“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 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.