The Perilous Sea (6 page)

A clear, blue mage light grew and spread. “I am going to look at your wound. You'll be a burden to me if you can't move on your own.”

With the nonharming covenant in place, she could not do anything to worsen his condition. Still, unease seized him at the thought of being more or less at her mercy. But he had no choice. “Go ahead.”

She cut away his clothes and sprinkled a cool, fragrant liquid onto his wound, a rain that doused a raging wildfire. He heard himself pant—from the blessed reduction of pain.

“Now I need to clean the wound,” she warned him.

Innumerable particles of sand had dug into his flesh. It might be a literal bloodbath to take them all out. Dread roared in his head; he clenched his teeth and said nothing.

The pain returned, sharp and tearing. He swallowed a scream and braced himself for more. But she only sprinkled more of what must be tears of the Angels on his back.

“It's done,” she said. “I removed all the grains of sand at once, since we don't have much time.”

He would have expressed gratitude, if he were not shaking too much to speak.

She applied layers and layers of various ointments, dressed his wound, and offered him a handful of granules. “Gray ones for strength. Red ones for pain—otherwise you'll still hurt too much to move.”

He swallowed them whole.

“Stay where you are for a minute, for everything to take effect. Then we must get going.”

“Thank you,” he managed.

“My, words I thought I'd never hear from you,” she said.

She checked and double-checked all the labels as she put the remedies back into her bag, with the care of a librarian reshelving books according to a particularly rigid reference code.

Now that he knew she was a girl, he was astonished that he had thought her a boy until they had been pressed together from shoulders to knees. Yes, there had been the man's clothes, the short hair, and the somewhat gravelly voice, but surely . . . He could only shake his head inwardly at the potency of assumption.

She glanced up, caught him staring, and frowned—she had a rather fearsome frown. “What's that cold thing inside your clothes?”

He was only just beginning to become aware of a chill against his heart, which he had hardly noticed earlier, when the pain from his back had crowded out all other sensations. Gingerly, he put one hand under his jacket. His fingers came into contact with something icy.

An attempt to move it chafed the back of his neck. That something was a pendant. He yanked the cord from around his neck.

The pendant was the shape of half an oval. The other half was clearly missing. Where was it? Who had it? And did the temperature of his half of the pendant indicate that the other half was far, far away, perhaps on a different continent altogether?

He sat up and examined his ruined clothes—jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. According to the labels sewn into the seams, they had been made by a tailor of Savile Row, London.

He found the pocketknife he had used earlier, engraved with a coat of arms that had a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn in the quadrants. The waistcoat yielded a watch, made of a cool, silver-gray metal, engraved with the same coat of arms. The jacket's inside pocket contained a wallet—and again the same coat of arms.

Inside the wallet was a negligible amount of nonmage currency, British, by the looks of the coins. But more important, there were several cards, all with the same coat of arms yet once more, and on the other side, the words
H. S. H. Prince Titus of Saxe-Limburg
.

Was he this Prince Titus? What kind of place was Saxe-Limburg? There was no mage realm by that name. And as far as he knew, not a nonmage one either.

She handed him a tunic from her satchel. He destroyed the ruined clothes, stowed the pendant inside the wallet, and shoved the wallet and the watch into his trouser pockets. A hot, unpleasant sensation tore across his back as he lifted his arms overhead to pull on the tunic, but it was ignorable.

She tossed a waterskin his way. He drank nearly half of the contents of the waterskin, gave it back to her, and pointed at the broken strap of her satchel. “I can repair that for you.”

“Go ahead, if it will make your conscience feel better.”

He rejoined the two halves of the strap. “Why do you assume I have a conscience?”

“Indeed. When will I stop being such a bumpkin?”

She enlarged the space in which they found themselves and stood up. “
Linea orientalis.
”

A faint line appeared underfoot, running due east.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, a better question than
Where are we?
He did not want to betray the fact that he had no idea of their location.

“The Nile.”

So they were in the Sahara. “How far are we from the Nile?”

“What do you think?”

A cool challenge was in her eyes. He realized that he enjoyed looking at her—the arrangement of her features was aesthetically pleasing. But more than that, he liked the assured way she carried herself, now that she no longer bothered to be nice to him. “I do not know enough to tell.”

At his admission, she cast him a speculative look. “We are seven hundred miles west of the Nile.”

“And how far south of the Mediterranean?”

“About the same.”

That would put them approximately a hundred, a hundred twenty miles southwest of the nearest Bedouin realm, one allied with Atlantis, no less. The armored chariot must have taken off from an Atlantean installation in that realm, which would explain how they managed to arrive on the scene so fast.

But why? Why would Atlantis come racing? Was it for the same reason that he would rather endure any amount of pain than be caught?

He rose to his feet—and would have wobbled if he had not braced himself with a hand against the sand wall, which felt almost damp against his skin.

“Can you walk?” she asked, her tone bordering on severe.

“I can walk.”

He expected her to say something cutting, along the lines of how she would gladly leave him behind if he could not keep up. But she only handed him a nutrition cube. “Let me know when you need to rest.”

An odd sensation overcame him: after a moment or two he recognized it as embarrassment. Mortification, almost. There was still a chance, of course, that everything about her was a pretense. But it seemed more and more likely that she was simply a very decent, even compassionate, person.

He took a bite of the nutrition cube, which tasted like lightly flavored air. “I guess this is also poisoned, like your remedies.”

The corner of her lips lifted slightly. “Of course.”

She excavated along the line she had made, maintaining a moving space just large enough for them to walk abreast. The air he breathed was cool and slightly moist. The sand that crunched beneath his feet had a barely perceptible sheen of wetness. Overhead and to either side of them, sand flowed backward, making him feel a little dizzy. Making him feel as if he were in a submarine vessel, navigating in the dark depths of a strange ocean.

A quick test told him that they were ninety-three feet below the surface. A mobile dome—even an adamantine dome—could not hold up under the weight of so much sand. Only the girl's elemental powers kept them from being buried alive.

Her face was almost blank with concentration, her eyes downcast and half closed. Her hair was blue-black in the mage light and the cut of it made him notice her bone structure and her full lips.

She glanced at him—he had been staring. He turned his attention to his wand instead, which he recognized as a replica of Validus, Titus the Great's wand. Upon entering adulthood mages typically chose to commission original designs for their wands; before that, they were often given wands that were copies of those once wielded by legendary archmages.

So nothing there, other than that he was probably still underage and that someone in his family admired Titus the Great.

“Does that tell you who you are?” she asked, her chin pointing toward his wand.

The significance of her question did not escape him.
Does that tell you who you are?
She assumed that he did not otherwise know his own identity. Which was quite true but hardly the conclusion someone would come to, from knowing him for all of a few minutes, unless . . .

Unless she also did not know that about herself.

He handed over one of the cards from his wallet. She examined it carefully, front and back, murmuring spells to reveal hidden writing. But it was what it was, an ordinary nonmage calling card.

“Do you have anything that tells you who you are?” He asked the same question in return.

She looked up for a second, as if debating whether she wished to give any answers, reached into her trousers pocket—and went completely still. He heard it too. Something was coming up from behind them, something big and metallic, scraping the bedrock as it approached.

CHAPTER
6

England

“TAKE A LOOK AT THIS,”
said Iolanthe. She opened a drawer, took out a framed photograph, and handed it to Wintervale.

Wintervale, Cooper, and Titus were in her room. They had just come back from their last class on a short day. It was hours from teatime, but she had offered to share a cake from High Street and Mrs. Dawlish's boys were not known to turn down opportunities to eat.

Wintervale whistled at the photograph. “Nice.”

Cooper took the framed photograph from him. “Pretty.”

“I kissed her,” said Iolanthe.

Titus, who had been examining a tin of biscuits from her cupboard, did not look up. “I have killed more dragons than you have kissed girls, Fairfax.”

“And how many dragons have you killed, Your Highness?” asked Cooper eagerly.

“None.”

Wintervale nudged Iolanthe. “Fairfax, I do believe the prince has insulted your manhood.”

“My dear Wintervale,” said Iolanthe, “the prince has just admitted to having never brought down a single firedrake in his entire life. How could
he
possibly insult
my
manhood?”

Titus glanced at her then, a slight, knowing smile on his face. The effect of that smile was a streak of heat across her skin.

Cooper thrust the photograph toward Titus. “Do you want to see the girl Fairfax kissed, prince?”

The prince barely scanned the picture. “Ordinary.”

“His Highness is jealous because he wishes he could have kissed her,” Iolanthe said to Cooper and Wintervale.

“I do not kiss commoners,” said Titus, looking her full in the eyes.

She was most certainly a commoner, without a drop of aristocratic blood. And he had most certainly kissed her at every opportunity.

“No wonder you are so ill-tempered all the time,” she replied.

Wintervale and Cooper laughed.

The door swung open and Sutherland poked in his head. “Gentlemen, I have excellent news: we could be looking at twenty-four hours of debauchery.”

“Every day of my life is twenty-four hours of debauchery,” Titus said, his attention again on the biscuit tin. “You will have to do better than that, Sutherland.”

This took Sutherland aback. He was one of those boys who had thought Titus an insignificant Continental princeling who ruled over a dilapidated castle and ten acres of land. But after the events of the Fourth of June, Sutherland had become rather more respectful. He stood at the door, blinking a little, not quite sure how to respond.

“Don't listen to him, Sutherland. His Highness knows as much about debauchery as he does about killing dragons,” said Iolanthe. “Now tell me your news.”

Sutherland cleared his throat rather sheepishly. “My uncle has a house in Norfolk, on the coast. He has agreed to let me have the use of it to entertain a few of my friends. We can make a trip of it Saturday and Sunday—play a bit of cricket, shoot some grouse, and lay waste to a very fine collection of cognac.”

Wintervale was on his feet. “I am all for it.”

“And everyone else?” Sutherland gestured at the rest of the room.

“They too, of course,” Wintervale answered for them.

“Excellent. I will have my uncle issue a letter to Mrs. Dawlish, stating that he will ensure adequate supervision and allow only activities that strengthen both body and soul.”

“Which encompasses laying waste to his very fine collection of cognac, I take it,” said Iolanthe.

“Precisely!” Sutherland winked. “And if Kashkari returns in time, let him know he is also invited.”

Sutherland sauntered off. Wintervale and Cooper, too, departed, after they had ransacked Iolanthe's supply of cake. Titus remained, consuming a scone at a leisurely pace, studying her from across the room.

It was possible that over summer he had become broader across the shoulders. And perhaps half an inch taller. But his eyes were still the same, young and ancient at once. And his gaze, focused entirely on her . . . heat again swept through her.