The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Provided that she didn’t become hopelessly lost.4

It took her four days, two and half of which were spent thinking she had become hopelessly lost. Fortunately, the closest villages and towns were accustomed to seeing lost hikers stumbling out of the mountains, dirty and disoriented, in desperate need of a wash and a meal.

The first thing Iolanthe asked for, before a wash and a meal, was a newspaper. It was almost the anniversary of Titus’s coronation and every year, to mark the occasion, a parade was held in Delamer. If the parade was canceled, then he was in trouble.

But no, the parade would take place the next day, and the Master of the Domain would attend several ceremonies and give out prizes to exemplary students.

A kindly farmer offered her a lift in his ancient chariot, pulled by an even more ancient pegasus, to the nearest town that had expedited services. From there she was able to catch a translocator to a larger town, which happened to be a hub of expedited highways.

Being at the hub made her heart palpitate: there could be agents of Atlantis, lying in wait for her. But she had to move quickly—and she was protected by an Irreproducible Charm that made it impossible for her image to be reproduced and transmitted.

She reached Delamer that evening. The next afternoon, from quite some distance away, she watched Titus pass over Palace Avenue on a floating balcony, flanked by the regent and Lady Callista. He did not wear his grandfather’s sunburst medal, to signal that he was under house arrest or any other type of captivity. But he was encircled by guards and attendants, with barely enough room to breathe.

She could not go near him while he was thus surrounded. Her only choice was to leave him a coded message in The Delamer Observer, head to Eton, and hope that he, too, would be given permission to go back to that nonmage school.

Departing so soon—and by herself—was not how she had envisioned her summer. She debated whether to remain in Delamer for some more time, so that she could arrange for a meeting with Titus or find out on her own something of Master Haywood’s whereabouts. But in the end, she decided it was far too risky to stay longer: there was a subtle tension in the mood of the capital; even just standing in line to buy a bit of something to eat, she overheard whispers about agents of Atlantis being particularly active.

To get out of the Domain by instantaneous means required documents she could not provide. But traveling within the Domain was easy enough with the student pass. By expedited highways and ferries she arrived on the Melusine Archipelago, one of the Domain’s outlying island chains.

She had learned in the teaching cantos of the Crucible about a secret store of sailboats on the southernmost isle of the archipelago. The travel restrictions Atlantis had implemented did not prevent nonmage means of locomotion, and a good, fast sloop was sometimes just the way to make an escape.

Her command of air and water came in handy for the one hundred and twenty miles of open ocean to Flores, one of the northwestern islands of the Azores. From there she bargained a passage on a whaling ship to Ponta Delgada, and at Ponta Delgada she hopped on a steamer to the Madeira Islands.

She could have remained on Madeira. But when she learned, moments after disembarking, that a French cargo freighter in the harbor would be pulling anchor and setting out for South Africa in two hours, she hesitated only a minute before running to the harbor agent’s office to inquire as to whether the French freighter also took passengers.

Titus had created a good background for Archer Fairfax, the identity she assumed when she was at Eton, by setting Fairfax’s family in Bechuanaland, a place where other Eton students were unlikely to visit. But that otherwise spell, as effective as it was at school, would disintegrate if agents of Atlantis took it into their heads to discover the exact location of the Fairfax family farm.

She did not stay long in Cape Town, but she spent her entire time there conducting a fervent campaign of disinformation via a battery of new otherwise spells. Now, should inquisitive agents of Atlantis come through, they would be told that the Fairfaxes had just departed: a distant relative had died and left Mrs. Fairfax a decent sum of money, and the family decided to enjoy their good fortune by getting rid of the farm and taking a trip around the world—without the son, of course, who had to go back to Eton for Michaelmas Half.