The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

She looked back. Yes, she had managed to raise the swarm of bees to the height of the Bane’s carpet. With the most powerful current she could generate, she sent them toward the Bane.

He laughed and fire rippled across the air surrounding him. Bees fell like raindrops. But among the entire swarm there was a smaller number that Iolanthe had protected. They punched through the fire and landed on his person.

The Bane stopped laughing. He gazed with something akin to incomprehension at his hand, upon which were not one, not two, but three bees. His hand swelled before Iolanthe’s eyes.

He clutched at his throat. The carpet lost altitude, snagging in the branches of a tree before falling to the ground.

The mind that controlled Wintervale’s body might be unimaginably powerful, but Wintervale’s body had one great frailty: it was allergic to bee venom.

Titus landed the carpet and dug through the emergency bag. He had prepared antidotes for Wintervale, in case there were bee stings in the future. He pulled out a small case, which contained a few vials.

“No!” shouted someone. “Do not help him!”

Lady Wintervale.

She scrambled off a carpet of her own and set herself between Titus and Wintervale.

“We can’t watch him die!” cried Iolanthe.

“Do you believe for an instant the Bane would leave him before then? No, as long as there is a chance that he can get you to believe that he is Leander Wintervale again, he will remain and it will be to the ruin of all.”

On the ground Wintervale jerked and writhed. Iolanthe shook. She pressed her face into Titus’s back. But she still heard Wintervale, gargling, like a mute trying to speak.

At last, silence.

“No, do not assume he is dead,” cautioned Lady Wintervale. “Do you have any instruments?”

The prince found the Kno-it-all gauge. With a levitating spell he laid it on Wintervale’s person. The tip of the gauge showed green.

They all three threw up shields at the same time, Titus for Iolanthe, Iolanthe for Titus, and Lady Wintervale for them both. Even so Titus stumbled backward, clutching his chest.

“I am all right,” he said, already pointing his wand to set up another shield.

The Bane twitched again. His hand fell atop the gauge. The green slowly faded into a dark gray. The dark gray turned red.

Wintervale was dead.



Lady Wintervale had her son’s hand in hers. Her lips trembled. “He had such a beautiful soul, my Lee. He worried that he would not be as great a man as his father, but he was always a far better man.”

She looked about the orchard. “When we were small, Ariadne sometimes brought me in here to play. I never thought this is where my son would meet his end.”

Titus knelt down and kissed Wintervale on his forehead. “Good-bye, cousin. You saved us all.”

He had tears in his eyes. Tears were already spilling down Iolanthe’s cheeks. Wintervale, by being so open, trusting, and artless his entire life, had made his more cynical friends hang on to their secrets. And in doing so, they had preserved themselves from the Bane.

Wintervale’s body disappeared. The Crucible keeps no dead.

“Do you want to come with us, ma’am?” Iolanthe asked Lady Wintervale.

Lady Wintervale shook her head. “No, I’m here only for my son. I will give a proper memorial and offer his ashes to the Angels. Long may his soul soar.”

“Upon the wings of the Angels,” Iolanthe and Titus said together.

“It almost kills me to say this,” said Lady Wintervale, her own tears finally falling. “But . . . they lived happily ever after.”

And she, too, exited from the Crucible.



Titus was the one to point out that Iolanthe’s clothes were in tatters. She changed into a pair of tunics from the emergency bag and they took to the air again. More pursuers, on wyverns and pegasi, were close at hand—the Atlanteans must have raided the stables in a few stories.

“We will not make it to Forbidden Island in time,” said Titus grimly.

Which left only Briga’s Chasm.

They came down at the edge of Briga’s Chasm, with the Atlanteans barely two hundred feet behind. The thick fog that filled the entire chasm writhed and flowed, obscuring everything beneath.

“Can we put on fog glasses and ride through that?” she asked as they ran toward the entrance of the tunnels that led to the bottom of the chasm.

He folded the carpet and attached it to the emergency bag, the way Kashkari had shown them. The carpet, which was actually a sheet of canvas with pockets, changed color to match that of the bag. “I tried it once. That is not fog and it is utterly impenetrable even with fog glasses.”

She shuddered as she stepped on the strangely spongy ground in the tunnels. A sickly light filtered down from cracks in the rock ceiling above. All the surfaces looked damp. Slimy.

“Make sure you touch nothing,” Titus said, pressing the vertices of the quasi-vaulter into her hand.