packing and checked each other’s bags to make sure no important items had been left behind.
When there was nothing more to be done, Iolanthe closed the door of the laboratory. She wished she had time for one last stroll on the headland. It was an austerely beautiful place, Cape Wrath, and she’d seen very little of it, despite the number of times she’d visited the laboratory.
Someday. Someday when all the prophecies in the world went up in flames.
She took a deep breath. “Ready?”
“No,” said Master Haywood.
“I know what you mean. No one can be ready for what we are about to face.”
“No, that is not what I meant at all.”
She glanced at him. Had he changed his mind? “Then what do you mean?”
From the abandoned barn in Kent, Iolanthe vaulted Master Haywood and herself to Gravesend, then to central London, then West Drayton, six miles east of Eton. She didn’t know exactly how far Atlantis’s no-vaulting zone extended, but they arrived in West Drayton without mishap, and from there took a train to Windsor and Eton Central railway station, immediately on the doorstep of Windsor Castle.
The castle was inside the no-vaulting zone, which was still very much in effect. High walls and guarded entrances, however, were no matches for two mages with breaking in on their minds. In fact, the only problem Iolanthe had was in determining the precise location of the room she used to vault into, for meeting with Lady Wintervale.
But she knew it faced north and was on an upper floor. And she gave a detailed enough description for a footman, under an otherwise spell that made him believe that she was one of the English queen’s ladies-in-waiting, to know exactly which sitting room she was talking about.
Later that day, her voice rang out clearly from inside the room. “Toujours fier.”
What Lady Wintervale had told her to say, to summon the noblewoman from her lair deep in the castle.
Except this time those words summoned only the agents of Atlantis, lying in wait.
CHAPTER 12
TITUS SAILED THE SLOOP SOUTHWARD. The sea was steel gray and choppy, the spray cold as knives. Kashkari and Amara were huddled near each other toward the aft, but they seldom spoke. Amara, despite the sailing aid Titus had given her, looked as if she were desperately trying not to lose her breakfast.
If he thought about it, it was strange that Amara had tagged along—he vaguely recalled whispered exchanges between Kashkari and her, while they were still in the laboratory. But Titus did not devote much time to the oddity of her choice: everyone who was not Fairfax was free to try his or her luck on Atlantis.
They were all going to die anyway.
It was nearly dark before they sighted land—a rock heap that belonged to the Nereids Isles, one of the Domain’s outlying archipelagos. Titus more or less ran the boat aground. They were lucky it did not tip over and injure someone.
Just as he had done with the countries of Europe, Titus had methodically taken himself to many parts of his own realm. He gave Kashkari and Amara each a hefty dose of vaulting aid and vaulted them to a bigger island ninety miles away.
Another hop and they were on a third island, this time before an old temple that had fallen into ruins. In the inner sanctum of the temple, Titus pointed his wand at the floor. “Aperito shemsham.”
The huge stones receded, leading to a passage down.
“Hesperia,” he said, by way of explanation.
Hesperia the Magnificent had spent a significant portion of her childhood under imprisonment. After she wrested power from the Usurper, she was determined never to lose her freedom again. Everything she ever built had multiple means of escape that led everywhere in the Domain.
The secret chamber beneath the inner sanctum had a portal that led to a similar secret chamber underneath a similarly dilapidated shrine, this time in the Labyrinthine Mountains.
Finding places in the Labyrinthine Mountains was always tricky. Titus asked Kashkari and Amara to remain in the vicinity of the shrine, while he himself vaulted about to see how the mountains had shifted. That is, he blind vaulted—vaulting with his eyes wide open, staring at where he wanted to go, instead of using actual memories of a place that he had visited before. In the Labyrinthine Mountains, where everything moved, vaulting did not work as well as it did elsewhere.
It would have been easier for him to use a carpet and scan the landscape from a higher vantage point,