“You like household management?”
“I like the authoritative answers the magazines give. Dear Mrs. So-and-So, all you need to have hair that shines like the moon is to mix olive oil and spermaceti in a proportion of eight to one and apply liberally. Dear Miss So-and-So, no, you will not wish to serve soup at your wedding breakfast. One or two hot dishes if you must, the rest should be cold.”
Solvable problems, that was what he liked. The pleasure of ordinary concerns. The resolute lack of real danger.
Someday, she thought. Someday.
Iolanthe felt like a seed after a good long spring shower, soaked to bursting—yet somehow unable to break through her shell. Her capacity for elemental magic might be grand, but her ability stubbornly refused to improve.
At least the latest news offered some consolation. After a brief interval during which she’d seemed on the verge of consciousness, the Inquisitor had slipped deeper into her coma.
Iolanthe settled into a familiar cadence of classes and sports, a rhythm she had dearly missed in Little Grind. Sometimes it was almost possible to believe she was living only a slightly skewed version of normal life.
With the lengthening of the days, lockup happened much later in the evening, and boys were allowed outside as long as one last shimmer of the sun still remained above the horizon. For hours every day, she pitted herself against the boys on the pitch—where she could apparently do no wrong.
This athletic prowess earned her a ridiculous level of approval. She had always been careful to fit in wherever she went. But it was more than a little ironic that she had never been as popular as a girl as she was now as a boy, as someone who bore little resemblance to the real her.
This particular evening, after practice, many of the boys stayed behind to watch a match between the two best school clubs. Iolanthe packed up her gear and started toward Mrs. Dawlish’s. She enjoyed the camaraderie of her teammates, but she was always the first one off the pitch at the end of a practice: as much as she refused to believe the prophecy of the prince’s death, somehow it felt more ominous when she was away from him.
Kashkari fell into step beside her. They walked together, discussing a Greek assignment that was due in the morning. She remained somewhat wary of Kashkari, but no longer felt nervous in his company—he was most likely not a spy of Atlantis, only a shrewd and observant boy.
“What about dative or locative?” asked Kashkari.
“You can use the accusative, since they are going to Athens—makes it Athens-ward,” Iolanthe answered.
She’d discovered that her grasp of Greek, inferior in her own eyes, was considered quite proficient by the other boys.
“Accusative, of course.” Kashkari shook his head a little. “I wonder now how we got by when you weren’t here.”
“I have no doubt the devastation was widespread, the suffering universal.”
“Indeed, it was the Dark Ages in the annals of Mrs. Dawlish’s house. Ignorance was thick on the ground, and unenlightenment befogged all the windows.”
Iolanthe smiled. Kashkari grinned back at her. “If ever I can do something for you in return, let me know.”
You can pay a little less attention to me. “I’m sure I’ll be banging on your door as soon as I take up Sanskrit.”
Eton didn’t have such a course, but mages in upper academies were usually required to master a non-European classical language. Iolanthe, in her before-lightning days, had aspired to Sanskrit for its wealth of scholarship.
“Ah, Sanskrit. I dare say my Sanskrit is as good as your Latin—my family put me to it when I was five,” said Kashkari, rolling up his sleeve to check his elbow, which he had scraped on the ground in a fall during practice.
On his right arm, just beneath his elbow, he sported a tattoo in the shape of the letter M—for Mohandas, his given name, she supposed.
“What about Latin? Your Latin is good. Did you have a tutor for it before you came to England?”
He nodded. “Since I was ten.”
“Was that when you knew you’d be sent abroad for schooling?”
“On my tenth birthday, in fact. I remember that day because my relatives kept telling me about the night I was born, all the shooting stars.”
“What?”
“I was born in the middle of a meteor storm.”
“The one in November of”—she still had trouble with the way the English counted years—“1866?”
“Yes, that one. And then they’d tell me about the even greater meteor storm in ’33.”
“There was one in 1833?”
“The most magnificent meteor storm ever, according to—”
“Look, it’s Turban Boy and Bumboy.”
Iolanthe looked across the street to see Trumper and Hogg, snickering to each other.
“Somebody ought to give them a thrashing,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low.
“Do you thrash for your prince every night?” said Hogg, moving his hips obscenely.