The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

Her ruthlessness surprised her. Had she always been such a hard bargainer, or was she but responding to the boy’s cold-bloodedness?

“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “But I am not letting you in without a nonharming agreement. Put a drop of your blood on the dome.”

A boy who practiced blood magic—she shivered.3 A nonharming agreement wasn’t as fearsome as a blood oath, but still, all blood magic was powerful and dangerous, to be entered into only with extreme caution. “Only if you reciprocate.”

“You first,” he said.

She took out a set of compact tools she had seen in her satchel earlier, jabbed a slender pick into her finger, and touched the dome.

It was like touching the top of a giant jellyfish: cool, soft, yet resilient.

The boy grimaced. From reluctance, she thought, until she realized that it was from the pain of movement to take a pocketknife out of his jacket. He extracted a drop of blood and sent it outward to the dome, which absorbed it as thirsty soil would soak in water.

Next thing she knew she was in it to the elbow. She drew back, startled.

“Hurry,” said the boy.

The dome was slightly sticky on her skin as she pushed through. Sitting down next to the boy, she willed sand to rise and cover the dome, not stopping until it was pitch-dark inside.

Thirty seconds later came the soft thuds of armored chariots landing nearby.

Atlantis, it would seem, knew exactly where to find them.





CHAPTER 4


England

TWO HOURS AFTER THE INTRUDER had escaped the Citadel, Titus walked through the front door of his residence house at Eton College. Mrs. Dawlish’s parlor, brimming with printed chintz and needlework flowers, was as neat and proper as always. But the walls reverberated with the noise of thirty-five pupils stomping up and down, greeting friends they had not seen since the end of Summer Half.

A bittersweet sensation expanded inside Titus’s chest: in this house he had spent some of the happiest hours of his life. He could almost hear Fairfax’s boastful words and see the gleefully cocky expression on her face.

He broke into a run, pushing past a gaggle of junior boys clogging up the parlor, and taking the steps three at a time. At the stair landing of the next floor stood a cluster of senior boys—but she was not among them.

In the split second he took, trying to decide whether to shove those boys aside too, Leander Wintervale turned around and saw him.

“Did you hear the news, prince?” Wintervale greeted Titus with a hearty slap to the back. “Fairfax made the twenty-two, alongside myself, of course.”

A long moment passed before Wintervale’s sentence made sense: he was talking about cricket. At the beginning of Michaelmas Half, twenty-two boys were selected as candidates for the next year’s school cricket team. They would split into two teams and play each other all year long. Then the best eleven would be named to the school team come Summer Half, for the pride and glory of facing off against teams from Harrow and Winchester.

“Does—does Fairfax know?”

Wintervale grinned. “Fairfax hasn’t stopped boasting about it since he heard the news.”

Relief tore through Titus, making him lightheaded. She was here. She had made her way back. “Where is he?”

“Gone to High Street with Cooper.”

Titus swallowed his disappointment. “What for?”

“Tomorrow’s tea stuff, of course, or we’d have nothing to eat,” said Wintervale, not noticing any of the emotions that buffeted Titus. “By the way, Kashkari will not be joining us for a few days. Mrs. Dawlish had a cable from him. His steamer ran into some rough weather in the Indian Ocean and he reached Port Said only today.”

For four years, Titus had paid no particular attention to Kashkari, the Indian pupil with whom he and Wintervale took their afternoon tea—Kashkari was mainly Wintervale’s friend. But a few months ago Kashkari, unbeknownst to him, had played a crucial role in keeping Titus out of Atlantis’s grasp.

“Port Said,” said Titus. “So he has to put in at Trieste, cross over the Alps, and pass through Paris before he can get here.”

The whole of the summer holiday was barely enough time for the round trip from England to India and back. Kashkari would be lucky if he got to spend a week with his family in Hyderabad.

“You forgot to mention the English Channel. It’s the worst.” Wintervale shuddered. “In the first year of our Exile, my father wanted the family to have an authentic nonmage experience. So we crossed the English Channel on a steamer and I puked my guts out something proper. I had a great deal more respect for the nonmages afterward—I mean, the hardship these people endure.”

Leave it to Wintervale to talk like this within easy hearing of at least half a dozen boys. Words such as “discretion” and “caution” held no meaning for him. He knew enough to not announce outright that he was a mage, but otherwise his inclination was to continually blurt out the first thing that came into his head.