The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Of course he would have tried it, he who approached his mission with a no-stone-unturned thoroughness.

“There has to be more. My suppressed memories only resurfaced every two years. If anything happened to the memory keeper before she could reach me, I would be without facts important to my survival for a long, long time—and I refuse to believe that Master Haywood wouldn’t have prepared for that possibility.” She tapped her finger on the envelope. “Can you make it so that secret writing is only made visible if a revealing charm has a countersign attached?”

“You could. But then it requires you to know the countersign.”

She scanned the letter. She did not know the countersign. If Master Haywood used one, he must have included it in the letter. And if he had done so, he would have called attention to it by setting it slightly apart in some manner.

Her eyes fell on the second postscript. Do not worry about me.

Could it be? She tried the revealing charm on the envelope again, while silently reciting Do not worry about me as a countersign.

Immediately new writing appeared on the envelope.

But only if you are armed with a knife and willing to use it.

“Try it on the letter, too,” said the prince, his voice full of barely leashed excitement.

She did, and was rewarded with Oysters give pearls.

“‘Oysters give pearls, but only if you are armed with a knife and willing to use it,’” she read the sentence aloud. “Should this mean something to me?”

“Give me a moment.” The prince went inside the Crucible and came back a minute later. “It is a line from an Argonin play called The Fisherman’s Pilgrimage.”

Argonin was considered the greatest playwright the Domain ever produced. Iolanthe had studied some of Argonin’s plays at school, but not The Fisherman’s Pilgrimage.

The line had been given in two parts, as password and countersign. But to what?

All at once she knew: for something that Master Haywood had reason to trust would always be on her person.

Her wand.

Her wand too was stored in the laboratory—it would be difficult to pass herself off as nonmage if she were caught with it. She retrieved it from the cabinet and turned it about in the light.

It had once been her pride and joy, her wand, a piece of extraordinary craftsmanship. Emerald vines and amethyst flowers had been set onto the surface; the veins of the leaves were composed of hair-thin filaments of malachite, the pistils and stamens of the flowers tiny yellow diamonds.

A wand especially commissioned for her birth, Master Haywood had told her, to be an heirloom piece. And she had not wondered too much how her parents, both still students, both from terribly modest backgrounds, had managed to afford it.

But now she knew it was not the Seabournes who had ordered such a spectacularly costly wand, but the memory keeper, the most untrustworthy person she had ever known.

Her mother, if the prince was right about it.

“Oysters give pearls,” she said aloud, and recited the rest silently.

The wand slid apart. The inlays had been done on a shell, which now detached from the base of the wand to reveal a separate core. Four small objects had been embedded in the core; they were identical looking, pea-size lumps as black as coal.

The prince leaped to his feet. “These are the vertices of a quasi-vaulter.”10

The only device known to circumvent a fully established no-vaulting zone—and most likely what had enabled Master Haywood’s disappearance from the Citadel last June.

“I have been trying to buy a quasi-vaulter on the black market for five years,” the prince went on. “Not a single one came up for sale in all that time.”

But now she had one at her disposal and would be able to escape from anywhere. Once.

He picked up the lumps and handed them to her. “The vertices are contact requisite and need to be on your person for at least seventy-two hours before they will transport you. It is quite likely that was already done when you were an infant, but you want to make sure.”

She dropped them into the inside pocket of her jacket and carefully sealed the pocket shut. “But where is the target?”

A full quasi-vaulter set came with five pieces, four vertices and a target to be placed ahead of time. She was fairly confident the target wouldn’t be inside an active volcano, but she would have preferred to know where she was going.

“Somewhere Atlantis cannot find, I hope,” said the prince. “You are making impressive progress, by the way. What do you plan to do should you locate your guardian?”

Questions of the future hurt—all possible courses of action invariably involved her leaving Titus for parts unknown. “Set him free and go into hiding.”

“Have you thought of a place?”

She shook her head. “Time enough to think about that once I manage to actually free him.”