The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

She shrugged. “Go ahead.” The cool challenge came back into her eyes. “Should I address you as Your Serene Highness?”


“You may announce a prince as such, but you address him as only ‘Your Highness,’ ” he said. “For example, ‘Your Highness, it has been a privilege to crawl through a cramped, airless tunnel with you.’”

She scoffed, but without rancor. The water sphere had grown large. She took the waterskin from him, refilled it, and put it back into her bag. He realized only when she glanced up and their eyes met that he had not looked away from her this entire time.

“Your Highness,” she said, her tone half-mocking, “may I have the honor of excavating another half mile of passage for you?”

“But certainly,” he answered, handing back her calling card. “When we are on the throne again, we shall remember and reward your loyalty and devotion.”

She shook her head at his pomposity, but he could see by the tilt of her lips that she was amused. And it startled him that in the midst of all the danger and uncertainty, he felt a leap of pure delight at having made her smile.



They found out the next minute that they could not levitate each other again.

“The levitation spells we used earlier were probably close to wearing off when we stopped—we would not have noticed since we were only three inches off the ground,” said the boy who might or might not be a prince. “If that were the case, a quarter-hour wait would be required. Which means we can try again in about”—he glanced at his watch—“seven minutes.”

He was still in pain—he held himself carefully to avoid unnecessary movement. People reacted differently to pain: some wanted sympathy and help; others preferred to suffer alone, to not have witnesses in their hour of affliction. He was probably the latter kind, the kind who became bad-tempered when faced with an insistent do-gooder.

Or . . . “Did you think I was the one who injured you?”

He seemed amused. “That is only occurring to you right now?”

“Why should it have occurred to me sooner? I didn’t do it.”

He raised a brow. “You are sure about that?”

The question stumped her—she had no way of knowing for certain, did she? If he had harmed her protector, then she could see herself exacting vengeance. But on the other hand, his was not a wound caused by elemental powers.

She pointed that out.

He moved his lips in an eloquent representation of a shrug. “Are you telling me you do not know how to make a potion?”

Did she? At the question, she began to recall all kinds of recipes—clarifying potion, bel canto draught, light elixir. She rubbed her temples. “Do you know why you are in the guise of a nonmage?”

“I could be an Exile. The clothes I was wearing came from a place in London, England, and I recognized it as a street known for tailor shops.”

“Savile Row?” The named rolled easily off her tongue, surprising her.

Surprising him as well. He shifted—and winced in pain. “How do you know?”

“When you said a street known for tailors in London, it just came to mind.” And yet she could not recall her own name.

“So we retain knowledge and skills we have acquired,” he said, “but we have no personal memories.”

This implied the use of precision memory spells. Blunt-force memory spells required only the will to do damage, but precision memory spells were contact requisite: the mage who had so neatly cut away her memories must have accumulated many hours of direct physical contact with her, in order to be able to wield such spells over her.

Most contact-requisite spells required thirty-six hours of contact; the more powerful ones needed seventy-two hours. Except infants being held by parents or siblings, or lovers who could not leave each other’s embrace, mages simply did not touch one another enough to be able to deploy contact-requisite spells. Of course there were ways around it, but in general the contact-requisite threshold ensured that a great many potentially dangerous spells were not used willy-nilly by anyone with a grudge.

In this case, however, that contact-requisite threshold raised thorny questions: it meant her memory had not been taken by an enemy, but quite possibly someone she knew very, very well.

That someone had made sure that she retained her fear of Atlantis. And whoever had applied the memory spells to the boy had done the same.

“Do you—do you think we knew each other?”

He looked at her a long moment. “What do you think are the odds that two completely unconnected strangers ended up in the middle of the Sahara Desert, within a stone’s throw of each other, both missing their memories?”

The idea was an uncomfortable one, that she might be linked to this boy in some significant manner.

“But it remains to be seen whether we were allies or enemies,” the boy added. He checked his watch. “Shall we get going?”