The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

“If you would like us to give you some privacy—” began Iolanthe.

“I’ve already unburdened myself to the two of you earlier. It would be silly to pretend otherwise.” He opened the envelope and handed the photograph to Iolanthe. “That’s her.”

Three people were in the frame—Kashkari, a young woman in a sari, and a handsome young man who must be Kashkari’s brother. The woman’s hair was covered by the sari. An enormous nose ring—with a chain attached somewhere in her hair—obscured a good bit of her face. But still it was easy to see that she was extraordinarily lovely.

“She is beautiful enough to be the girl of anyone’s dreams.”

Kashkari sighed. “That she is.”

Iolanthe passed the photograph to the prince, who took a sip of tea as he accepted the photograph from her.

Almost immediately he began coughing—and kept on coughing.

Iolanthe was bewildered—the Master of the Domain was not the kind of boy to choke on his tea. Kashkari stood up and struck the prince forcibly between the shoulder blades.

The prince, panting, returned the photograph to him. “My tea—went down the wrong way. She is—handsome indeed.”

“She seems to have a strong effect on not just you,” Iolanthe said to Kashkari.

The prince gave her a strange look. “How did she and your brother meet, Kashkari?”

“It’s an arranged marriage, of course.”

“Of course. What I meant was, is she from the same city as you?”

“No. We belong to the same community, but her family settled years ago in Punjab.” Kashkari smiled weakly. “They could have found any girl to be my brother’s bride, and it had to be her.”

The prince rose to leave shortly thereafter. Iolanthe stayed a minute longer. Then she was knocking on his door—she must speak to him about the implications of Kashkari’s prophetic dreams—and found herself dragged inside.

“Kashkari—” she began.

He cut her off. “That woman in the photograph—she was the one who crashed the garden party at the Citadel. The one who escaped on a flying carpet. The one who asked for you.”





CHAPTER 17


The Sahara Desert

HE WAS STILL SLEEPING, HIS shoulder touching hers, when she woke, perspiring.

Inside the buried tent, it was dim and prodigiously hot. She called for water, drank her fill, and topped the waterskins. Then she sat up, called for some mage light, and turned her attention to the prince. He was sleeping on his stomach, without his tunic. She sucked in a breath at the sight of the bandage on his back: if it were bright red, it would be one thing, but it was blood mixed with an inky dark substance—an appalling sight.

“Just my body expelling the poison.” His words were slow and sleepy. “I took every antidote in your bag.”

She took off the old bandage and destroyed it. “What in the world was it?”

“It has to be venom of some sort, but I cannot feel any puncture marks.”

“I don’t see any either.” She handed him a few granules for pain. “It just looks as if your skin has been eaten away by acid, or something.”

“But this substance is organic, because the antidotes did work.”

She shook her head. “Such a large area. Almost as if someone had a bucket of venom and just threw it at you.”

And yet he had walked goodness knew how many miles in this desert, dragging her along.

She cleaned his wound, applied more topical analgesic, and then spread a regenerative remedy. “Do you know what I am reminded of? Have you ever read the story of Briga’s Chasm?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the pulpwyrms that guard the entrance to the chasm? Those nasty creatures that are big as roads? They are said to spew an endless stream of a black substance that can dissolve a mage down to just teeth and hair.”

“But pulpwyrms are not real.”

“Now why must you upset a perfectly good hypothesis with such bothersome things as facts?”

The corner of his lips lifted—and disrupted her train of thought. She stared at his profile, longer than she ought to, before she remembered that she had a task at hand.

“How long have you been up?” he asked.

She pull out two other vials. “Five minutes or so. I filled the waterskins.”

“You actually sound awake, for once.”

“I’m slightly groggy, but I don’t feel as if I’ll start snoring in the next minute.”

He hissed as she sprinkled the contents of one vial onto his back. “Good. I was about to go deaf from your snoring.”

“Ha!” She decanted another remedy onto his wound, counting the drops carefully. “Speaking of being important, isn’t the Master of the Domain named Titus? It isn’t a very common name.”11

He thought for a moment. “It is quite common among the Sihar.”12