The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Horatio Haywood, 18, of the Trident and Hippocampus School on Sirenhaven, Siren Isles, and Penelope Rainstone, 19, of the Commonweal Academy of Delamer. They are headed to the Conservatory of Magical Arts and Sciences and the Titus the Great Center of Martial Learning, respectively. Though Mr. Haywood and Miss Rainstone met only at the reception, they could not heap enough compliments on each other.



The young man and the young woman in the picture were turned toward each other, their faces glowing with pleasure.

Was this it? Was Commander Penelope Rainstone the memory keeper?

Was she Iolanthe’s mother?





CHAPTER 19


The Sahara Desert

THE ROAR CAME AGAIN.

Fairfax dove for the satchel. Titus grabbed his tunic and yanked his wand from his boot.

She made a pushing motion with her hand. A noise almost as terrifying as a dragon’s roar rumbled through the tent—she was causing an avalanche, meant to startle and distract the sand wyvern outside.

“Stay here,” Titus ordered as he put on the tunic.

He vaulted out—and was immediately buried under a landslide of sand. He vaulted again, toward the top of the high dune, just as a sand wyvern, almost exactly the same color as the Sahara, took to the sky screeching, its wings beating hard.

He knew that sand wyverns were bigger than normal wyverns, but this one was at least three times the size he had anticipated, its wingspan the dimensions of a small manor, and carried two riders, instead of the usual one.

The riders, in Atlantean uniforms, tried to rein in the sand wyvern and point its nose in Fairfax’s general direction again. Titus launched a succession of shield-punching spells at the riders, followed by a stunning spell.

One rider slumped over. The sand wyvern turned and blasted a stream of fire toward Titus. He tossed up a shield and aimed an attack at the beast’s belly. Wyverns—ordinary wyverns at least—had a soft underbelly, the reason they could be caught and tamed by skilled mages.

But the sand wyvern did not even react as Titus’s destabilizing spell hit it squarely in the abdomen, except to lunge at him, one enormous claw extended.

Hoping to draw the sand wyvern away from Fairfax, he vaulted toward the top of the next dune—he had set up camp in the narrow valley between two waves of towering dunes that ran close and parallel to each other, hoping for better protection from the heat of the sun during the day. Blind vaulting being what it was, he ended up halfway up the sand slope he had aimed for, instead of at the top, with the sand wyvern already on his heels. Looking down the valley toward the point in the distance where the dunes appeared, he vaulted again.

This time, he rematerialized at least a quarter mile away. The sand wyvern wheeled about and shot toward him. Then in midair it jerked—convulsed, almost—and with a huge roar, turned back toward Fairfax, even though Titus prodded it with several thorn spells.

He swore and vaulted back to the tent—only to find himself completely entombed in sand. Not only was Fairfax gone, the tent, too, was gone. Swearing again, he took himself to a high spot.

Fairfax stood in the valley between the dunes, completely dwarfed by the sand wyvern, no more than twenty feet from her. Her arms were raised, as if she were signaling the beast to stop. And the beast seemed to be cooperating in a most civilized manner, hovering, the tip of its tail almost touching the ground.

Two seconds passed before Titus understood exactly what he was seeing. The sand wyvern was trying to advance, inch by inch, against the headwind Fairfax had created, which sent sand billowing in its path. She shouted. The sand wyvern, with its hundred-foot wingspan, was actually blown back a few yards.

Titus aimed more attacks at the remaining rider on the sand wyvern. But the rider crouched low behind the dragon’s right wing, shielded from attacks.

Titus vaulted several times, trying to find a good angle—he hoped the sand wyvern was not accustomed to working so hard for its supper and would gladly leave the uncooperative elemental mage for easier prey if only he could render the rider comatose.

Finally, he found a suitable spot that gave him a relatively unimpeded view. He raised his arm. But what was he hearing? Mixed in with the howling of the headwind, the sand being carried away like sediments of a river, and the beating of the sand wyvern’s wings, was there something else?

He vaulted away just as a shock of heat reached his skin.

A squadron of albino wyverns had arrived. He vaulted back to Fairfax. It would still be far too risky for her to vault, but he did not know how else to get her out of this.