Other boys on either side of the street were stopping to see what was going on.
“Ignore them,” Kashkari said calmly.
“Go home to your idol-worshipping, sister-marrying family,” said Trumper. “We don’t want your kind here.”
That was it. Iolanthe gripped her cricket bat and crossed the street.
“What a big stick you carry,” sneered Hogg. “Is that what the prince likes to use on you?”
She smiled. “No, just what I like to use on your friend.”
She swung the bat. Not very hard, since she didn’t want to kill Trumper, but still it connected with his nose in a very satisfying way.
Blood trickled out of Trumper’s nostrils. He howled. “My nose! He broke my nose!”
“You too?” she asked Hogg. “How about it?”
Hogg took a step back. “I—I have to help him. But you are going to regret this for the rest of your life.”
Several boys from nearby houses had stuck their heads out of their windows. “What’s going on?” they asked. “What’s that caterwauling?”
“Nothing,” said Iolanthe. “Some idiot walked into a lamppost.”
Trumper and Hogg took off amidst a volley of laughter—no one, it seemed, liked them.
When Iolanthe returned to Kashkari’s side, he looked at her with something between alarm and admiration. “Very unhesitating of you.”
“Thank you. I hope they’ll think twice now before insulting my friends in my hearing. Now what were you telling me about the meteor shower in 1833?”
Titus winced as he pulled himself out of the scull in which he had spent the past three hours rowing up and down the Thames. Fairfax was on the pier, waiting for him.
“Is something wrong?” he asked as they walked out of earshot of the other rowers. She usually did not come to the pier.
She tapped her cricket bat against the side of her calf in an agitated cadence. “Thirty-three years before I was born, there was another meteor storm, wasn’t there, an even more spectacular one? Were there no prophecies then concerning a great elemental mage?”
“There were. Seers fell over themselves predicting the birth of the greatest elemental mage of all time.”
“And?”
“And he was born in a small realm in the Arabian Sea. When he was thirteen, he caused an underwater volcano long thought extinct to erupt.”
Fire was a flamboyant power—as was lightning. But the ability to move mountains and raise new land from the sea was power on a different magnitude altogether.
She emitted a low whistle, suitably impressed. “What happened to him?”
“The realm was already under the dominion of Atlantis. The boy’s father and aunt had both died while taking part in a local resistance effort. When agents of Atlantis arrived to take the boy away, his family decided that they would never allow it. They killed him instead.”
This time her response was a long silence.
“What were the consequences to the boy’s family?” she asked, her voice tight.
“To the family specifically, I am not sure. But the Bane’s displeasure was great, and the entire realm suffered a battery of retaliatory measures. My mother believed that the Bane’s failure to obtain the boy caused a loss of vigor on his part, which in turn led to a slackening of Atlantis’s grip on its realms.
“Mages did not quite notice at first—not for decades—but when they did, they began to test the leashes. There were minor infractions, which became rebellions, which became full-scale uprisings.”
“The January Uprising.”
“Baron Wintervale timed it to take advantage of the general chaos. The Juras was already a bloodbath, with heavy casualties on both sides. Atlantis was also having trouble with both the Inter-Dakotas and the realms of the subcontinent. And there were rumors of discontent in Atlantis itself. The leaders of the January Uprising thought they would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“But they themselves were crushed instead. Atlantis must have found a way to harness a new power.”
“Or an old one. My mother believed that the Bane had to deplete his own life force, something he had been careful to preserve throughout the long centuries of his life. Which would explain why he is so desperate to locate you.”
She turned the cricket bat around a few times, her motion growing more steady and deliberate. “I am not his to be had. And someday, he might just regret coming after me—after us—and not leaving well enough alone.”
It was not until Titus was in his room, changing, that he realized the significance of what she had said: she meant to wrap her hands around the reins of her destiny. Around the reins of their destiny.
An unfamiliar emotion surged in his chest, warm and weightless.
He was no longer completely alone in the world.