The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

“Of course.”


Iolanthe saw Wintervale to the waiting carriage below, then walked to practice by herself. As she approached the playing fields, someone called her name.

She turned around. It was a boy of about nineteen, also in his kit, tall, long-limbed, and straight of bearing. His dark blond hair was cropped short and he sported a rather impressive mustache. His features, slightly too irregular to be labeled classically handsome, were nevertheless quite attractive to look at.

It took her a moment to recognize him—the last time she’d seen him, he’d had longer hair and no mustache. “West! Just the person I was looking for. Wintervale had to leave for a family emergency and he wanted you to know.”

West, like Wintervale, had been a member of the school cricket team last Summer Half. Wintervale’s selection had thrilled everyone at Mrs. Dawlish’s house. But West was that much higher than Wintervale on the ladder, since he was widely expected to be captain of the eleven come next summer.

Iolanthe had briefly met him when her house team had played his house team. Her team had lost, but it had been an excellent match, the outcome uncertain until near the end.

West offered her his hand to shake. “I hope nothing is terribly wrong in the Wintervale household.”

“I should think not, but his mother likes to have him on hand whenever she is feeling unwell.”

They walked a minute or so in silence before West asked, “You are a friend of Titus of Saxe-Limburg, aren’t you?”

Until the past Fourth of June, she would have said that most of the boys in Mrs. Dawlish’s house probably couldn’t remember the name of Titus’s made-up Prussian principality of origin. But since then, she had fielded quite a few questions from boys who had seen the grand family entourage that had descended on the school and were consequently made curious about the prince. “Yes, I live next door to His Highness.”

“He seems an interesting character,” said West.

Iolanthe did not need to answer, as they had arrived and the cricket master wanted a word with West.

But yes, an endlessly interesting character, her prince.



Baycrest House, Sutherland’s uncle’s property in Norfolk, sat upon a high promontory jutting into the North Sea, with many gables, a cloistered garden at its back, and a small crescent of sheltered beach to the side, accessed by a hundred feet of rickety ladders that had been bolted to the cliffs.

The boys were quite ecstatic. Cooper, in particular, hollered as he ran up and down, as if he had never seen the sea—or a house, for that matter—in his entire life.

The other boys and Iolanthe were just about to have a bite to eat when Cooper called down from an upstairs balcony, “Gentlemen, our friend from the subcontinent has arrived!”

Iolanthe and the prince exchanged a look. She liked Kashkari. She was, in addition, quite grateful to him for the help he had given Titus and herself. Still, she was more than a little nervous at the prospect of meeting Kashkari again: Kashkari listened, and his intelligent eyes missed nothing.

But this Half she was better prepared. During her summer of steamer journeys, she had made her way through a number of books from the ships’ libraries, especially those dealing with the political geography of the British Empire. Since she came ashore in England, she had read The Times every day. When she had time, she took a look at The Daily Telegraph, The Illustrated London News, and The Manchester Guardian—sometimes it felt as if she studied for Kashkari’s return more diligently than she’d ever reviewed for any examination in her life.

Kashkari looked the same, doe-eyed, striking, and stylish. But after a quarter hour or so, Iolanthe actually began to relax. The boy who walked into Baycrest House did not seem to possess the same razor-sharp powers of observation Iolanthe had been half dreading.

When he asked after her holidays and her family, and she told him about the Fairfaxes coming into some money and selling the farm, he only nodded and said it was a good time to get out of Bechuanaland, before the hostility between the English and the Boer tilted into open war.

And then he moved on to Wintervale’s absence. “Does anyone know about the emergency chez Wintervale? Mrs. Hancock told me he went home near the beginning of the week and hasn’t come back yet.”

“That’s right,” said Cooper. “He went in such a huge hurry he left half a Chelsea bun behind—and you know Wintervale, he never leaves food unfinished.”

“Did anyone see him go?”

“I was there,” said Iolanthe.

This time, Kashkari’s attention was more focused on her. “How did he seem?”

“Vexed, but hardly in a state of devastation.”