The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

The sandstorm shrank away, as if afraid of what she might do.

She panted, like a runner after a hard sprint. About her, the radius of clear, undisturbed air had increased tenfold, expanding a hundred feet in each direction.

Numbly she spun around, searching for what she dared not hope to find.

Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Then, the silhouette of a body in the sand.





CHAPTER 2


The Domain Seven Weeks Earlier



“HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE TITUS the Seventh,” announced the stone phoenixes that guarded the four corners of the grand terrace, their voices bell-like and resonant.

Titus stopped at the edge of the terrace, the celebrated garden of the Citadel before him. Elsewhere in the garden, there were informal, even intimate areas, but not here. Here acres of evergreen shrubs had been meticulously trimmed into hundreds of parterres, which when viewed from above formed a stylized phoenix, the symbol of the House of Elberon.

The evergreens, bred by the Citadel’s master botanists, bloomed late in summer. And every year the color of the flowers changed. This year the blossoms were a deep, vibrant orange, the color of sunrise. Dalbert, Titus’s valet and personal spymaster, reported that he had seen the phoenix emblems on Delamer’s public buildings painted a similar hue of fire, often accompanied by a hasty scrawled The phoenix is aflame!

The last time the phoenix was aflame, the January Uprising had soon followed.

In the space between the landscape phoenix’s two upraised wings, a large white canopy had been erected, brilliant in the light of the afternoon sun. Under the canopy, a diplomatic reception was in full swing. Attendants in the Citadel’s gray livery wove between guests in jewel-toned overrobes, offering hors d’oeuvres and glasses of chilled summer wine. A fine, ethereal music drifted on the breeze from the sea, and with it, the sounds of soft laughter and involved chitchat.

Titus inhaled. He was jittery. It was possible he was responding to the strain beneath the party’s apparent gaiety, but in truth it was, as always, all about Fairfax, his powerful and incandescent elemental mage.

He descended a flight of wide, shallow steps, and walked the length of a statue-lined avenue, a retinue of twelve in tow. As he approached the canopy, the entire gathering bowed and curtsied. He might be without any real powers, but he was still, ceremonially speaking, lord and master of the Domain.1

An exceptionally beautiful woman came forward, a smile on her face: Lady Callista, the palace’s official hostess, the most renowned beauty witch of her generation, and one of Titus’s least favorite persons on the face of the earth.

For he aimed to destroy the Bane, Lord High Commander of the Great Realm of New Atlantis and the greatest tyrant the world had ever known, and Lady Callista was very much a servant of the Bane. Not to mention, though he had no concrete evidence to support his suspicion, he had always believed deep down that Lady Callista had been the one responsible for the death of his mother.

“My lady,” he acknowledged her.

“Your Highness,” Lady Callista cooed, “we are delighted you could join us. Please, allow me to present the new ambassador from the Kalahari Realm.”

Titus was quite happy to see visible bags beneath her eyes. Life had not been easy for her since the evening of the Fourth of June, when Atlantis’s most prized prisoner had disappeared from the Citadel’s library. In the same library, on the same night, the Inquisitor, one of the Bane’s most loyal and capable lieutenants, had met a sudden and unexpected end.

Lady Callista had the bad luck to be the last person to walk into the library before Haywood’s disappearance. She had also been the one to order a pool of blood in the library cleaned up, when Atlantis would have very much liked to have a few drops of that blood, in order to find out who had been responsible for the death of the Inquisitor.

As a result, despite her years of service as an agent of Atlantis, she was watched as heavily as Titus, her movements confined to within the boundaries of the Citadel. Moreover, every week she had to meet with Atlantean investigators, each interview lasting hours, sometimes an entire day.

A distracted and distressed Lady Callista was one less threat to Titus.