“The first time I met her face-to-face, I was eight.” He spoke quietly; she had to strain to hear. “My grandfather had died two months before, and my coronation was the next day.
“When you are born to the House of Elberon, you are trained to act serene and superior no matter what you feel. But the Inquisitor was—she has frightening eyes. I tried, and I could not make myself look at her. So as she spoke, I looked down at my cat.
“Minos was actually my mother’s cat, as gentle and sweet as she. After she died, he went everywhere with me and slept in my bed at night.
“That day he was on my lap. I scratched his head and he purred. At some point he stopped purring. But it was not until the end of the audience, when the Inquisitor rose to take her leave, that I noticed he was—he was dead.”
The catch in his voice shot her through with a violent emotion she could not name.
“I wanted to cry. But because she was watching, I tossed Minos aside and said, the way my grandfather would, ‘One would think a cat of the House of Elberon would have more breeding than to die before an esteemed guest. My apologies.’
“I have only kept birds ever since—birds and reptiles are immune to a mind mage’s powers.17 And I have been terrified of the Inquisitor ever since.”
He fell silent.
She turned around and stared at the tapestry, willing herself to feel no sympathy for him.
And not succeeding.
CHAPTER 14
TITUS DROVE HIMSELF, ACCOMPANIED BY a phalanx of mounted guards. A team of four Pacific golden phoenixes pulled his chariot—the head of the House of Elberon being the only mage in the Domain entitled to use phoenixes as beasts of burden.
There was a possibility, thought Titus, that the edict had been set down so that the ruling prince or princess would not be distracted from the task of governing by the need to invent ever more ostentatious ways to show up at a Delamer gala.
Lady Callista’s spring gala was the worst. One year some idiots decided to arrive in a chariot drawn by hundreds of butterflies, each the size of a handspan. The butterflies began dropping of exhaustion as the chariot approached the landing platform, causing a nasty crash.
The year before that a group of guests came on turuls—giant Magyar falcons. Another set of lords and ladies brought along a pair of imported Chinese water dragons. As it turned out, turuls and Chinese water dragons despised each other with a white-hot passion. A messy spectacle had ensued.
Titus’s cavalcade approached the expedited airway, built two hundred years ago during the reign of Apollonia III to facilitate travel between the castle and the capital. Fairfax had been perched on his shoulder, her claws digging lightly into his overrobe. But now he took her in hand and tucked her inside his tunic. “I would hold you,” he said, “but I need both of my hands.”
Phoenixes were fractious animals and cared not the least for expedited airways.
“Brace yourself. It will be a hard slam,” he warned her. Probably unnecessarily. As a native of Delamer, she would have daily used the city’s vast network of expedited ways, both on the ground and in the air. And if not daily, certainly more than he, with his upbringing in the mountains.
The thrust came suddenly. He could not breathe. His lungs grew emptier and emptier. Just when he thought he could stand it no more, the chariot was spat out the other end of the airway.
The phoenixes cawed harshly. He yanked them under control, reached for Fairfax, and set her on his shoulder again.
“You all right?”
She was busy gawking at the city that had once been her home.
Delamer was one of the greatest mage metropolises on earth, a glittering spread of pink-marble palaces and stately gardens, from the heights of the Serpentine Hills to the edge of the cool blue sea, aglow in the last rays of sunset.
Its beauty, however, was marred by patches of dense wood that resembled fungal growth from above. Quick pines, they were called: they were not pines at all, but certainly quick, achieving as much height and girth in two years as most trees did in five decades, bred by Atlantis’s botanists to camouflage the blights left behind by death rains.
A familiar column of red smoke rose into the sky, marking the location of the Inquisitory. The Fire of Atlantis had burned steadily since the end of the uprising.
The hour of his meeting with the Inquisitor drew ever nearer.
He turned his face away. They were headed directly into the sunset. The west coast as a whole was rocky and wave-pummeled, especially the stretch along Delamer. Naturally an ambitious, wealthy capital of a great dynasty, full of mages who had enjoyed the balmy pleasures of the Mediterranean realms, had decided to make improvements.