The sound of steel wheels grinding on metal rails had never sounded so sweet.
Fairfax was safe. For now.
CHAPTER
THE TRAIN HAPPENED TO TAKE them to Charing Cross rail station. Titus decided that one of the big, new hotels near Trafalgar Square frequently patronized by American tourists would serve his purpose very well.
He briefly bewitched a middle-aged lady and her maid. As the two followed dazed and obedient in his wake, he presented himself to the hotel clerk as Mr. John Mason of Atlanta, Georgia, traveling with his mother. Once he had his key in hand, he walked the lady and her maid out a different door, released them from the bewitchment, and bade them a cordial good night.
In his rooms, he applied layer upon layer of anti-intrusion spells, feeling no compunction in using the deadlier ones known to magekind. Deeming it secure enough for Fairfax to resume human form, he left her in the bedroom with a tunic from his satchel and a pair of his English trousers.
She padded out of the bedroom just as the dumbwaiter dinged.
“Your supper,” he mumbled from where he lay slumped on the settee, his arm over his eyes.
She found the door of the dumbwaiter. The aroma of chicken broth and beef pie wafted into the parlor. She set down the tray of food on the low table next to him. “Are you all right?”
He grunted.
“You don’t want to eat anything?”
“No.” He did not want to tax his stomach for the next twelve hours.
“So what now? Are we going on the run?”
He removed his arm from his face and opened his eyes. She was sitting on the carpet before the low table, wearing his gray, hooded tunic, but not his trousers. Her legs were bare below mid-thigh.
The sight jolted him out of his lethargy. “Where are your trousers?”
“They had no braces and won’t stay up. Besides, it’s warm enough in here.”
He was feeling quite hot. It was not unusual to see girls in short robes come summertime in Delamer. But in England skirts always skimmed the ground and men went mad for a glimpse of feminine ankles. So much skin—boys at school would faint from overexcitement.
He might have been a bit unsteady too, if he were not already lying down.
“You never answered my question,” she said, as if the view of long, shapely legs should not scramble his thoughts at all. “Are we going on the run?”
“No, we go back to school tomorrow.”
“What?”
“Had they managed to take you before we left the Domain, you would have been doomed. But now that danger is past, we must do everything in our power to preserve your current identity. As long as it remains intact, Atlantis can suspect me as much as it wants, but cannot prove anything.”
“But you said you hadn’t managed to convince the Inquisitor of anything. She will come after you again.”
“She will, but not immediately. That interruption of yours was a blow to her. She will need some time to recover. Besides, I cannot disappear just like that. It is the law of the land that the throne cannot be left unoccupied. Alectus would be named the ruling prince.”
And that would be the end of the House of Elberon.
She ladled herself a bowl of soup and dug into the beef pie. “So we have no choice but to carry on at school?”
“For as long as we can.”
“And when we can’t anymore?”
“Then we will be put to the test.”
This earned him a look that was almost pure stoicism—except for a flash of sorrow. She had such beautiful eyes, this girl, and . . .
His thoughts slowed as he realized her eyes might be the last thing he saw before he died.
“You wouldn’t have been involved in this at all if it weren’t for your mother,” she said, yanking him back to the present. “What if the Inquisitor is right?”
What if the Inquisitor had been? Much of his mother’s brief life was a mystery to him, as were many of her visions. “Bear in mind the Inquisitor wanted to destabilize my mind as much as possible.”
“Did your grandfather kill your mother?”
His face burned. “Yes.”
Her gaze was steady. “Why?”
“To preserve the House of Elberon—he refused to go down as the last prince of the dynasty.”
When given the choice by Atlantis between abolishing the crown altogether or offering his daughter, an active participant in the January Uprising, as a sacrifice, Prince Gaius had chosen the latter. It was not the most shameful secret of the House of Elberon’s long history, but it came close enough.
“Did your mother really foresee her own death when she was a child?”
“I do not know.”
“Did she tell you anything before she died?”
“Only that if I ever wanted to see my father, I had to bring down the Bane.”
He would never have brought his father into the discussion, but the blood oath obliged him to tell the truth.
She chewed contemplatively. “If you don’t mind my asking, who is your father?”
His cheeks scalded hotter, if possible. “I do not know that either.”
“Your mother never mentioned him?”
“She mentioned him a great deal.” His love of books, his beautiful singing voice, his smiles that could raise the sun at midnight. “But nothing that can be used to identify him.”
How excited he had been at the possibility his mother’s question implied. Do you want to see your father? He had thought it a question like Do you want a slice of cake?—with the cake to be produced within the minute.
Fairfax swirled a spoon in her soup bowl. “What did you say when you heard that you had to bring down the Bane?”
He had not been able to say much for the fear and disappointment that jostled within him. And the anger—that his own mother would trick him so.
“I said I was not going to fight the Bane because I did not want to die.”
His mother had broken down and sobbed, tears streaming down her face to splatter upon her lovely sky-blue shawl. He had never seen her cry before.
“But you agreed eventually,” said Fairfax quietly, her eyes almost tender.
He could still see his mother’s tearstained face. Still hear her muffled voice as she answered his bewildered question.
Why are you crying, Mama?
Because I hate myself for what I ask of you, sweetheart. Because I will never forgive myself, in this life or the next.
Something in him had broken apart at those words.
“I was six,” he said. “I would have done anything for her.”
There existed something in this world that bound a mage tighter than a blood oath: love. Love was the ultimate chain, the ultimate whip, and the ultimate slave driver.
He reached into the satchel, which he had placed on the floor next to the chaise, and pulled out a thick book.
“I’ve seen that book. You brought it all the way from school?” asked Fairfax.
“In priorem muta,” he said. The book undisguised itself and became a plain, leather-bound journal. “My mother’s diary. She recorded all her visions in here.”
“It’s empty,” Fairfax said, after he had turned some thirty, forty pages.
“It will only show what I must see.”
The diary had been left to him when his mother died, with the inscription My dearest son, I will be here when you truly need me. Mama.
He had opened it daily and come across absolutely nothing. Only after he had learned the truth of her death—that it had been murder, not suicide—had the first entry appeared. The one about him, on the balcony, witnessing the phenomenon that would and did change everything.
He kept turning the pages, but they remained stubbornly blank. Something cold and terrible gnawed at his guts.
I need you now. Do not abandon me. Do not.
A few pages from the very end of the diary, writing at last appeared in her familiar, slanted hand. His hand tightened on the binding so his fingers would not shake from relief.