“The prophecies about you—I never doubted their accuracy.” He pulled out a stool for her. “Have a seat.”
She sat down and, betraying more emotion than he had seen from her so far, squeezed her head between her palms. “When I woke up this morning, I mattered to no one except myself. Would that nothing had changed.”
“Fortune cares little for the will of mortals.”
“So I have learned.” Her face still lowered, she said, “Please don’t let me keep you from returning to school.”
Dalbert was required to note the time of Titus’s departure from the Domain. The Inquisitor and her agents knew what time Titus should arrive at school—and he was already running late.
But he could not simply leave the girl in the laboratory, a place that had no food or water, no lavatory, and nowhere for her to lie down and rest except atop the workbench.
She pushed her hair back from her face. She had used the Pears soap the hotel provided, with its subtle fragrance of an English meadow. The laboratory was small; he stood quite close to her. For a moment he was completely distracted by her scent—and the ripple of her still-damp hair.
He had seen her before. Where had he seen her before?
She looked up, her eyes dark as ink. “You don’t need to go anymore?”
“I cannot leave you here.”
The laboratory had two other exits. One led to Cape Wrath in the Scottish Highlands, where he sometimes visited in warmer weather, the other to an abandoned barn in Kent. Either way, by taking her out of the laboratory, he would be bowing to the inevitable.
He pulled open a drawer and took out a vial of green powder.
“It seems we will be following the original plan after all, Miss Seabourne,” he said. “I hope you enjoy the company of boys.”
The barn was more or less the same as when Titus had seen it last. Fallen beams, missing doors, patches of gray sky visible through the dilapidated roof. Rain puddled on the floor. The smell of rotting wood and ancient muck assailed his nose.
A stiff breeze stirred. Her hair blew about her face. She looked tousled, as if she had just rolled out of bed, the warmth of the quilt still clinging to her. “Where are we?”
He closed the laboratory door behind him. The door promptly disappeared—it let the occupants of the laboratory out, but could not be used to gain entrance. “Southeast England.”
“You don’t have an exit that takes you directly to school?”
“In case the laboratory is breached, I do not want it easily traced to me. Can you vault more than once in a day?”9
“Yes, but I haven’t much of a range. I’ve never tried to vault more than a few miles.”
He took her hand and tapped out a small mound of the green powder into her palm. “Take this vaulting aid. We have to go fifty miles, but you do not need as big a range when you hitch a vault.”
She swallowed the vaulting aid. “You have a fifty-mile range?”
He had a three-hundred-mile range, practically unheard of. She put her hand on his arm, and the next moment they were in Fairfax’s room.
Either his vaulting aid was superlatively effective, or her natural range measured far greater than a few miles: she neither bent over in pain nor stumbled about, disoriented. As if they had merely climbed up a flight of stairs and walked through the door, she let go of his arm and looked about.
Thirty-five pupils, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, lived in this house. The junior boys had the smaller rooms on the upper floors. The senior boys enjoyed bigger, better accommodation right above the ground floor.
Fairfax’s room, like those of other senior boys, measured eight feet by ten feet. A writing desk and a chair had been placed near the fireplace. A set of shelves beside the window held books on top and various sporting equipment on the bottom. A chest of drawers and a spare chair by the door rounded out the collection of furniture.
An oval-framed picture of Queen Victoria, looking puffy and disapproving, hung on the blue-papered wall. Six postcards of ocean liners had been arranged in a semicircle under the queen’s image. Scattered about the rest of the room were photographs and etchings of Africa: wavelike dunes, grazing gnus, a leopard at a watering hole, and a round, thatched hut beside a listing shepherd’s tree.
He drew a soundproof circle. “Welcome to Eton College. We are in Mrs. Dawlish’s house. And this is your room.”
“Who’s Mrs. Dawlish? And why do I have a room here?”
“Boys at Eton live in resident houses—this particular house is run by Mrs. Dawlish. You have a room here because you are a pupil here. Your name is Archer Fairfax, and you have been home these past three months with a broken femur. Your family has a home in Shropshire, but you have spent most of your life in Bechuanaland—an area near the Kalahari Realm.”
“Where is the real Archer Fairfax?” She sounded alarmed.
“There was never a real Archer Fairfax. Since I had to be here, I made a place for you—when I thought you were a boy.”
She frowned. “And people here know me, even though I have never set foot here?”