The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

A vein throbbed at her temple. When she had scanned the sea after the maelstrom had come and gone, she too, had seen wreckage, but not bodies.

If the ship that had tumbled into Wintervale’s maelstrom had been decommissioned and empty, then there must have been collusion between some of the parties involved. It would mean somebody deliberately sent an old, useless vessel after Wintervale, so as not to waste personnel or ships in active service, because they knew at some point it was going to be destroyed.

Who could have known that the ship would be destroyed? Wintervale, according to both the prince and Kashkari, had been the feeblest of elemental mages, barely able to get a fire going in the grate. Who could have predicted, ahead of time, that he would singlehandedly put an Atlantean ship to ruin?

She bit her lips and reached for the emergency bag.



Nobody had returned from Sunday service yet—it was not that unusual for the sermon to run long. Titus stood inside Fairfax’s room and looked around.

He had decorated the room years before she arrived, with a picture of the queen on the wall, postcards of ocean liners, and images that represented Bechuanaland, her supposed home. She had replaced the photograph of Queen Victoria with that of a society beauty and put up new curtains, but otherwise left the room more or less as it was.

His gaze fell on the photograph of her that did not look like her at all. She had passed around the photograph the day Sutherland issued his invitation for them all to go to his uncle’s house, which seemed an impossibly long time ago.

She materialized next to him, the emergency bag strapped across her shoulders. Alarm pulsed through him.

“Why do you have the bag? What is the matter?”

“What do you think of my eyesight?” she asked, her tone tense.

That was not the question he had expected. “Perfectly good. Now tell me why you are already carrying the emergency bag.”

She ignored his demand. “What do you think of my grasp of Greek?”

He could shout at the top of his lungs for her to answer his question first, but this was Fairfax, who never did anything without a good reason. He held himself back. “Not bad.”

“Do you think it is likely that I have completely misread the name of the ship Wintervale sank?”

“But you just told me last night that you probably did misread it.”

“I mistook it for a similar word—or so I thought. Is it possible that the actual name is nothing like what I thought it to be either time?”

“Anything is possible.” He recalled the skimmer, whirling around on the outer rim of the maelstrom before being pulled under. “But if you were already paying attention, there is no reason you should have been that much mistaken.”

She gripped his arm, hard. “If I am correct about the ship’s name, then it must be either Sea Wolf or Ferocious. Dalbert had confirmed to you—and to me again today—that there is no Atlantean naval vessel called Sea Wolf. But there was one called Ferocious, and it had been decommissioned three years ago.

“I saw no bodies when I surveyed the sea that day. Wreckage but no bodies. Do you think it is possible that the ship had been empty? That”—she swallowed—“it was all for show?”

He stared at her, beginning to feel as if he too had been caught in an enormous trap, with an undertow too strong to escape. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure what I mean, and I’m not sure I want to know.” Her hand came up to her throat. “Fortune shield me, that’s almost exactly what Lady Wintervale said.”

“What? When?”

“When I visited Lady Wintervale just now, she told me that she and Wintervale had become separated on their way to Grenoble for more than seventy-two hours.”

With the discussion of the Bane still fresh in his memory, a loud gong went off inside Titus’s head: seventy-two hours was the threshold for the most powerful contact-requisite spells. “You have to be in direct physical contact with someone for that long in order to . . . to . . .”

A seventy-two-hour disappearance.

And when he returned, the boy who could barely light a candle with his elemental powers had become mighty enough to create a spectacular whirlpool.

Fortune shield him. “The remedy I gave Wintervale, the one that made him go into a seizure—do you know what ‘intangible tenure’ means?”

A choked sound issued from her throat. “I have heard of it before—Master Haywood had a colleague at the Conservatory who researched the occult. Isn’t saying someone is under an intangible tenure just a wordier way of saying that person is possessed?”

Possessed.

“Fortune shield us all.” Her voice was hoarse. “Did you give Wintervale an exorcism aid?”

Had he? “What happens if you give someone an exorcism aid by accident?”

“Nothing. That was how they used to tell whether someone is really possessed or just pretending. You slip an exorcism aid in their food and if they show no reaction, it’s just an act. But if they start seizing—”