Текст книги "The Burning Sky"

Автор книги: Sherry Thomas

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He collected himself. “What did the Oracle say about your guardian?”

“That he won’t be in the Inquisitory for much longer.”

“How will he escape?”

“Do oracles ever answer such questions?”

A loud knock came, not on his door, but hers. “You there, Fairfax?” asked Cooper. “I could use some help with my critical paper.”

“My flock bleats. I’d better shepherd.” She opened the door. “Cooper, old bloke. Have you missed me?”

Titus already missed her.

When she had left, he opened the Crucible to the illustration for “The Oracle of Still Waters.” Her face looked back at him from the surface of the pool. As he had hoped, the pond’s ability to capture the likeness of anyone who looked into it was immune from the reach of the Irreproducible Charm.

Titus VI had built the trick into the pond because he had wanted all the great and terrible mages who dwelled inside the Crucible to resemble him. Titus VII didn’t even like to look at his own face in the mirror, but he was immensely grateful that his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had been so silly.

Now he could work her likeness into any story of his choosing.

Now he could fight dragons for her.

And now he could kiss her again.

CHAPTER 19

PART OF A BRITISH BOY’S education consisted of memorization. In repetition class, pupils had to recite the forty of so lines of Latin verse they had been assigned to memorize.

Titus seldom viewed anything through the same prism as his classmates did. But on this mind-numbing exercise, he and they were in agreement: it was a colossal misuse of time. To make matters worse, although a boy could leave as soon as he had said his lines, sprinting out of the classroom like a puppy that had been kenneled too long, he could not say those lines until he had been called upon to do so. And Frampton invariably kept Titus waiting until almost everyone else had gone.

On the day Titus first returned to class after a weeklong convalescence, however, Frampton called on him second, immediately after Cooper, who always provided a perfect recital to set the standard for the rest of the class.

Titus, who had come to rely on listening to the lines repeated dozens of times during class to memorize them, stumbled badly.

Frampton tsked. “Your Highness, you are shortly to assume the reins of an ancient and magnificent realm. Surely the thought ought to compel you to do better.”

This was new. Frampton might have delighted in making Titus cool his heels, but he had never been openly antagonistic.

“The success of my rule does not rely on my ability to recite obscure Latin verse,” Titus said coldly.

Frampton showed no sign of being humbled by the rebuke. “I speak not of the memorization and delivery of specific lines, but of the understanding of duty. From everything I have seen of you, young man, you have a poor grasp of obligation and responsibility.”

Next to him, Fairfax sucked in a breath. She was not alone. The entire class was riveted.

Titus made a show of examining his cuff links. “It is irrelevant what a lackey such as you thinks of my character.”

“Ah, but times change. Nowadays princes from thousand-year-old houses may very well find themselves without a throne,” said Frampton smoothly. “Next, Sutherland. Let’s hope you’ve prepared better.”

Titus wasted no time in leaving. As soon as he was back in his room at Mrs. Dawlish’s, he inserted a piece of paper under the writing ball. No new intelligence awaited him. Not very surprising—only three hours ago Dalbert had reported that there had been little changes in the Inquisitor’s condition.

But if the Inquisitor remained unconscious, why had Frampton gone on the offensive? Simply to remind Titus that he was now persona non grata in Atlantean circles for having incapacitated one of the Bane’s most capable lieutenants?

He was jittery. More than a week after the Inquisition, he still had no idea how to interpret the rupture view of a skyful of wyverns and fire-spewing armored chariots. Fairfax’s march to greatness had stalled since her breakthrough with air. Their only concrete progress he could point to was an escape satchel that they had prepared and stowed in the abandoned barn.

They could not go on like this, at the mercy of events beyond their control. He had to find a way to neutralize the Inquisitor, exploit the rupture view, and spur Fairfax to firmer mastery over her powers.

He turned to his mother’s diary, hoping for guidance. If there was a silver lining to the dark cloud of the Inquisition, it was that his faith in her had been fully restored. The threads of Fortune wove mysteriously, but he had become convinced that Princess Ariadne, however briefly, had had her hand on the loom.

He lifted the pages carefully, one by one, feeling that peculiar tingle of anxiety in his stomach. It was not long before he came to a page that was not blank.

26 April, YD 1020

Exactly a year before her death.

A strange vision. I am not sure what to make of it.

Titus, looking much the same age as he does when he sees that distant phenomenon on a balcony, but wearing strange—nonmage?—clothes, is leaning out of the window of a small room. It is not a room I have ever seen at the castle, the Citadel, or the monastery, plain but for an odd flag on the wall—black and silver, with a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn.

The made-up flag of Saxe-Limburg. As far as Titus knew, there was only one in existence.

It is evening, or perhaps night, quite dark outside. Titus turns back from the window, clearly incensed. “Bastards,” he swears. “They need their heads shoved up their—”

He freezes. Then rushes to take a book down from his shelf, a book in German by the name of Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde.

There was nothing else.

Titus read the entry two more times. He closed the diary. The disguisement spell resumed. The diary swelled in size, its plain leather cover metamorphosing into an illustration of an ancient Greek temple.

Beneath the picture, the words Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde.

A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities.

So one evening in the not-too-distant future, he would curse from his window, then rush to read the diary again. That knowledge, however, did little to extricate him from his current quagmire.

Three knocks in rapid succession—Fairfax, back from class.

“Come in.”

She closed the door and leaned against it, one foot on a door panel. She had learned to walk and stand with a cocky jut to her hips. He had to rein himself in so his gaze didn’t constantly stray to inappropriate places on her person.

“You all right?” she asked.

“No further news on the Inquisitor. But it does not mean they cannot tighten the noose in the meanwhile.” He tossed aside his uniform jacket and his waistcoat. “I have to go to rowing practice.”

A boy well enough to attend classes was well enough for sports. Fingers on the top button of his shirt, he waited for her to vacate his room.

She gazed at him as if she hadn’t heard him, as if he weren’t headed out for a few hours on the river, but to some distant and perilous destination.

All about him the air seemed to shimmer.

Then, abruptly, she turned and opened the door. “Of course, you must get ready.”

Mrs. Hancock was in the corridor, making sure the boys were in bed for lights-out, when Titus placed one last piece of paper under the writing ball. The machine clacked. He waited impatiently for the keys to stop their pounding.

The report read:

The Inquisitor has yet to regain consciousness, but the latest intelligence has her responding better to stimuli. Atlantean physicians are optimistic she will continue to make headway. Baslan is rumored to have already scheduled a day of thanksgiving at the Inquisitory, so confident is he of his superior’s imminent recovery.

He jumped at the knock on his door.

“Good night, Your Highness,” said Mrs. Hancock.

He barely managed not to snarl. “Good night.”

Of course the improvement in the Inquisitor’s condition and Frampton’s new belligerence were related. Of course.

He looked through his mother’s diary again, but it was blank. He paced for a few minutes in his room, angry at himself for not knowing what to do. Then he was inside the Crucible, running down the path that led to the Oracle.

It was night. Dozens of lanterns, suspended from trees at the edge of the clearing, illuminated the pool.

“You again, Your Highness,” said the pool, none too pleased, as he showed himself. Flecks of golden light danced upon her darkened surface.

“Me again, Oracle.” He had visited her many times, but she had yet to give him any advice.

Her tone softened slightly. “At least you seem sincere—for once.”

“How can I keep her safe, my elemental mage?”

The pool turned silvery, as if an alchemist had transmuted water into mercury. “You must visit someone you have no wish to visit and go somewhere you have no wish to go.”

An Oracle’s message remained cryptic until it was understood. “My gratitude, Oracle.”

The pool rippled. “And think no more on the exact hour of your death, prince. That moment must come to all mortals. When you will have done what you need to do, you will have lived long enough.”

In the distance, obscured by rising dust, an army of giants advanced, as if an entire mountain range was scudding across the plain. The ground beneath Iolanthe’s feet shuddered. Boulders wobbled; pebbles hopped like so many drops of water on hot oil.

The wall that she had been building, from quarried blocks of granite originally intended for a temple, would have enabled the townspeople to attack the vulnerable soft spots atop the giants’ skulls. But the wall was nowhere near completion.

The giants bellowed and banged enormous hammers against their shields. She’d already stuffed cotton into her ears, but the clangor still startled her. Ignoring the din as best she could, she focused her mind on the next block of granite. It didn’t look particularly impressive in size, but it was five tons in weight. With the greatest difficulty, she’d managed to roll a three-ton block end over end to the base of the wall. But she couldn’t even lift a corner of this block off the ground.

The prince had assigned her three stories. In one, she needed to produce a cyclone to protect a poor family’s crops against a blizzard of locusts—but she could only come up with breezes. In another, she was to part the waters of a lake to rescue magelings who’d been stranded at the bottom in an ever-shrinking air bubble—had it been real, she’d have lost a great many magelings on her watch. And the wall—this was her sixth attempt at erecting the wall; she had yet to stop the giants.

Now when she woke up in the morning, the pain in her hands extended all the way to her elbows. She tried not to imagine what it would feel like when that same swollen sensation took over her entire body.

She kept on doggedly at her task until a giant hefted the very same granite block above his head and hurled it into the marketplace, setting off a long chain of screams.

She sighed. “And they lived happily ever after.”

No more giants. No more boulders. Instead of the deafening roar of battle, rain fell steadily and softly. She was back in the prince’s room and—

His hand was clamped over hers on the Crucible. His head rested on his other arm, his face turned toward her, his eyes closed. In the gray, watery light, he looked as tired as she felt. And thin, his face all angles. Granted, his was a remarkable bone structure—chiseled, one might say—but no one so young should be careworn to the point of gauntness.

Without quite realizing what she was doing, she reached out and touched his cheek. The instant her fingertips came into contact with his skin, she snatched her hand back. He did not react at all. She licked her lower lip, reached out again, and traced a finger along his jaw.

When she drew her hand back this time, she saw a note by his elbow.

I am in the reading room.

The teaching cantos consisted of more than classrooms. On the ground floor it also had a large library, referred to as the reading room. He’d been spending every spare minute there.

She looked back at him, this beautiful and just slightly warped creature. “I don’t care what the visions say,” she whispered, “I will not let you die. Not while I have a breath left.”

He was in the stacks, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, three books open before him in a semicircle, another dozen in a tall pile to the side.

Iolanthe picked up the book at the top of the pile. Her eyebrows nearly met her hairline at the title, How to Kill a Mage at Five Miles: A Primer on Distance Spell-Casting. “I have been wondering what you read in your leisure time.”

“A bit of light fare,” he said without looking up, “before I get back to Magical Properties of a Still Beating Heart.”

She smiled down at the top of his head. “So what areyou looking for?”

“Something that will let me put the Inquisitor into a permanent coma. She willawaken. She willput me under Inquisition again—without you by my side. My only hope is to find a way to attack while her mind is extended and vulnerable.”

How quickly she’d hardened—she barely blinked at his answer. “You’ll be in the same room with her. How will How to Kill a Mage at Five Mileshelp?”

“I like reading it—something I cannot say for books dealing with mind magic. And that is a tongue-in-cheek title, by the way. Distance spell-casting is a perfectly legitimate target-hitting sport in many mage realms.”

“So the book doesn’t teach you to kill?”

“It is like archery. If you strike someone at the right distance and speed, your arrow will kill, but that is not why English ladies enjoy it at their country house parties.” He took the book from her. “How was the wall, by the way?”

“Not built.”

He shook his head. “Not good. You must be able to take on the Bane, and I must be able to take on the Inquisitor.”

That, in a nutshell, was their problem. “I can go back in again after supper, but now I need to write my critical paper.”

“Can you write me one too? It does not have to be good.”

“I’ll bet most other fugitives from Atlantis don’t have to write two sets of critical papers.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

Her heart slipped from its mooring, as it always did when he smiled. “Only this once. And you owe me.”

As she turned to leave, he said, “English household management magazines.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That is what I read in my leisure time.”

“You like household management?”

“I like the authoritative answers the magazines give. Dear Mrs. So-and-So, all you need to have hair that shines like the moon is to mix olive oil and spermaceti in a proportion of eight to one and apply liberally. Dear Miss So-and-So, no, you will not wish to serve soup at your wedding breakfast. One or two hot dishes if you must, the rest should be cold.”

Solvable problems, that was what he liked. The pleasure of ordinary concerns. The resolute lack of real danger.

Someday,she thought. Someday.

Iolanthe felt like a seed after a good long spring shower, soaked to bursting—yet somehow unable to break through her shell. Her capacity for elemental magic might be grand, but her abilitystubbornly refused to improve.

At least the latest news offered some consolation. After a brief interval during which she’d seemed on the verge of consciousness, the Inquisitor had slipped deeper into her coma.

Iolanthe settled into a familiar cadence of classes and sports, a rhythm she had dearly missed in Little Grind. Sometimes it was almost possible to believe she was living only a slightly skewed version of normal life.

With the lengthening of the days, lockup happened much later in the evening, and boys were allowed outside as long as one last shimmer of the sun still remained above the horizon. For hours every day, she pitted herself against the boys on the pitch—where she could apparently do no wrong.

This athletic prowess earned her a ridiculous level of approval. She had always been careful to fit in wherever she went. But it was more than a little ironic that she had never been as popular as a girl as she was now as a boy, as someone who bore little resemblance to the real her.

This particular evening, after practice, many of the boys stayed behind to watch a game between the two best school clubs. Iolanthe packed up her gear and started toward Mrs. Dawlish’s. She enjoyed the camaraderie of her teammates, but she was always the first one off the pitch at the end of a practice: as much as she refused to believe the prophecy of the prince’s death, somehow it felt more ominous when she was away from him.

Kashkari fell into step beside her. They walked together, discussing a Greek assignment that was due in the morning. She remained somewhat wary of Kashkari, but no longer felt nervous in his company—he was most likely not a spy of Atlantis, only a shrewd and observant boy.

“What about dative or locative?” asked Kashkari.

“You can use the accusative, since they are going to Athens—makes it Athens-ward,” Iolanthe answered.

She’d discovered that her grasp of Greek, inferior in her own eyes, was considered quite proficient by the other boys.

“Accusative, of course.” Kashkari shook his head a little. “I wonder now how we got by when you weren’t here.”

“I have no doubt the devastation was widespread, the suffering universal.”

“Indeed, it was the Dark Ages in the annals of Mrs. Dawlish’s house. Ignorance was thick on the ground, and unenlightenment befogged all the windows.”

Iolanthe smiled. Kashkari grinned back at her. “If ever I can do something for you in return, let me know.”

You can pay a little less attention to me.“I’m sure I’ll be banging on your door as soon as I take up Sanskrit.”

Eton didn’t have such a course, but mages in upper academies were usually required to master a non-European classical language. Iolanthe, in her before-lightning days, had aspired to Sanskrit for its wealth of scholarship.

“Ah, Sanskrit. I dare say my Sanskrit is as good as your Latin—my family put me to it when I was five,” said Kashkari, rolling up his sleeve to check his elbow, which he had scraped on the ground in a fall during practice.

On his right arm, just beneath his elbow, he sported a tattoo in the shape of the letter M—for Mohandas, his given name, she supposed.

“What about Latin? Your Latin is good. Did you have a tutor for it before you came to England?”

He nodded. “Since I was ten.”

“Was that when you knew you’d be sent abroad for schooling?”

“On my tenth birthday, in fact. I remember that day because my relatives kept telling me about the night I was born, all the shooting stars.”

“What?”

“I was born in the middle of a meteor storm.”

“The one in November of”—she still had trouble with the way the English counted years—“1866?”

“Yes, that one. And then they’d tell me about the even greater meteor storm in ’33.”

“There was one in 1833?”

“The most magnificent meteor storm ever, according to—”

“Look, it’s Turban Boy and Bumboy.”

Iolanthe looked across the street to see Trumper and Hogg, snickering to each other.

“Somebody ought to give them a thrashing,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low.

“Do you thrash for your prince every night?” said Hogg, moving his hips obscenely.

Other boys on either side of the street were stopping to see what was going on.

“Ignore them,” Kashkari said calmly.

“Go home to your idol-worshipping, sister-marrying family,” said Trumper. “We don’t want your kind here.”

That was it. Iolanthe gripped her cricket bat and crossed the street.

“What a big stick you carry,” sneered Hogg. “Is that what the prince likes to use on you?”

She smiled. “No, just what I like to use on your friend.”

She swung the bat. Not very hard, since she didn’t want to kill Trumper, but still it connected with his nose in a very satisfying way.

Blood trickled out of Trumper’s nostrils. He howled. “My nose! He broke my nose!”

“You too?” she asked Hogg. “How about it?”

Hogg took a step back. “I—I have to help him. But you are going to regret this for the rest of your life.”

Several boys from nearby houses had stuck their heads out of their windows. “What’s going on?” they asked. “What’s that caterwauling?”

“Nothing,” said Iolanthe. “Some idiot walked into a lamppost.”

Trumper and Hogg took off amidst a volley of laughter—no one, it seemed, liked them.

When Iolanthe returned to Kashkari’s side, he looked at her with something between alarm and admiration. “Very unhesitating of you.”

“Thank you. I hope they’ll think twice now before insulting my friends in my hearing. Now what were you telling me about the meteor shower in 1833?”

Titus winced as he pulled himself out of the scull in which he had spent the past three hours rowing up and down the Thames. Fairfax was on the pier, waiting for him.

“Is something wrong?” he asked as they walked out of earshot of the other rowers. She usually did not come to the pier.

She tapped her cricket bat against the side of her calf in an agitated cadence. “Thirty-three years before I was born, there was another meteor storm, wasn’t there, an even more spectacular one? Were there no prophecies then concerning a great elemental mage?”

“There were. Seers fell over themselves predicting the birth of the greatest elemental mage of all time.”

“And?”

“And he was born in a small realm in the Arabian Sea. When he was thirteen, he caused an underwater volcano long thought dormant to erupt.”

Fire was a flamboyant power—as was lightning. But the ability to move mountains and raise new land from the sea was power on a different magnitude altogether.

She emitted a low whistle, suitably impressed. “What happened to him?”

“The realm was already under the dominion of Atlantis. The boy’s father and aunt had both died while taking part in a local resistance effort. When agents of Atlantis arrived to take the boy away, his family decided that they would never allow it. They killed him instead.”

This time her response was a long silence.

“What were the consequences to the boy’s family?” she asked, her voice tight.

“To the family specifically, I am not sure. But the Bane’s displeasure was great, and the entire realm suffered a battery of retaliatory measures. My mother believed that the Bane’s failure to obtain the boy caused a loss of vigor on his part, which in turn led to a slackening of Atlantis’s grip on its realms.

“Mages did not quite notice at first—not for years—but when they did, they began to test the leashes. There were minor infractions, which became rebellions, which became full-scale uprisings.”

“The January Uprising.”

“Baroness Sorren timed it to take advantage of the general chaos. The Juras was already a bloodbath, with heavy casualties on both sides. Atlantis was also having trouble with both the Inter-Dakotas and the realms of the subcontinent. And there were rumors of discontent in Atlantis itself. The leaders of the January Uprising thought they would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“But they themselves were crushed instead. Atlantis must have found a way to harness a new power.”

“Or an old one. My mother believed that the Bane had to deplete his own life force, something he had been careful to preserve throughout the long centuries of his life. Which would explain why he is so desperate to locate you.”

She turned the cricket bat around a few times, her motion growing more steady and deliberate. “I am not his to be had. And someday, he might just regret coming after me—after us—and not leaving well enough alone.”

It was not until Titus was in his room, changing, that he realized the significance of what she had said: she meant to wrap her hands around the reins of her destiny. Around the reins of theirdestiny.

An unfamiliar emotion surged in his chest, warm and weightless.

He was no longer completely alone in the world.

Titus stood a long time outside Prince Gaius’s door. Beyond awaited his mother’s murderer, who had died comfortably in his bed, in the full of old age.

Even now anger and hatred simmered in him. But the Oracle had said that he must visit someone he had no wish to visit, and he could not think of anyone, other than the Inquisitor, whose presence repelled him more.

He shouldered open the heavy door. Music spilled out, notes as sweet and succulent as summer melons. A handsome young man sat on a low white divan, surrounded by plump blue cushions, plucking at the strings of a lute.

“Where is Prince Gaius?” Titus demanded.

“I am he,” answered the young man.

But you are supposed to be an old man.All the other princes and princesses looked as they had close to the end of their lives. Hesperia in particular, though the gleam in her eyes remained undiminished, was as wrinkled as a shelled walnut. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

Only a few years older than Titus. “And you are qualified to teach everything you listed outside your door?”

“Of course. I am a prodigy. I was finished with volume two of Better Magesby the time I was sixteen.”

Titus had not yet progressed halfway through volume one of Better Mages, the definitive text on higher magic. Gaius teased another few bars of music from his lute, each chord more plummy than the last.

“How can I help you?” asked Gaius, who clearly believed in his own superiority, but was not particularly tedious about it. In fact, there was a glamour to his assurance—a charm, even.

The hard, grim old man Titus remembered had once been this winsome, carefree youth.

“Do you know anything about your daughter, Ariadne?”

“Please,” laughed Gaius, “I am not married yet. But Ariadne is a lovely name. I should like a daughter someday. I will groom her to be as great as Hesperia.”

He had hated the petitions that landed on his door yearly for him to abdicate in her favor. There had been a huge chasm between father and daughter.

“Do you know anything of your future?”

“No, except I am set to knock Titus the Third out of the triumvirate of greats. There is nothing anyone can do to dislodge the first Titus and Hesperia, but I should easily surpass the third Titus’s achievements. What do you think they will call me? Gaius the Grand? Or perhaps Gaius the Glorious?”

They had called him Gaius the Ruinous. And he had known it.

“Care to hear a piece I wrote myself?” asked Gaius.

He began without waiting for a reply. The piece was very pretty, as light and sweet as a spring breeze. His face glowed with enjoyment, blissfully ignorant that he would later ban music from court and destroy his priceless instruments one by one.

When he was done, he looked expectantly at Titus. Titus, after a moment of hesitation, clapped. It was good music.

The prince—who would someday have no music, no child, and only tatters of his youthful dreams—graciously inclined his head, acknowledging the applause.

“Now, Your Highness,” said Titus, “I would like to ask you some questions about Atlantis.”