The Perilous Sea

by Thomas,Sherry

  They had already deduced that the Bane was capable of “driving” other bodies that looked like his. Who was to say he could not take command of one that did not resemble his original self?

  “The mental instability the Kno-it-all gauge detected in Wintervale,” he heard himself say, his voice almost flat. “What if it was exactly right?”

  “And Wintervale’s inability to walk unassisted—that must be because he looks nothing like the one driving his body,” said Fairfax. “There is a reason that until now the Bane only used similar-looking bodies—the mind probably can’t trick itself enough into fully controlling everything if the face looked that different.”

  “And the guards outside Mrs. Dawlish’s house—they weren’t there at the beginning of the Half. They only came after Wintervale’s maelstrom.”

  They hadn’t been posted to watch Titus, as he had assumed, but most likely to ensure someone else’s safety.

  Fairfax pulled on her collar, as if it had become too tight. “I always did think it was miraculous that Atlantis let you return to school this Half. I wouldn’t have.”

  Icarus Khalkedon had been correct. After the great comet had come and gone, the Bane had indeed walked into Mrs. Dawlish’s house and he had done so in Wintervale’s body. And West had disappeared because he unfortunately resembled the Bane—and the Bane could always use yet another spare.

  “What I still don’t understand is what it is all for,” Fairfax continued. “What is the Bane trying to accomplish by doing all this?”

  Titus gripped her. “It’s all for you, do you not see? He had failed to find you earlier, so all this trickery is to get into my mind, because if he could do that, all my secrets would be open to him. After what happened last time, there was no way he could put me under Inquisition again without first provoking a war—nor does he have anywhere near as powerful a mind mage at his disposal these days, after I killed the Inquisitor. And run-of-the-mill memory or mind-control spells do not work on me because the heirs of the House of Elberon are protected from birth against such shenanigans. His only way into my mind was via a contact-requisite means.”

  She shook. “That’s why he always wanted you to support him when he walked places, trying to accumulate enough hours of direct contact.”

  “But he doesn’t have those hours yet. So I am still safe. And you are still safe. And—”

  The door burst open. Titus nearly blasted a hole through the house before he realized it was Kashkari.

  “I know who you are,” said Kashkari, to Fairfax.

  She reeled, but recovered fast. “I already told you who I am. I am the prince’s bodyguard.”

  Kashkari closed the door behind him. “You are the girl who brought down the lightning.”

  Titus stepped in front her, wand drawn. “If you—”

  “Of course not. I was just in a state of shock and I had to confirm it.”

  “Did you just guess all of a sudden?” Titus demanded sharply. “And where is Wintervale? Is he here?”

  “No, he is still milling about outside the chapel—Mrs. Hancock is watching over him. And I guessed because Roberts was passing around photographs taken several weeks ago.”

  “Who is Roberts and what photographs?” Titus demanded.

  “Cricket player. Never made the eleven. Wanted to counterfeit photographic evidence for posterity that he was part of the school team. I was included in some of the photographs on the periphery and next to me was someone with”—Kashkari looked about the room and grabbed Fairfax’s picture, the one that did not look anything like her—“this face. I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. I remember it was Fairfax sitting next to me that day. There was no reason for him to look so different—until I remembered the photograph in his room.

  “Then I remembered that Atlantis has trouble finding the girl who brought down the lightning because her image cannot be painted or otherwise captured. And that was also when I remembered that the day Fairfax first arrived at this school was the day the girl manifested her powers.”

  Fairfax gasped.

  Titus instantly had his arm around her shoulders. “What is it?”

  “Wintervale. Someone is going to pass those pictures to him, sooner or later.”

  “So?” said Kashkari.

  “Wintervale is the Bane, or he has been since the day he came to Sutherland’s uncle’s house.”

  Kashkari shivered and stared at them. “No. Please, no.”

  Mrs. Hancock materialized among them. Before anyone could demand why she wasn’t watching Wintervale, she said, “Something is wrong with Wintervale. He was looking at these pictures then he suddenly started laughing.”

  “Wintervale is the Bane. And I’m the one who brought down the lightning. He has been trying to reach a contact-requisite threshold with the prince, so he can find out where I am,” said Fairfax. “But those photographs he was looking at let him know that he has already found me, and I’ve been under his nose all along.

  Mrs. Hancock shuddered. “Now I finally understand.” She turned to Kashkari. “By staying close to Wintervale, you saved him-His Highness, not Wintervale.”

  Kashkari gawked at her, thunderstruck.

  “We must go,” Titus said to Fairfax. “Right now.”

  She gripped the emergency bag already strapped to her shoulders. “Let’s.”

  But they could not vault. The Bane must have come to the same conclusion Kashkari had. And if he had been at this school this long, the no-vaulting zone must have been at the ready for almost as long, waiting for his command to be put into effect.

  Kashkari rushed to the window. “You can’t use the flying carpet either. There are armored chariots outside.”

  The armored chariots were high above, circling like a flock of birds. But should Titus and Iolanthe dare to make an escape on the carpet, the armored chariots would swoop down in an instant. And the armored chariots’ top speed was much higher than the carpet’s one hundred and twenty miles an hour.

  “The quasi-vaulter, then,” said Fairfax.

  “We’ll save that until we have no other choice. For now we still have this.” Titus set the Crucible on the table.

  “You two had better leave this room,” said Fairfax, to Kashkari and Mrs. Hancock. “You have not been compromised yet. The Bane does not know you are involved with us, so do what you can to keep yourselves safe.”

  “Will we meet again?” asked Kashkari.

  Titus untwisted half of his pendant and gave it to Kashkari. “We can hope.”

  Kashkari and Mrs. Hancock left. Titus and Fairfax each laid a hand on the Crucible, hers over his.

  Titus began the password.

  “How far is Forbidden Island?” Iolanthe shouted, over the air rushing over the carpet at one hundred twenty miles an hour.

  “Ninety miles,” Titus shouted back.

  Forty-five minutes, then.

  They were a tight fit on the carpet, which was no more than three-and-a-half feet wide and five feet long. At this speed there was only one way to ride: flat on one’s stomach, hands tightly gripped onto the front of the carpet, a safety harness clipped over the torso.

  Below, the ground rushed by. She recognized the Plain of Giants. And somewhere to the north, Briga’s Chasm, made faintly visible by the vapor of miasma rising out of the depths of its deep ravine, a vapor that writhed and shifted, almost like a fog, under the sunlight.

  There was also a portal at Briga’s Chasm, but that one led to the copy of the Crucible that had been lost, and without knowing where that copy of the Crucible was, Titus had not been willing to take the risk. So they were headed for Forbidden Island, to access the copy of the Crucible in the monastery, which was still a safe place for the Master of the Domain, if he could get to it.

  “Wish they could have picked easier stories to use for portals,” she said, knowing very well the point of selecting difficult locations was to decrease the likelihood one would be followed from one Crucible to another. “I can b
eat the Big Bad Wolf to a pulp on any given day.”

  “And I daresay the seven dwarfs are no match for my prowess,” said Titus, turning carefully to look behind them.

  “Anyone chasing us?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I guess we can’t ever go back to school again.”

  “No.”

  It was probably the last she’d see of the boys. She hoped Cooper would still remember her, when he was a portly, middle-aged lawyer, coming back to school each year on the Fourth of June to celebrate the memories of his youth.

  And Master Haywood. She had one of her Wyoming Territory calling cards in her pocket—in case she couldn’t go to Paris in person, she was going to send it to him, to let him know not to expect her for a while. She wondered if she could still post it somewhere, so that he would worry less.

  She turned to Titus. “I hope Kashkari and Mrs.—”

  The carpet spun wildly along its long axis, the world a stomach-churning kaleidoscope of mountain and sky. She screamed. He swore and reached for a corner of the carpet. With a sudden yank the carpet stabilized—upside down.

  But it hadn’t stopped—it was still cruising at top speed upside down. Her view of the sky was obstructed, but when she tilted her head back, the ground below zoomed by, making her feel dizzy.

  “On the count of three,” shouted Titus, “kick your feet up and throw all your weight toward your head. One, two, three.”

  Their combined motion flipped the carpet over. They were no longer upside down, but the carpet had screeched to a stop, since they now faced the opposite direction.

  And coming at them, in Wintervale’s body, was the Bane, riding a carpet of his own.

  Unfortunately, the Bane already knew how to get into the Crucible when it was in the middle of being used as a portal, and there was no one at school with the ability to stop him.

  Titus and Iolanthe’s carpet juddered to restart itself. They leaned their weight to one side. The carpet banked, turning.

  A gust roared toward them and the carpet was blown end over end several times—they would have fallen off if it weren’t for the safety harnesses holding them in place.

  “Do not let the Bane play with us,” shouted Titus.

  She called for a bolt of lightning, aimed at the Bane. But the lightning only struck a shield instead, and the Bane passed under unharmed. She kept calling for more thunderbolts, which flashed and sizzled as if they were in the middle of a thunderstorm.

  Skillfully, easily, the Bane wove between the currents of electricity, dodging Iolanthe’s attacks.

  And he was too fast. They would not reach Briga’s Chasm before he caught up with them.

  She threw down several huge fireballs, setting the landscape beneath aflame.

  “What are you doing?” Titus shouted.

  “Making him have to come through smoke, at least. If only Wintervale suffered from asthma.”

  No sooner had she finished speaking than the carpet swerved north.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, startled.

  “Asthma,” Titus said tightly. “Or perhaps something even better.”

  The season inside the Crucible always reflected that outside: there were no flowers on the trees of the orchard, which had also been picked clean of their fruits. In the distance rose a house shaped like a wicker beehive, small at the bottom, bulging out at the middle, and then tapering again toward the top.

  Titus had brought Iolanthe here in the very early days of their acquaintance, when she still couldn’t control air. In that house he had tried to force her, and she had almost drowned in honey.

  Or rather, the sensations had been those of a near-drowning, but she had never been in real danger: the vast majority of the time they used the Crucible as a proving ground, and injuries—or even death—inside the Crucible had no bearing on the actual world outside.

  But now they were using the Crucible as a portal, and all the rules changed: injuries caused actual harm and death was irreversible.

  They flew low, between rows of neatly pruned apple trees. Iolanthe, a long branch in hand, overturned every skep they came across, releasing swarms of buzzing, agitated bees. Behind the carpet the bees billowed, kept together—and kept away from Titus and Iolanthe—by currents of air that kept them together like fish caught in a net.

  The Bane was closing in. Iolanthe divided the bees into two groups and, forcing them close to the ground, sent them to the periphery of the orchard.

  She sent another bolt of lightning the Bane’s way. And, to further distract him, she ripped off smaller branches with high winds, set them on fire, and hurled them at him.

  All the while she pushed the bees farther out of view.

  The Bane waved away the flaming branches as if they were so many toothpicks. And he retaliated by uprooting entire trees in their path, forcing Titus to fly the carpet above the tree line, giving the Bane a clear line of sight.

  “Just a little farther,” Iolanthe implored under her breath.

  Titus yelled and banked them sharply to the left. Something passed so close to Iolanthe’s head that it lifted her hair. A fence plank, its triangular tip deadly at high speed.

  One plank hurtled at them from behind, one from right, one from left, while a tree, clumps of dirt still falling off its roots, shot up in the air and came at them from the front.

  With a scream Iolanthe called down another bolt of lightning, splitting the tree in two just in time for them to fly straight through, almost blinding herself in the process.

  “Are the bees ready?” Titus demanded.

  “Almost.”

  The ground itself swelled and almost knocked them from the flying carpet. A huge ball of fire appeared all around them. Iolanthe barely had time to punch a hole through the conflagration for them to fly through. Her own jacket caught on fire, but she put out the flames before they could hurt her person.

  It was now or never.

  She looked back. Yes, she had managed to raise the swarm of bees to the height of the Bane’s carpet. With the most powerful current she could generate, she sent them toward the Bane.

  He laughed and fire rippled across the air surrounding him. Bees fell like raindrops. But among the entire swarm there was a smaller number that Iolanthe had protected. They punched through the fire and landed on his person.

  The Bane stopped laughing. He gazed with something akin to incomprehension at his hand, upon which were not one, not two, but three bees. His hand swelled before Iolanthe’s eyes.

  He clutched at his throat. The carpet lost altitude, snagging in the branches of a tree before falling to the ground.

  The mind that controlled Wintervale’s body might be unimaginably powerful, but Wintervale’s body had one great frailty: it was allergic to bee venom.

  Titus landed the carpet and dug through the emergency bag. He had prepared antidotes for Wintervale, in case there were bee stings in the future. He pulled out a small case, which contained a few needles.

  “No!” shouted someone. “Do not help him!”

  Lady Wintervale.

  She scrambled off a carpet of her own and set herself between Titus and Wintervale.

  “We can’t watch him die!” cried Iolanthe.

  “Do you believe for an instant the Bane would leave him before then? No, as long as there is a chance that he can get you to believe that he is Wintervale again, he will remain and it will be to the ruin of all.”

  On the ground Wintervale jerked and writhed. Iolanthe shook. She pressed her face into Titus’s back. But she still heard him, gargling, like the mute trying to speak.

  At last, silence.

  “No, do not assume he is dead,” cautioned Lady Wintervale. “Do you have any instruments?”

  The prince found the Kno-it-all gauge. With a levitating spell he laid it on Wintervale’s person. The tip of the gauge showed green.

  They all three threw up shields at the same time, Titus for Iolanthe, Iolanthe for Titus, and Lady Wintervale for t
hem both. Even so Titus stumbled backward, clutching his chest.

  “I am all right,” he said, already pointing his wand to set up another shield.

  The Bane twitched again. His hand fell atop the gauge. The green slowly faded into a dark gray. The dark gray turned red.

  Wintervale was dead.

  Lady Wintervale had her son’s hand in hers. Her lips trembled. “He had such a beautiful soul, my Lee. He worried that he would not be as great a man as his father, but he was always a far better man.”

  She looked about the orchard. “When we were small, Ariadne sometimes brought me in here to play. I never thought this is where my son would meet his end.”

  Titus knelt down and kissed Wintervale on his forehead. “Goodbye, cousin. You saved us all.”

  He had tears in his eyes. Tears were already spilling down Iolanthe’s cheeks. Wintervale, by being so open, trusting, and artless his entire life, had made his more cynical friends hang on to their secrets. And in doing so, preserve themselves from the Bane.

  His body disappeared. The Crucible keeps no dead.

  “Do you want to come with us, ma’am?” Iolanthe asked Lady Wintervale.

  Lady Wintervale shook her head. “No, I’m here only for my son. I will give a proper memorial and offer his ashes to the Angels. Long may his soul soar.”

  “Upon the wings of the Angels,” Iolanthe and Titus said together.

  “It almost kills me to say this,” said Lady Wintervale, her own tears finally falling. “But . . . they lived happily ever after.”

  And she, too, exited from the Crucible.

  Titus was the one to point that Iolanthe’s clothes were in tatters. She changed into a pair of tunics from the emergency bag and they took to the air again. Their pursuers, on wyverns and pegasi, were close at hand—the Atlanteans must have raided the stables in a few stories.

  “We will not make it to Forbidden Island in time,” said Titus grimly.

  Which left only Briga’s Chasm.

  They came down at the edge of Briga’s Chasm, with the Atlanteans barely two hundred feet behind. The thick fog that filled the entire chasm writhed and flowed, obscuring everything beneath.

  “Can we put on fog glasses and ride through that?” she asked.