The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

The elemental mage’s voice dripped with sarcasm. Reassuring, that: he vastly preferred someone who wanted nothing to do with him. “I will have to endure it for your remedies.”


The elemental mage burrowed beneath him, the movement causing a wave of agony. He ground his teeth and concentrated on modifying the tensile dome into a normal, mobile shield, which should keep a bubble of air around them and prevent sand from falling onto his back.

The elemental mage wrapped one arm around his neck and hooked a leg behind his knees. They began to sink, sand excavated from underneath flowing up either side of the shield to the top.

“And how do you know my remedies aren’t poisoned?” said the elemental mage as they descended.

“I assume they are.”

“I look forward to applying them to you then.”

They sank more rapidly. Something was not quite right. The elemental mage had seemed rangy of build, but with their torsos pressed tightly together, he did not feel nearly as much skeleton as he had anticipated. In fact . . . in fact . . .

He sucked in a breath—and hissed at the pain that shot through him. But there could be no doubt about it. “You are a girl.”

She was unmoved by his discovery. “And?”

“You are dressed as a man.”

“You are dressed as a nonmage.”

He did not know that. When he had come to, he had been lying on his back, hot sand digging into the open wound on his back. It had been all he could do to turn onto his stomach and build the tensile dome—he had paid no attention to what he wore. And later, when he needed a sharp implement, he had simply tried a pocket, without thinking about whether mage attire would have a pocket at that particular place.

The whole thing was becoming more incomprehensible by the minute. Waking up in the middle of a desert, injured, with no idea how he had come to the place was bad enough. Now nonmage clothes too?

They stopped.

“Bedrock in three feet.” She slipped out from underneath him.

His nails dug into the center of his palm, fighting against the fresh, searing pain brought on by her movement.

A clear, blue mage light grew and spread. “I am going to look at your wound. You’ll be a burden to me if you can’t move on your own.”

With the nonharming covenant in place, she could not do anything to worsen his condition. Still, unease seized him at the thought of being more or less at her mercy. But he had no choice. “Go ahead.”

She cut away his clothes and sprinkled a cool, fragrant liquid onto his wound, a rain that doused a raging wildfire. He heard himself pant—from the blessed reduction of pain.

“Now I need to clean the wound,” she warned him.

Innumerable particles of sand had dug into his flesh. It might be a literal bloodbath to take them all out. Dread roared in his head; he clenched his teeth and said nothing.

The pain returned, sharp and tearing. He swallowed a scream and braced himself for more. But she only sprinkled more of what must be tears of the Angels on his back.

“It’s done,” she said. “I removed all the grains of sand at once, since we don’t have much time.”

He would have expressed gratitude, if he were not shaking too much to speak.

She applied layers and layers of various ointments, dressed his wound, and offered him a handful of granules. “Gray ones for strength. Red ones for pain—otherwise you’ll still hurt too much to move.”

He swallowed them whole.

“Stay where you are for a minute, for everything to take effect. Then we must get going.”

“Thank you,” he managed.

“My, words I thought I’d never hear from you,” she said.

She checked and double-checked all the labels as she put the remedies back into her bag, with the care of a librarian reshelving books according to a particularly rigid reference code.

Now that he knew she was a girl, he was astonished that he had thought her a boy until they had been pressed together from shoulders to knees. Yes, there had been the man’s clothes, the short hair, and the somewhat gravelly voice, but surely . . . He could only shake his head inwardly at the potency of assumption.

She glanced up, caught him staring, and frowned—she had a rather fearsome frown. “What’s that cold thing inside your clothes?”

He was only just beginning to become aware of a chill against his heart, which he had hardly noticed earlier, when the pain from his back had crowded out all other sensations. Gingerly, he put one hand under his jacket. His fingers came into contact with something icy.

An attempt to move it chafed the back of his neck. That something was a pendant. He yanked the cord from around his neck.

The pendant was the shape of half an oval. The other half was clearly missing. Where was it? Who had it? And did the temperature of his half of the pendant indicate that the other half was far, far away, perhaps on a different continent altogether?