“I am never wrong in these matters.”
“May I ask, sir,” ventured Persephone, “why do you have a canary with you?”
“Miss Buttercup? She is an exceptional judge of character. Has she made a peep since you welcomed me into your group?”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“Then you have her approval. Ah, I see from Miss Alcyone’s expression that she sees a gorgon. Now watch, Miss Buttercup is turning around. She will lay eyes on the gorgon, and she will express her disapproval.”
Fairfax issued a series of furious peeps. Was she warning him that he had gone too far?
“Your Highness,” said the Inquisitor directly behind him.
Her tone. His stomach roiled—she was livid.
The beauty witches all curtsied. He did not turn around. “I trust you can see I am busy, Madam Inquisitor.”
“I have changed my mind. Shall we to the Inquisitory?”
It was the last place he wanted to go. He hoped Fairfax was happy.
“My apologies, ladies,” he said to the beauty witches. “I must desert you for a short time. I hope you are not leaving immediately.”
He did not hear what they said in return.
It was time for his first Inquisition.
CHAPTER 
15
BEING A BIRD GAVE IOLANTHE the freedom to look anywhere she liked. What she found out was that everyone watched them. Him.
At first she put it down to his rank and his attire—his deep-blue overrobe, heavily embroidered with silver thread, was magnificent. But this was an occasion that overflowed with magnificent clothes on men and women of superior rank. And the way they looked at him, footmen and prime minister, serving maids and baronesses alike, it was as if he’d cast a spell on them.
He had Presence.
The moment he stepped off his chariot, it was obvious that he was no ordinary adolescent. He was rude and inaccessible, but he exuded an enigmatic charisma that could not be ignored.
He would never convince Atlantis—or anyone for that matter—to take him lightly.
Perhaps he knew that. His heart pounded next to her—he’d put her inside his overrobe for the trip to the Inquisitory. The tunic he wore beneath the overrobe was of very fine silk, redolent of the herbs with which it had been stored, warm with the heat of his body.
She burrowed deeper against him.
“I will keep you safe,” he murmured.
He meant it.
As long as he was safe, she was safe.
But how long would he remain safe?
Titus drove one of Alectus’s pegasus-drawn chariots—the phoenixes were too sensitive to be brought near a place as sinister as the Inquisitory. Lowridge, his captain of the guards, and six soldiers from the castle rode behind him, each on a white pegasus.
Night had fallen. All the streetlamps and houses had been lit, which only emphasized the dark, desolate stretches of quick pine. The column of red smoke that marked the location of the Inquisitory glowed bright and eerie, a display of power that dominated the skyline night and day.
The original Inquisitory had been lleveled during the January Uprising. Since its rebuilding, security had been airtight. The Inquisitor received no callers and gave no parties. The only way to get in, it was sometimes said, was to be dragged in.
The pair of pegasi that pulled Titus’s borrowed chariot certainly wanted to bolt—almost as much as he did. One could not fly over territory under the Inquisitor’s direct control; once they crossed its boundary, the pegasi had to trot on the ground. They whinnied, shied, and slapped each other with their tough wings. Titus cracked the whip near their ears to stop their jumpy antics.
Would that all he needed was a not-quite-lashing to pull himself together.
The new Inquisitory was a circular structure, the exterior one solid black wall, unbroken by a single window. Three sets of heavy gates led to an enclosed courtyard enveloped by an uncomfortably red-tinted light.
The Inquisitor’s second in command, Baslan, was on hand to greet Titus. Titus could not decide whether he ought to be happy about the Inquisitor’s absence or frightened that she was even now preparing for his Inquisition.
He tossed aside his reins and froze. Not ten feet from where he had pulled his chariot to a stop, a human skeleton poked out of the ground; the bony remains of its hand, the tips of the phalanges dark red, reached skyward as if seeking help from above.
“Interest choice of decoration,” he said, blood roaring in his ears.
“Half of the courtyard has been allowed to remain in ruins—a reminder for the servants of Atlantis to stay ever vigilant,” answered Baslan.
The ruined half was pockmarked and strewn with blasted chunks of wall and broken pieces of glass that glittered red in the light. There were no other human skeletons, but Titus saw a dog skeleton and the top half of a doll, which made him recoil until he realized it was not a mutilated baby.
At the center of the courtyard stood a hundred-foot-tall tower. From the top of the tower, red smoke billowed.
Titus exhaled with relief when their path at last led away from the courtyard into the building. He stripped off his driving gloves. His palms were damp with perspiration.
They descended immediately; the aboveground rooms were obviously too good to waste on prisoners. The air below was musty, as was usually the case for subterranean interiors, but every surface was scrupulously clean.
All the hygienic measures in the world, however, could not diminish the oppressiveness of the place. With every step he took, the walls seemed to close in another inch. The air grew warmer and denser. It suffocated.
Three flights down, a desire to flee seized him. Thousands and thousands of mages had been held here in the first few years after the January Uprising. No one knew what had happened to them. But their despair had seeped into the very walls. Invisible filaments of it curled around Titus’s ankles, driving chills up his tendons.
Three more flights down they emerged into a large circular space with eight corridors leading from it. The corridor they followed went on for a hundred and fifty feet. There were no bars, only solid walls and steel doors that were far too close together.
The cells could not have been more than four feet wide.
Baslan stopped halfway down the corridor. With a tap of his hand, a narrow section of the wall turned transparent. A small, dimly lit cell appeared before them, empty except for a thin cot on the stone floor. A woman sat on the cot, sobbing—the housebreaker.
“Rise,” proclaimed Lowridge, as his subordinates clicked their heels smartly. “You are in the presence of the Master of the Domain, His Serene Highness Titus the Seventh.”
The woman looked up in shock. Then contempt. She spat. “You lie!”
This amused Titus, if grimly. “Can she see us?”
“No, Your Highness,” answered Baslan. “The transparency is only one way.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Nettle Oakbluff. She is the registrar of Little Grind-on-Woe.”
Titus addressed the woman. “Why are you here?”
“I shouldn’t be!” the woman cried. “I was trying to help Atlantis. I was trying to get them the girl!”
Titus glanced at Baslan, whose expression remained perfectly composed.
“You are a subject of the Domain. Why do you seek to help Atlantis?”
“There is money in it.” Obviously a great deal of truth serum still flowed through the woman’s veins. “I overheard my in-laws-to-be talking about it all hush-hush. They said Atlantis was itching for a really powerful elemental mage and that the agent who brought in this mage stood to gain a huge reward.”
“And have you received said reward?”