The Burning Sky

by Shelly Thomas

  He tried to sit up.

  She placed her palm firmly against his chest. “Stay down.”

  “How do I drink tea on my back?”

  “Have you forgotten who I am?” A globule of tea the color and translucency of smoky quartz floated toward him. “This is how you will drink tea lying down.”

  Her expression was somewhere between anger and grief, but closer to which he could not tell. “I can sit up for a cup of tea,” he said.

  “Don’t. I was there. I knew what the Inquisitor did to you. I saw you bleed from the ears.”

  He sucked in a breath. “You remembered?”

  “Yes.”

  Before he attempted his first transmogrification, he had read all the extant literature on the subject. Transmogrification was fairly old magic, so even though it had always been frowned upon and at times outlawed, there was no lack of records and studies.

  In fifteen hundred years, there had been only two accounts of mages claiming memory from time spent in animal form. Most scholars considered those mages to have been either exaggerating or lying outright.

  But Fairfax was clearly not lying—there was no other way she could have known what happened to him in the Inquisition Chamber except to rely on her own memory.

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure. I wonder if it has anything to do with the blood oath—that I had to maintain a continuity of consciousness so that I am never in danger of betraying my word.”

  He almost did not hear a thing she said as he recalled what he had said. If you loved me, everything would be so much easier.

  She was still speaking, berating him for his stupidity in refusing to let the court physician treat him even though he had bled from his ears.

  “I was not bleeding from the ears.”

  “Don’t lie. I saw you.”

  “I cannot lie to you while under the blood oath, remember? The blood came from the veins on my wrists—I had extractors hidden inside my cuff braces. The court physician would have realized. That was why I could not see him. I cannot allow word to get back to the Inquisitor that I am not as badly hurt as I appeared to be.”

  The way she gaped at him, he could not tell whether she wanted to punch him or to hug him. Probably the former. He missed those brief hours when she would have hugged him. He never liked himself as much as when she had liked—even admired—him.

  “How did you know you’d need extractors?” she asked, still suspicious.

  “Before their minds broke, Inquisition subjects often bled from various orifices. I had hoped that when I bled, the Inquisitor would think she had gone far enough.”

  She clamped her teeth over her upper lip. “Did she stop?”

  “No.” He shook his head—and grimaced at the sharp pain brought on by the motion. “What happened in there? Did Captain Lowridge take it upon himself to break down the doors?”

  Interruptions during Inquisition were never allowed. If Captain Lowridge had indeed cut in, for the man’s own safety Titus would need to dismiss him immediately, so he could hide from the Inquisitor’s wrath.

  “No,” said Fairfax. “Her minions rushed in first when they heard her scream. Captain Lowridge followed very closely on their heels, though.”

  He frowned. “What made her scream then?”

  Iolanthe recounted her tactic, barely paying attention to her own story, still reeling from the revelation that the prince had planned the bleeding-from-the-ears part.

  She ought to be more concerned that he was trying to make her fall in love with him, but all she could think about was the boy whose cat was killed on his lap, and who grew up terrified of the day he would be subject to the power of that same mind mage.

  She recalled the precision of his spells, the result of endless, feverish practice. What of this nonspell, this pretense of bleeding? How many times had he rehearsed with extractors in his sleeves, falling down on the cold granite floors of the monastery, hoping that should an Inquisition come to pass, he would have a prayer of saving his mind?

  “I moved the chandelier. The light elixir spheres fell out. My eyes were closed, but I believe one of the spheres struck the Inquisitor’s person directly—I heard a thud before the crashes came. And then it was all to Captain Lowridge’s credit for getting you out of the Inquistory.”

  She didn’t expect him to be grateful, but she did expect him to be pleased. After all, he’d been deeply concerned about her inability to command air. Now she’d not only saved him, but proved herself that rarest of creatures, an elemental mage who controlled all four elements.

  But his expression, after an initial shock, turned grim. He pushed the sheet aside and struggled to get up. “Why did you not tell me sooner?”

  She gripped his arm to steady him. “I thought you were drawing your last breath.”

  He swayed, but his scowl was fierce. “Understand this: you will never again care whether I live or die, not when your own safety is in danger. My purpose is to guide and protect you for as long as I can, but in the end, only one of us matters, and it is not me.”

  He was so close, his heat seemed to soak into her. There was a small patch of dried blood he had not yet managed to wash off, an irregular-shaped smear at the base of his neck. And where he’d loosened his sleeves, she could see a puncture mark on the inside of each wrist, where the extractors had pierced his skin.

  A bright pain burned in her heart. She might yet save herself from falling in love with him, but she would never again be able to truly despise him.

  “We must get you out of the Domain this instant,” he said, “before the Inquisitor realizes that someone else was in the Inquisition chamber—someone with elemental powers.”

  He was already walking—tottering. She braced an arm around his middle.

  “I need to go back to my apartment at the castle. The transmogrification potion is in my satchel. Get me to the bathtub upstairs. Then come down here and remove all evidence that might lead anyone to suspect your presence. The Inquisitor dared to come after my sanity; she could just as well invade my sanctuary.”

  She nodded tightly and walked faster, pulling him along.

  At the bathtub, he bent down to turn on the faucets. “Go. And come back fast.”

  She ran and did as he asked. Sprinting back upstairs, she reached the bathtub as he materialized again, this time soaking wet, holding not a flask, but what looked to be a bottle of hair tonic.

  “Where’s the potion?”

  He climbed out of the tub and pointed his wand at the hair tonic. “In priorem muta.”

  The bottle turned into a compartmented flask. She grabbed it. Drinking the potion in big gulps, she pointed her free hand at him and dissipated all the water from his sodden undertunic—the night was cool and he’d begun to shiver. Then she whisked away all the water he’d dripped onto the floor while downing the second solution.

  “Clear thinking under pressure, as always,” he murmured.

  Assuming bird form was not only unpleasant, but disorienting, everything around her rapidly inflating to mountainous sizes.

  He took her in hand. “Time to go.”

  “You wish to be on a train headed not into Slough, but into London, sire?” asked Dalbert, sounding doubtful.

  “Precisely.” Titus checked his person, his clothes, and his belongings, applying one spell after another to reveal the presence of tracers and other foreign objects. He was clean.

  “But sire, in your condition—”

  “All the more reason to leave without delay. You saw what the Inquisitor did to me. The House of Elberon means nothing to her. The farther I am from her, the safer I will be.”

  Dalbert still did not look convinced, but he acquiesced and lifted Titus’s satchel.

  A loud knock rattled the door of Titus’s bedchamber. “Your Highness, Lady Callista to see you,” announced Giltbrace from outside

  Exactly what Titus had feared. He grabbed Fairfax’s cage and gestured to Dalbert to keep quiet and follow him.
>
  “Your Highness,” came Lady Callista’s voice. “The regent and I have been most distressed to hear of the seizure you unexpectedly suffered while touring the Inquisitory.”

  “Hurry,” Titus whispered to Dalbert. “They will try to confiscate my transport.”

  They slipped into a secret passage accessed from Titus’s dressing room and ran, Titus willing his stomach not to rebel again until later. The secret passage ended somewhere below the garret. He took the revolving steps three at a time, growing dizzier with each turn. Beneath came the pounding din of pursuit.

  The garret, at last. They threw themselves into the rail coach, Titus bolting the door while Dalbert lurched for the controls. No sooner had Dalbert’s hand fitted around the lever than a phalanx of guards burst through the door.

  “Go!” Titus commanded.

  Dalbert pulled. The rail coach shuddered and forcefully inserted itself into the pulsating bloodstream that was the English rail works.

  The sound of steel wheels grinding on metal rails had never sounded so sweet.

  Fairfax was safe. For now.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER 17

  THE TRAIN HAPPENED TO TAKE them to Charing Cross rail station. Titus decided that one of the big, new hotels near Trafalgar Square frequently patronized by American tourists would serve his purpose very well.

  He briefly bewitched a middle-aged lady and her maid. As the two followed dazed and obedient in his wake, he presented himself to the hotel clerk as Mr. John Mason of Atlanta, Georgia, traveling with his mother. Once he had his key in hand, he walked the lady and her maid out a different door, released them from the bewitchment, and bade them a cordial good night.

  In his rooms, he applied layer upon layer of anti-intrusion spells, feeling no compunction in using the deadlier ones known to magekind. Deeming it secure enough for Fairfax to resume human form, he left her in the bedroom with a tunic from his satchel and a pair of his English trousers.

  She padded out of the bedroom just as the dumbwaiter dinged.

  “Your supper,” he mumbled from where he lay slumped on the settee, his arm over his eyes.

  She found the door of the dumbwaiter. The aroma of chicken broth and beef pie wafted into the parlor. She set down the tray of food on the low table next to him. “Are you all right?”

  He grunted.

  “You don’t want to eat anything?”

  “No.” He did not want to tax his stomach for the next twelve hours.

  “So what now? Are we going on the run?”

  He removed his arm from his face and opened his eyes. She was sitting on the carpet before the low table, wearing his gray, hooded tunic, but not his trousers. Her legs were bare below mid-thigh.

  The sight jolted him out of his lethargy. “Where are your trousers?”

  “They had no braces and won’t stay up. Besides, it’s warm enough in here.”

  He was feeling quite hot. It was not unusual to see girls in short robes come summertime in Delamer. But in England skirts always skimmed the ground and men went mad for a glimpse of feminine ankles. So much skin—boys at school would faint from overexcitement.

  He might have been a bit unsteady too, if he were not already lying down.

  “You never answered my question,” she said, as if the view of long, shapely legs should not scramble his thoughts at all. “Are we going on the run?”

  “No, we go back to school tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Had they managed to take you before we left the Domain, you would have been doomed. But now that danger is past, we must do everything in our power to preserve your current identity. As long as it remains intact, Atlantis can suspect me as much as it wants, but cannot prove anything.”

  “But you said you hadn’t managed to convince the Inquisitor of anything. She will come after you again.”

  “She will, but not immediately. That interruption of yours was a blow to her. She will need some time to recover. Besides, I cannot disappear just like that. It is the law of the land that the throne cannot be left unoccupied. Alectus would be named the ruling prince.”

  And that would be the end of the House of Elberon.

  She ladled herself a bowl of soup and dug into the beef pie. “So we have no choice but to carry on at school?”

  “For as long as we can.”

  “And when we can’t anymore?”

  “Then we will be put to the test.”

  This earned him a look that was almost pure stoicism—except for a flash of sorrow. She had such beautiful eyes, this girl, and . . .

  His thoughts slowed as he realized her eyes might be the last thing he saw before he died.

  “You wouldn’t have been involved in this at all if it weren’t for your mother,” she said, yanking him back to the present. “What if the Inquisitor is right?”

  What if the Inquisitor had been? Much of his mother’s brief life was a mystery to him, as were many of her visions. “Bear in mind the Inquisitor wanted to destabilize my mind as much as possible.”

  “Did your grandfather kill your mother?”

  His face burned. “Yes.”

  Her gaze was steady. “Why?”

  “To preserve the House of Elberon—he refused to go down as the last prince of the dynasty.”

  When given the choice by Atlantis between abolishing the crown altogether or offering his daughter, an active participant in the January Uprising, as a sacrifice, Prince Gaius had chosen the latter. It was not the most shameful secret of the House of Elberon’s long history, but it came close enough.

  “Did your mother really foresee her own death when she was a child?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did she tell you anything before she died?”

  “Only that if I ever wanted to see my father, I had to bring down the Bane.”

  He would never have brought his father into the discussion, but the blood oath obliged him to tell the truth.

  She chewed contemplatively. “If you don’t mind my asking, who is your father?”

  His cheeks scalded hotter, if possible. “I do not know that either.”

  “Your mother never mentioned him?”

  “She mentioned him a great deal.” His love of books, his beautiful singing voice, his smiles that could raise the sun at midnight. “But nothing that can be used to identify him.”

  How excited he had been at the possibility his mother’s question implied. Do you want to see your father? He had thought it a question like Do you want a slice of cake?—with the cake to be produced within the minute.

  Fairfax swirled a spoon in her soup bowl. “What did you say when you heard that you had to bring down the Bane?”

  He had not been able to say much for the fear and disappointment that jostled within him. And the anger—that his own mother would trick him so.

  “I said I was not going to fight the Bane because I did not want to die.”

  His mother had broken down and sobbed, tears streaming down her face to splatter upon her lovely sky-blue shawl. He had never seen her cry before.

  “But you agreed eventually,” said Fairfax quietly, her eyes almost tender.

  He could still see his mother’s tearstained face. Still hear her muffled voice as she answered his bewildered question.

  Why are you crying, Mama?

  Because I hate myself for what I ask of you, sweetheart. Because I will never forgive myself, in this life or the next.

  Something in him had broken apart at those words.

  “I was six,” he said. “I would have done anything for her.”

  There existed something in this world that bound a mage tighter than a blood oath: love. Love was the ultimate chain, the ultimate whip, and the ultimate slave driver.

  He reached into the satchel, which he had placed on the floor next to the chaise, and pu
lled out a thick book.

  “I’ve seen that book. You brought it all the way from school?” asked Fairfax.

  “In priorem muta,” he said. The book undisguised itself and became a plain, leather-bound journal. “My mother’s diary. She recorded all her visions in here.”

  “It’s empty,” Fairfax said, after he had turned some thirty, forty pages.

  “It will only show what I must see.”

  The diary had been left to him when his mother died, with the inscription My dearest son, I will be here when you truly need me. Mama.

  He had opened it daily and come across absolutely nothing. Only after he had learned the truth of her death—that it had been murder, not suicide—had the first entry appeared. The one about him, on the balcony, witnessing the phenomenon that would and did change everything.

  He kept turning the pages, but they remained stubbornly blank. Something cold and terrible gnawed at his guts.

  I need you now. Do not abandon me. Do not.

  A few pages from the very end of the diary, writing at last appeared in her familiar, slanted hand. His hand tightened on the binding so his fingers would not shake from relief.

  “You might as well read along with me,” he said to Fairfax. “Many of her visions have to do with our task.”

  Fairfax left the low table and crouched down next to him.

  4 April, YD 1021

  While Titus and I played in the upper gardens this morning, I had a vision of a coronation—one could not mistake those particular banners of the Angelic Host, flown only at coronations and state funerals. And judging by the colorful attire of the spectators thronging the street, I was witnessing no funeral.

  But whose coronation is this? I caught three minutes of a long parade, that was all.

  I came back to Titus tugging at my sleeve. He had found a ladybug he wanted me to admire. The poor child. I do not know why he loves me. Whenever he wants my attention, I always seem to be caught in another vision.

  “The date—it’s just after the end of the January Uprising, isn’t it?” asked Fairfax.

  Titus nodded. Baroness Sorren had been executed the day before.

  They read on.

  10 April, YD 1021