“Eleveris,” Titus shouted, swimming toward Wintervale, not daring to vault again for fear of finding himself farther away.
Wintervale screamed at being suddenly airborne. He thrashed, turning over and over a few feet above the waves, as if he were rotating on a spit.
The waves battered Titus. But at least Wintervale, held above water, could not drown. Titus’s muscles protested as he fought toward Wintervale. Fifty feet. Twenty-five feet. Ten feet.
“Titus!” Wintervale shouted. “Thank goodness. Fortune is no longer spitting in my face.”
Titus closed the last few feet of distance between them, grabbed Wintervale’s arm, and vaulted them both to the beach beneath Sutherland’s uncle’s house.
Wintervale promptly vomited.
Titus waited until he was done, kicked sand and pebbles over the mess, and led him ten feet away. Wintervale crumpled to the ground. Titus crouched beside him, cleaned him with a few spells, and checked his pulse and pupils.
“What were you trying to do?” Wintervale rasped. “You know I can’t vault more than half a mile.”
“Unless you could swim five miles to land, vaulting was our only choice.”
Wintervale was already shivering.
“Wait here.” Titus vaulted to his room, grabbed a towel and a change of clothes, and vaulted back down. “You need to change out of those clothes.”
Wintervale’s fingers shook as he tried to undo the buttons of his jacket.
“Exue,” said Titus.
Wintervale’s jacket flew off. As Titus repeated the spell, Wintervale’s waistcoat and shirt also made themselves scarce.
“S-smashing spell, that,” stuttered Wintervale, his teeth chattering.
“The ladies agree with you,” said Titus.
He turned around before doing away with Wintervale’s trousers. Then he vaulted back to Baycrest House to change out of his own dripping clothes, scanning the sea for signs of other Atlantean forces as he did so. A familiar knock came at his door as he was buttoning his new shirt.
Fairfax.
“Come in,” he said, shrugging into another waistcoat.
Her face was pale as she closed the door behind her. “What’s going on? Where’s Wintervale?”
He thrust his arms into a jacket. “On the beach, changing his clothes. I will find out what is going on.”
She came nearer. “Are you all right?”
He thought it a strange question until she took his hand: he was shaking without being aware of it.
“Must have been the cold—the water was freezing,” he said, extracting a vial from the emergency remedy pack in his luggage.
But as he spoke, he was thinking not of the frigidness of the sea, but of those moments just before the nautical distress signal came: rising from his bed, glancing at the clock, noting the time—fourteen minutes after two—then stepping out onto the balcony.
There was a terrifying familiarity to the chain of actions. And that, as much as his sodden clothes, had made him tremble.
He pulled her in and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Keep the boys on the side of the house away from the beach. Keep an eye on the sea. And do nothing that would reveal yourself to anyone—do not even think about using your powers to dry those clothes of mine, for instance. If Wintervale is not safe, then neither are we.”
Wintervale had put on dry clothes but he was still shivering. Titus gave him the warming remedy he had brought.
“I need to get you somewhere you can rest. Think carefully: Did the Atlanteans know where you were headed?”
“No,” said Wintervale, his voice hoarse. “They didn’t even know who I am.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
Titus was far from assured, but he did not have many choices. “In that case, I will take you up to Sutherland’s uncle’s house.”
Wintervale blanched. “Please don’t vault me again.”
Wintervale was in no shape to be vaulted again just now. In fact, he could scarcely stand. Titus glanced at the steep cliff and the rickety ladders, and sighed. “We can do without vaulting.”
Wintervale was about the same height as Titus, but at least a stone heavier. As Titus started his ascent, Wintervale on his back, he felt like Atlas, carrying the weight of the whole world. “Why was Atlantis chasing you? We thought you were home with your mother.”
“They weren’t chasing me. And we weren’t at home. My mother and I were in France. In Grenoble.”
Titus clambered over a protrusion of rocks to reach the next ladder, straining not to tilt backward. “Grenoble?”
As far as he knew, the town did not host an Exile community of any appreciable size.
“Do you know who Madame Pierredure is?” asked Wintervale.
The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)
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