The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

“I have never come across the vision she mentioned.”


Iolanthe had always regarded Princess Ariadne’s visions with something approaching awe. Their accuracy and almost eerie relevance had opened her mind to the possibility that she might be meant for something greater than a professorship, and might have a responsibility to look out for not just herself and Master Haywood, but the world at large.

So it was with a sense of disorientation that she saw for the first time how much Princess Ariadne’s visions depended on Titus’s action in order to become fulfilled. Years ago, she had read something that dealt with this paradox of a prophecy coming to pass because—and only because—those who had seen the prophecy worked tirelessly to make it happen.

What was the term for it?

“Created reality,” she said.

“What?”

“You follow her prophecies to the letter, for them to come true.”

He looked uncomfortably defensive. “One can never change what has already been preordained.”

Growing up, she had heard that a hundred times. Everyone had. “Not standing in a prophecy’s way is not the same as giving up your entire life to make every last detail of reality match what she had set down decades ago.”

“I do not know of any other way to make this work.”

He looked so defeated, the back of her throat stung.

The rest of the entry did not help her cause, as it kept referring to the One. “There is no reason that Wintervale must replace me. We can work together, all three of us.”

“But my mother always specified one partner and only one partner.”

“Did she forbid you from having more than one?”

“We cannot approach her visions with that kind of glibness. A seer of her caliber comes once every five hundred years and we would have accomplished nothing if it were not for her guidance.”

He could be so cynical, her prince, and yet his faith in his mother was heartbreakingly pure.

“But that means you will be headed to Atlantis with Wintervale.” The thought made her blood run cold. “Then you will be as good as dead.”

“I am as good as dead—it is all written in the stars. I had thought . . . I had thought I would have you.” His eyes dimmed. “But I cannot argue with the force of destiny.”

She gripped his arm. “Do I not also have the force of destiny on my side? It was your mother who wrote the very words that led me to summon my first thunderbolt. You might be dead today if I hadn’t killed the Bane in the Crucible. Not to mention that I was born on the night of the meteor storm—you can’t mean to tell me that Wintervale’s birth date had been falsified too.”

“But my mother was never one of those who predicted the birth of a great elemental mage on that night.”

“Fine, so birth dates don’t matter. But remember, Helgira in the Crucible looks exactly like me. That has to mean something, right?”

“Of course it does. But you read what my mother wrote—”

“You are hinging everything on the merest, merest of details. Your mother mentioned no names. You saw me bring down a bolt of lightning at fourteen minutes past two o’clock, on a balcony. Isn’t that enough? Is our partnership not something worth preserving?”

“If only the choice was mine, you know I would choose you a thousand times every day. But this is not my choice. None of it is my choice. I can only walk the path that has been laid out.”

She let go of him, understanding dawning: the diary was not just his mother’s words. To him, it was his mother, the voice of destiny itself. And he would never disobey Princess Ariadne, in this world or the next. “So this is my dismissal?”

“No!” He cupped her face. “I can never dismiss you from my life. I—”

Don’t say it, she shouted in her head. Don’t say it.

“I love you,” he said.

All at once, the wretchedness inside her turned into anger. She shoved the diary back at him. “You don’t love me. You loved a convenience—you loved that I happened to fit into your plans.”

His eyes were full of hurt bewilderment. “How can you say that?”

“How can I say that? How can you say what you just said? Who was it that swore up and down that I had a destiny, that I always had destiny even if I didn’t know it? Has it even been a fortnight since you told me that you were so glad it was me, that you could not do this with anyone else? But now you could. Now you say ‘thank you, but no thank you,’ as if I were a kitchen maid to be replaced at will!”

“Iolanthe—”

He rarely called her by her real name. The vast majority of the time, even when they were alone, he addressed her as Fairfax, so as to never get out of the habit.

“No,” she said reflexively. “Unless you are about to tell me that you are wrong, there is nothing you can say that I want to hear.”

He clutched the diary to his chest, his face ashen. “I am sorry. Forgive me.”

After everything they had gone through together, everything they had been to each other, was that all he had to say?

She turned and walked away.