a stretch—that was how he accumulated enough hours of contact.”
Fairfax’s lips flattened. It came to Titus that this must have been a story she had loved hearing: her guardian, devoted to her from day one. But it had been a different infant in his arms, someone else altogether.
Amara exhaled. “I still don’t like it. But I suppose when there is no good solution, we must accept the least terrible one.”
Fairfax, who had been watching her guardian, frowned. Titus looked in the direction of her gaze. The sound circle only blocked the sounds inside from traveling out; they could hear Aramia talking animatedly about Lady Callista, glad to have at last found a receptive audience.
Haywood waited until Aramia had come to a stop, then excused himself.
“Would you mind keeping Miss Tiberius company for a minute, Kashkari?” asked Fairfax.
Kashkari was nonplussed, but he left readily enough. They redrew the sound circle to include Haywood.
“My spell didn’t work, and I can’t understand why,” said Haywood. “I could have sworn I’d held her for at least seventy-two hours.”
“You have,” said Fairfax. “I saw the visitors’ log of the Royal Hesperia Hospital with my own eyes.”
“But the spell refused to take.”
Fairfax pressed the heels of her palms against her temples. “There’s something not quite right about all this. But never mind that. Can you do this instead, Master Haywood: wait until we are on the meadow, ready to exit, then use a blunt force memory spell on her?”
Haywood grimaced but nodded.
Fairfax erased the sound circle and opened the shutter outside the window. “Get on your carpets, everyone. We are leaving.”
Titus climbed onto Iolanthe’s carpet. It hurt to look at him: he seemed a mere husk of his former self.
He took her hand. She shook his grip loose as she accelerated, leaving Black Bastion behind.
“We are all going to die soon,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Do you really wish to waste time being angry at me?”
“Yes,” she hissed. “I remain an unrepentant optimist. If I see that I am about to die, or you, I will forgive you. But not until then, you bastard.”
She hadn’t called him “bastard” since the earliest days of their acquaintance.
“I will not apologize, you know. We all thought you would end up being used for sacrificial magic, and that must be avoided at all costs.”
“And have I asked you to apologize for that? No. But you had better grovel hard for your high-handed methods. You drugged me. Were you out of your mind?”
“Yes.”
She was taken aback by his admission. “That was no excuse. You’ve lived through many trying situations. You should have been able to think more clearly.”
He said nothing for a long time. Then he sighed. “I am sorry for my methods. I panicked. And when I panicked, all I could think about was myself, how I could not go on knowing that the hour of your death had already been declared. Forgive me.”
What could she say to something like that? How could she maintain her anger in the face of his despair?
He pulled the hood of her tunic more closely about her head—the temperature was nowhere near as frigid as that of the north of Scotland, but the night air was still chilly. “Please. We have so little time.”
And they hurtled at such a breakneck speed toward that eventual rendezvous with destiny.
“When we are in the Crucible,” he said, “we are in a folded space, much like the inside of the laboratory—and our location cannot be pinpointed. But the moment we exit, we will be on Atlantis itself.”
Which wouldn’t be long now—already the turrets of Sleeping Beauty’s castle were visible in the distance.
“In case conditions are adverse once we leave the Crucible and I do not have the that one last opportunity, Fairfax . . . I love you.”
Once upon a time they’d had a falling-out because he had not wanted them to act on their feelings for each other—he had thought love would interfere with their task, would make them weak and indecisive.
Now she wondered whether he hadn’t been right after all. Until this moment she had been driven by rage, which was a despot of an emotion: when rage ruled, it ruled alone; the mind was void of everything except anger.
But now that he had defused her wrath, now that he had brought up love, fear came rushing back: fear of loss, fear of dying, fear of failing in the end, after every sacrifice had been made.