needed no such gaudy announcement,” she half mumbled.
He snorted softly and pressed a food cube into her hand. “We missed celebrating your birthday in September. You have been seventeen for a while.”
“No wonder I’ve been feeling old and tired lately. Age, it creeps up on you.”
“Then lie down and sleep some more.”
“Durga Devi is right. If you are under-rested, you’ll be of no use to us. Now vault me someplace where I can see Lucidias.”
He sighed, kissed her on her lips, and vaulted them both to a nearby peak. She examined the concentration of floating fortresses and armored chariots. “Did it look like this when you last saw it?”
“More or less.”
“You think they believe us to be still somewhere in the city.”
His arm around her shoulder tightened. “That might be wishful thinking.” He expected that more trouble than ever awaited them where they were headed—and that was why she would not survive.
When they returned to the ledge, Kashkari was already asleep, laid out flat. She tucked Titus in and watched as he dropped off into a fitful slumber.
“So you have forgiven him?” asked Amara.
Iolanthe sat down next to her. “Provisionally—in case I die very soon.”3
“And if not?”
“Then I’ll have the luxury of time in which to hold a grudge, no?”
Amara chuckled softly. Iolanthe stared: the woman was amazingly beautiful, perfect from every angle. It occurred to her that though they had become comrades in a life-and-death struggle, she knew very little about Amara besides her stupendous loveliness and that she was the object of Kashkari’s impossible longing.
She summoned some water and offered it to Amara. “Did you say that your grandmother came from one of the Nordic realms?”
Amara unscrewed the cap of her canteen and let Iolanthe direct a stream of water inside. “You’ve heard of the good looks of the gentlemen mages of the Kalahari Realm, I trust?”
“Oh, yes.” There had been students from the Kalahari Realm at the Conservatory, and some of them had been spectacularly handsome—all that mingling of the bloodlines produced a most unusual beauty.
“My grandfather liked to joke that as a grass-green immigrant, my grandmother stepped out of her transport, laid eyes on the first nearby Kalahari man, and immediately proposed.”
“Did your grandmother ever admit to it?”
Amara held up a hand, indicating that her canteen was full. “She insisted until the day she died that he was the third man she encountered after her arrival, not the first.”
Iolanthe chortled and absentmindedly spun the remainder of the sphere of water she’d summoned.
“They were my father’s parents. My mother was born and raised on the Ponives—the same archipelago Vasudev and Mohandas’s grandparents hail from, incidentally, though not the same island. My father visited the Ponives on some sort of official business, and he met my mother while he was there. The way my mother told it, she nearly fainted with wonder when she first saw him—but only after they were married did she realize that among other Kalahari, his looks were considered mediocre at best.”
Iolanthe chortled again. Until this moment, she hadn’t been sure whether she liked Amara. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that until this moment she had never seen Amara as an actual person. “You said your parents left the Kalahari Realm when you were very small.”
“True. I never got to experience this overabundance of male pulchritude myself.”
“Why did they leave?”
Amara shrugged. “Atlantis, what else? The Kalahari Realm has the first Inquisitory Atlantis ever built overseas.”
Iolanthe was embarrassed: she hadn’t known that—and she probably should have. “Why did the Kalahari Realm interest the Bane so much?”
“I never understood it myself until I learned about Icarus Khalkedon from Mohandas—he wrote a great deal when he was flying to us in the desert. The Bane wanted control over our realm because he wanted our oracles. We are—or were—famous for our oracles. That’s why so many mages from all over the world had come there in the first place, to consult the oracles.”
“You mean there are others like Icarus Khalkedon?”
“No, I’d never heard of another human oracle like him, but there was the Prayer Tree, the Field of Ashes, the Truth Well, and a number of others throughout history. I imagine the Bane probably inquired at every one of them when and where he could find you.”
“Not me, just the next potent elemental mage—that was probably long enough ago that even Kashkari’s uncle’s powers hadn’t yet manifested themselves.”
Amara nodded. “You are right. It was forty years ago that the Inquisitory was built. He must