The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

“There you are,” cried Cooper, as Iolanthe stalked into the house. “Wintervale is unwell, Kashkari is nursemaiding, and Sutherland is paying a call at a neighbor’s house. I was getting bored of my own company. What say you to a game of billiards?”

Iolanthe did not want to take part in such a peaceful pastime. If only Cooper had suggested a few rounds of boxing—as an elemental mage brought up to channel her anger via violence, she was in desperate need to smash her fist into someone’s face.

“I don’t know how to play,” she told Cooper.

“I’ll teach you.”

He looked so hopeful she hadn’t the heart to turn him down. Titus could thrill Cooper by saying no, but that was because Cooper viewed Titus as a demigod, powerful and capricious, not to be reasoned with. Iolanthe Cooper considered a friend, and he was much more sensitive to how his friends treated him.

“Lead the way, then,” she said. Wallowing in misery on her own or playing a strange nonmage game—what was the difference?

The first drops of rain struck the windows as they reached the billiard room, which reeked of cigar smoke, the scent embedded in the crimson curtains and the slate-blue wallpaper.

On Iolanthe’s turns, Cooper acted as her adviser, explaining angles and shot selections. When Iolanthe sank her first ball, he clapped. “Well done, Fairfax. Soon you’ll be as good at the table as you are on a cricket pitch.”

And a fat lot of good that would do her. But she said nothing.

On Cooper’s next turn, as he circled the table, strategizing, he asked, “Did you really say last night that you might be leaving us for the American West?”

Her hand tightened on the cue stick. She hadn’t thought at all of what to do with herself, now that she was no longer required for the Great Endeavor. “My parents are not good planners. Tomorrow it could be quite a different scheme.”

“If you don’t want to go out to the Wyoming Territory, you could come and work at my father’s firm,” said Cooper, with wholehearted hope. “Maybe lawyering wouldn’t be so terrible, if I had a friend nearby. And you’d make a good solicitor—I’d stake money on it.”

She didn’t know why her eyes prickled all of a sudden—perhaps it just felt good to be needed.

This was something she had not appreciated enough: as petrifying as it was to be informed that she was the key to the Bane’s downfall, it had been, at the same time, an enormous compliment. To be singled out like that meant she was special, that her existence mattered.

Now, the opposite: that she did not matter and was not special, and any illusions of grandeur were but that, illusions.

And to hear that from the boy for whom she had risked her life more than once, traveled half of the circumference of the Earth, and with whom she was going to . . . She could not bear to think of the Queen of Seasons’ summer villa, now swept clean of flower petals.

“Thank you for that offer,” she told Cooper, and briefly gripped his shoulder. “It’s very much appreciated.”

Cooper looked both pleased and embarrassed. “Well, think about it.”

She could not. Any attempt to responsibly and realistically consider the future was like breathing water, a sharp, indescribable pain that radiated deep into every cavity of her skull.

It was all she could do to hold herself together, so that she did not involuntarily burn down Sutherland’s uncle’s house.



Every breath was despair.

Part of Titus was convinced he was being punished for having been too happy, for forgetting that life’s cruelties were never far away. The other part was a crazed prisoner, screaming in the dungeons, unheard by the outside world.

When the rain started in earnest, he vaulted back to the laboratory, to safely stow away his mother’s diary. Then he left in an unholy hurry, so that he would not be tempted to pick up the diary and throw it across the room.

Why must he give up Fairfax? Why, if he was a prisoner of his destiny, could he not have his little window, his small square of the blue sky above?

Back at Baycrest House, he stood a long time outside the door of the billiard room, listening to the crisp sounds of cue stick striking ivory, and to Cooper’s involved explanation on how she ought to place her next shot.

How could he make her understand that he needed her as much as ever? More, probably: the mere thought of ushering Wintervale to the Commander’s Palace in the uplands of Atlantis made him want to crawl into a deep, dark place and never come out again.