The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

“The friend, the woman I’ve always known as my grandmother, convinced her husband that they must take my mother and flee to a nonmage realm, so they did, leaving their island in the Arabian Sea to settle on the subcontinent, in Hyderabad.

“My mother grew up knowing she was a mage refugee, but she didn’t know anything about the history of her biological family. A spate of uprisings in the subcontinent realms brought an influx of mage refugees to Hyderabad. Some of them wanted to form a coherent new community; others simply wished to disappear into the crowd. She married a young man of the latter group. He became a lawyer, they had two children, and they lived a life that on the outside was scarcely distinguishable from those of the nonmages all around them.

“And then she became pregnant again and I was born during the great meteor storm of 1866. This frightened my grandparents, who remembered what had happened the previous time a child of my mother’s bloodline was born during a meteor storm. They finally told my mother the truth about her brother and her parents, and even though elemental powers rarely run in families, together they watched me anxiously.

“My power, it turned out, was not in elements, but in prophetic dreams. Did Fairfax tell you?”

Titus debated whether to involve Fairfax in the conversation. “He finds your ability quite novel.”

“When my family realized that I was no elemental mage, they relaxed enough to allow me to make my own decision as to whether I wished to come to England for schooling. We of Eastern heritage do not view visions of the future as something that must be accepted, so I leaned toward staying with my family, until I had a new dream that tipped my decision.

“The dream was only a fragment, of a number of people in a room—your room, in fact—and one of them saying to me, ‘By staying close to Wintervale, you saved him.’ ”

This was not what Titus had expected to hear. For some reason, because his knowledge of Kashkari’s prophetic dreams had first come from Fairfax, and because the Oracle had told her that Kashkari was the one from whom she should seek aid, he had come to anticipate that anything else Kashkari would say to him would also revolve around Fairfax.

But of course he should have known better. From the moment Kashkari began his explanation, even though he had yet to specifically mention it, every word he had uttered had centered on one thing: the great elemental mage not of his uncle’s time, but of their own.

And despite everything Titus fiercely wished for, that mage was Wintervale, and not Fairfax. “So you came to save Wintervale,” he said, careful to keep his disappointment out of his voice.

“I knew who Baron Wintervale was—the January Uprising was so successful for a time that his name became synonymous with hope in all the mage realms. My family could not stop talking about all his new victories—we didn’t learn until later that he had Baroness Sorren as his strategist; we thought it was all him, singlehandedly outwitting and overpowering Atlantis. And I remember my grandparents whispering to each other about the possibility of finally going home again, to be Exiles no more.

“All that hope came crashing down when the January Uprising was crushed. And by the time I started having that particular dream, Baron Wintervale was already dead. But I thought to myself, what if this means I have some greater role to play than I had imagined? What if I am meant to rescue Baron Wintervale’s son from some terrible danger and help him to rekindle his father’s dream?”

“And to think I once thought your ambition was to help India achieve independence from Britain.”

“No, my ambition has always been the overthrow of the Bane,” Kashkari said easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Justice for my uncle and his entire family. Justice for all the other families that had been sacrificed in the Bane’s quest for ever more power.”

“And you think Wintervale is the key to all that?”

“I don’t know one way or the other. Just as I can’t say my lingering about Wintervale all these years has had any effect.”

Titus had noticed how closely Kashkari stuck to Wintervale in recent weeks. But come to think of it, the two had been nearly inseparable for years.

“Have you told Wintervale?”

Kashkari shook his head. “You know how he is. Either he has to become much more discreet or the situation has to become much more dire, before I’d risk telling him the whole truth.”

“Why are you telling me, then?”

“I need some advice.”

Titus felt a strange premonition. “Go on.”

“I recently had the dream again and this time I finally saw the face of the speaker, the one who said, ‘By staying close to Wintervale, you saved him.’”

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Hancock.”

“What?” Mrs. Hancock, special envoy of Atlantis’s Department of Overseas Administration?