The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

He sat up and examined his ruined clothes—jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. According to the labels sewn into the seams, they had been made by a tailor of Savile Row, London.

He found the pocketknife he had used earlier, engraved with a coat of arms that had a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn in the quadrants. The waistcoat yielded a watch, made of a cool, silver-gray metal, engraved with the same coat of arms. The jacket’s inside pocket contained a wallet—and again the same coat of arms.

Inside the wallet was a negligible amount of nonmage currency, British, by the looks of the coins. But more important, there were several cards, all with the same coat of arms yet once more, and on the other side, the words H. S. H. Prince Titus of Saxe-Limburg.

Was he this Prince Titus? What kind of place was Saxe-Limburg? There was no mage realm by that name. And as far as he knew, not a nonmage one either.

She handed him a tunic from her satchel. He destroyed the ruined clothes, stowed the pendant inside the wallet, and shoved the wallet and the watch into his trouser pockets. A hot, unpleasant sensation tore across his back as he lifted his arms overhead to pull on the tunic, but it was ignorable.

She tossed a waterskin his way. He drank nearly half of the contents of the waterskin, gave it back to her, and pointed at the broken strap of her satchel. “I can repair that for you.”

“Go ahead, if it will make your conscience feel better.”

He rejoined the two halves of the strap. “Why do you assume I have a conscience?”

“Indeed. When will I stop being such a bumpkin?”

She enlarged the space in which they found themselves and stood up. “Linea orientalis.”

A faint line appeared underfoot, running due east.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, a better question than Where are we? He did not want to betray the fact that he had no idea of their location.

“The Nile.”

So they were in the Sahara. “How far are we from the Nile?”

“What do you think?”

A cool challenge was in her eyes. He realized that he enjoyed looking at her—the arrangement of her features was aesthetically pleasing. But more than that, he liked the assured way she carried herself, now that she no longer bothered to be nice to him. “I do not know enough to tell.”

At his admission, she cast him a speculative look. “We are seven hundred miles west of the Nile.”

“And how far south of the Mediterranean?”

“About the same.”

That would put them approximately a hundred, a hundred twenty miles southwest of the nearest Bedouin realm, one allied with Atlantis, no less. The armored chariot must have taken off from an Atlantean installation in that realm, which would explain how they managed to arrive on the scene so fast.

But why? Why would Atlantis come racing? Was it for the same reason that he would rather endure any amount of pain than be caught?

He rose to his feet—and would have wobbled if he had not braced himself with a hand against the sand wall, which felt almost damp against his skin.

“Can you walk?” she asked, her tone bordering on severe.

“I can walk.”

He expected her to say something cutting, along the lines of how she would gladly leave him behind if he could not keep up. But she only handed him a nutrition cube. “Let me know when you need to rest.”

An odd sensation overcame him: after a moment or two he recognized it as embarrassment. Mortification, almost. There was still a chance, of course, that everything about her was a pretense. But it seemed more and more likely that she was simply a very decent, even compassionate, person.

He took a bite of the nutrition cube, which tasted like lightly flavored air. “I guess this is also poisoned, like your remedies.”

The corner of her lips lifted slightly. “Of course.”

She excavated along the line she had made, maintaining a moving space just large enough for them to walk abreast. The air he breathed was cool and slightly moist. The sand that crunched beneath his feet had a barely perceptible sheen of wetness. Overhead and to either side of them, sand flowed backward, making him feel a little dizzy. Making him feel as if he were in a submarine vessel, navigating in the dark depths of a strange ocean.

A quick test told him that they were ninety-three feet below the surface. A mobile dome—even an adamantine dome—could not hold up under the weight of so much sand. Only the girl’s elemental powers kept them from being buried alive.

Her face was almost blank with concentration, her eyes downcast and half closed. Her hair was blue-black in the mage light and the cut of it made him notice her bone structure and her full lips.

She glanced at him—he had been staring. He turned his attention to his wand instead, which he recognized as a replica of Validus, Titus the Great’s wand. Upon entering adulthood mages typically chose to commission original designs for their wands; before that, they were often given wands that were copies of those once wielded by legendary archmages.