Shelly Thomas - The Burning Sky

I won’t let you fall.

She did not. She held the wyvern aloft and propelled it with a tailwind the Angels would be pleased to have breathed.

As for the phantom behemoth and the would-be murderer who sat upon it—enough was enough.

She raised her hand toward the overcast sky. The clouds crackled with electric charge. Blue flashes leaped from cloud to cloud. From the farthest horizon, lines of energy rushed toward Purple Mountain, meeting at the zenith of the sky, seething, roiling.

Waiting for her.

She pointed her finger at the phantom behemoth.

Down the lightning came, beyond beautiful, beyond powerful.

All the boulders in the air fell. The phantom behemoth fell, striking ground with a force that jolted her entire person.

After another minute, the hardy little wyvern regained consciousness and, finding itself still airborne, began to flap its wings again.

Titus landed on Helgira’s terrace, kissed the wyvern on its scaly neck, and dismounted. Helgira, panting, regarded him with both tenderness and fury. All at once he knew she was not Helgira, but Fairfax. She had come, his most stalwart friend, and she had saved him.

He closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I thought this was the night the prophecy came true.”

“No, not tonight.” One of her hands was in his hair, the other tracing his jaw. “Not ever, if I can help it. But not tonight, at least.”

He could not begin to describe the sensation of being alive, being safe, and being here, with her .

His lips hovered barely an inch above hers. Their breaths mingled.

“Love will make you weak and indecisive, remember?” she murmured.

What a fool he had been. For a journey like theirs, love was the only thing that would make him strong enough.

“Don’t ever listen to an idiot like me,” he answered.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t count if it happens in the Crucible.”

With that, she pulled him to her and kissed him. Tears stung the back of his eyes. He had survived. They had survived. He held tightly on to her, on to life itself.

Titus would have liked to remain forever—or at least another minute—in this state of euphoric closeness. But with a sigh, Fairfax let go of him. “I’ve got boys running all over Eton to cover our tracks. I need to get them back to bed.”

Titus made sure he left behind Helgira’s cuff. And just to be careful, after they returned to the Black Bastion in his copy of the Crucible, he sealed the portal: he still preferred to err on the side of caution, even in the midst of risking his life.

In this fort, where he had caused such a ruckus, there was consternation at his reappearance, followed by flabbergasted looks as Fairfax climbed onto a wyvern behind him. But that was the advantage of being mistaken for the lightning-wielding mistress of Black Bastion: she didn’t need to explain herself to anyone.

Even better, as the wyvern took to the air, she wrapped her arms about him and laid her head on his shoulder.

Was this what happiness felt like?

She recounted how she had managed to pass before the Inquisitor unscathed, and that Kashkari had been “the scorpion.” He told her what he had seen and heard in the Citadel, including Horatio Haywood’s mysterious disappearance.

“Thank you,” she said, banding her arms tighter around him.

“What for?”

“For being willing to rescue my guardian.”

“Now we no longer know where he is.”

“We’ll find out,” she said, her voice scratchy with fatigue. She ruffled his hair. “And you—you are all right with having killed the Inquisitor?”

“I would rather someone else had taken her life. But I will not miss her.”

They dismounted on the meadow before Sleeping Beauty’s castle. She shed the wig and the gown she had borrowed and turned once again into a lithe, cocky boy.

He drew her to him and rested his cheek against her hair. “Is it true that if it happens in the Crucible, it doesn’t count?”

She held him tight. “My rescue, my rules.”

He kissed the shell of her ear. “Then let me tell you this: I live for you, and you alone.”

Kashkari had followed Fairfax’s directions beautifully. He had tied, blindfolded, and gagged Trumper and Hogg with strips of their own clothes. Then, once they had regained consciousness, he had thrown a barrage of German at them, as Fairfax had asked, in order to make them think that he was Titus, generally known to be a native speaker of German.

When Fairfax and Titus arrived on the scene, he shook their hands and then left with Fairfax to join the other boys. Titus did the same after rendering Trumper and Hogg unconscious again and dropping them on the front steps of their house, stripped to their drawers.

All the boys stood together and admired his handiwork. Now that their night’s task—and fun—was done, they started back for their own beds, yawning. At Mrs. Dawlish’s, the front door was open, the downstairs lights on, and Mrs. Dawlish and Mrs. Hancock both waiting. Mrs. Dawlish wearily waved them up. “Go to bed now. We’ll deal with the lot of you tomorrow.”

“Except you, Your Highness,” said Mrs. Hancock. “Would you mind coming with me to my office?”

Fairfax stepped in front of him. “We all went. The prince shouldn’t be singled out.”

Titus briefly rested his hand on her shoulder. “Go. I will be fine.”

In Mrs. Hancock’s office, it was Baslan’s spectral projection again, pacing into shelves and walls.

“You may leave us,” Baslan said to Mrs. Hancock.

“I would like to remind you, sir, that I am a special envoy of the Department of Overseas Administration, not your subordinate,” Mrs. Hancock said, smiling.

Baslan gave Mrs. Hancock a cold stare.

Titus plunked himself down on Mrs. Hancock’s best chair. He enjoyed squabbles between agents of Atlantis. “What do you want this time, Baslan?”

“You will address me as Inquisitor, Your Highness.”

Inquisitor. So Titus’s nemesis was truly dead. He gave his stomach a moment to settle. “Inquisitor, Baslan? Is everybody at the Inquisitory called the Inquisitor these days?”

Baslan flinched at Titus’s suggestion. “Madam Inquisitor can no longer carry out her duties. She has departed this earth.”

Titus found that he did not need to pretend to be shocked. He was shocked, still. “It cannot be true. I last saw her only hours ago. Right here at Eton. She showed no signs of imminent death.”

“To our lasting regret, it is quite true.”

“How did it happen?”

“That is strictly private. I need Your Highness to give an account of your whereabouts tonight.”

“And that is not strictly private?”

“No,” said Baslan without any sense of irony.

Titus crossed his arms before his chest. “After your lot finally let me go in the evening, I retreated to my room to enjoy a little peace and quiet. I was there until lights-out. Not long after lights-out, two boys threw a rock into my window. I chased them down, gave them what-for, and dragged them to the front door of their house.”

“Are there corroborating eyewitnesses?”

The question was for Mrs. Hancock. “The prince was in his room at lights-out—I knocked myself. Both the prince and his neighbor’s windows were broken. As for the rest, I will go check right now.”

“And you will confiscate all the prince’s books,” ordered Baslan.

Mrs. Hancock rolled her eyes but did not remind him again about their separate jurisdictions.

Titus exhaled. A very good thing that Fairfax had his mother’s diary. And that he had stowed his copy of the Crucible, disguised as a volume of devotional poetry in medieval French, at the school library, until he could move it to the laboratory.