The Immortal Heights (31 page)

“May I—may I offer you a seat, sire?” She somehow managed to keep her voice even. “And some tea? I also have some chocolate from Mrs. Hinderstone's shop.”

“No, thank you. I just had breakfast.”

She was beginning to feel terrifically awkward. How did one ask the Master of the Domain what in the world he was doing in her house? And how had he come through the storage closet, which was emphatically not a portal of any kind?

“Me too,” she said, “at Mrs. Hinderstone's. She mentioned that you had been there in person two days ago.”

“Yes, the picnic basket for us.”

For us
.
Us!
Should it feel so completely disorienting when dreams came true? She was asleep, wasn't she, this whole thing just one fantastical illusion?

He came toward her, until barely a sliver of air separated them. So close that she could make out the exact design on the decorative buttons on his tunic: a coat of arms unlike any she had ever seen
before, with a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn occupying the quadrants.

So close that she breathed in his scent of silver moss and cloud pine. So close that when she looked into his eyes, she saw every detail of the starburst pattern of his blue-gray irises.

“I have missed you,” he murmured.

And kissed her.

In the mountains where she grew up, sometimes people rafted down steep, fast-flowing streams. His kiss felt exactly like that, full of danger and exhilaration, making her heart rattle and thump, ready to leap out of her rib cage.

He pulled back slightly and traced a thumb across her cheek, a caress like lightning. “You and you alone,” he said softly.

Suddenly her head felt strange, a thousand brilliant dots of light hurtling about. Memories burst into her cranium as if from a geyser. She gripped his shoulder to steady herself.

He wrapped his arm about her. “Everything coming back now?”

A secret life unfurled before her. The diligent, mild-mannered candidate for Master of Magical Arts and Sciences was in fact the power beside the throne. Those long walks that he took in the wilderness of the Labyrinthine Mountains? That was time they spent together discussing, strategizing, and sometimes agonizing over difficult decisions. That historic speech he'd given when he'd announced his Sihar heritage and reforms he planned to undertake to make the Sihar full subjects, instead of merely guests of the crown? She had
drafted a large portion of it—not to mention persuaded him to take the monumental step in the first place. And one entire summer, as well as a good chunk of an academic term her second year at the Conservatory, instead of being back in the mountains taking care of her elderly grandmother, as she and everyone else had believed, she had been at his side, in disguise as a male aide-de-camp, waging campaigns against remnants of the Bane's forces.

Of course, there had been the Last Great Rebellion, in which she had played an instrumental part. Grief shot through her as she remembered those who had been lost—Amara, Wintervale, Mrs. Hancock, Titus's father, and Master Haywood. She experienced a moment of searing disgust at the thought of Lady Callista and Aramia, who were now in Exile, along with Prince Alectus.
⁸

And then, pure joy, as she looked upon the young man before her.

He was the one with whom she'd come through war and hell. The one with whom she'd changed the world. The one with whom her destiny would forever be entwined.

She smoothed a finger over his brow. “Titus.”

“That is sire to you, young lady,” he answered, teasing.

“Ha. Only when you address me as ‘my hope, my prayer, my destiny.'”

He gave her a dirty look.

She laughed. “And how dare you take advantage of a poor, hero-worshipping girl?”

He gave her another dirty look. “I keep telling you to forget all about me in the meanwhile. But will you listen? And then when I misjudge the time, you look at me as if you have been on your knees a thousand years, praying for me.”

She giggled. “I do get pretty pathetic, pining after you.”

“No worse than me. You do not know how hard it is to have to wait a week every time before I can see you again. Sometimes I still think that anyone with eyes could have seen through our secret the day of your graduation gala, even though I tried my best to treat you exactly the same as everyone else.”

Nobody had seen through it, but soon things would change.

She had always planned to assume a false identity to attend the Conservatory. But she had vacillated over whether to also assume a set of false memories, so that she would enjoy a purer, more unencumbered university experience, without being constantly distracted by what Titus had to deal with as the Master of the Domain.

In the end she had decided to give it a try, with many, many safeguards in place, and a blood oath she had demanded of Titus, that he absolutely must summon her to his side when the need arose.
⁹

By and large, she'd had a marvelous time at the Conservatory.
¹⁰
But now that her time there was near an end, she had become impatient to be who she really was. As soon as she finished her master's degree, her true identity would be revealed—it still wasn't a perfectly safe world, but she was no longer deterred by the risks. After that, well, she looked forward to seeing how her life would unfold.

And today she would take the first step on that new path. “Ready for the Fourth of June? Ready for dear Cooper to fawn all over you?”

She hadn't seen Cooper, or anyone from Mrs. Dawlish's, since she left England on a hot air balloon.

Titus groaned. “As ready as I will ever be.”

She kissed him, grinning. “Come. Let's go make him the happiest man alive.”

Cooper squealed and lifted Fairfax bodily off the ground. “My God, I can't believe it. It really is you.”

She laughed and lifted him in return. “Cooper, old bloke. I heard you've avoided becoming a solicitor after all.”

The most unexpected twist in the entire saga was that Titus and Cooper had become semi-regular correspondents—regular on Cooper's part and semi on Titus's. Cooper never would have presumed to write to Titus, but his letters to Fairfax, sent to the fake address in the Wyoming Territory that Titus had set up, had come to Titus instead. And in those early years after the Bane's death, when Lady Wintervale had nearly been assassinated twice, Titus had deemed it too dangerous for Fairfax, who was supposed to be dead, to reply, even if it was to a nonmage.

So he had written back instead, putting his talent for lying into creating fiction. He found it relaxing to spin yarns of Fairfax, first as a Wyoming Territory rancher, then as a San Francisco hotel manager,
and of late, a Buenos Aires businessman. He had also come to enjoy Cooper's long, rambling missives, full of news of their old friends' doings. Sutherland had not yet married a loathsome heiress. St. John rowed for Cambridge. Birmingham was now a proper Egyptologist, with eager sponsors for his excavations and avid audiences for his lectures.

“Thank goodness for that,” said Cooper. “Being the private secretary to a very important man agrees with me. I am well on my way to becoming an insufferable fart.”

He turned to Titus, blushed a little, and took off his hat, revealing a mop of luxuriant hair.

Titus shook his head. “Vanity, thy name is Thomas Cooper.”

One time, remembering his long-ago dream of meeting Cooper on a Fourth of June, Titus had asked in a letter whether he had become heavy. Cooper replied that he had retained his girlish figure, but had unfortunately lost a great deal of hair. Titus, in a charitable moment, had sent him a case of anti-baldness elixir.

Fairfax slapped Cooper on the back. “My God, that is beautiful, Cooper.
Beautiful.
”

Cooper turned the color of a beet. The world's happiest beet. “I'm so glad to see the two of you. It's been far too long. And . . .” Some of the delight drained from his face. “And we aren't always guaranteed to meet with old friends again after many years, are we?”

In his latest letter, Titus had at last told Cooper that Wintervale
and Mrs. Hancock had died long ago, in the same “palace intrigue” that had taken him away from Eton.

Fairfax wrapped an arm around Cooper's shoulders. “But today we are. All the old friends in the world.”

They gathered up Sutherland, Rogers, St. John, and several other old boys from Mrs. Dawlish's and sat down to a plentiful picnic. Halfway through the picnic, Birmingham, their old house captain, arrived with, of all people, West, in tow. The young men turned aflutter at the sight of West, who had not only captained the Eton eleven, but had gone on to also captain the Oxford University cricket team. He was now embarking on a career as a physicist and shared a house in Oxford with Birmingham.

West held an animated conversation with Fairfax. Then he, Fairfax, and Titus together spoke for a while. When he left to join a conversation between Sutherland and Birmingham, Fairfax whispered in Titus's ear that West and Birmingham were “together.”

He whispered back, “Do you think I am blind?”

She laughed, the sound of which was drowned out by an overjoyed squeal from Cooper. “Gentlemen, our friend from the subcontinent has arrived!”

Titus and Fairfax both exclaimed. They had, of course, met Kashkari numerous times in the intervening years—spent months together on campaigns, even. But this was special, to stand with him where it all began.

They ate, laughed, and reminisced. At some point in the afternoon, Titus, Fairfax, and Kashkari bade good-bye to the other friends and vaulted to London for a very long tea. They had much to talk about, as Kashkari was also planning to reveal the truth about his and Amara's involvement in the Last Great Rebellion.

The day was fading when Titus and Fairfax made their way to the house on Serpentine Hills where his parents used to meet. In the past six years, it had become a refuge for them too, a safe haven where they could shed their responsibilities and simply enjoy each other's company.

“You know how we always go to the Queen of Seasons' summer villa?” he asked, collapsing onto a long sofa in the solarium.

“Far be it from me to tire of the most beautiful place in the Crucible,” she teased, sitting down next to him. “But go on.”

He set their clasped hands on top of his copy of the Crucible. “Well, recently I went into the Queen of Seasons'
spring
villa and saw something unexpected.”

The spring villa, on a high alpine meadow with riots of pink and mauve wildflowers, was every bit as beautiful as the summer villa. Titus pointed at a pair of travelers walking across the meadow, their faces glowing in the light of a brilliant sunset. “Look at them.”

Fairfax sucked in a breath. “But they are your parents.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “She kept a record of his likeness after all, for me to find someday. And for me to see them happy and together.”

They watched the young couple, their arms around each other, stroll past the villa and disappear beyond a bend in the path.

Then Fairfax took his hand. “I'm ready for whatever the future brings.”

“Me too,” he told her. “Me too.”

NOTES

1
.
Redhull, Bernard

YD 967–1014. Seer.

Known more for prolificacy than significance. Claimed to have never had a single vision about himself, but always about complete strangers. Sent out batches of letters every month to those who his visions concerned, when he could discover their identity. Best remembered as the one whose vision of a conversation between Lady Callista Tiberius and a friend spurred her to action, to duplicate all the measures enumerated in that foreseen exchange.
See
Lady Callista Tiberius, Horatio Haywood, Iolanthe Seabourne, Aramia Tiberius, Prince Titus VII.

—From
Biographical Dictionary of the Domain

2
.
THE FOLLOWING
is an excerpt from Hancock's written account:

Two months later I came across one more mention of Pyrrhos Plouton, in a letter by a remote acquaintance, exclaiming how he had not aged a single day in twenty-five years. It would appear that the first feat of sacrificial magic Plouton performed was so powerful it gave him not only unnatural longevity, but also seemingly unfading youth. This might be the reason he moved far away to become Palaemon Zephyrus: to avoid the kind of speculation brought on by his apparent agelessness.

Judging by all the sources I'd collected, both Pyrrhos Plouton and Palaemon Zephyrus—before the latter's encounter with the “giant serpent,” at least—were fine physical specimens, suffering from no handicaps and missing not even a small toe. Which led me to conclude that Plouton must have powered his first sacrifice with a kidney. Organs are highly valued in sacrificial magic, but one could live a normal life with only one kidney and, perhaps equally important, give the impression of being whole and unmaimed.

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

3
.
THE TEXT
of the note Seabourne left in Titus VII's laboratory before she departed Britain is as follows:

Your Highness,

I am going to kill you—eagerly and with great satisfaction. Perhaps I am speaking figuratively; perhaps not. You will find out. Likely too late.

But if it should be that both I and Fate somehow spare you, and you return here one day, victorious and in one piece, know that I meant what I said: I have
no regrets about going to Atlantis, deadly prophecies notwithstanding.

And know that I have loved you all along, even while I plot your imminent demise. Maybe especially as I do so.

Now and always,

The one who walks beside you

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

4
.
THE PRACTICE
of wearing troth bands goes back almost a millennium. Once a pair of lovers seals their pledge to each other and puts on the troth bands, the bands cannot be taken off unless one or both of the wearers pass away.

This irreversibility is likely the reason troth bands never became popular. Even the most sincerely devoted couples could drift apart over time. What, then, to do about this no longer meaningful symbol that cannot be removed unless one is willing to give up an arm too in the process?

—From
Encyclopedia of Cultural Customs

5
.
THE TEXT
of the entries Commander Rainstone read in Princess Ariadne's diary:

6 May, YD 1012

Why do I so seldom see good news? The lonely finding love and friendship. The just and brave rewarded for their courage and sacrifice. Or even
a rapturously received new play—at least that would be something to look forward to.

No, instead I see death and misfortune. And when I am lucky, things that I cannot quite interpret one way or the other.

Now on to the vision. It is a hospital—or at least it looks like the maternity ward of a hospital, with a number of newborns in rows of bassinets. A man, in a nurse's white overrobe and white cap, his face covered by a protective mask, checks all the babies one by one.

He stops before two bassinets and looks at the babies inside for a long time. Then, with a glance to the window that looks out to the corridor, he quickly switches the babies.

So frustrating—the man is clearly committing a terrible misdeed. Yet because it has not taken place yet, I cannot do anything. Nor can I recognize the hospital, though I toured a number of hospitals last summer, especially in the provinces.

I will wait for the vision to come back and hope for more identifying information.

19 August, YD 1012

The vision came again. This time I could see that there are fireworks out the window, a steady shower of golden streaks.

Father's birthday or a feast day?

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

6
.
Commander Penelope Rainstone:

Sometimes the reports make it seem that my rupture with Princess Ariadne was permanent. That wasn't quite the case. Her Highness did dismiss me, since I read her diary without authorization and then refused to give a reason. But six months later I went to see her.

I made it clear that I could never confess why I'd snooped—Callista didn't want anyone to know that we were related, that her mother had indulged in an affair with a gardener during her marriage. But I asked Her Highness to please understand my dilemma, as a woman who also had secrets she couldn't tell the world.

She was silent for a long time, but then she nodded slowly.

I can't tell you how much that meant to me, her forgiveness. I offered to take a blood pledge, as a gesture of my gratitude and loyalty. She declined it, but said if I wished to, I could make that same pledge to her infant son.

I did. At the time I had no idea that years later the pledge, which bound me to His Highness, would enable me to break through the siege of the bell jar dome in the Sahara Desert.

The threads of Fortune weave mysteriously.

—From
The Last Great Rebellion: An Oral History

7
.
Vasudev Kashkari:

I was twenty when I left home for the Sahara Desert. There was never any question that I wanted to be part of the resistance—even if my uncle hadn't been Akhilesh Parimu, I would still have wanted to contribute.

Not long after I arrived at my first rebel base, in the western Sahara, a courier came from another base. I watched her at lunch, speaking to and laughing with some of my friends. I wasn't in the habit of approaching girls, but there was something irresistible about her warmth and vivacity—and she had a lovely smile. At the next meal I mustered the courage and took the seat next to hers.

We got to talking. As it turned out, her mother was from the Ponives, my grandparents' native realm. So we talked more—and more. We were the last two to leave the canteen that evening. The next morning we met again for breakfast and talked until she had to leave.

When she was gone I walked around in a fog for the rest of the day. That night I wrote her, a few lines in my two-way notebook. She replied immediately and we kept on writing for hours. That became a pattern: every night we wrote to each other, about what happened that day and everything else under the sun. [Smiles] I had to get a new notebook every few weeks because we chatted so much.

I suggested many times that we should meet again. But she always found some excuse to demur. After four months, I had had enough and wrangled myself an assignment to improve the irrigation system at her base. But when I got there, no one on the premise knew who I was talking about. They all took turns with courier duties and nobody used the nom de guerre of Durga Devi. When I mentioned her connection to the Ponives, they pointed to this intimidatingly
beautiful young woman as the only one with a mother from that realm.

My repeated questions in the notebook went unanswered. I didn't know what to do. I felt as if I'd been the biggest fool. I was also completely unsettled: I like solving problems, and problems that presented no rational solutions made me restless and irritable.

When I finished my assignment and was about to leave, a message came from her at last, begging me to stay at her base, even though she wasn't there and nobody knew anything about her. If I stayed, I would find answers, she said.

I agonized over my decision but in the end I stayed. I loved her and I needed to see her again. If staying at her base was going to lead me back to her, then that was what I'd do, despite my misgivings.

In the meanwhile, Amara was promoted to oversee supplies and logistics for the base, which meant we interacted at regular intervals. I found those occasions awkward: she was usually quite curt and never looked me in the eye.

And needless to say, my evening conversations with the one I loved had also become stilted and uncomfortable. I couldn't just pretend that everything was the same as before.

Three weeks in I told her that she had to see me face-to-face and tell me everything before another month was out. We argued back and forth and finally agreed to meet on a day six months in the future.

A week before our rendezvous, I saw her across the canteen,
chatting with a group of carpet weavers as if she hadn't a care in the world. I stared at her. She looked up at me and smiled—a friendly smile, but one without any hint of recognition.

Next thing I knew, Amara had her hand on my arm and was dragging me away from the canteen. We almost came to blows, she pulling on me and me trying to get back to the girl whose absence had consumed me for months.

“That's my cousin Shulini.” Amara spoke directly into my ear. “You have never met her nor she you. I took her form when I went to your base.”

I couldn't speak for my shock—mutables are so rare in real life that the possibility never crossed my mind. She explained that when she traveled away from the base she often took on Shulini's appearance because her own face made people stare. But she had to stop because she was becoming too old to 'mute at will, at least not without fear of ending up looking permanently like someone else.

I became angry. We'd known each other ten months by then. At any point she could have told me. Instead she chose to let me simmer in my own anxiety. She said she was afraid of losing me, since I never showed the slightest interest in her.

“How about this? You've lost me anyway,” I said, and stormed out.

For a few days I showed Shulini around the base. She was a nice girl but there was no spark between us whatsoever, which made me even more incensed. Amara I ignored altogether.

But she didn't give up on me. She got us assigned to night patrol
duty together. In the dark, when I couldn't see her face, but only hear her voice—that was why she'd spoken so little to me since I came to live at her base, because she still had the same voice. And I loved her voice, the sound of her laughter, the precision of her vowels, and especially the way she sometimes hummed a little to herself.

From there we started our reconciliation. It took me a while to fall in love with her face—I used to start every time I saw it, especially if we'd been sitting side by side for a while, talking without looking at each other. Later she would joke that she wanted to marry me because I was the only man who preferred her in the dark.

[Smiles again.]

And there you have it, our story.

Interviewer:

After you were reconciled, how long were you together?

V. Kashkari:

Three years eleven months.

Interviewer:

Too short a time.

V. Kashkari:

All good years are short, as are all full lives.

—From
The Last Great Rebellion: An Oral History

8
.
Prince Titus VII:

The morning of the state funeral, I was informed that the Atlanteans had handed over Miss Aramia Tiberius. That afternoon, I had her brought in along with Alectus and Lady Callista.

In the short time since the Bane's downfall, Alectus had become an old man: he stooped and wore an expression of perpetual confusion. Lady Callista seemed to have lost much of the elegance for which she had been so admired—it was a twitchy woman who curtsied to me. Aramia simply looked terrified.

I addressed her first. “I see you are safe and sound, Miss Tiberius.”

She had the sense to not say anything.

“Your Highness, why was I not allowed to attend my daughter's funeral?” Lady Callista interjected. “Why, indeed, was I not mentioned at all in the account you gave of how the Bane was brought down? My daughter was the great heroine of her generation, and you would have the populace believe that she was the child of those paupers from the Conservatory?”

I stared at her until she fidgeted and curtsied again. “I apologize for my outburst. Please forgive me, sire.”

“Miss Seabourne was not your daughter,” I told her.

“I might not have raised her, but I gave birth to her. My blood ran in hers and so did the blood of Baron Wintervale, the greatest hero of
my
generation.”

“Baron Wintervale betrayed my mother.”

“No, that is not possible.”

“Ask his widow about it, if she will condescend to meet with you. As for your kinship with one of the bravest mages this realm has ever known . . .”

A blood assay had already been readied. I picked up the glass beaker.
“Sanguis densior aqua.”

The clear liquid in the beaker turned jellylike and slightly opaque. “I require a drop of blood from you and from Miss Tiberius.”

They hesitated. Miss Tiberius pricked her finger first, squeezing out a drop of blood. The blood drop fell through the jellylike substance as a pebble in water, reaching the bottom of the beaker with an audible
plink
.

Lady Callista did the same.