The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

He was silent. Suddenly she wondered whether he had hoped the Kno-it-all gauge’s reading could be his way out of a partnership with Wintervale.

If push came to shove, she would accept that reason—she trusted herself to keep him alive far better than Wintervale—but she would not be happy with it. She wanted him to choose her because he dared to defy his mother’s dictates from beyond the grave, not because an out-of-date diagnostic tool didn’t know how to assess the mental state of someone under a panacea-induced sleep.

“You already know I think Wintervale is the last person who should accompany you to Atlantis. But he is temperamentally unsuited for the task, not non compos mentis.”

He walked to her window and peeked out from the gap of the curtain, as she had done earlier, when he’d arrived to take her to the laboratory. After a minute or so, he looked back at her. “Remember the memory spells we discovered on you this afternoon?”

“How can I forget?” The shock of it, having her memory shown to be riddled with more holes than a sieve.

“May I have a look at your memory line again?”

She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

He recast the spell and the memory line appeared between them, filling almost the entire width of her room, all the colors and patterns making her feel as if she were looking at him through a pane of stained glass.

“Is there something specific you want to check?”

“See the subsidiary lines that connect the shapes representing the suppressed memories to the main line?”

The subsidiary lines were as fine as spider silk. “Yes?”

“They are green for most of the timeline. But look here”—he pointed at the last set of subsidiary lines that branched out, from the most recent instance of the resurfacing of her memories. “These latest lines are black, which means that the memory keeper has made it so that your memories would no longer resurface.”

The implication of it was a hard thud in the back of her head. “Am I going to end up like Master Haywood?”

Master Haywood had become a husk of his former self: because his buried memories had not been allowed to resurface, his subconscious mind had pushed for more and more self-destructive means to attract the memory keeper’s attention.

Titus dissipated the memory line. “Do you ever feel your mind in a state of ungovernable restlessness?”

“No. At least, not yet.”

“Then you still have time. And we will find a way.”

She laughed, more than a little bitterly. “We?”

He met her eyes. “Of course. You are still the one I love. You are the one I will love until the day I die.”

She meant to dispute it, to tell him that his avowals were only words without the force of action behind it. But she did not say anything.

He kissed her on her forehead, gazed at her another moment, and left.



The next afternoon Iolanthe was in the reading room again, poring over Master Haywood’s dissertation. This time, the section on how one could protect oneself from memory spells.

At the height of memory magic’s popularity, mages tried to achieve a certain amount of immunity against possible attacks. The dissertation listed pages upon pages of different safeguards to prevent or minimize the erasure and rearrangement of memories.

Iolanthe pinched the bridge of her nose. Master Haywood had known all this, but had not thought to defend himself—or her—with a few of these safeguards.

He must have trusted the memory keeper as she had trusted the prince, never for a moment believing that a bond such as theirs could be anything but invincible.

Come to think of it, even if he never thought to be wary of the memory keeper, he should still have sought to give Iolanthe more information, knowing that should the memory keeper be unable to reach Iolanthe, she could be left without vital knowledge.

What if he had?

She sat up straighter. In the emergency pack that he had thrust into her hands, just before she left the Domain, there had been a letter. She had checked the letter for hidden writing. There had been none—or at least none that was within her power to reveal.

But what about the envelope?

She could not say the password to exit the Crucible fast enough.



Back in the laboratory, someone held her hand.

The prince. He was watching her, the longing in his eyes palpable.

You are still the one I love. You are the one I will love until the day I die.

Almost without thinking, she reached out and lifted a strand of his hair—only to suddenly come to her senses, an electric pain in her heart.

She got off the stool on which she had been sitting and walked to the cabinet that held those things she had brought with her from the Domain. She found Master Haywood’s letter, and set both letter and envelope on the worktable. “Revela omnia.”

“I already tried the envelope,” said the prince.