The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, they scanned the sky.

“And there they come,” he said. “Would you believe it, they brought back our sand wyvern to sniff us out, in case we hide underground or inside dunes.”

Not the best idea in any case. If she fell asleep again, they would be stuck inside bedrock. Or worse, buried under a mountain of sand. “Do you think the Bane is with them?”

“I certainly hope n—”

A movement at the periphery of his vision made him turn to the west; she mirrored his motion almost in unison. Someone was hurtling toward them on a flying carpet.

They had their wands at the ready.

The flying carpet came to a sudden and complete stop. “Can you not see what is coming?” cried the rider. “Why are you two just standing there? Get moving!”

Titus and Fairfax glanced at each other. They could not see him very well in the dark, but his voice was that of a young man.

“We have no steed and she cannot be vaulted,” said Titus.

The rider seemed flabbergasted. “What happened to the carpet I gave you?”

He leaped off his own carpet and came toward them. “Can you give me a spark or two, Fairfax?”

She was so stunned by his calling of her name she almost did not do what he asked. But she recovered in time to produce the faintest flicker of fire, which lit a slim, handsome young man of about their age in the robe and keffiyeh of the Bedouin tribes.

In one swift, violent motion, he ripped off the outside of the satchel that she carried across her person, making her gasp.

The outside of the satchel was in fact not a part of the satchel, but a shell with pockets. And the shell was a larger piece of fabric that had been folded thinly and tightly so as to fit around the body of the bag without gaps or bulges.

With a vigorous shake of the rider’s wrists, the shell unfurled entirely. And with a murmured password, it rose off the ground, a flying carpet ready for use.

Titus and Fairfax exchanged another look, stupefied.

“Hurry up!” the rider shouted again, physically pushing them toward the flying carpet. “What is wrong with the two of you? Let’s go!”





CHAPTER 28


England

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” IOLANTHE SAID, dumbfounded. “What is she doing here?”

Was Lady Callista the memory keeper?

“Quick,” said the prince. “I need everyone’s help for a containment dome.”

A containment dome did not protect the mage inside against forces outside, but the other way around: it was to shield those outside from the one inside.

They barely finished the dome before the time-freeze spell wore away. Lady Callista blinked, finding herself suddenly surrounded.

“I guess my secret is out,” she said, seemingly unconcerned, but her fingers clutched tightly around a jeweled wand not unlike the one that belonged to Iolanthe.

Lady Callista had been the one giving birth on the night of the meteor storm. Lady Callista had been the one conducting an affair with Baron Wintervale. Lady Callista, the last one to walk into the library at the Citadel before Master Haywood, had been the one to distribute the vertices of a quasi-vaulter that whisked him away.

“It can’t be you,” Iolanthe heard herself say. “You’ve been working against us all along.”

“If you refer to the instance on the day you brought down lightning, when I set a tracer on the prince’s sleeve, that was done purely at Atlantis’s behest. I had no idea that I would lead them to you, until I myself arrived on the scene and saw agents of Atlantis working to undo the anti-intrusion spells His Highness had put in place.”

“You were there?”

“Of course—I had made your wand into a tracer. I should have scooped you up that day and been done with all this nonsense a long time ago.”

But she hadn’t been able to. Titus and Iolanthe had escaped into the laboratory. Ever since then, Iolanthe’s wand had been stored in the laboratory, a folded space that could not be located—and so Lady Callista had lost track of Iolanthe.

“I do not believe you,” said Titus. “You gave me truth serum at your spring gala, just before my Inquisition. What could you possibly have hoped to achieve? For the Inquisitor to learn of your daughter’s whereabouts even sooner?”

“For that you have only yourself to blame, Your Highness,” Lady Callista shot back. “Yes, I made Aramia administer the truth serum to you—the Inquisitor had told me in no uncertain terms to see that accomplished. But what the Inquisitor didn’t know was that I had substituted a different type of truth serum, a slow-acting one.”

Titus narrowed his eyes.