The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

In you.

She gazed at him for a long moment, then she reached into her jacket and took out a small envelope. “Take this. A birthday present.”

It was his seventeenth birthday, a day that he had meant to let pass unremarked, but it thrilled him that she remembered. When he opened the envelope, however, he saw that it contained the vertices of the quasi-vaulter.

“No,” he said in shock. “No, I cannot. They are to keep you safe.”

She came around the desk and pushed the envelope into his pocket. “I’m safe enough. You need to take care of yourself.”

After he had seen her safely back to her room, Titus lay in bed for a long time, the envelope upon his sternum, thinking about how immensely fortunate he was in his friends.

In her.





CHAPTER 23


The Sahara Desert

IT TOOK THE TWO HUNTING ropes several trips each to satisfy the sand wyvern’s appetite. While the beast dined, Titus looked it over, as a rider’s courtesy, to make sure that the steed did not have any injuries or discomforts.

He almost did not see the slight discoloration on the wyvern’s spine ridge. A sensation of chill at the back of his neck made him look again: a tracer that had been made the exact same color as the wyvern, except it had faded slightly from exposure to the elements.

Almost numbly, he checked the rest of the oddly shaped ridge bumps. Two more tracers. How many more that he had not found?

He destroyed all the tracers and glanced up. Nothing loomed in the sky yet. The group he had dispatched with distance spells earlier had probably come across them by luck; the kind of tracers that had been put on the sand wyvern took some trial and error to track down.

Indecision paralyzed him: half of him wanted to leap atop the wyvern and take flight; the other half recognized that there was no point in going anywhere unless he cleared the steed of all the tracers.

He searched, inspecting every square inch of the creature’s scaly exterior and its entire wingspread. He found a tracer attached to a talon, another one at the tip of a wing bone.

Was that all?

It was turning dark, but there was no mistaking the storm cloud that fanned out from the horizon, which was no storm cloud at all, but hundreds of wyverns flying in close formation.

Fortune shield him, for nothing else would.

Instead of destroying the last batch of tracers, he threw them down. He took his seat on the saddle behind Fairfax, already strapped in and fast asleep, and urged the sand wyvern to take flight, but as close to the ground as possible without the tips of its wings striking the surface.

When he had gone perhaps a mile, he landed the wyvern, made it lie down, and performed a hypnosis spell. The wyvern snorted a couple of times and closed its eyes. He lifted Fairfax out of the saddle, removed the saddle from the wyvern’s back, and hid it under one of the wyvern’s wings. Next he set a sound circle and a tensile shield beyond, so that the wyvern’s presence could not be detected by either its smell or its snore-like breathing.

Fairfax and himself he hid under the wyvern’s other wing. He should distance them from the wyvern, but if the beast proved to be still tracked, they were doomed in any case, as he could not dig them into the dunes and the camouflage tent was not something he dared rely on when a bright light might be shined squarely upon it.

With a noise like thousands of banners streaming in a gale, their pursuers arrived. He held his breath and lifted the sand wyvern’s wing just enough for a peek. Wyverns and armored chariots darkened the already shadowy sky. Some circled overhead, some swooped in crisscross patterns, and others headed straight toward the spot where he had dropped the tracers.

The scale of the hunt took his breath away.

A wyvern landed two hundred feet away. He took Fairfax’s hand. It did not make him any less afraid to have her hand in his, but it made the misery of being fearful more bearable.

Another wyvern landed, even closer.

A commotion went through the Atlanteans. Shouts rose. “The base is being attacked!” “We must head back!” “We must protect the Lord High Commander!”

The Lord High Commander. Fairfax whimpered—Titus was crushing her hand in his. He forced his fingers to unclench. The Bane was in the Sahara?

“We will go nowhere!” countered a gruff, authoritative voice. “Our order came directly from the Lord High Commander and that order is to apprehend those two fugitives.”

Something streaked through the air. It was followed by a piercing scream, as if a rider had been gored in the stomach.

More projectiles, a forest of long, thin objects, hurtled toward the Atlanteans. For a moment Titus thought he was looking at hundreds of hunting ropes. But no, they were spears, bewitched to chase and impale enemies.