Kashkari offered Titus the only chair and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Were you able to get some rest?” asked Titus.
His voice sounded strange to his own ears, as if his vocal cords had been badly scratched.
Kashkari shook his head. He looked worn—an insomniac’s body craved the rest to which his mind could not succumb. “I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. So I’ve been writing letters.”
There was a finished letter on the table, already in its envelope. “To be sent by Her Majesty’s post?”
“The British post is very reliable.”
The reach and efficacy of a realm’s postal service was usually the rough equivalent of the reach and efficacy of its power.
Kashkari rose and added some more coal to the grate. “And you? I don’t suppose you spoke to Fairfax—or she would be here to see me herself.”
Instead she was sound asleep, still blissfully ignorant. “No,” Titus admitted. “I could not tell her. I am as much of a coward as you are.”
Kashkari gave a soft, bitter laugh. “I hate this ability. Hate it.”
Titus closed his hand around the collar of his coat—he was cold again despite the warmth of the small room. “My mother was a seer and she hated it too.”
Kashkari had picked up the poker to jab into the grate. At Titus’s words he stilled—then slowly turned around. “When we spoke earlier, you mentioned a death that has long been prophesied. By your mother?”
“Yes.”
Kashkari’s eyes were wide with dismay. “Fortune shield me. Whose death? Yours?”
Titus nodded wearily, beyond caring.
Kashkari gripped the edge of the mantel. “I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.”
Titus sighed. “My mother could not tell me face-to-face either—left it to her diary to decide when it should be revealed.”
“Was that why you told me that the person I dreamed about already knew of the prophesied death?”
“Both Fairfax and I suspected that you had dreamed about me, confirming my mother’s vision. Never in a million years would I have guessed that—” Titus still could not bring himself to speak those words aloud. “Upon my death, Alectus assumes the reins of power and that will be an unfavorable development, but it only worsens the current situation by degrees. Whereas . . . the rippling effect of what will happen to Fairfax was what you were trying to warn me about, was it not, when I walked out on you a few hours ago?”
Were she to fall into the Bane’s hands, the consequences would be unthinkable.
Kashkari lifted the poker again and redistributed the coal in the fireplace. “It’s the dominant view among western mage realms that one must never tamper with what has already been seen. But as I told Fairfax a while ago, we of the eastern heritage do not have such a draconian stance on the flow of time. For us, what I dreamed yesterday morning would be considered a shot across the bow, a warning from above.”
“Against what?”
“Against that very eventuality. Fairfax should not step onto Atlantis.”
Titus set his elbow on the desk and dropped his forehead into his hand. “You think we stand a chance without her?”
That prophecy of his mother’s, that of two young men approaching the Commander’s Palace—had she meant Titus and Kashkari? Fortune shield him, he had come across that vision right after Kashkari had revealed himself as not only a mage, but a mage bent on the downfall of the Bane. And when he had opened her diary that day, he had wanted specifically to know whether she had seen anything about Kashkari.
“We don’t have Fairfax’s powers, obviously. But we also don’t carry the same liability. If we fail, we are just two more dead mages.”
In Titus’s mother’s vision, those two young men, whoever they were, had reached the outermost ring of the Commander’s Palace. They were still as far from the Bane’s crypt as a snail in Iceland was from the summit of Mount Everest—but they were closer than anyone had been in at least a generation.
“Perhaps your mother’s vision was a warning too,” said Kashkari.
“What? I should not go to Atlantis either?”
Was it wrong how much he wished Kashkari were correct?
“Maybe not now. Maybe at a different time.”
“You forget that I cannot simply lie low—not without ceding the throne to the regent.”
“But you yourself said that the harm of such a course of action is incremental.”
Titus sighed. “Compared to the catastrophe of Fairfax falling into the Bane’s hands, I suppose the harm of everything else is incremental.”
“Then think about it.”
Titus pressed two fingers against the