The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Is this Helgira?

Father had wanted me to practice getting into the inner chambers at the Black Bastion in order to use Helgira’s prayer alcove as a portal. To that end I had once dressed up as a serving maid delivering a flagon of wine, but I had been recognized as an imposter almost immediately and had barely the time to shout “And they lived happily ever after” to avoid being hacked to pieces.

When the vision had left me, I found my copy of the Crucible and turned to Helgira’s story. The illustration shows a woman in her thirties, still handsome but scarred and battle-hardened, nothing like the courtly beauty I had seen on the balcony.

Who is she, then?





3 September, YD 1011


It is Helgira.

The young woman with the white dress and the whipping long hair raises her hands and down plunges the most awe-inspiring bolt of lightning I have ever witnessed, the energy of an entire turbulent sky focused into a singular beam of power.

Helgira the lightning wielder. There has never been any other.

So this is what she looks like.





19 September, YD 1011


I have changed Helgira’s face in my own copy of the Crucible, the monastery’s copy, and the Citadel’s copy—I hope Father would not mind, as he considered the Citadel’s copy his personal copy.

But now that I have done that, I begin to wonder why I should have seen this vision at all. The deeds of a folkloric character who only exists in fiction—and in the Crucible—are not something that one ought to see in a vision about the future, are they?



But his mother had indeed seen the future. That had been Fairfax standing on Helgira’s balcony, calling down the bolt of lightning that would strike the Bane dead. Dead temporarily, at least.

Because Princess Ariadne had altered Helgira’s image inside the Crucible, Fairfax had been able to move about Black Bastion freely. And when the Atlanteans had demanded answers about the girl who brought down lightning, Titus had been able to shrug and tell them to learn something about the Domain’s folklore.

Fairfax had been writ large across his life.

Why then could she not remain the One?



The lake parted.

It was an inland sea, actually, so large that the far shores were below the horizon. At its bottom, a group of schoolchildren had been trapped inside an ever-shrinking air bubble.

Fairfax had spent a good bit of time in this tale, trying to rescue the schoolchildren. She had never completely succeeded. But now, with Wintervale at the task, the deep waters of the lake parted to reveal a muddy, mile-long path to the air bubble.

Titus shook his head slowly. What could one do but marvel at power of this magnitude?

He took Wintervale to a different story, “The Locust Autumn.” Wintervale took a look at the locust swarm approaching the field of a poor farmer, and, with a wolfish grin, raised his hands. He summoned such a cyclone, the entire swarm was blown away without a trace.

In yet another story, he lifted fifty-ton boulders as if they were no heavier than tennis balls and easily constructed a high wall around a town about to be trampled by giants. From the top of the wall, the townspeople attacked the vulnerable soft spots on top of the giants’ unprotected heads, leading to a rousing victory.

“This is the best feeling I have ever had, in my entire life!” Wintervale shouted at Titus, as giants fell like dominoes, making the rampart beneath their feet thump.

Titus ought to be happy: he had read The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages time and again and Wintervale was most assuredly measuring up. He ought to be relieved, too, that he had made the right choice: other than his inability to command lightning, Wintervale’s powers were in every way superior to Fairfax’s.

Yet Titus felt . . . uneasy: he had never known what it was like to achieve one’s goal in one giant leap, rather than through years of strenuous toil. He shook his head and reminded himself that he had better enjoy the moment, because the harder part was to come.

Always.

Wintervale’s excitement remained unabated as they exited the Crucible. “I can’t even tell you how ready I am to take on a squadron of armored chariots and greet them with these huge boulders.”

“Which you can only do when there are such boulders lying about.”

“Or I can yank them off the bones of the earth,” Wintervale enthused. “Imagine if my father had someone like me during the January Uprising.”

The outcome would have been different, Titus had to admit, at least for some battles. The Crucible in hand, he rose from Wintervale’s cot, on which they had been sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. It had been a calculated risk to bring the Crucible to school, but Wintervale had never vaulted well and Titus was not ready to divulge the location of the new entrance to the laboratory.