The Perilous Sea (25 page)

His main anxiety was for his mother and Titus was happy to tell him the truth: there was no news on Lady Wintervale. Wintervale also wanted to know what had happened to all the other mages entrapped by Atlantis that night in Grenoble; on that Titus also let him have the truth, which was that Titus did not really know.

It was when Wintervale asked about the state of the resistance as a whole that Titus fudged his answers. He did not want Wintervale demoralized by the heavy blow Atlantis had dealt the resistance, nor did he want to give the impression that he was personally interested in the developments taking place.

It was six days after Wintervale woke up that he spoke of the future for the first time, two simple, declarative sentences. “I am going to find the resistance. And I am going to join it.”

“You cannot walk on your own.”

The problem baffled Titus. Wintervale could move his toes. His lower limbs most certain had feelings—heat, cold, touch, he felt them all. With support, he shuffled along, effectively enough to reach where he needed to go. But without the strength of another to make up for his own lack of balance, even if he stood with his back against a wall, after a minute or so he would start tipping to one side and not be able to right himself.

They told everyone that Wintervale had badly strained a muscle, keeping the truth hidden as otherwise Mrs. Dawlish would insist on additional medical attention, and Wintervale did not want to be poked and prodded.

“I don't need to walk to use my elemental powers,” said Wintervale. “They can put me on a wyvern.”

“You have never been on a wyvern.”

“I can learn, after I find the rebellion. You are sure you don't have any contacts?”

“I am sure.” At least on this front Titus did not need to lie. His mother had died for her involvement with the rebels; he had no plans to repeat that mistake. “Good luck locating the resistance without getting caught by Atlantis.”

The look on Wintervale's face was not so much disappointment as despair—he had survived being pursued by Atlantis, he had discovered a rare and marvelous ability in himself, and yet he remained stuck at this nonmage school, with no way of finding his mother or contributing to the resistance.

Kashkari came into the room then, Cooper and Sutherland in tow. Titus slipped out, but Wintervale's distress stayed with him.

By nature and by necessity, he prepared incessantly for the future. After discovering that all along his mother had meant Wintervale, however, he could not think of the next week, or even the next day without some part of himself recoiling—without Fairfax, what future was there?

But he could not allow that dangerous self-indulgence to continue. His personal feelings did not matter—they never had. Only the task was paramount.

What he needed most, obviously, was for Wintervale to recover his balance and mobility. It was impossible for him to drag Wintervale in his current condition across the breadth of Atlantis to the Commander's Palace in the uplands—or at least extremely inadvisable.

At some point he would have to tell Wintervale everything—or at minimum admit to Wintervale that he, too, was willing to take on Atlantis. But with Wintervale's history of indiscretion, Titus planned to wait until he absolutely must.

What he could do in the meanwhile, both to prepare Wintervale and bolster the latter's morale, was to take him into the Crucible. Atlantis already knew about the Crucible. So even if Wintervale inadvertently blabbered about it, he would not alert Atlantis to anything new.

Before he dared show the Crucible to Wintervale, however, he must purge all traces of Fairfax from the book.

He sat down in the laboratory and studied her images for a long time, in the illustrations of “The Oracle of Still Waters” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Without those illustrations, after she left the school, he might never be able to see her again.

He undid the changes he had made and returned the illustrations to their original state.

As he was about to close the Crucible, he remembered to check “Battle for Black Bastion,” Helgira's story. And there it was, Fairfax's face. He had added her image to the other two stories, but not this one. A quick scan of the log of modifications that the Crucible kept informed him that the image was altered twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago this copy of the Crucible belonged to his mother.

Do not
, he told himself. What did it matter now why Princess Ariadne had made the change?

But he reached for the diary and opened it.

 

5 February, YD 1011

 

Many times I see a place in my visions and I have no idea of the location. Not this time. This time I immediately recognize the hulking shape of the Black Bastion, one of the most difficult locales in the Crucible.

It is night, but the fortress is lit with torches. And near the very top of the bastion, upon a balcony that during the day would have a magnificent view, stands a young woman in a white dress, her long, black hair whipping in the wind.

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.

“Mind taking me to the privy before you go?” asked Wintervale.

Wintervale's elemental powers had exploded in amplitude, but his bladder seemed to have shrunk in size, at least when Titus was around. “Come on, then.”

Wintervale sprang up, not in the direction of Titus's outstretched hand, but toward the window—and nearly took a header for his trouble. Titus barely kept him from hitting a corner of his shelves. “Careful!”

Wintervale stood with his forehead pressed against the window pane. “For a moment—for a moment I thought it was my mother.”

But all Titus saw as he looked out, besides a hawker he had never seen before this Half, was the usual street outside Mrs. Dawlish's house.

 

When Iolanthe arrived at the laboratory, after lights-out, the prince was already there. Or rather, he was in the Crucible, his hand over the book, his head resting on the table.

Even seemingly asleep, he looked tense and worried. Her heart clenched—she wished she could still help him.

Then why don't you?
asked another part of her.
Even if you are not the great heroine you imagined yourself to be, there is still so much to do.

But he doesn't want my help.

He only said you are not the One. When did he say he no longer needed your help?

Next to the Crucible on the table was a pastry box with a note underneath. She pulled out the note to read.

 

Dalbert told me Mrs. Hinderstone's shop also sells Frankish pastry, which are very popular with the patrons. These are from Paris. I hope you like them.

 

“These” were two cream puffs, a tiny fruit tart, and a mille-feuille, which consisted of alternating layers of smooth pastry cream and buttery puff pastry.

She almost pushed the box away from herself, afraid its contents would only ever taste of heartache and rejection. But somehow a piece of the fruit tart found its way into her mouth. It was delicious beyond belief—and all she could think of was the care he had always taken with her.

She laid her hand over his and kept it there for several minutes, before she started the password and the countersign to enter the Crucible.

 

In the reading room, Titus sat with his forehead on the cabinet-size book before him, his eyes bleary.

“Are you all right?” came Fairfax's voice.

He straightened. “I hate to sound like a broken clock but it is not safe for you to leave Mrs. Dawlish's after lights-out.”

“I know.”

She looked at him oddly. He could not decide whether she was displeased with him—or completely the opposite.

“You are not sleeping enough,” she said.

“I do not sleep well, in any case. But I was not sleepy, just overwhelmed with information.”

“What information?”

“I need Wintervale to be able to walk on his own power before we can set out for Atlantis. But before that, I have to find out what exactly is the matter with him.” He tapped the tome on the table. “This is the most comprehensive reference on how to interpret the Kno-it-all gauge's readings. Some combinations immediately narrow the choice down to one or two likely diagnoses. But gross motor impairment and mental instability open up endless possibilities—anything from the onset of a new phobia to an irreparable splintering of the psyche.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “The splintering of the psyche case dates to almost fifteen centuries ago, back when mages were still debating whether cancer was divine punishment for illicit misdeeds. I am not going to pay any mind to that.”

“Then what are you worried about?”

“Earlier today, he almost fell over getting to the window, because he thought he saw his mother outside. Yet from where he was sitting, he would have seen nothing but the sky—and maybe a bit of roof on the opposite side of the street.”