“What about dative or locative?” asked Kashkari.

“You can use the accusative, since they are going to Athens—makes it Athens-ward,” Iolanthe answered.

She’d discovered that her grasp of Greek, inferior in her own eyes, was considered quite proficient by the other boys.

“Accusative, of course.” Kashkari shook his head a little. “I wonder now how we got by when you weren’t here.”

“I have no doubt the devastation was widespread, the suffering universal.”

“Indeed, it was the Dark Ages in the annals of Mrs. Dawlish’s house. Ignorance was thick on the ground, and unenlightenment befogged all the windows.”

Iolanthe smiled. Kashkari grinned back at her. “If ever I can do something for you in return, let me know.”

You can pay a little less attention to me. “I’m sure I’ll be banging on your door as soon as I take up Sanskrit.”

Eton didn’t have such a course, but mages in upper academies were usually required to master a non-European classical language. Iolanthe, in her before-lightning days, had aspired to Sanskrit for its wealth of scholarship.

“Ah, Sanskrit. I dare say my Sanskrit is as good as your Latin—my family put me to it when I was five,” said Kashkari, rolling up his sleeve to check his elbow, which he had scraped on the ground in a fall during practice.

On his right arm, just beneath his elbow, he sported a tattoo in the shape of the letter M—for Mohandas, his given name, she supposed.

“What about Latin? Your Latin is good. Did you have a tutor for it before you came to England?”

He nodded. “Since I was ten.”

“Was that when you knew you’d be sent abroad for schooling?”

“On my tenth birthday, in fact. I remember that day because my relatives kept telling me about the night I was born, all the shooting stars.”

“What?”

“I was born in the middle of a meteor storm.”

“The one in November of”—she still had trouble with the way the English counted years—“1866?”

“Yes, that one. And then they’d tell me about the even greater meteor storm in ’33.”

“There was one in 1833?”

“The most magnificent meteor storm ever, according to—”

“Look, it’s Turban Boy and Bumboy.”

Iolanthe looked across the street to see Trumper and Hogg, snickering to each other.

“Somebody ought to give them a thrashing,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low.

“Do you thrash for your prince every night?” said Hogg, moving his hips obscenely.

Other boys on either side of the street were stopping to see what was going on.

“Ignore them,” Kashkari said calmly.

“Go home to your idol-worshipping, sister-marrying family,” said Trumper. “We don’t want your kind here.”

That was it. Iolanthe gripped her cricket bat and crossed the street.

“What a big stick you carry,” sneered Hogg. “Is that what the prince likes to use on you?”

She smiled. “No, just what I like to use on your friend.”

She swung the bat. Not very hard, since she didn’t want to kill Trumper, but still it connected with his nose in a very satisfying way.

Blood trickled out of Trumper’s nostrils. He howled. “My nose! He broke my nose!”

“You too?” she asked Hogg. “How about it?”

Hogg took a step back. “I—I have to help him. But you are going to regret this for the rest of your life.”

Several boys from nearby houses had stuck their heads out of their windows. “What’s going on?” they asked. “What’s that caterwauling?”

“Nothing,” said Iolanthe. “Some idiot walked into a lamppost.”

Trumper and Hogg took off amidst a volley of laughter—no one, it seemed, liked them.

When Iolanthe returned to Kashkari’s side, he looked at her with something between alarm and admiration. “Very unhesitating of you.”

“Thank you. I hope they’ll think twice now before insulting my friends in my hearing. Now what were you telling me about the meteor shower in 1833?”

Titus winced as he pulled himself out of the scull in which he had spent the past three hours rowing up and down the Thames. Fairfax was on the pier, waiting for him.

“Is something wrong?” he asked as they walked out of earshot of the other rowers. She usually did not come to the pier.

She tapped her cricket bat against the side of her calf in an agitated cadence. “Thirty-three years before I was born, there was another meteor storm, wasn’t there, an even more spectacular one? Were there no prophecies then concerning a great elemental mage?”

“There were. Seers fell over themselves predicting the birth of the greatest elemental mage of all time.”

“And?”

“And he was born in a small realm in the Arabian Sea. When he was thirteen, he caused an underwater volcano long thought dormant to erupt.”

Fire was a flamboyant power—as was lightning. But the ability to move mountains and raise new land from the sea was power on a different magnitude altogether.

She emitted a low whistle, suitably impressed. “What happened to him?”

“The realm was already under the dominion of Atlantis. The boy’s father and aunt had both died while taking part in a local resistance effort. When agents of Atlantis arrived to take the boy away, his family decided that they would never allow it. They killed him instead.”

This time her response was a long silence.

“What were the consequences to the boy’s family?” she asked, her voice tight.

“To the family specifically, I am not sure. But the Bane’s displeasure was great, and the entire realm suffered a battery of retaliatory measures. My mother believed that the Bane’s failure to obtain the boy caused a loss of vigor on his part, which in turn led to a slackening of Atlantis’s grip on its realms.

“Mages did not quite notice at first—not for years—but when they did, they began to test the leashes. There were minor infractions, which became rebellions, which became full-scale uprisings.”

“The January Uprising.”

“Baroness Sorren timed it to take advantage of the general chaos. The Juras was already a bloodbath, with heavy casualties on both sides. Atlantis was also having trouble with both the Inter-Dakotas and the realms of the subcontinent. And there were rumors of discontent in Atlantis itself. The leaders of the January Uprising thought they would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“But they themselves were crushed instead. Atlantis must have found a way to harness a new power.”

“Or an old one. My mother believed that the Bane had to deplete his own life force, something he had been careful to preserve throughout the long centuries of his life. Which would explain why he is so desperate to locate you.”

She turned the cricket bat around a few times, her motion growing more steady and deliberate. “I am not his to be had. And someday, he might just regret coming after me—after us—and not leaving well enough alone.”

It was not until Titus was in his room, changing, that he realized the significance of what she had said: she meant to wrap her hands around the reins of her destiny. Around the reins of their destiny.

An unfamiliar emotion surged in his chest, warm and weightless.

He was no longer completely alone in the world.

Titus stood a long time outside Prince Gaius’s door. Beyond awaited his mother’s murderer, who had died comfortably in his bed, in the full of old age.

Even now anger and hatred simmered in him. But the Oracle had said that he must visit someone he had no wish to visit, and he could not think of anyone, other than the Inquisitor, whose presence repelled him more.

He shouldered open the heavy door. Music spilled out, notes as sweet and succulent as summer melons. A handsome young man sat on a low white divan, surrounded by plump blue cushions, plucking at the strings of a lute.

“Where is Prince Gaius?” Titus demanded.

“I am he,” answered the young man.

But you are supposed to be an old man. All the other princes and princesses looked as they had close to the end of their lives. Hesperia in particular, though the gleam in her eyes remained undiminished, was as wrinkled as a shelled walnut. “How old are you?”