The Perilous Sea (27 page)

“That can't be true,” said Cooper. “I think Wintervale is downright grateful that you are always there to help him. Goodness knows I'd be.”

Kashkari sighed. “I hope—”

Something caught Iolanthe's senses, an impression of objects crashing toward her. She swung her cricket bat—and felt the impact of the hit deep in her shoulder.

Cooper yowled, amid a racket of thuds and cracks.

Roof tiles—from Mrs. Dawlish's house, as they were almost about to enter her door.

Iolanthe had struck one tile and sent it in several pieces to the middle of the street. Kashkari looked shaken, but unhurt. Cooper, however, had been hit by another tile and was bleeding a little from the side of his head.

Iolanthe glanced at the roof—no one was up there. Across the street, the rather suspicious hawker who had been loitering about of late also wasn't there. She broke into a run and circled the house, but there was no one on the other side of the roof ridge, nor anyone either clambering back into windows or flat-out running away.

When she came back to the curb outside the front door, Kashkari was holding a handkerchief against Cooper's skull. “Do you feel faint? Or nauseous? Or anything out of the ordinary?”

Cooper stared in fascination at a smear of bright red on his hand. “Well, my ears are ringing a little, but I think I'm fine.” He grinned. “I'll have a story to tell at supper.”

Kashkari shook his head. “Come on. Let's get you to a dispensary first.”

After Cooper's wound had been cleaned and bandaged, Iolanthe bought him a paper cone of roasted chestnuts from a street hawker. Back at Mrs. Dawlish's, they settled him into his room with a pot of tea and a sandwich. Sutherland, Rogers, and a few other boys crowded into his room.

Cooper recounted his freak accident with great relish.

Sutherland, however, frowned. “You don't suppose Trumper and Hogg are behind this, do you?”

Iolanthe shook her head. Trumper and Hogg, two pupils who had made a great deal of trouble for Mrs. Dawlish's boys the previous Half and had been humiliated in turn, were no longer at the school. And even if they had come back to Eton specifically to seek vengeance, they lacked the competence to organize a remote precision strike, for there had been no one on the roof.

Such an attack, however, would be all too easy for a mage.

But against whom? Iolanthe, who was still the most wanted mage in the world, or Kashkari, who, at least according to what he had told the prince, was an implacable foe of the Bane?

More boys came to see Cooper. Iolanthe and Kashkari yielded their places and went out into the corridor.

“Thank you,” said Kashkari.

“It was nothing.”

“I might have been hit by that roof tile, if you hadn't reacted so fast.”

“Or maybe I would have been.”

“Maybe,” said Kashkari, not sounding terribly convinced. “I'd better go check on Wintervale.”

And she, decided Iolanthe, had better go speak with the prince.

 

The prince was not in his room. He was also not in the laboratory. The laboratory's other entrance was via a lighthouse on Cape Wrath, Scotland. She put on the lighthouse keeper's mackintosh and went out despite the howling wind and the driving rain—sometimes the prince liked to walk on the headland, when he had been reading for too long.

There was no sign of a single soul out and about. Puzzled, she returned to Mrs. Dawlish's. From there, she walked to High Street, wondering whether he had gone to buy some foodstuff—he usually didn't, preferring to vault to London for his supply, going to a different shop each time, so he could be sure his cakes and tins hadn't been tampered with.

An enemy of the Bane had many worries.

She bought a hot cross bun for herself at the baker's and had just stepped out of the door of the shop when someone took her by the arm.

Lady Wintervale, pale, drawn, and just short of skeletal.

Iolanthe almost dropped the bun in her hand. It was a long moment before she could raise her bowler hat an inch. “Afternoon, my lady.”

Without a word in reply, Lady Wintervale led Iolanthe into an alley and vaulted. They rematerialized in a room with ivory silk wallpaper, an enormous fireplace, and a gilded ceiling. A large window looked out onto—

Iolanthe took a few steps closer. It was the Thames River, and Eton College on the other side. “Are we in the English queen's home?”

“We are.” Lady Wintervale pulled off her gloves and tossed them aside. “Such a hovel.”

The interior of Windsor Castle was stodgy, to be sure, but it felt respectable enough. Then again, the Wintervale estate, before its destruction at the end of the January Uprising, was supposed to have rivaled the Citadel in magnificence. “Do the staff know you are here?”

“They do. They think I am one of the queen's German relatives.” Lady Wintervale sat down in a daffodil-yellow stuffed chair. “Now tell me, how is Lee?”

Wintervale's given name was Leander, but no one ever called him that—or any variants of it. “He can't walk by himself, but otherwise he seems fine. He asks about you a lot.”

“What does he ask about me?”

“I . . . He never does it in front of me, so I can only relate what I have heard from His Highness. The prince says Wintervale is always anxious for your news. And His Highness has been glad not to have your news, so he doesn't have to lie to Wintervale.”

Lady Wintervale placed two fingers against her temple. “And why can't Lee walk by himself?”

“We don't know. Would you like me to have the prince bring him here to meet you?”

Lady Wintervale's head snapped up. “No.
No
. That would be far too dangerous. Absolutely not. And say nothing to Lee of my presence, you understand?
Not a word
.”

The woman always made Iolanthe nervous. “Yes, my lady, I understand. Wintervale is not to know you are here.”

“Good. You may go,” said Lady Wintervale, closing her eyes as if she had been exhausted by the conversation. “If you learn anything I should know, come back to this room and say
Toujours fier
.”

 

This time the prince was in the laboratory.

“Where were you?” Iolanthe could barely contain herself. “I have been looking for you all over.”

“I was in Paris.”

Paris again. “What were you doing there?”

“Buying things for you, obviously.” He pointed at a bag of pastries sitting on the worktable.

She didn't think he had hopped across the Channel just for the baked goods, but that was a topic for another time. “I just spoke to Lady Wintervale.”

His expression changed instantly. “How did she escape? Or was she let go?”

Iolanthe's heart dropped half a foot. “I didn't ask.”

Part of her was always petrified with fear at being face-to-face with Lady Wintervale, since Lady Wintervale had very nearly suffocated Iolanthe to death when she first came to England. “I was in shock. She vaulted me to Windsor Castle, asked me a few questions about Wintervale, told me not to mention anything of her presence to him, and dismissed me.”

And she had been all too glad to be let go.

“Tell me everything again,” asked Titus. “More slowly this time. Give me all the details.”

She did, as he listened carefully. Then she asked, “Why do you suppose Lady Wintervale came to me, instead of you?”

“She knows I am watched, now more than ever.”

The hawker who always loitered before Mrs. Dawlish's house, the person who might or might not be hiding in the copse of trees behind—they were but the tip of the iceberg. Some days, when Iolanthe walked to school with the other boys, she could feel the surveillance the entire length of the way.

“And what were you doing on High Street?” asked the prince. “It is not your turn to provide for tea.”

Mrs. Dawlish supplied three meals a day, but the boys were responsible for their own tea, which was in essence a fourth meal. The prince, Wintervale, Kashkari, and Iolanthe took turns buying a week's worth of teastuff for the four of them.

Iolanthe started. “I completely forgot why I was there in the first place. The tiles.”

She related the incident of the roof tiles, and of the book that fell off a shelf and struck Kashkari. “Too many falling items to be a coincidence. Kashkari thinks they were all for him, the book and the tiles.”

Titus's face was grave. “Far too many, especially roof tiles. Before I was sent here, mages from the Domain came and improved the house from top to bottom. Have you ever noticed clogged drains, creaking steps, or bad flues in this house?”

She had to think about it. “No.”

When things went smoothly, they did so unnoticed.

“And there would not be, not while I remain here, and perhaps not even for years afterward. So it is quite impossible for roof tiles to have blown off. Those roof tiles should have stayed in place even if a tornado took a running leap at Mrs. Dawlish's house.”

He opened the bag of pastries, handed her an éclair, and took one for himself. “Anything else I need to know about?”

Something nagged at the back of her mind. It took her a few seconds to realize what it concerned. “West, the cricketer. He seems more interested in you than he has reason to be.”

Titus's brow knitted. “I am not sure I remember what he looks like. I will come and see at your next practice.”

They spent a few minutes in silence, eating. It felt comfortable, almost.

When he was done with his éclair, he looked at her, as if he had come to a decision. “About Lady Wintervale, I actually think it is good news. She knows about you, so if she is not being interrogated by Atlantis, all the better for you. As for West, I do not know enough to fear. But the flying tiles are a different matter altogether.

“They were probably not meant for you—Atlantis wants you whole, not maimed. But anything striking so close to you worries me. Whether the mischief-doer wants to harm Kashkari because he is part of the resistance or because he guards the path to Wintervale, the point is, someone knows something.”

He exhaled. “You should leave. Soon.”

Her heart slowed; perhaps it stopped altogether. “You want me to go?”

“The more I think about the roof tiles, the more it disturbs me. We might all have to go, before too long. Once we part ways, however, I will not be able to help you find your guardian, and I want to—or at least get you close enough.”

Once we part ways
.

Something almost choked her—like anger, but not quite. Opposition. She had been resigned to her eventual departure from the school, from his life. But now that he had spoken these very words, that resignation had evaporated like morning mist.

She did not want to go.

She never did.

 

A quarter of an hour later, Iolanthe was the first person to walk into Wintervale's room for tea.

Before Wintervale became the One, she and he had rarely spent any time alone—they had always interacted as members of a group. Afterward, she saw no reason for that to change. All the better to keep the buffer of someone else's, or lots of someone elses', presence between them. Easier for her to act as if nothing had changed, just another cocky young man who happened to be a bit too big for his britches.

She walked to the fire burning in his grate and held out her hand toward the warmth. “Getting cold.”

“I heard you swatted a flying roof tile today,” said Wintervale from his cot.

Iolanthe shrugged. “Gaining West's admiration on the pitch. Saving my mate's life on the way home. Just another day in the extraordinary life of Archer Fairfax.”

The old Wintervale would have guffawed, and then moaned for the rest of the day that he had missed such a terrific sight. But the new Wintervale only smiled—and only a half smile at that.

It occurred to Iolanthe that he looked tired, as tired as the prince sometimes looked, a weariness beyond what could be cleared up by a good long night of sleep.

The stab of guilt was sharp. More than anything else, she had envied him. His power. His destiny. His now unbreakable claim on Titus. When she, of all people, should understand what a terrifying ordeal it must have been. And to lose his mobility on top of it.

And his mother too, or at least he so believed.

“Is it getting to you, not being able to move around?”

He sighed. “So many plans, so many visions of greatness, and I can't even take a piss by myself.”

“Have you improved at all since you stopped sleeping all the time?”

“Sometimes I think I have. Sometimes I am sure I have. And then, the next time I get up, it's the same thing all over again.”

“Well, you can't give up,” she said softly. “Those plans and visions of greatness don't realize themselves, you know.”

This less robust, more serious Wintervale nodded. “You are right, Fairfax. And that may be exactly what I need to hear right now.”

Sane, so sane. Drained, perhaps, but unquestionably sound and sober. And now, with proof that his mother was nearby, they knew for certain he had never hallucinated, but had actually seen Lady Wintervale, who had probably been on top of a roof on the opposite side of the street, to get a better look into his room.

So why then was the Kno-it-all gauge so correct about his gross motor skills, but so wrong about his mental state?

The junior boys bustled in with platters of fried eggs and grilled sausages. Kashkari entered in their wake, looking calm if a bit grim. And conversation moved on to things that, essentially, mattered to nobody.

CHAPTER
25