Shelly Thomas - The Burning Sky

His last option, ripped from him. He stumbled back into his room, numb with panic.

Distantly there came the sound of fireworks exploding and enthusiastic cheering. Like a sleepwalker, he drifted to his window, only to see Trumper and Hogg on the grass, each with a brick in hand, getting ready to throw them at his and Fairfax’s window.

His anger boiling over, he slashed his wand in the air. They promptly fell over. He clenched his hand, willing himself not to do anything else. In his current state of mind, he might maim them permanently.

He turned around . “ Bastards. They need their heads shoved up their—”

He froze. It was exactly what he had said in his mother’s vision. He hurried to his copy of Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde . In his hands it turned back to Princess Ariadne’s diary. Almost immediately he located the rest of the entry.

It is evening, or perhaps night, quite dark outside. Titus turns back from the window, clearly incensed. “Bastards,” he swears. “They need their heads shoved up their—”

He freezes. Then rushes to take a book down from his shelf, a book by the name of Lexikon der Klassischen Altertumskunde.

Everything blurred.

When I could make out clear images again, I was no longer looking at the same small room, but at the library of the Citadel. Is it the same evening? I cannot be sure. Titus appears again, this time in a gray, hooded tunic, moving stealthily through the stacks. (Someday he will be the Master of the Domain. Why the furtiveness in his own palace?)

Again everything dissolves—to coalesce once more into the interior of the Citadel’s library. Many more mages are present, most of them soldiers in Atlantean uniform—how far the fortunes of the House of Elberon will have fallen—surrounding what looks to be a body on the floor. Alectus and Callista are there too.

“I can’t believe it,” Callista murmurs.

Alectus looks as if he’d lost his own sister. “The Inquisitor, dead. It is not possible. It is not possible.”

Did this mean if Titus took himself to the Citadel tonight, it would somehow result in the Inquisitor’s death? The prospect was dizzying.

What had the Oracle said? You must visit someone you’ve no wish to visit and go somewhere you’ve no wish to go.

To go to the Citadel, he would have to pass through Black Bastion, Helgira’s fortress.

My visions are usually not so disjointed. At this point I am not sure whether this is one vision or three separate ones. I will record them as one for now and hope for clarification later.

He turned the page. There was no more text. He turned another page and froze. At the bottom right corner of this page, there was a small skull mark.

He had left the mark, on the page that bore the vision of his death.

Were these two visions but part of the same larger vision? By going to the Citadel this night, was he going to his end?

Think no more on the exact hour of your death, prince. That moment must come to all mortals. When you will have done what you need to do, you will have lived long enough.

He set his hand on the Crucible, bowed his head, and began the password.

IOLANTHE WAS DRAGGED OUT OF Mrs. Dawlish’s by boys who had come back to the house for supper. They could not understand why she wanted to stay in her room, and she, preoccupied, had failed to complain early on of headaches or fatigue.

She made sure she always stood or walked where it was darkest, kept a wary eye for the presence of Atlanteans, and an even warier one for the possibility of Master Haywood and Mrs. Oakbluff being led about like a pair of bloodhounds.

But no one arrested her. She made it back to Mrs. Dawlish’s house and headed directly for the prince’s room.

He was not there. She spent a petrified moment thinking he’d been taken after all, until she noticed his uniform jacket on the back of a chair—and the still warm kettle next to the grate.

So he’d come back, taken off his jacket, boiled water for tea, and then—she felt the kettle again—between a quarter to a half hour ago, gone somewhere else.

But where? He could not vault anywhere. Atlantis monitored the periphery of the no-vaulting zone. And Lady Wintervale had blocked the wardrobe portal on her end.

Birmingham’s voice rang out in the hall, reminding the boys that it was time to prepare for bed. Soon Mrs. Hancock would come around to knock on all the boys’ doors, making sure they were in their rooms at lights-out.

She checked the common room; he was not there. The baths were already locked. Only the lavatory was left.

Wait, she told herself. But half a minute felt like a decade. She swore and made for the lavatory, a facility she used only when it was entirely or mostly unoccupied. It was now shortly before lights-out: the place was not going to be empty.

She took three deep breaths before going inside, and still she almost ran out screaming. The trough was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with boys emptying their bladders—the last thing she wanted to witness, even if it was from the back.

“You want my place, Fairfax?” asked Cooper as he stepped back from the trough, refastening his trousers.

“No, thank you! I’m looking for Sutherland. He has my classical geography book.”

She knocked on the stalls. “You in there, Sutherland?”

“Good Lord, can’t a man visit a privy in peace anymore?” came Birmingham’s grumpy reply from the last stall.

All the boys laughed. Iolanthe contributed her own nervous guffaws and escaped with unholy haste.

On a different night she might not have worried so much—if the prince didn’t have some secret plans brewing, he wouldn’t be Titus VII. But this day they’d faced their nemesis and escaped by the skin of their teeth. He must be dying to find out how she’d pulled off the deed. Not to mention they desperately needed to come up with a coherent strategy, together, to counter the Inquisitor’s next move.

She returned to the prince’s room. There was one place she hadn’t checked, the teaching cantos. The Crucible was on his desk; she placed her hand over it. Once she was in the pink marble palace, she ran to his classroom.

A note on his door said, F, I will be gone for a short while. No need to worry about me. And no need to worry about lights-out. T.

Instead of reassuring her, his vagueness about his destination and purpose made her even more uneasy.

She opened the door—and paused on the threshold. Inside the classroom, illuminated by a dozen torches, woody vines rose wrist-thick from openings on the floor, intertwined in knots and arabesques on the walls, and spread open upon the ceiling. Clusters of small golden flowers hung from this canopy. A bank of French windows opened to a large balcony and a dark, starry sky.

There were no tables or chairs upon the carpet of living grass, but two elegant bench swings set at oblique angles to each other. The prince sat on one of those swings, in his Eton uniform, his arms stretched out along the back of the bench.

“Tell me what I like to read in my leisure time,” he said.

“Who gives a damn! Where are you?”

As if he hadn’t heard her at all, he repeated his demand.

With a pinch in her heart she remembered it wasn’t really him, only a record and a likeness . “Ladies’ magazines, English.”

“Where did you last kiss me?”

The memory still burned. “Inside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”

He nodded. “What can I do for you, my love?”

He’d never before called her that. Her chest constricted. Was he saving all such endearment for after his death? “Tell me where you’ve gone.”