“I was hoping one of them would be your favorite,” he said quietly.
From what he had told her, it was not difficult to modify details in a story inside the Crucible: one only had to write the changes in the margins of the pages. So it was not as if he had sneaked back into the Domain and smuggled out the ices against all odds. But still something fluttered in her stomach, followed by a feeling of constriction in her chest.
He had wanted everything to be perfect.
And it would have been.
It would have been.
At her silence, he cleared his throat again. “I was just about to leave. Enjoy your ice.”
He disappeared on the tail end of those words, leaving her alone in a place where they were supposed to be together.
She had come because she had not been able to help her curiosity. However difficult the experience might prove, she had wanted to see the place he had prepared for her—for them. Why had he come back? He already knew exactly what he had done with the place.
Because she wasn’t the only one who wished that the maelstrom had never happened. Who was drawn to the summer villa, despite the pain it would cause, to imagine what it would have been like, had things been different.
She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.
How did one fall out of love without falling apart at the same time?
The reading room, the main library in the teaching cantos of the Crucible, was vast. It might very well be infinite, for all Iolanthe knew: shelves went on until they converged into a single point in the distance.
She approached the help desk—an empty station near the door—and said, “I would like everything available on Horatio Haywood from the last forty years.”
Books populated the shelf behind the desk: compilations of student-run newspapers on which he had served as reporter and editor; journals that published his scholarly articles; the dissertation he had written for his Master of the Art and Science of Magic degree from the Conservatory.
She picked up his dissertation. There had been a copy of it in their home, which she had tried to read as a little girl and had understood nothing of. But now, as she flipped through the pages, her eyes grew wider and wider. She knew Master Haywood’s research specialty had been archival magic, which dealt with the preservation of spells and practices no longer in popular usage. But she’d had no idea that his dissertation revolved around memory magic.
In the dissertation, Master Haywood traced the development of memory magic and chronicled the remarkable precision of the spells at the height of its popularity.9 One could erase memories by the hour—by the minute if one really wanted to. And by the outlines of precise, concrete events. Enjoyed oneself enormously at a party, with the exception of a drunken kiss? With one quick wave of the wand, it would be as if the kiss had never happened—the party was now a long, unmarred stretch of outstanding memories.
She left the reading room reluctantly—there were set times in the day, called Absences, when Mrs. Dawlish and Mrs. Hancock counted their boys, to make sure the latter hadn’t gone missing. The prince was still in the laboratory, seated opposite her, flipping the pages of his mother’s diary.
It was as if a fist had closed around her heart, seeing him spending time with his one true love.
He looked up. “Did you find anything useful?”
She was determined to speak normally. “Master Haywood did his dissertation on memory magic, the kind that the memory keeper eventually applied on him.”
“So he supplied the expertise that was used against him?”
“Probably.”
He was silent for a moment. “Do you want to find out whether you have memory lapses?”
The question astonished her. “Me?”
He pointed his wand at himself. “Quid non memini?”
What do I not remember?
A line appeared in the air, straight and marked at regular intervals, like a tape measure. With a wave of his wand, the line moved closer to Iolanthe, so she could see that it was a timeline, divided into years, months, weeks, and days. About three-fifths of the timeline was white, the rest red.
She had never seen anything like it. Even Master Haywood’s dissertation had mentioned nothing of the kind. “This represents the state of your memories?”
“Yes.”
“What happened when you were eleven?” Three days short of eleven, actually. That was when the line abruptly turned red.
“I learned that I would die young. And I decided to rid myself of the memories of the details of the prophecy, so I would not be constantly preoccupied with them.”
You would not die young, not if I—she barely stopped herself from speaking those words aloud. Wintervale would have to keep him alive now, Wintervale who was not known for his ability to remain cool under pressure.
The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)
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