The Burning Sky (25 page)

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
ability
stubbornly 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 match 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 extinct 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 decades—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.”

“Baron Wintervale 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
their
destiny.

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 Mages
by 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.”

CHAPTER 20

IN THE DISTANCE, SWORDS, MACES,
and clubs bewitched by the Enchantress of Skytower continued to hurtle toward Risgar's Redoubt. Titus went through a cascade of spells to lock, steady, amplify, and focus his aim. The missiles must be struck down when they were more than three miles out, beyond the outer defensive walls of the redoubt. The moment they crossed over the walls, they would dive to the ground to wreak havoc on lives and property.

It was enjoyable, the repetition of the spells. It would have been meditative had his aim been perfect. But his success with moving objects hovered stubbornly at 50 percent. He would hit a few targets in a row, then miss the next few.

“That's it for this flock,” shouted the captain. “Eat something quick if you need to. Visit the privy. The next flock will be here in no time.”

Fairfax appeared next to him on the rampart, paying little attention to the soldiers rushing about. “Sorry it took so long. Rogers' verses were in terrible shape.”

He had heard an Eton education described as something that taught boys to write bad verses in Latin and just as awful prose in English.

“You ought to charge a fee for your help.”

“Next Half I will. You wanted to see me?”

He always wanted to see her. Even when they were both in the Crucible together, the sad truth was that they saw far too little of each other, with most of her time spent in the practice cantos, and most of his in the teaching cantos.

He took her elbow and exited the Crucible. “Remember what I told you about the rupture view?”

She nodded. “The image of wyverns and armored chariots you saw in your head when I interrupted the Inquisitor.”

“I cannot be completely sure, but after speaking to my grandfather, I think it is the outer defenses of the Commander's Palace in Atlantis.”

“The one in Lucidias?”

Lucidias was the capital city of Atlantis. He shook his head. “That compound is called Royalis—it used to be the king's palace, when Atlantis still had kings. The Commander's Palace is in the uplands. My grandfather had a spy who managed to send back a message in a bottle that traveled a thousand miles in open ocean. He indicated the rough location of the palace and noted that it had several rings of defense, one of wyverns, one of lean, swift, armored chariots, and another of huge chariots that carried dragons.”

“You didn't mention dragons being carried.”

“No, my view was too brief to notice all the details. I knew fire was coming out from some of the chariots, but I did not know what was producing the fire. It makes sense—several of the dragon species with the hottest fires either cannot fly or cannot fly well. By putting them on aerial vehicles, Atlantis can better exploit their fire.”

She rose from her chair, went to his tea cabinet, and pulled out the small bag of chocolate macaroons he had recently purchased on High Street. Slowly, she ate three macaroons, one after another.

“It sounds as if you mean to tell me we will have to go to the Commander's Palace. Would it not be to our advantage to lure the Bane out to a less hostile location?”

He extended his hand toward her—he needed something to fortify him too. “What do you think of our chances at this less hostile location?”

She placed a few macaroons on his palm. “Next to nil.”

He took a bite of a macaroon. “And you think so because?”

“He is invincible. He cannot be killed—or so mages say.”

“And they are right—for once. Twice the Bane has been killed before eyewitnesses. Once in the Caucasus, where mages are experts at distance spell-casting. The second time when he was on the subcontinent to quell an uprising.

“In both cases, he was said to have been destroyed—brains and guts all over the place. In both cases, by the next day he was walking around, right as rain. And in both cases, the Domain sent spies to verify the accounts; they returned baffled because the witnesses were telling the truth.”

She fell back into her seat. “He
resurrected
?”

“Or so it seems. That was the reason my grandfather was interested in the defenses at the Commander's Palace. If the Bane was truly invincible, he could sleep in the open and not fear for his life. But the Bane does fear something. And so does the Inquisitor—or she would not have been thinking about the defenses of the palace, which are vulnerable to great elemental powers.”

She bowed her head.

Sometimes, as he lay in bed at night, he imagined a future for her beyond her eventual confrontation with the Bane. A popular, well-respected professor at the Conservatory of Magical Arts and Sciences—she had mentioned the goal several times in the school records Dalbert had unearthed for Titus—she would try to live a quiet, modest life.

But wherever she went, thunderous applause would greet her, the great heroine of her people, the most admired mage in her lifetime.

It was a future that did not include him, but it gave him courage to think that, by doing his utmost, perhaps he could still make it come true for her.

Tonight, however, that future was dimmer and more distant than ever.

She lifted her face. “Is it over the Commander's Palace that you would fall?”

To his death, she meant.

He swallowed. “It is possible. My mother saw a night scene. There was smoke and fire—a staggering amount of fire, according to her—and dragons.”

“Which stories in the Crucible have dragons?”

“Half of them, probably. ‘Lilia, the Clever Thief,' ‘The Battle for Black Bastion,' ‘The Dragon Princess,' ‘Lord of the—'”

“What about ‘Sleeping Beauty'? My first time in the Crucible you said you'd take me to her castle someday to fight the dragons.”

He had deliberately not mentioned Sleeping Beauty. “The dragons there are brutal. I put in the toughest ones as part of my own training. And I still get injured, even though I have been doing this for years.”

“I want to go after supper,” she said.

“You already did two sessions in the Crucible today; you will not be in top form for the dragons.”

Her voice brooked no dissent. “I imagine by the time I get to the Commander's Palace, I'll be quite tired too. I might as well get used to deploying my powers under less than optimum conditions.”

He wavered. He had no good reason to refuse her, but if she succeeded . . .

He was being irrational. Her first time she would not even get inside the castle's gates, let alone climb all the way to the garret. He had nothing to fear.

“All right,” he said, “if you insist, we will go after supper.”

 

A thick ring of tangled briar girded Sleeping Beauty's castle. The prince pointed his wand and blasted a fifty-yard-long tunnel through the bramble.

The white marble of the castle's walls, lit by lamps and cressets, gleamed at the end of the tunnel. Inside the tunnel, however, only fantastically shaped shadows flickered. Iolanthe called forth globes of fire to float before her, shining their light on the path.

Her heartbeat was at an almost painful velocity—naturally brave she was not. She took a couple of deep breaths and tried to distract herself. “Why do you put the most brutal dragons here, rather than in a different story?” she asked him.

He blinked, as if the question had startled him. “It is convenient.”

As far as she knew, every story was equally convenient to access in the Crucible. “Is it because you get to kiss Sleeping Beauty afterward?”

She was only joking. Or at least half joking. But he opened his mouth—and said nothing.

She stopped, flabbergasted by his implicit admission. “So . . . you want me to fall in love with you, while you play kissing games with another girl?”

It was the first time she had ever mentioned this particular scheme of his in the open.

He swallowed. “I have never done anything of the sort.”

Since he hadn't doubled over in pain, she had to accept his answer as truthful. All the same, what wasn't he telling her?

An unearthly shriek split the night, nearly tearing her eardrums.

“They have smelled us,” said the prince, his voice tight.

Overhead, flame roared, a comet of fire that shed pinpricks of orange through the thick tangle of thorns above. The heat of the flame made her turn her face away and shield it with her arms.

“What are they, exactly?” she asked, forgetting Sleeping Beauty for the moment.

“A pair of colossus cockatrices.”

She'd seen dragons at the Delamer Zoo quite a few times. She'd seen dragons at the circus. And once she'd gone on a safari with Master Haywood to the Melusine Archipelago, to see wild dragons in their native habitats. Still her jaw slackened as she emerged from the tunnel. Standing before the castle's gates were two dragons with roosterlike heads, whose dimensions dwarfed those of the castle's walls. “Are they a mated pair?”

Colossus cockatrices, wingless, were ground nesters. To protect their eggs, the combined fire of a mated pair, thanks to a process that was still not clearly understood, became one of the hottest substances known to magekind.

The prince didn't need to answer. The cockatrices before the castle entwined their long necks—exactly what a mated pair did—and screeched again.

An explosion of fire sped at them, its mass greater and hotter than anything she'd ever known. Instinctively she pushed back.

Her shriek nearly rivaled that of the cockatrices. The agony in her palms, as if she'd plunged her hands into boiling oil.

“Fiat praesidium maximum!”
the prince shouted. “Are you hurt?”

The fire stopped abruptly, barricaded a hundred feet away. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see blisters the size of saucers. But her palms were not even reddened from the heat. “I'm fine!”

“This shield can take two more hits. Should I set up another shield?”

“No, I want to see what I can do.”

The dragons took a fifteen-second rest, then attacked again. She tried to stop the fire from reaching the shield, but failed miserably. The shield cracked, distorting her view of everything behind it.

Fifteen seconds. Attack. The shield blocked the fire, but dissipated in the wake of it.

She reminded herself that she was dealing with illusions. But the stink of the cockatrices, the crackle of the brambles burning behind her, the torch flames that leaped back from the dragon fire, as if in fear—they were all too real.

She threw up a wall of water as the cockatrices screamed again. The water evaporated before the fire had even touched it.

Ice. She needed ice. She was not adept at ice, but to her surprise, a substantial iceberg materialized at her command.

The ice melted immediately.

Changing tactics, she used air to try to divert the fire. But all she did was split the fire mass in two, both halves hurtling straight toward them.

Now she had no choice but to pit herself directly against the dragons.

Ordinary fire was as pliant as clay. But this fire was made of knives and nails. She shrieked again with pain. But was she doing anything to the fire? Was she slowing it? Or did it merely seem to arrive at a more leisurely pace because the agony in her hands distorted her perception of time?

Slow or swift, it swooped down toward them.

“Run!” she yelled at the prince.

For the first time in her life, she fled before fire.

 

She opened her eyes to find herself back in the prince's room, seated before his desk, her hand on the Crucible. The odor of charred flesh lingered in her nostrils. The skin on her back and her neck felt uncomfortably hot, as if she'd been out in the sun too long.

The prince knelt before her, one hand clamped on her shoulder, the other on her chin, his eyes dark and anxious. “Are you all right?”

“I—think so.”

He set two fingers against the pulse at the side of her throat. “Are you sure?”

Not at all. “I'm going back in.”

She might not have been born with natural courage, but she did loathe failure.

There was no fire burning in the bramble tangle and no tunnel going through: the Crucible always returned to its original state. The moons had risen, twin crescents, one pale, one paler.

“Does your shield spell have a countersign?” she asked the prince.

He hesitated, as if he wanted to tell her again to save the dragons for another day. Instead he gave her the countersign. She practiced the spell. When she thought her shield sturdy enough, she blasted a path through the brambles.

Walking through the tunnel, they discussed tactics and agreed that in order to eventually counter dragon fire, she must first achieve safety.

“Let's both put up shields, mine on the outside of yours,” she said. That way, if her shield proved less than stalwart, they'd still have his for protection.

“Good idea.”

“But if my shield is good enough, then I'll keep going.”

He nodded. “I will stay on this side and distract the cockatrices—if they alternate their fire between the two of us, it will give you more time to figure out what to do. But for this time, do not go beyond the front steps of the castle.”

“Why?” But then she remembered. “Is it because you don't want me to see Sleeping Beauty?”

“That is not—”

“Is she pretty?”

“She does not exist.”

“In here she does. Is she pretty?” She disliked herself for the pestering questions, but she couldn't seem to stop.

“Pretty enough.” He sounded strained.

“Do you enjoy kissing her?”

Better than you enjoy kissing me?

“I have not kissed her since I met you.” Suddenly it was the Master of the Domain speaking, his tone hard, his eyes harder.

Misery and thrill collided in her. Had he declared that he'd given up other girls for her? Or was she being a complete fool?