He went to Fairfax’s room to vault to his laboratory—and could not. His shock was almost as great as what she must have felt when he tossed her into Ice Lake. Going into the empty house officers’ lounge, he tried again—and again found himself in the same spot. He ran downstairs into the street—and still could not vault.
This was Atlantis’s doing. It went without saying that if he managed to find the boundary of this no-vaulting zone, he would find it heavily guarded. And his flying carpet had been packed away as part of Fairfax’s survival kit, now beyond his reach.
He took a deep breath and told himself he had no need to lose hope. There was always the wardrobe in Wintervale’s room.
But when he opened the door of the wardrobe, he saw a note pasted on the inside. Dear Lee, I am blocking this portal for now, until I find a more secure means for you to access the house. Love, Mother.
His last option, ripped from him. He stumbled back into his room, numb with panic.
Distantly, there came the sound of fireworks exploding and enthusiastic cheering. Like a sleepwalker, he drifted to his window, only to see Trumper and Hogg on the grass, each with a brick in hand, getting ready to throw them at his and Fairfax’s window.
His anger boiling over, he slashed his wand in the air. They promptly fell over. He clenched his hand, willing himself not to do anything else. In his current state of mind, he might maim them permanently.
He turned around. “Bastards. They need their heads shoved up their—”
He froze. It was exactly what he had said in his mother’s vision. He hurried to his copy of Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde. In his hands it turned back to Princess Ariadne’s diary. Almost immediately he located the rest of the entry.
It is evening, or perhaps night, quite dark outside. Titus turns back from the window, clearly incensed. “Bastards,” he swears. “They need their heads shoved up their—”
He freezes. Then rushes to take a book down from his shelf, a book by the name of Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde.
Everything blurred.
When I could make out clear images again, I was no longer looking at the same small room, but at the library of the Citadel. Is it the same evening? I cannot be sure. Titus appears again, this time in a gray hooded tunic, moving stealthily through the stacks. (Someday he will be the Master of the Domain. Why this furtiveness in his own palace?)
Again everything dissolves—to coalesce once more into the interior of the Citadel’s library. Many more mages are present, most of them soldiers in Atlantean uniform—how far the fortunes of the House of Elberon will have fallen—surrounding what looks to be a body on the floor. Alectus and Callista are there too.
“I can’t believe it,” Callista murmurs.
Alectus looks as if he’d lost his own sister. “The Inquisitor, dead. It is not possible. It is not possible.”
Did this mean if Titus took himself to the Citadel tonight, it would somehow result in the Inquisitor’s death? The prospect was dizzying.
What had the Oracle said? You must visit someone you’ve no wish to visit and go somewhere you’ve no wish to go.
To go to the Citadel, he would have to pass through Black Bastion, Helgira’s fortress.
My visions are usually not so disjointed. At this point I am not sure whether this is one vision or three separate ones. I will record them as one for now and hope for clarification later.
He turned the page. There was no more text. He turned another page and froze. At the bottom right corner of this page, there was a small skull mark.
He had left the mark, on the page that bore the vision of his death.
Were these two visions but part of the same larger vision? By going to the Citadel this night, was he going to his end?
Think no more on the exact hour of your death, prince. That moment must come to all mortals. When you will have done what you need to do, you will have lived long enough.
He changed into the gray tunic the vision had specified, set his hand on the Crucible, and began the password.
CHAPTER 23
IOLANTHE WAS DRAGGED OUT OF Mrs. Dawlish’s by boys who had come back to the house for supper. They could not understand why she wanted to stay in her room, and she, preoccupied, had failed to complain early on of headaches or fatigue.
She made sure she always stood or walked where it was darkest, kept a wary eye for the presence of Atlanteans, and an even warier one for the possibility of Master Haywood and Mrs. Oakbluff being led about like a pair of bloodhounds.
But no one arrested her. She made it back to Mrs. Dawlish’s house and headed directly for the prince’s room.
He was not there. She spent a petrified moment thinking he’d been taken after all, until she noticed his uniform jacket on the back of a chair—and the still-warm kettle next to the grate.
So he’d come back, taken off his jacket, boiled water for tea, and then—she felt the kettle again—between a quarter to a half hour ago, gone somewhere else.