At that time we all thought that perhaps it was the Master of the Domain himself who was behind the overture.”
Titus was not—he had always been adamantly against anyone knowing anything about his work. Nor were war machines his modus operandi.
“In any case,” Kashkari went on, “it seems that Amara has been forgiven. It must have been the same mages who contacted her just now in her two-way notebook—that was how they had always got in touch with her, even though she had never matched her notebook with theirs.”
“Do you think it might be Dalbert?” Iolanthe asked Titus.
“Not Dalbert himself—he is careful not to be mixed up in something like this. But it might have been mages he considered trustworthy.”
“Good to know,” said Kashkari.
“True, we are not entirely alone,” replied Titus.
But his face was troubled, even as he uttered his apparently hopeful words.
They settled in a deep curve of a dune that undulated for miles.
Once Iolanthe discovered that the battle supplies they’d grabbed from the rebel base contained sachets of tea, she cleared a small space for them inside the dune, where she could summon a fire without being seen.
Over Titus’s objection, of course. “You will overtax yourself,” he said, shaking his head.
“Please, Your Highness, show some respect for the great elemental mage of your time.”
They didn’t have any cooking vessels, so she heated the sphere of water she’d summoned as it spun lazily a few inches above the fire. When she judged the water hot enough, she dropped in a pinch of tea leaves to steep.
The battle rations also came with pastries that had savory fillings of peas, potatoes, and spices.
“This is wonderful,” she said wholeheartedly. “We’ve had nothing but food cubes since we woke up in the desert. What I wouldn’t give now for one of those breakfast spreads at Mrs. Dawlish’s.”
Kashkari chewed meditatively. “When I was at Mrs. Dawlish’s, I was always waiting for some dramatically eventful future to happen. But now that it’s all happening, I wish I’d better appreciated the boring old days, when the most exciting thing I ever did was occasionally vaulting to London, or to the West Sussex coast for a walk by the sea.”
Titus had already finished one pastry and was on to the next—this might be the fastest she’d ever seen him eat. “I miss rowing,” he said. “Cricket was incomprehensible, so I chose rowing. At first I thought it was only a little less stupid as a sport. And then it turned out that when I rowed I paid attention only to the rhythm of my breaths and the rhythm of my pulls—I did not think at all.”
Which must have been a lovely respite from the tyranny of his destiny.
In Summer Half, sometimes the cricketers walked down to the river and heckled the rowers. In her mind’s eye she saw the four-man scull coming down the Thames, the rowers with their backs to the spectators, the blades of their oars slicing into the water in perfect unison and exact alignment.
She had been as enthusiastic a heckler as any cricketer, disparaging the rowers’ form, speed, and general manliness. Titus usually ignored the cricketers, as befitting his lofty persona, but once—just once—he lifted his hand from the oar and flashed the cricketers an obscene gesture.
The cricketers had agreed that it was the best heckling session in their collective memory.
“I miss Cooper,” she said. “I miss all of them. I miss the pictures of Bechuanaland from my room—they made me feel nostalgic, even though I’d never been anywhere near the Kalahari.”
Into their warm enclosure a silence fell. Titus stared into the fire. Kashkari looked down at the sand at his feet. The sphere of hot water had turned a clear russet; she directed the tea into everyone’s waterskins.
Then she exhaled and acknowledged the keenly felt absence. “And I really miss Wintervale. He would have loved to be here with us—he would have had the time of his life.”
Kashkari lifted his head. “You were the last one to see him, weren’t you?”
And by “him,” Kashkari meant the real Wintervale, before he had been turned into a vessel of the Bane.
“I was, the day of the first cricket practice for the twenty-two. He’d been called back by his mother and just remembered that the wardrobe portal in his room no longer worked. And he was fretting over how long it would take to get home via nonmage transports.” She blew at the steam rising from her waterskin. “Such an ordinary parting. I never thought