The Perilous Sea (17 page)

Footsteps echoed. She turned around to see Titus coming out from the open doors of the villa, about to start down the steps that led to the terrace. He froze as he saw her. Her cheeks scalded; he looked as mortified as she felt.

After an interminable silence, he braced his hand on the balustrade of the steps and cleared his throat. “How do you find the ice?”

“Very palatable.” She managed to find her voice. “I've only ever had the pinemelon-flavored one at Mrs. Hinderstone's in Delamer.”

“When I was in Delamer this summer, I had Dalbert bring me some of Mrs. Hinderstone's ices to try—since you mentioned the place.”

She had mentioned it only once, in passing, when they were discussing something else altogether. “Did you like them?”

“I did, especially the lumenberry flavor. But the pinemelon is nice too.”

“Master Haywood always had the lumenberry. I preferred the pinemelon.”

“I was hoping one of them would be your favorite,” he said quietly.

From what he had told her, it was not difficult to modify details in a story inside the Crucible: one only had to write the changes in the margins of the pages. So it was not as if he had sneaked back into the Domain and smuggled out the ices against all odds. But still something fluttered in her stomach, followed by a feeling of constriction in her chest.

He had wanted everything to be perfect.

And it would have been.

It would have been.

At her silence, he cleared his throat again. “I was just about to leave. Enjoy your ice.”

He disappeared on the tail end of those words, leaving her alone in a place where they were supposed to be together.

She had come because she had not been able to help her curiosity. However difficult the experience might prove, she had wanted to see the place he had prepared for her—for them. Why had he come back? He already knew exactly what he had done with the place.

Because she wasn't the only one who wished that the maelstrom had never happened. Who was drawn to the summer villa, despite the pain it would cause, to imagine what it would have been like, had things been different.

She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

How did one fall out of love without falling apart at the same time?

 

The reading room, the main library in the teaching cantos of the Crucible, was vast. It might very well be infinite, for all Iolanthe knew: shelves went on until they converged into a single point in the distance.

She approached the help desk—an empty station near the door—and said, “I would like everything available on Horatio Haywood from the last forty years.”

Books populated the shelf behind the desk: compilations of student-run newspapers on which he had served as reporter and editor; journals that published his scholarly articles; the dissertation he had written for his Master of the Art and Science of Magic degree from the Conservatory.

She picked up his dissertation. There had been a copy of it in their home, which she had tried to read as a little girl and had understood nothing of. But now, as she flipped through the pages, her eyes grew wider and wider. She knew Master Haywood's research specialty had been archival magic, which dealt with the preservation of spells and practices no longer in popular usage. But she'd had no idea that his dissertation revolved around memory magic.

In the dissertation, Master Haywood traced the development of memory magic and chronicled the remarkable precision of the spells at the height of its popularity.
9
One could erase memories by the hour—by the minute if one really wanted to. And by the outlines of precise, concrete events. Enjoyed oneself enormously at a party, with the exception of a drunken kiss? With one quick wave of the wand, it would be as if the kiss had never happened—the party was now a long, unmarred stretch of outstanding memories.

She left the reading room reluctantly—there were set times in the day, called Absences, when Mrs. Dawlish and Mrs. Hancock counted their boys, to make sure the latter hadn't gone missing. The prince was still in the laboratory, seated opposite her, flipping the pages of his mother's diary.

It was as if a fist had closed around her heart, seeing him spending time with his one true love.

He looked up. “Did you find anything useful?”

She was determined to speak normally. “Master Haywood did his dissertation on memory magic, the kind that the memory keeper eventually applied on him.”

“So he supplied the expertise that was used against him?”

“Probably.”

He was silent for a moment. “Do you want to find out whether
you
have memory lapses?”

The question astonished her. “Me?”

He pointed his wand at himself. “
Quid non memini?
”

What do I not remember?

A line appeared in the air, straight and marked at regular intervals, like a tape measure. With a wave of his wand, the line moved closer to Iolanthe, so she could see that it was a timeline, divided into years, months, weeks, and days. About three-fifths of the timeline was white, the rest red.

She had never seen anything like it. Even Master Haywood's dissertation had mentioned nothing of the kind. “This represents the state of your memories?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when you were eleven?” Three days short of eleven, actually. That was when the line abruptly turned red.

“I learned that I would die young. And I decided to rid myself of the memories of the details of the prophecy, so I would not be constantly preoccupied with them.”

You would not die young, not if I
—she barely stopped herself from speaking those words aloud. Wintervale would have to keep him alive now, Wintervale who was not known for his ability to remain cool under pressure.

She said instead, “It's harmful, isn't it, to suppress memories for so long?”

“Depends on how you do it. See those dots?” The dots were black in color and floated above the timeline. The first one coincided with the color change of the timeline, the rest were distributed at three-month intervals. “They show how often that particular memory is allowed to surface in my mind. The color and shape of the dots assure me that the exact same memory is excised again each time, and that nothing else has been tampered with.”

“You worry about people tampering with your memories?”

“It is almost impossible for that to happen without my full consent—the heirs of the House of Elberon are protected by many hereditary spells to make sure they do not become unwitting puppets in the hands of others. But I can do it to myself. This tool reassures me that I have not been persuaded to tamper with my own memories and then forget about it.” He waved away the memory line. “Would you like to see the state of your memories?”

“You believe my memories have been tampered with?”

Her question seemed to surprise him. “You
do
not
think so? Your guardian is an expert. The memory keeper is another expert. They had a huge secret to protect in you. Between the two of them, it would be almost impossible for you to come through unscathed.”

For the longest time she had not known that she could control air, but she had thought her ignorance the result of an otherwise spell. Could it have been caused by memory magic instead?

“Show me, then.”

He pointed his wand at her. She gasped: the representation of the state of his memories had been a simple line, but hers was an entire mural. There was almost no part of the nearly seventeen-year-long timeline that had not been tampered with. It showed white for only the first few months of her life. Then all colors of the rainbow appeared, some in several gradations. Above the timeline were not only dots, but triangles, squares, and pentagons—all the way to dodecagons. And whereas on the prince's memory line, the dot that represented his suppressed memory stayed the same size, on her line, the shapes kept increasing in size at every iteration.

Her mind is not quite her own
. Master Haywood had said that a long time ago, about the elderly mother of one of his colleagues. Iolanthe never thought that could apply to her, but it did. Her memory was riddled with holes.

The prince peered at the timeline. “They are all compound events.”

“What is a compound event?”

“When my suppressed memory is allowed to surface, and then resuppressed, I remember the surfacing, I just do not remember what surfaced. But for you, every time your memories are allowed to surface, all the memories around the surfacing are also suppressed. So that you do not realize that there are things about yourself you cannot recall.”

She examined the pattern of the resurfacing. “Every two years.”

“Two years is at the very edge of the margin of safety.”

So the memory keeper didn't want to corrupt the health of her mind, but she also didn't want Iolanthe to remember more often than she absolutely must. “The next time I will remember is in the middle of November, if the pattern holds.”

“Your birthday.”

Her birthday, during the meteor shower, which in the end had portended no greatness. The trickery by the memory keeper, the sacrifices on the part of Master Haywood—they were all ultimately meaningless.

“They could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble,” she said, her tone harsh. “Master Haywood threw away his entire life.”

The prince looked down, closed his mother's diary, and said, “Let us go. The physician for Wintervale should arrive any moment now.”

CHAPTER
15

The Sahara Desert

THE ARMORED CHARIOTS WERE ADVANCING
all too quickly.

Despite the frigid night air, Titus perspired. Fairfax could not be vaulted. He would not manage to levitate her again so soon. Hiding inside the rock formation was not an option: at least half of the hunting ropes he had just diverted would come after them en masse. And there was not even enough sand underfoot in which to bury themselves, just a scant half inch that was no help whatsoever.

He murmured a prayer, slipped out of the tensile dome, and blind vaulted toward the western horizon, materializing halfway up a massive dune. Pointing his wand skyward, he sent up a silver-white flare that burst midair into an intricate pattern he could not recognize from where he stood.

He blind vaulted again, northward this time, and sent up another flare, hoping it would appear to be an answering signal to the first one, which not only still hung in the air, but had expanded to remarkable dimensions, bright and huge against the starscape—a phoenix, its wings lifted high.

A deep breath and it was back to the rock formation, to Fairfax's defense, should the armored chariots prove unwilling to be diverted. The armored chariots, however, were gone, speeding toward the beacons, the second of which was also an enormous phoenix, flame-colored and warlike.

They were no ordinary beacons, yet he had produced them without even thinking.

He pushed back inside the tensile dome and fell to his knees. “I am beginning to think I do not want to know who I am, or who you are, if this is the sort of danger that keeps chasing us.”

She slept on, unconscious of their peril. He rested his palm against her hair for a minute, glad for her safety.

But there was never any rest for the weary. “Time to go on the run again, Sleeping Beauty.”

 

She seemed to be moving. Lightly and easily, like a raft carried downstream by a wide, calm river. Or she could be floating on clouds, as one sometimes did in dreams.

Every time she stopped, she was given water. At some of those occasions, she tried to wake up; other times she did not even possess the will for the attempt, drinking while she slept on.

When she finally broke through again to consciousness, they seemed to be in a cave of some sort, dark, warm, and stuffy. She could not see him, but she could hear him beside her, his breaths deep and slow.

She said a silent prayer for his well-being before heavy slumber towed her under again.

The next time she woke up, she was in the same space, and it was bright enough for her to see that she was alone. The two waterskins were both there. The one next to her had a mouthful of water; the other, not even a drop. Her eyes half-closed, she willed water from underground rivers and oasis lakes—or even moisture that clung to the underside of rocks—to flow to her. Several minutes passed before the first drop materialized. She filled his waterskin three-quarters full before she became too exhausted, barely managing to cap the waterskin before it fell from her hand.

The same dream came to her again, of floating sweetly down a tranquil river. She traveled the length of the Nile, or so it seemed, before she realized that she actually was floating, but on air, thanks to a levitating spell.

It was dawn. Half of the sky had turned a fish-belly shade of translucence. To her left, at the very top of a mountainous dune, the sand was already the color of molten gold. Had they been on the move all night?