like us, to act as dummy doubles?”
She thought wildly. “I’ve a tent. It can take various shapes.”
“Have it ready.”
She fished the tent out of her satchel—the tent that had served as Titus’s and her shelter during their days in the desert. They shot into a side door and came to a sudden halt that almost threw her off. Kashkari jumped down from the carpet and motioned her to do the same.
She shook the tent open and shaped it roughly to look like two slender, conjoined cylinders. They strapped the tent onto the carpet. Kashkari bewitched it to fly down a long corridor and toward the open door at the other end. “Come with me.”
He led her down to the level beneath the stage, a warren of corridors. They turned and turned, seeming to go around in circles, before Kashkari pushed open a door into a dark and cramped storage room and called for mage light.
He swore. “I don’t see it.”
“Are we in the right place?”
“Yes. When I went to England at the beginning of Michaelmas Half, it was here. It’s always been here.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“A double-door wardrobe. Huge. Curlicues and whatnots everywhere. You can’t miss it.”
They came across shelves and racks and trunks, but no wardrobes, armoires, or freestanding cupboards, huge or otherwise.
She gripped him by the arm. “Do you hear that?”
They were no longer alone in the basement. They’d taken too long—the Atlanteans had discovered their ruse.
She tamped down her panic. “Wait! Did you say the theatrical season hasn’t quite started yet? When does it start?”
He stared at her a second. “This way!”
They raced up to the auditorium level. The theatrical season was about to start, which meant there must have been rehearsals. Neither of them had ever taken part in Eton’s dramatic productions, but Sutherland had and sometimes talked about his experience. The later rehearsals were always conducted with the stage dressing in place, so that the actors would know where the props were and how to negotiate their way across the proscenium.
But there was nothing onstage except a bed, draped in rather garish silks and velvets. They stared at each other, stricken.
Then, with a soft cry, Kashkari rushed toward the stage. He yanked off the red and gold counterpanes and heaved aside several layers of padding. Now it became clear that underneath the bedcovers had not been a bed frame, but an enormous armoire lying on its face.
Iolanthe lifted it with a levitation spell and set it back down on its feet. They scrambled inside and closed the doors.
“Out of the frying pan, at least,” she said.
Kashkari exhaled. “Here’s to going into the fire.”
CHAPTER 7
“SAY THAT AGAIN,” TITUS DEMANDED.
“Lady Callista and Commander Rainstone are half sisters.”
One was the regent’s mistress, the power behind the throne, and the other the woman in charge of defending the realm from external threats. And yet Titus, the Master of the Domain, had known nothing of it.
“Who else knows?”
“I don’t know, sire. I can tell you that I was never told, but overheard an argument between the two of them. Commander Rainstone was lambasting Lady Callista for having no grasp of the concept of loyalty. For not understanding why Commander Rainstone was so distraught that she had been dismissed from Her Highness’s service. ‘To you everyone’s value is only in what they can do for you,’ she said to Lady Callista. And then she added, ‘I wish I’d never discovered that we were sisters.’”
Commander Rainstone had been let go by Princess Ariadne, Titus’s late mother, after the latter caught Commander Rainstone snooping in her personal diary, in which she recorded all her prophetic visions. Neither Titus nor his mother had been able to make sense of this transgression on Commander Rainstone’s part. But now Titus was beginning to see how Commander Rainstone could have been pushed into it, by a sister who desperately wanted to know if there were prophecies inside that diary concerning her daughter.
“I never mentioned to either of them what I’d overheard,” Haywood went on. “But I’m fairly certain they stopped spending time together after that—the matter with Her Highness was probably the weight that snapped an already fraying bond.”
Titus thought back. Had he ever seen Lady Callista and Commander Rainstone in the same place? Yes, he had, at the garden party at the Citadel that Amara had crashed. But the two women had been separated by the crowd, and Commander Rainstone was well known for her disinclination to attend social functions at the Citadel.
“But whether they’d reconciled