale only smiled—and only a half smile at that.
It occurred to Iolanthe that he looked tired, as tired as the prince sometimes looked, a weariness beyond what could be cleared up by a good long night of sleep.
The stab of guilt was sharp. More than anything else, she had envied him. His power. His destiny. His now unbreakable claim on Titus. When she, of all people, should understand what a terrifying ordeal it must have been. And to lose his mobility on top of it.
&
nbsp; And his mother too, or at least he so believed.
“Is it getting to you, not being able to move around?”
He sighed. “So many plans, so many visions of greatness, and I can’t even take a piss by myself.”
“Have you improved at all since you stopped sleeping all the time?”
“Sometimes I think I have. Sometimes I am sure I have. And then, the next time I get up, it’s the same thing all over again.”
“Well, you can’t give up,” she said softly. “Those plans and visions of greatness don’t realize themselves, you know.”
This less robust, more serious Wintervale nodded. “You are right, Fairfax. And that may be exactly what I need to hear right now.”
Sane, so sane. Drained, perhaps, but unquestionably sound and sober. And now, with proof that his mother was nearby, they knew for certain he had never hallucinated, but had actually seen Lady Wintervale, who had probably been on top of a roof on the opposite side of the street, to get a better look into his room.
So why then was the Kno-it-all gauge so correct about his gross motor skills, but so wrong about his mental state?
The junior boys hustled in with platters of fried eggs and grilled sausages. Kashkari entered in their wake, looking calm if a bit grim. And conversation moved on to things that, essentially, mattered to nobody.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER ♦25
The Sahara Desert
THE GIRL WOKE UP TO a star-studded sky and the sound of air rushing over her ears.
She was moving, strapped into the saddle on the back of a large flying steed. Someone held her from behind with one arm.
“A star just fell,” said Titus.
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “You saw a meteor?”
“I am beginning to think that perhaps your admirer was not being hyperbolic, but literal, in what he wrote: you could have been born during a meteor shower and you could have made lightning strike on the day you and he met.”
“So he is pardoned for his heinous literary offenses because he was being truthful?”
“The parts having to do with elemental magic, maybe. But it is still the height of unmanliness to mewl ‘you are my hope, my prayer, my destiny.’”
“May I remind you that is the only way to properly address a girl who wields lightning? Anything less reverent and, poof, one’s hair is on fire and one’s brain scrambled.”
“All right, my hope—but I am not saying the rest of it—I have something you need to feel.”
She feigned the sound of outrage. “But we barely know each other, sir!”
He laughed softly. “But you must hold it in your hand and feel it change,” he urged, in her ear. “I insist. I can wait no longer.”
She knew they were on a serious subject, but the flutter of his breath on her skin, the low drawl of his words—heat raced along all her nerve endings. “Will I like it?”
“Well, I do have to apologize for its size. It is rather small.” And with that, he pressed something rather small into her hand.
It was a pendant on a chain, and while the chain was cool, the pendant was warm.
“Remember the first day, you asked me what was so cold under my clothes? It was this.”
Then it had been icy; now it was not cold anymore. It must be half of a pair of heat tracers: a heat tracer’s temperature increased as distance to its mate decreased. The mate of this particular tracer had been quite far away earlier. But now whoever carried the other half of the pair was much, much closer.
“Before too long, we should land and put the pendant some distance away,” Titus continued, “so we can conceal ourselves and see who is coming before they see us.”
“How much time before this mage catches up with us?” That idea would work better during daylight hours.
“Depends on our relative speed. Just keep an eye on it.”
She nodded and put it back into the bag.
“There is something else you should probably know,” he said.
She couldn’t quite decide from his tone whether he was making a silly subject sound serious or making light of a grave one. “Will we be talking about dimensions again?”
“Yes, the eye-poppingly enormous size of my—well, if I must be specific, our—trouble: the Bane is here in the Sahara.”
She shivered. “For us?”
“For now I would assume so, until I learn otherwise.”
“And how did you learn about it to start with?”
He gave a brief account of the additional tracers he had found on the wyvern, which had led Atlantean forces to close in on them, before those battalions were themselves attacked.
“Bewitched spears?” Her jaw dropped. “Which century are we living in?”
“It was like watching a reenactment of a historic battle, no doubt about that.”
“What kind of mages carry hundreds of bewitched spears with them?”
“The kind who doesn’t want Atlantis to find out who they are.”
“And they are helping us?”
“Accidentally, I would imagine. They are probably causing Atlantis trouble because that is what they live for.”
She nodded slowly, digesting everything he had told her. “And this is the same sand wyvern as earlier?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure you have rid it of all Atlantean tracers?”
“Hard to tell. But we have not had trouble in the past hour and—”
He looked at his watch and swore. “What’s the matter?”
“According to the compass built into my watch, we are flying in the wrong direction. I had set a course with a racing funnel for southeast, but now we are headed almost due north.
A racing funnel was a spell used to keep a wyvern on the straightest possible path during a speed trial. A wyvern in a racing funnel had no reason to deviate from its set course.
He murmured, resetting the racing tunnel. But instead the wyvern turned due north, then gradually, north-northwest.
“Is it taking us to the coast of the Mediterranean?”
His arm tightened around her middle. “No, I think it is taking us in the direction of the Atlantean base.”
“What?”
“Homing elixir.”
For cavalry, and even for large private stables, the practice was fairly common. Beasts raised in those establishments were fed small amounts of elixir that kept them docile and happy. Those elixirs, when formulated specifically for the establishment, also served to prevent lost or stolen beasts from straying too far, because going more than twenty-four hours without will make them automatically turn toward home.
“But I thought this wyvern didn’t come from around here. I thought it had to be transported in from central Asia. Besides, we haven’t had it for twenty-four hours yet. Twelve hours barely.”
“The Atlanteans may have have left an aerosolized trail of its particular homing elixir, to lead it—and us—in the direction of the nearest base.”
“We have to get off then. Take it down!”
He swore again. “It is refusing to follow directions—and we are half a mile up.”
She swallowed. “Can you blind vault us to the ground?”
“It is still too soon for you to vault. I cannot take that chance.”
She used a far-seeing spell. “But there are armored chariots ahead!”
“I can see that! And I do not want to hear you get all martyrish and tell me to vault off alone—I have not dragged you this far to hand you to Atlantis.”
She could scarcely breathe. “Then what do we do?”
“We will jump.”
“What?”
He was already unbuckling her harness.
“If you can produce enough of an air current to hold a hard-flying sand wyvern in place, then you can produce one to break our fall.”
He came to h
is feet and pulled her to hers. She was barely able to stand with the force of the wind rushing past.
“What if I don’t produce that air current?”
“You will.” He took her hand in his, his tone brooking no dissent. “Now on the count of three. One. Two. Three.”
They fell, accelerating toward the ground at thirty-two feet per second squared.
The free fall seemed to push Titus’s heart and lungs upward, compressing them into half their size against the top of his ribcage. The air roaring past made his eyes water, but he dared not close them.
Where was the air current that would save them?
“Do something!” he shouted.
“Shut up! I’m trying!”
They bumped into little pockets of air that did nothing to decelerate their plunge, but made them flip and tumble. The starry night and the dark desert chased across his vision as he spun in every which direction.
The ground rose toward them at terrifying speeds. They screamed.
And kept on screaming.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER ♦26
England
AT HER DESK IN THE reading room, Iolanthe stared at the image of a young Commander Rainstone, looking dashing as a pirate wench, a cutlass in hand. The picture was from a different article Iolanthe had found about the Argonin tricentennial fancy dress ball, evidence that she had indeed been part of the duo that attended as the visualization the Argonin quote Oysters give pearls, but only if you are armed with a knife and willing to use it.
It was easier to dig up information about Commander Rainstone’s youth than to find out about her in the present. The current her made no news and stirred no controversies. She never married or had children—at least none on record. And she lived a simple life outside of her work, preferring quiet evenings spent at home to the glamorous social life of the Citadel.
That she lived alone could be a result of her already having a secret life. That secret life was also made easier by the fact that she had no family. And the signs had always pointed to the memory keeper being well-placed in life and close to the center of power, which certainly could be said about Commander Rainstone.
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