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.