The Perilous Sea (12 page)

“And so it was on the day we met. I was awakened at fourteen minutes past two. I walked out onto my balcony. And barely a minute later, your lightning.”

For some reason, the fact that he had it timed to the minute filled her with horror. Or perhaps it was the way he spoke, like an automaton, as if he could only get the words out by pretending they had nothing to do with him.

With
them
.

“This afternoon,” he went on, “I woke up at exactly fourteen minutes after two, and walked onto a balcony.”

She stared at him. Had she somehow drunk as much cognac the night before as Kashkari? She was unsteady on her feet, and all ash and grit inside her mouth. “Do you mean to tell me that your mother's prophecy actually referred to Wintervale, and not me?”

Her voice, tentative and thread-thin, barely sounded like her own.

He nodded slowly, still not looking at her.

Her voice shook. “You are sure?”

He stood still, his expression completely blank. The next moment he was on his knees, his hands over his face. Shock burned through her. This was a boy who had held himself together even in the midst of an Inquisition. But now he was falling apart in front of her.

Numbness spread in her, gray and wooden. She did not understand anything at all. How could Wintervale be the Chosen One when it was up to her to brave the dangers, defeat the Bane, and keep Titus alive throughout it all?

“I am sorry,” came Titus's barely audible words. “I am so sorry.”

She only shook her head—and kept shaking her head. This was her destiny, her
destiny
, not an old jacket that could be handed down to someone else.

He was wrong. He had to have made a mistake.

“Show me your mother's diary,” she said. “I want to read those visions for myself.”

 

A minute later, the diary was in her hand. The words that appeared swam a little, but she pored over them with a resolve that felt almost frivolously optimistic next to his bleak hopelessness.

When she came across the beginning of the last entry, he said, “This was when I knew. I smiled today, when I woke up, because I had been dreaming of you.”

Pressure built behind her eyes, a pain that was not going away. She kept reading.

 

Suddenly everything makes sense. This is not some random sighting, this is the moment Titus first comes into his destiny. Everything I had learned so far about elemental magic and elemental mages points to a revelatory feat that announces the arrival on the scene of an extraordinary elemental mage.

The boy who should have been the great elemental mage of my generation was said to have brought a dead volcano back to life, the eruption visible for hundreds of miles. (He is also said to have died young of illness, but Callista had informed me in strict confidence that the then-Inquisitor Hyas had told her that no, the boy's own family had killed him, rather than let him be taken into the local Inquisitory's custody.)

This, then, is most likely what Titus is witnessing, the manifestation of the great elemental mage who would be, as he would say in a different vision, his partner for the task.

 

She was utterly confused. “That's it? As
you
would say in a different vision? Is she talking about that conversation we had the day I came to Eton, when you first told me what you planned to do?”

The irony might kill her outright.

“I have never come across the vision she mentioned.”

Iolanthe had always regarded Princess Ariadne's visions with something approaching awe. Their accuracy and almost eerie relevance had opened her mind to the possibility that she might be meant for something greater than a professorship, and might have a responsibility to look out for not just herself and Master Haywood, but the world at large.

So it was with a sense of disorientation that she saw for the first time how much Princess Ariadne's visions depended on Titus's action in order to become fulfilled. Years ago, she had read something that dealt with this paradox of a prophecy coming to pass because—and only because—those who had seen the prophecy worked tirelessly to make it happen.

What was the term for it?

“Created reality,” she said.

“What?”

“You follow her prophecies to the letter, for them to come true.”

He looked uncomfortably defensive. “One can never change what has already been preordained.”

Growing up, she had heard that a hundred times. Everyone had. “Not standing in a prophecy's way is not the same as giving up your entire life to make every last detail of reality match what she had set down decades ago.”

“I do not know of any other way to make this work.”

He looked so defeated, the back of her throat stung.

The rest of the entry did not help her cause, as it kept referring to the One. “There is no reason that Wintervale must replace me. We can work together, all three of us.”

“But my mother always specified one partner and only one partner.”

“Did she forbid you from having more than one?”

“We cannot approach her visions with that kind of glibness. A seer of her caliber comes once every five hundred years and we would have accomplished nothing if it were not for her guidance.”

He could be so cynical, her prince, and yet his faith in his mother was heartbreakingly pure.

“But that means you will be headed to Atlantis with Wintervale.” The thought made her blood run cold. “Then you will be as good as dead.”

“I
am
as good as dead—it is all written in the stars. I had thought . . . I had thought I would have you.” His eyes dimmed. “But I cannot argue with the force of destiny.”

She gripped his arm. “Do I not also have the force of destiny on my side? It was your mother who wrote the very words that led me to summon my first thunderbolt. You might be dead today if I hadn't killed the Bane in the Crucible. Not to mention that I was born on the night of the meteor storm—you can't mean to tell me that Wintervale's birth date had been falsified too.”

“But my mother was never one of those who predicted the birth of a great elemental mage on that night.”

“Fine, so birth dates don't matter. But remember, Helgira in the Crucible looks exactly like me. That has to mean something, right?”

“Of course it does. But you read what my mother wrote—”

“You are hinging everything on the merest, merest of details. Your mother mentioned no names. You saw me bring down a bolt of lightning at fourteen minutes past two o'clock, on a balcony. Isn't that enough? Is our partnership not something worth preserving?”

“If only the choice was mine, you know I would choose you a thousand times every day. But this is not my choice. None of it is my choice. I can only walk the path that has been laid out.”

She let go of him, understanding dawning: the diary was not just his mother's words. To him, it
was
his mother, the voice of destiny itself. And he would never disobey Princess Ariadne, in this world or the next. “So this is my dismissal?”

“No!” He cupped her face. “I can never dismiss you from my life. I—”

Don't say it
, she shouted in her head.
Don't
say it.

“I love you,” he said.

All at once, the wretchedness inside her turned into anger. She shoved the diary back at him. “You don't love me. You loved a convenience—you loved that I happened to fit into your plans.”

His eyes were full of hurt bewilderment. “How can you say that?”

“How can I say that? How can
you
say what
you
just said? Who was it that swore up and down that I had a destiny, that I always had destiny even if I didn't know it? Has it even been a fortnight since you told me that you were so glad it was me, that you could not do this with anyone else? But now you could. Now you say ‘thank you, but no thank you,' as if I were a kitchen maid to be replaced at will!”

“Iolanthe—”

He rarely called her by her real name. The vast majority of the time, even when they were alone, he addressed her as Fairfax, so as to never get out of the habit.

“No,” she said reflexively. “Unless you are about to tell me that you are wrong, there is nothing you can say that I want to hear.”

He clutched the diary to his chest, his face ashen. “I am sorry. Forgive me.”

After everything they had gone through together, everything they had been to each other, was that all he had to say?

She turned and walked away.

 

“There you are,” cried Cooper, as Iolanthe stalked into the house. “Wintervale is unwell, Kashkari is nursemaiding, and Sutherland is paying a call at a neighbor's house. I was getting bored of my own company. What say you to a game of billiards?”

Iolanthe did not want to take part in such a peaceful pastime. If only Cooper had suggested a few rounds of boxing—as an elemental mage brought up to channel her anger via violence, she was in desperate need to smash her fist into someone's face.

“I don't know how to play,” she told Cooper.

“I'll teach you.”

He looked so hopeful she hadn't the heart to turn him down. Titus could thrill Cooper by saying no, but that was because Cooper viewed Titus as a demigod, powerful and capricious, not to be reasoned with. Iolanthe Cooper considered a friend, and he was much more sensitive to how his friends treated him.

“Lead the way, then,” she said. Wallowing in misery on her own or playing a strange nonmage game—what was the difference?

The first drops of rain struck the windows as they reached the billiard room, which reeked of cigar smoke, the scent embedded in the crimson curtains and the slate-blue wallpaper.

On Iolanthe's turns, Cooper acted as her adviser, explaining angles and shot selections. When Iolanthe sank her first ball, he clapped. “Well done, Fairfax. Soon you'll be as good at the table as you are on a cricket pitch.”

And a fat lot of good that would do her. But she said nothing.

On Cooper's next turn, as he circled the table, strategizing, he asked, “Did you really say last night that you might be leaving us for the American West?”

Her hand tightened on the cue stick. She hadn't thought at all of what to do with herself, now that she was no longer required for the Great Endeavor. “My parents are not good planners. Tomorrow it could be quite a different scheme.”

“If you don't want to go out to the Wyoming Territory, you could come and work at my father's firm,” said Cooper, with wholehearted hope. “Maybe lawyering wouldn't be so terrible, if I had a friend nearby. And you'd make a good solicitor—I'd stake money on it.”

She didn't know why her eyes prickled all of a sudden—perhaps it just felt good to be needed.

This was something she had not appreciated enough: as petrifying as it was to be informed that she was the key to the Bane's downfall, it had been, at the same time, an enormous compliment. To be singled out like that meant she was special, that her existence mattered.

Now, the opposite: that she did not matter and was not special, and any illusions of grandeur were but that, illusions.

And to hear that from the boy for whom she had risked her life more than once, traveled half of the circumference of the Earth, and with whom she was going to . . . She could not bear to think of the Queen of Seasons' summer villa, now swept clean of flower petals.

“Thank you for that offer,” she told Cooper, and briefly gripped his shoulder. “It's very much appreciated.”

Cooper looked both pleased and embarrassed. “Well, think about it.”

She could not. Any attempt to responsibly and realistically consider the future was like breathing water, a sharp, indescribable pain that radiated deep into every cavity of her skull.

It was all she could do to hold herself together, so that she did not involuntarily burn down Sutherland's uncle's house.

 

Every breath was despair.

Part of Titus was convinced he was being punished for having been too happy, for forgetting that life's cruelties were never far away. The other part was a crazed prisoner, screaming in the dungeons, unheard by the outside world.

When the rain started in earnest, he vaulted back to the laboratory, to safely stow away his mother's diary. Then he left in an unholy hurry, so that he would not be tempted to pick up the diary and throw it across the room.

Why must he give up Fairfax? Why, if he was a prisoner of his destiny, could he not have his little window, his small square of the blue sky above?

Back at Baycrest House, he stood a long time outside the door of the billiard room, listening to the crisp sounds of cue stick striking ivory, and to Cooper's involved explanation on how she ought to place her next shot.

How could he make her understand that he needed her as much as ever? More, probably: the mere thought of ushering Wintervale to the Commander's Palace in the uplands of Atlantis made him want to crawl into a deep, dark place and never come out again.

Cooper started talking about plans for the Half, another tennis tournament before it became too damp to play on the lawn, a chess competition for those dark, rainy nights, and what did Fairfax think of him getting a guinea pig to keep in his room?

Titus could almost feel her grief as Cooper chattered on. She would have enjoyed all these things, the guinea pig included, in a different time, when Eton was her refuge and her link to normalcy. Without her destiny, the school was just a place with lavatories she could not use.

He left then, because he could not stand the pain in his own heart. He did not want to go see Wintervale, but he made himself head in the direction of Kashkari's room: none of this could be blamed on Wintervale, who was as much Fortune's fool as the rest of them.