The Burning Sky

by Shelly Thomas

  He countermanded the far-seeing spell. The phantom behemoth faded again to a dot in the sky. It was still miles behind him.

  The beast roared once more. The biggest winged creatures did not always fly the fastest. But judging by the roar, the phantom behemoth was closing in so swiftly, Titus might as well be running on foot.

  He turned around again and tried to see if the phantom behemoth carried a rider. A smaller creature was tethered to it, a giant peregrine—which looked like a flea next to the phantom behemoth. The peregrine most certainly carried a rider. In the eerie glow of the behemoth, the rider’s eyes were entirely colorless.

  The Inquisitor!

  And the rider who sat on the enormous head of the behemoth, with his handsome and oddly familiar-looking face, was none other than the Bane.

  Iolanthe didn’t know how she managed to bring down the wyvern on Black Bastion’s landing platform without killing them both.

  But her feet were on solid stone, and the wyvern was being skillfully led away by a pair of grooms, without erupting into a rage that would roast mages in a hundred-foot radius.

  She expected to be challenged immediately, but everyone on the landing platform who wasn’t busy with the wyvern sank to one knee, with murmurs of “M’lady.”

  Who knew help was so desperately needed at Black Bastion?

  She descended into the bailey. More people paid obeisance to her. And even more dropped to their knees as she marched through the great hall. Who did they think she was? Helgira herself?

  She kept pushing farther into the fort. Each time she was faced with a choice of directions, she chose the one that looked more sumptuous.

  Opposition came in the form of a nondescript maid. As Iolanthe stepped into Helgira’s richly decorated apartment, the maid cried, “That is not our lady!”

  “No?” Iolanthe raised a brow. She snapped her finger, and a bolt of lightning flashed outside the window.

  The maid appeared horribly confused.

  Iolanthe snapped her finger again and another, even more impressive lightning bolt sizzled across the width of the sky.

  “Forgive me, my lady.” The maid sank to her knees, shaking.

  Iolanthe ignored her. Inside the bedchamber, she passed through the prayer alcove to the Black Bastion in the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible.

  This Black Bastion was much calmer, its inhabitants preparing for bed rather than war. Iolanthe thought its mistress away from home until she saw a woman standing before a window, her long black hair fluttering in the strong breeze.

  Helgira.

  A woman who lived in warlike times should be more alert to her surroundings. Iolanthe could be an assassin, waiting in the shadows. Helgira, however, remained oblivious to Iolanthe’s presence, her breaths emerging in a series of trembling sighs and gasps. “An Angel . . . I have been blessed. I have been blessed.”

  She was probably in a bout of religious mania. But out of curiosity, Iolanthe used a far-seeing spell to look out the window.

  The soles of her feet prickled. A phantom behemoth. No wonder Helgira was dazed. In every chapel and cathedral Iolanthe had ever visited, they had been painted on the ceiling, the steeds of the Angels.

  But wait. There was a wyvern, a few miles closer to her, and it carried a rider. She redoubled the far-seeing spell. The rider’s features were still too faint, but she recognized the gray, hooded tunic that Princess Ariadne had specified in her vision.

  Titus.

  It took Titus a moment to remember that he had directed the mind-ruining spell at the Inquisitor while the latter had been under the time-freeze spell. Mages under time-freeze spells were safe from the vast majority of assaults. Little wonder then the Inquisitor was well enough to accompany her master on his pursuit of Titus.

  He urged his wyvern to fly even faster, wishing he had brought a pair of goggles. His eyes burned from the relentless wind, his ears ached.

  The next second the ache turned into agony, as if someone had threaded a needle between his ears. He screamed. Then he felt it, a sensation like a finger poking inside his head, rubbing against the ridges and folds of his brain.

  Was this what the Bane and the Inquisitor had been talking about, a more subtle way to use the Inquisitor’s talents? It was obscene.

  That she was able to do it from several miles behind him frightened him. Her health hadn’t been the only thing improved by her trip to Atlantis. Her powers, too.

  He could guess what she wanted. For the moment, not secrets buried deep, only his identity, since they could not see his face. But once she had it, what would prevent her from going deeper right then and squeezing everything out of him?

  It was now or never.

  He double-tapped his wand, unsheathing it—he had not lied about the fact that it was indeed a blade wand. Then, wrapping his sleeve around the wand so the light from the crowns could not be seen, he turned around, his other hand holding the hood shut below his eyes.

  The spells left his lips like a paean to the Angels, syllables cascading with a deadly beauty. Such spells were of no use at all in close range, like trying to fell someone with a feather. But as he straightened his arm and aimed, the puff that left his wand would gather strength and momentum, until it became an unstoppable force, all the more lethal for its invisibility.

  He wrapped his arms around the wyvern’s neck. In the nick of time—a fresh turbulence tossed the beast upside down. It shrieked. Titus hung on, but only barely, his fingers slipping from the smooth scales. The wyvern fell for an eternity before it righted itself, the two of them both shaking with fright.

  A tornado materialized directly in his path.

  This was not natural weather. An incredibly powerful elemental mage was at work.

  The Bane.

  Why had Titus not known that the Bane was an elemental mage himself?

  He yanked the wyvern to the left just as a second tornado appeared, also to the left. He swore. Urging the wyvern to the right, he narrowly fitted them between the two tornadoes, ducking as a chunk of debris hurtled by mere inches from his head.

  Fairfax might someday be the greatest elemental mage in the world, but today that title belonged to the Bane, who delighted in toying with him.

  The finger poking inside his head abruptly disappeared. He peered over his shoulder and deployed a new far-seeing spell, just in time to see the Inquisitor topple from her giant peregrine.

  The Bane’s mouth rounded with a scream. The Inquisitor’s body stopped falling and rose instead, all the way into the Bane’s arms. And then it disappeared.

  What if you die while you are using the Crucible as a portal? Would your body not rot inside, since you can’t get out? he’d once asked Hesperia in the teaching cantos. The Crucible keeps no dead, Hesperia had replied. It will expel the body.

  His mother’s vision had proved true again. In the library at the Citadel, Atlantean soldiers would surround their superior’s corpse while Alectus and Lady Callista spoke words of shock concerning her death.

  He had done it. He had killed the Inquisitor after all. He straightened, relief and nausea rising within him, entwined. He didn’t know whether to cry or to vomit.

  A hissing, crackling rumble behind him, however, made him forget both. He wrenched the wyvern higher and barely avoided a trail of fire as broad as a highway.

  The phantom behemoth was still half a mile behind him. No real dragon spewed its fire so far, so fast. But that was the advantage of mythological creatures: they were a law unto themselves.

  Fire fell like a meteor storm. The grassland below burned. Rising smoke racked him with coughs and made his eyes water. It was only by his sense of hearing that he dodged the next tornado; and only by the hair standing on the back of his neck that he somehow evaded a quieter tongue of flame that had stolen upon him.

  In front and to either side, walls of tornadoes towered, howling with violence. Behind him bellowed a mountain of fire, so much of it, as if a portion of the sun had been torn loose
.

  Was this it—fire, smoke, and dragons? Would he fall to his end, as his mother had foreseen?

  He had done what he needed to do. He had lived long enough.

  Be safe, Fairfax. Live forever.

  The fire the phantom behemoth breathed! The mass was staggering. The beauty. The splendor. As a lover of fire, Iolanthe had never see finer. That was, until she realized the fire was directed at Titus, her Titus. His wyvern weaved between the raging torrents, clinging to safety by a hairbreadth.

  Helgira sank to her knees. “The will of the Angels is a joy to behold,” she murmured.

  You mud-eating primitive! That is no Angel; that is Atlantis.

  Iolanthe said nothing; she only lifted her wand to render Helgira unconscious.

  I will not let you die. Not while I have a breath left.

  Huge tornadoes reared like a cliff, obscuring her view of him. The phantom behemoth emitted a roar that made windowpanes rattle, then spewed forth fire enough to melt Purple Mountain.

  She strode onto the terrace outside Helgira’s bedchamber and raised her hands. All the power that had been building inside her raced toward her fingertips.

  The fire would irreparably damage the wyvern’s wings, leading to certain death. The tornadoes? Almost certain death, but people had been known to survive tornadoes.

  Titus urged the wyvern forward. Perhaps they’d find a gap.

  Or perhaps not: the tornadoes formed an unbroken barrier.

  And then the barrier was no longer so unbroken. One tornado weakened, then dissipated altogether, leaving a cloud of falling debris.

  He wheeled the wyvern toward the gap.

  No, they were not going to make it before the gap closed.

  A tailwind—so freakishly strong it almost sheared him off the wyvern’s back—threw them through the gap.

  Another elemental mage was at work.

  Helgira.

  He reapplied the far-seeing spell. There she was, in her long white dress, standing on the terrace atop her fort, her black hair whipping in the wind. In the light from the fort’s torches, she resembled Fairfax exactly.

  He urged the wyvern toward her.

  The air whistled. Boulders the size of houses flew at him. They must already be in the foothills of the Purple Mountain, not too far to go.

  But the boulders were relentless, a storm coming from all sides. He steered the wyvern blindly, relying more on intuition than sight.

  I’m so close. Help me!

  Something struck the wyvern on the head, a smaller rock, but enough to send it plunging, and he with it.

  I won’t let you fall.

  She did not. She held the wyvern aloft and propelled it with a tailwind the Angels would be pleased to have breathed.

  As for the phantom behemoth and the would-be murderer who sat upon it—enough was enough.

  She raised her hand toward the overcast sky. The clouds crackled with electric charge. Blue flashes leaped from cloud to cloud. From the farthest horizon, lines of energy rushed toward Purple Mountain, meeting at the zenith of the sky, seething, roiling.

  Waiting for her.

  She pointed her finger at the phantom behemoth.

  Down the lightning came, beyond beautiful, beyond powerful.

  All the boulders in the air fell. The phantom behemoth fell, striking ground with a force that jolted her entire person.

  After another minute, the hardy little wyvern regained consciousness and, finding itself still airborne, began to flap its wings again.

  Titus landed on Helgira’s terrace, kissed the wyvern on its scaly neck, and dismounted. Helgira, panting, regarded him with both tenderness and fury. All at once he knew she was not Helgira, but Fairfax. She had come, his most stalwart friend, and she had saved him.

  He closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I thought this was the night the prophecy came true.”

  “No, not tonight.” One of her hands was in his hair, the other tracing his jaw. “Not ever, if I can help it. But not tonight, at least.”

  He could not begin to describe the sensation of being alive, being safe, and being here, with her.

  His lips hovered barely an inch above hers. Their breaths mingled.

  “Love will make you weak and indecisive, remember?” she murmured.

  What a fool he had been. For a journey like theirs, love was the only thing that would make him strong enough.

  “Don’t ever listen to an idiot like me,” he answered.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t count if it happens in the Crucible.”

  With that, she pulled him to her and kissed him. Tears stung the back of his eyes. He had survived. They had survived. He held tightly on to her, on to life itself.

  Titus would have liked to remain forever—or at least another minute—in this state of euphoric closeness. But with a sigh, Fairfax let go of him. “I’ve got boys running all over Eton to cover our tracks. I need to get them back to bed.”

  Titus made sure he left behind Helgira’s cuff. And just to be careful, after they returned to the Black Bastion in his copy of the Crucible, he sealed the portal: he still preferred to err on the side of caution, even in the midst of risking his life.

  In this fort, where he had caused such a ruckus, there was consternation at his reappearance, followed by flabbergasted looks as Fairfax climbed onto a wyvern behind him. But that was the advantage of being mistaken for the lightning-wielding mistress of Black Bastion: she didn’t need to explain herself to anyone.

  Even better, as the wyvern took to the air, she wrapped her arms about him and laid her head on his shoulder.

  Was this what happiness felt like?

  She recounted how she had managed to pass before the Inquisitor unscathed, and that Kashkari had been “the scorpion.” He told her what he had seen and heard in the Citadel, including Horatio Haywood’s mysterious disappearance.

  “Thank you,” she said, banding her arms tighter around him.

  “What for?”

  “For being willing to rescue my guardian.”

  “Now we no longer know where he is.”

  “We’ll find out,” she said, her voice scratchy with fatigue. She ruffled his hair. “And you—you are all right with having killed the Inquisitor?”

  “I would rather someone else had taken her life. But I will not miss her.”

  They dismounted on the meadow before Sleeping Beauty’s castle. She shed the wig and the gown she had borrowed and turned once again into a lithe, cocky boy.

  He drew her to him and rested his cheek against her hair. “Is it true that if it happens in the Crucible, it doesn’t count?”

  She held him tight. “My rescue, my rules.”

  He kissed the shell of her ear. “Then let me tell you this: I live for you, and you alone.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER 25

  Kashkari had followed Fairfax’s directions beautifully. He had tied, blindfolded, and gagged Trumper and Hogg with strips of their own clothes. Then, once they had regained consciousness, he had thrown a barrage of German at them, as Fairfax had asked, in order to make them think that he was Titus, generally known to be a native speaker of German.

  When Fairfax and Titus arrived on the scene, he shook their hands and then left with Fairfax to join the other boys. Titus did the same after rendering Trumper and Hogg unconscious again and dropping them on the front steps of their house, stripped to their drawers.

  All the boys stood together and admired his handiwork. Now that their night’s task—and fun—was done, they started back for their own beds, yawning. At Mrs. Dawlish’s, the front door was open, the downstairs lights on, and Mrs. Dawlish and Mrs. Hancock both waiting. Mrs. Dawlish wearily waved them up. “Go to bed now. We’ll deal with the lot of you tomorrow.”

&n
bsp; “Except you, Your Highness,” said Mrs. Hancock. “Would you mind coming with me to my office?”

  Fairfax stepped in front of him. “We all went. The prince shouldn’t be singled out.”

  Titus briefly rested his hand on her shoulder. “Go. I will be fine.”

  In Mrs. Hancock’s office, it was Baslan’s spectral projection again, pacing into shelves and walls.

  “You may leave us,” Baslan said to Mrs. Hancock.

  “I would like to remind you, sir, that I am a special envoy of the Department of Overseas Administration, not your subordinate,” Mrs. Hancock said, smiling.

  Baslan gave Mrs. Hancock a cold stare.

  Titus plunked himself down on Mrs. Hancock’s best chair. He enjoyed squabbles between agents of Atlantis. “What do you want this time, Baslan?”

  “You will address me as Inquisitor, Your Highness.”

  Inquisitor. So Titus’s nemesis was truly dead. He gave his stomach a moment to settle. “Inquisitor, Baslan? Is everybody at the Inquisitory called the Inquisitor these days?”

  Baslan flinched at Titus’s suggestion. “Madam Inquisitor can no longer carry out her duties. She has departed this earth.”

  Titus found that he did not need to pretend to be shocked. He was shocked, still. “It cannot be true. I last saw her only hours ago. Right here at Eton. She showed no signs of imminent death.”

  “To our lasting regret, it is quite true.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “That is strictly private. I need Your Highness to give an account of your whereabouts tonight.”

  “And that is not strictly private?”

  “No,” said Baslan without any sense of irony.

  Titus crossed his arms before his chest. “After your lot finally let me go in the evening, I retreated to my room to enjoy a little peace and quiet. I was there until lights-out. Not long after lights-out, two boys threw a rock into my window. I chased them down, gave them what-for, and dragged them to the front door of their house.”