The carpet spun wildly along its long axis, the world a stomach-churning kaleidoscope of earth and sky. She screamed. He swore and reached for a corner of the carpet. With a sudden yank the carpet stabilized—upside down.
But it hadn’t stopped—it was still cruising at top speed upside down. Her view of the sky was obstructed, but when she tilted her head back, the ground below zoomed by, making her feel dizzy.
“On the count of three,” shouted Titus, “kick your feet up and throw all your weight toward your head. One, two, three.”
Their combined motion flipped the carpet over. They were no longer upside down, but the carpet had screeched to a stop, since they now faced the opposite direction.
And coming at them, in Wintervale’s body, was the Bane, riding a carpet of his own.
Unfortunately, the Bane already knew how to get into the Crucible when it was in the middle of being used as a portal, and there was no one at school with the ability to stop him.
Titus and Iolanthe’s carpet juddered to restart itself. They leaned their weight to one side. The carpet banked, turning.
A gust roared toward them and the carpet was blown end over end several times—they would have fallen off if it weren’t for the safety harnesses holding them in place.
“Do not let the Bane play with us,” shouted Titus.
She called for a bolt of lightning, aimed at the Bane. But the lightning only struck a shield, and the Bane passed under unharmed. She kept calling for more thunderbolts, which flashed and sizzled as if they were in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Skillfully, easily, the Bane wove between the currents of electricity, dodging Iolanthe’s attacks.
And he was too fast. They would not reach Forbidden Island before he caught up with them.
She threw down several huge fireballs, setting the landscape beneath aflame.
“What are you doing?” Titus shouted.
“Making him have to come through smoke, at least. If only Wintervale suffered from asthma.”
No sooner had she finished speaking than the carpet swerved north.
“Where are we going?” she asked, startled.
“Asthma,” Titus said tightly. “Or perhaps something even better.”
The season inside the Crucible almost always reflected that outside: there were no flowers on the trees of the orchard, which had also been picked clean of their fruits. In the distance rose a house shaped like a wicker beehive, small at the bottom, bulging out at the middle, and then tapering again toward the top.
Titus had brought Iolanthe here in the very early days of their acquaintance, before she could control air. In that house he had tried to force her, and she had almost drowned in honey.
Or rather, the sensations had been those of a near-drowning, but she had never been in real danger: the vast majority of the time they used the Crucible as a proving ground, and injuries—or even death—inside the Crucible had no bearing on the actual world outside.
But now they were using the Crucible as a portal, and all the rules changed: injuries caused actual harm and death was irreversible.
They flew low, between rows of neatly pruned apple trees. Iolanthe, a long branch in hand, overturned every skep they came across, releasing swarms of buzzing, agitated bees. Behind the carpet the bees billowed, kept together—and away from Titus and Iolanthe—by currents of air that trapped them like fish in a net.
The Bane was closing in. Iolanthe divided the bees into two groups and, forcing them close to the ground, dispatched them to the periphery of the orchard.
She sent another bolt of lightning the Bane’s way. And, to further distract him, she ripped off smaller branches with high winds, set them on fire, and hurled them at him.
All the while she pushed the bees farther out of view.
The Bane waved away the flaming branches as if they were so many toothpicks. And he retaliated by uprooting entire trees in their path, forcing Titus to fly the carpet above the tree line, giving the Bane a clear line of sight.
“Just a little farther,” Iolanthe implored under her breath.
Titus yelled and banked them sharply to the left. Something passed so close to Iolanthe’s head that it lifted her hair. A fence plank, its triangular tip deadly at high speed.
One plank hurtled at them from behind, one from the right, one from the left, while a tree, clumps of dirt still falling off its roots, shot up in the air and came at them from the front.
With a scream Iolanthe called down another bolt of lightning, splitting the tree in two just in time for them to fly straight through, almost blinding herself in the process.
“Are the bees ready?” Titus demanded.
“Almost.”
The ground itself swelled and almost knocked them from the flying carpet. A huge ball of fire appeared all around them. Iolanthe barely had time to punch a hole through the conflagration for them to fly through. Her own jacket caught on fire, but she put out the flames before they could hurt her.
It was now or never.
The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)
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