tinted a rich mango hue by the westerly sun floated upon its surface. Along the edges of the lake, wild plants and shrubs grew, some still flowering, festooning the inside of the caldera with garlands of cream and yellow.
“What a beautiful place,” she murmured.
He draped his arm around her shoulders. She looked more exhausted than he had ever seen her, her eyes somber and wistful.
“What are you thinking about?” He could not get the image of her burning pyre out of his head, her still, lifeless body surrounded by flames.
“I was wondering whether Mrs. Hancock ever stood here. Also, whether she had ever seen anything of Britain.”
“Probably not.” Year in and year out, Mrs. Hancock had waited for the Bane to walk into Mrs. Dawlish’s, rarely straying from the resident house, and likely never outside the boundaries of the school.
“I’m glad that this time I left Britain in a hot air balloon—saw more of the country than I ever had before. It’s a beautiful island, especially the coasts—reminded me of the northern wilds of the Domain.”
Was she already looking backward toward all the people and all the places she had known and loved?
As if she heard his thought, she turned to him. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep going.”
“Then I will too.”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him very gently. “I’ve had an epiphany concerning happiness,” she murmured. “Happiness is never thinking that each kiss might be your last—to be so assured that there will be countless more that you don’t bother to remember any single one.”
“For what it is worth, this is happiness for me,” he told her. “This is what I have always wanted—that we should be together at the end.”
She gazed at him a long moment, and kissed him again. “You know what I regret?”
“What?”
“My former disdain for rose petals. In the greater scheme of things, they really aren’t so evil after all.”
He chortled at her unexpected admission. “If that is all you regret, then yours has been a life well lived.”
“I hope so.” She sighed. “All right, enough philosophical indulgences. Now let’s have your confession, Your Highness. Why did you refuse to let me see Sleeping Beauty when we first fought dragons at her castle?”
On the far side of the mountains, the land lay tumbled and broken, as if someone had shrunk the Coastal Range to a fraction of its size and then strewn copies about willy-nilly: the rocky ground was full of cuts, gashes, and stone slabs leaning at drunken angles.
They started after sunset, and still they flew with one eye on the sky. But no pursuers appeared over the top of the Coastal Range, which to Titus served to underscore Kashkari’s point: the Bane was more than happy to wait for them to come to him.
Their progress was swift, but not that swift. Amara steered the carpet she and Kashkari shared and set the pace for the group. Titus had the sensation that she did not want to hurtle toward the Commander’s Palace at a blistering speed.
Who did?
No one spoke. Titus and Fairfax shared a carpet, but they only held hands: everything that needed saying had already been said. They were past declarations of love, loyalty, or even hope. It now remained only to be seen what they could accomplish before their prophesied deaths.
Titus kept them in a northwesterly direction, stopping from time to time to spread maps on the ground and gauge their progress. A waxing crescent was low in the sky, when they came to a huge, vertical escarpment that the carpets could not ascend.
Titus attempted a blind vault—and went nowhere. “We must be inside the no-vaulting zone now.”
A hundred miles—or less—from the Commander’s Palace. They could be there within an hour, if they were to fly without interruption. Titus felt a weakness in his fingertips: he was frightened, after all.
He had always been.
Fairfax tried to boost them up, but around six hundred feet or so above ground, the force of air she generated was only enough to keep them hovering, not to gain any more altitude. And the top of the cliffs was still two hundred feet farther up.
“Should we climb or should we go around?” asked Amara, her voice tight.
“The fault line seems to stretch as far as I can see,” said Kashkari, surveying the expanse of the cliffs with the help of a far-seeing spell. “You’ve more experience with escarpments, Durga Devi. What do you recommend?”
Amara clamped her teeth over her lower lip. “I say let’s fly a