The Burning Sky Read online

  “I don’t need to eat. I need you to listen.”

  He rarely sounded parental these days—she couldn’t remember the last time. She turned around. “I’m listening. But please remember, a claim as extraordinary as yours—that I’ll be in danger from Atlantis by doing something as commonplace as lighting a wedding path—needs extraordinary proof.”

  He was the one who’d introduced her to the concept that extraordinary claims needed extraordinary proofs. Such a sponge she’d been, soaking up every one of his words, giddy and proud to be the closest thing to a daughter to this eloquent, erudite man.

  That was before his mistakes and lies had cost him position after position, and the brilliant scholar once destined for greatness was now a village schoolmaster—one in danger of being sacked, at that.

  He shook his head. “I don’t need proof. All I need is to rescind my permission for you to go to Meadswell for the wedding.”

  The only reason she was going to Meadswell in the first place was to save his employment. Rumor was that parents who’d soured on his inattentiveness to their children were urging Mrs. Oakbluff, the village registrar, to dismiss him. Iolanthe hoped that by providing a spectacular lighting of the path, not to mention the silver light elixir, Mrs. Oakbluff might be persuaded to tilt her decision in Master Haywood’s favor.

  If even a remote village in desperate need of a schoolmaster wouldn’t retain him, who would?

  “You forget,” she reminded him. “The laws are very clear that when a ward turns sixteen, she no longer needs her guardian’s permission for her freedom of movement.”

  She could have left him more than six months ago.

  He pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a gulp. The sickly sweet scent of merixida wafted to her nostrils. She pretended not to notice, when she’d have preferred to yank the bottle from his hand and throw it out of a window.

  But they were no longer the kind of family whose members raged honestly at one another. Instead, they were strangers conducting themselves according to a peculiar set of rules: no reference to his addiction, no mention of the past, and no planning for any kind of a future.

  “Then you will simply have to trust me,” he said, his voice heavy. “We must keep you safe. We must keep you away from the eyes and ears of Atlantis. Will you trust me, Iola? Please.”

  She wanted to. After all his lies—No, this is not match fixing. No, this is not plagiarism. No, these are not bribes—she still wanted to trust him the way she once had, implicitly, completely.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

  She’d never before acknowledged openly that she had only herself to rely on.

  He recoiled and stared at her. Was he searching for the child who’d adored him unabashedly? Who would have followed him to the end of the world? That girl was still here, she wanted to tell him. If he would only pull himself together, she would gladly let him take care of her, for a change.

  He bowed his head. “Forgive me, Iolanthe.”

  This was not an answer she’d expected. Her breath quickened. Did he really mean to apologize for everything that had led her to lose faith in him?

  He moved all of a sudden, marching toward the cauldrons while unscrewing the cap of his flask.

  “What are you—”

  He poured all the merixida that remained in the flask into the light elixir on which she’d slaved for a fortnight. Then he turned around and pulled a mute, openmouthed Iolanthe into his arms and hugged her hard. “I have sworn to keep you safe, and I will.”

  By the time she comprehended what he’d done, he was already walking out of the schoolroom. “I will inform Mrs. Oakbluff that you will not be able to perform the lighting of the path this evening, because you are too ashamed that your light elixir failed.”

  Iolanthe stared at the ruined light elixir, a flat, mildew-green puddle without any hint of viscosity. Silver light elixir she’d promised Mrs. Oakbluff, but silver light elixir could not be had for love or money at the last minute.

  Despair swamped her, a bitter tide. Why did she try so hard? Why bother saving his post when no one else cared, least of all he himself?

  But she was too accustomed to brushing aside her self-pity and dealing with the aftermath of Master Haywood’s actions. Already she was at the bookshelves, pulling out titles that might help. The Novice Potionmaker did not deal with light elixirs. The Quick Solution: A Classroom Handbook to Potionmaking Mistakes provided only guidance for light elixirs that emitted a foul smell, solidified, or wouldn’t stop fizzing. The Potionmaster’s Guide to Common and Uncommon Draughts gave her a lengthy historical perspective and nothing else.

  In desperation she turned to The Complete Potion.

  Master Haywood loved The Complete Potion. She had no idea why—it was the world’s most pretentious doorstop. In the section on light elixirs, beyond the introductory paragraphs, the text was in cuneiform.

  She kept flipping the pages, hoping for something in Latin, which she read well, or Greek, which she could manage with a lexicon, if she had to. But the only passages not in cuneiform were in hieroglyphs.

  Then, all of a sudden, in the margins, a handwritten note she could read: There is no light elixir, however tainted, that cannot be revived by a thunderbolt.

  She blinked—and hastily tilted her head back: she had no idea there were tears in her eyes. And what kind of advice was this? Placing any elixir in a downpour would cause irreversible damage to the elixir, defeating any hope of repairing it.

  Unless . . . unless the writer of the note had meant something else, a summoned thunderbolt.

  Helgira the Merciless had wielded lightning.

  But Helgira was a folkloric character. Iolanthe had read all four volumes and twelve hundred pages of The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages. No real elemental mage, not even any of the Greats, had ever mastered lightning.

  There is no light elixir, however tainted, that cannot be revived by a thunderbolt.

  The author of those words certainly had no doubt it could be done. The swirls and dashes of the penmanship brimmed with a jaunty confidence. As she looked up, however, the prince in his portrait expressed nothing but disdain for her wild idea.

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a minute. Then she pulled on a pair of thick gloves and grabbed the cauldron.

  What did she have to lose?

  The prince was about to kiss Sleeping Beauty.

  He was tattered and sweaty, still bleeding from the wound on his arm. She, his reward for battling the dragons that guarded her castle, was pristine and beautiful—if blandly so.

  He walked toward her, his boots sinking ankle deep in dust. All about the garret, in the gray light that filtered past the grime on the window, cobwebs hung as thick as theatrical curtains.

  He was the one who had put the details in the room. It had mattered to him, when he was thirteen, that the interior of the garret accurately reflect a century’s neglect. But now, three years later, he wished he had given Sleeping Beauty better dialogue instead.

  If only he knew what he wanted a girl to say to him. Or vice versa.

  He knelt down beside her bed.

  “Your Highness,” his valet’s voice echoed upon the stone walls. “You asked to be awakened at this time.”

  As he thought, he had taken too long with the dragons. He sighed. “And they lived happily ever after.”

  The prince did not believe in happily-ever-after, but that was the password to exit the Crucible.

  The fairy tale faded—Sleeping Beauty, garret, dust and cobwebs. He closed his eyes before the nothingness. When he opened them again, he was back in his own chamber, sprawled on the bed, his hand atop a very old book of children’s tales.

  His head was groggy. His right arm throbbed where the wyvern’s tail had sliced through. But the sensations of pain were only his mind playing tricks. Injuries sustained in the imaginary realm of the Crucible did not carry over to the real one.

  He sat up. His ca
nary, in its jeweled cage, chittered. He pushed off the bed and passed his fingers over the bars of the bird’s prison. As he walked out to the balcony, he glanced at the grand, gilded clock in the corner of the chamber: fourteen minutes past two o’clock, the exact time mentioned in his mother’s vision—and therefore always the time he asked to be awakened from his seeming naps.

  In the real world, his home, built on a high spur of the Labyrinthine Mountains, was the most famous castle in all the mage realms, far grander and more beautiful than anything Sleeping Beauty ever occupied. The balcony commanded splendid views: ribbon-slender waterfalls cascading thousands of feet, blue foothills dotted by hundreds of snow-fed lakes, and in the distance, the fertile plains that were the breadbasket of his realm.

  But he barely noticed the view. The balcony made him tense, for it was here, or so it had been foretold, that he would come into his destiny. The beginning of the end, for his prophesied role was that of a mentor, a stepping-stone—the one who did not survive to the end of the quest.

  Behind him, his attendants gathered, feet shuffling, silk overrobes swishing.

  “Would you care for some refreshments, sire?” said Giltbrace, the head attendant, his voice oily.

  “No. Prepare for my departure.”

  “We thought Your Highness departed tomorrow morning.”

  “I changed my mind.” Half his attendants were in Atlantis’s pay. He inconvenienced them at every turn and changed his mind a great deal. It was necessary they believe him a capricious creature who cared for only himself. “Leave.”

  The attendants retreated to the edge of the balcony but kept watch. Outside of the prince’s bedchamber and bath, he was almost always watched.

  He scanned the horizon, waiting for—and dreading—this yet-to-transpire event that had already dictated the entire course of his life.

  Iolanthe chose the top of Sunset Cliff, a rock face several miles east of Little-Grind-on-Woe.

  She and Master Haywood had been at the village for eight months, almost an entire academic year, yet the rugged terrain of the Midsouth March—deep gorges, precipitous slopes, and swift blue torrents—still took her breath away. For miles around, the village was the only outpost of civilization against an unbroken sweep of wild nature.

  Atop Sunset Cliff, the highest point in the vicinity, the villagers had erected a flagpole to fly the standard of the Domain. The sapphire banner streamed in the wind, the silver phoenix at its center gleaming under the sun.

  As Iolanthe knelt, her knee pressed into something cold and hard. Parting the grass around the base of the flagpole revealed a small bronze plaque set into the ground, bearing the inscription DUM SPIRO, SPERO.

  “While I breathe, I hope,” she murmured, translating to herself.

  Then she noticed the date on the plaque, 3 April 1021. The day that saw Baroness Sorren’s execution and Baron Wintervale’s exile—events that marked the end of the January Uprising, the first and only time the subjects of the Domain had taken up arms against the de facto rule of Atlantis.

  The flying of the banner was not in itself particularly remarkable—that, at least, Atlantis hadn’t outlawed yet. But the plaque, commemorating the rebellion, was an act of defiance here in this little-known corner of the Domain.

  She’d been six at the time of the uprising. Master Haywood had taken her and joined the exodus fleeing Delamer. For weeks, they’d lived in a makeshift refugee camp on the far side of the Serpentine Hills. The grown-ups had whispered and fretted. The children had played with an almost frantic intensity.

  The return to normalcy had been abrupt and strange. No one talked about the repairs at the Conservatory to replace damaged roofs and toppled statues. No one talked about anything that had happened.

  The one time Iolanthe had run into a girl she’d met at the refugee camp, they’d waved awkwardly at each other and then turned away embarrassed, as if there had been something shameful in that interlude.

  In the years since, Atlantis had tightened its grip on the Domain, cutting off contact with the outside world and extending its reach of power via a vast network of open collaborators and secret spies inside the realm.

  From time to time, she heard rumors of trouble closer to home: the loss of an acquaintance’s livelihood on suspicion of activities unfavorable to the interests of Atlantis, the disappearance of a classmate’s relative into the Inquisitory, the sudden relocation of an entire family down the street to one of the more distant, outlying islands of the Domain.

  There were also rumors of a new rebellion brewing. Thankfully Master Haywood showed no interest. Atlantis was like the weather, or the lay of the land. One didn’t try to change anything; one coped, that was all.

  She lowered and folded the banner, setting it aside to avoid damage. For a moment she wondered whether she could truly endanger herself by putting on a display of fire and water. No, she didn’t believe it. During the two years before they came to Little Grind, they’d lived right next door to a family of small-time collaborators, and Master Haywood had never objected to her showing fire tricks to the children.

  She nudged the cauldron so that its metal belly was snug against the pole, the better to absorb the jolt of the lightning. Then she measured fifty big strides away from the pole, for safety.

  Just in case.

  That she was preparing for anything at all to happen amazed her. Yes, she was a fine elemental mage by current standards, but she was nothing compared to the Greats. What made her think she’d accomplish a feat unheard of except in legends?

  She gazed up at the cloudless sky and took a deep breath. She could not say why, but she knew in her gut that the anonymous advice in The Complete Potion was correct. She only needed the lightning.

  But how did one summon lightning?

  “Lightning!” she shouted, jabbing her index finger skyward.

  Nothing. Not that she’d expected anything on her first try, but still she was a little deflated. Perhaps visualization might help. She closed her eyes and pictured a bolt of sizzle connecting sky and earth.

  Again nothing.

  She pushed back the sleeves of her blouse and drew her wand from her pocket. Her heart pumped faster; she’d never before used her wand for elemental magic.

  A wand was an amplifier of a mage’s power; the greater the power, the greater the amplification. If she failed again, it would be a resounding failure. But if she should succeed . . .

  Her hand trembled as she raised the wand to point it directly overhead. She inhaled as deeply as she could.

  “Smite that cauldron, will you? I haven’t got all day!”

  The first gleam appeared extraordinarily high in the atmosphere, and seemingly a continent away. A line of white fire zipped across the arc of the sky, curving gracefully against that deep, cloudless blue.

  It plummeted toward her—searing, bright death.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  CHAPTER 2

  A COLUMN OF PURE WHITE light, so distant it was barely more than a thread, so brilliant it nearly blinded the prince, burst into existence.

  He stood mute and amazed for an entire minute before something kicked him hard in the chest, the realization that this was the very sign for which he had waited half his life.

  His hand tightened into a fist: the prophecy had come true. He was not ready. He would never be ready.

  But ready or not, he acted.

  “Why do you look so awed?” He sneered at his attendants. “Are you yokels who have never seen a bolt of lightning in your lives?”

  “But sire—”

  “Do not stand there. My departure does not ready itself.” Then, to Giltbrace specifically, “I am going to my study. Make sure I am not disturbed.”

  “Yes, sire.”

  His attendants had learned to leave him alone when he wished it—they did not enjoy being sent to clean
the palace guards’ boots, haul kitchen slops, or rake out the stables.

  He counted on their attention returning immediately to the burning sky. A glance backward told him that they were indeed again riveted to the extraordinary, endless lightning.

  There were secret passages in the castle known only to the family. He was before the doors of his study in thirty seconds. Inside the study, he pulled out a tube from the center drawer of his desk and whistled into it. The sound would magnify as it traveled, eventually reaching his trusted steed in the stables.

  Next he drew an heirloom field glass from its display case. The field glass pinpointed the location of anything that could be sighted within its range—and its range extended to not only every corner of the Domain but a hundred miles beyond in any direction.

  His fingers shaking only slightly, he adjusted the knobs of the field glass to bring the lightning into sharper focus. It had struck far away, near the southern tip of the Labyrinthine Mountains.

  He grabbed a pair of riding gloves and a saddlebag from the lower drawers of the desk and murmured the necessary words. The next instant he was sliding down a smooth stone chute at a near vertical angle, the acceleration so dizzying he might as well be in free fall.

  He braced himself. Still, the impact of slamming onto Marble’s waiting back was like running into a wall. He swallowed a grunt of pain and groped in the dark for the handles mounted on the old girl’s shoulders. With his knees he nudged her forward.

  They were at the mouth of a hidden expedited way cut into the mountain. The moment the invisible boundary was crossed, they hurtled through a tunnel twelve feet in diameter—barely wide enough for Marble to fit through with her wings folded.

  The darkness was complete; the air pressed heavy and damp against his skin. They shot upward, so fast his eardrums popped and popped again. Then, a pinprick of light, which grew swiftly into a flood of sunshine, and they were out in the open, above an uninhabited peak well away from the castle.