The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas Page B

hold herself back no more. “There is something you are not telling me. What is it?”
    All at once he looked haggard, as if he had been traveling on foot for months and months, and could scarcely remain upright. She lifted a hand to brace him before she realized what she was doing.
    â€œJust tell me. It can’t be worse than leaving me in the dark.”
    He gazed at her a long moment, the way one would at the dearly departed. Dread strangled her.
    â€œWhen we read my mother’s diary after my Inquisition, do you remember the entry that mentioned my standing on a balcony, witnessing something that would shake me profoundly?”
    His words seem to reach her from a great distance, each syllable faint and tinny. She nodded, her neck stiff.
    His eyes were on the storm clouds that turned everything in their path gray and dreary. “I had always assumed that she meant the balcony outside my bedchamber at the castle. Whenever I was at the castle, after lunch, I would lie down and use the Crucible—because that was what she had seen in the vision, me waking up with my hand on an old book that might be the Crucible. And I always had Dalbert call me at fourteen minutes past two, the time she had specified in her vision.
    â€œAnd so it was on the day we met. I was awakened at fourteen minutes past two. I walked out onto my balcony. And barely a minute later, your lightning.”
    For some reason, the fact that he had it timed to the minute filled her with horror. Or perhaps it was the way he spoke, like an automaton, as if he could only get the words out by pretending they had nothing to do with him.
    With them .
    â€œThis afternoon,” he went on, “I woke up at exactly fourteen minutes after two, and walked onto a balcony.”
    She stared at him. Had she somehow drunk as much cognac the night before as Kashkari? She was unsteady on her feet, and all ash and grit inside her mouth. “Do you mean to tell me that your mother’s prophecy actually referred to Wintervale, and not me?”
    Her voice, tentative and thread-thin, barely sounded like her own.
    He nodded slowly, still not looking at her.
    Her voice shook. “You are sure?”
    He stood still, his expression completely blank. The next moment he was on his knees, his hands over his face. Shock burned through her. This was a boy who had held himself together even in the midst of an Inquisition. But now he was falling apart in front of her.
    Numbness spread in her, gray and wooden. She did not understand anything at all. How could Wintervale be the Chosen One when it was up to her to brave the dangers, defeat the Bane, and keep Titus alive throughout it all?
    â€œI am sorry,” came Titus’s barely audible words. “I am so sorry.”
    She only shook her head—and kept shaking her head. This was her destiny, her destiny , not an old jacket that could be handed down to someone else.
    He was wrong. He had to have made a mistake.
    â€œShow me your mother’s diary,” she said. “I want to read those visions for myself.”
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    A minute later, the diary was in her hand. The words that appeared swam a little, but she pored over them with a resolve that felt almost frivolously optimistic next to his bleak hopelessness.
    When she came across the beginning of the last entry, he said, “This was when I knew. I smiled today, when I woke up, because I had been dreaming of you.”
    Pressure built behind her eyes, a pain that was not going away. She kept reading.
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    Suddenly everything makes sense. This is not some random sighting, this is the moment Titus first comes into his destiny. Everything I had learned so far about elemental magic and elemental mages points to a revelatory feat that announces the arrival on the scene of an extraordinary elemental mage.
    The boy who should have been the great elemental mage of my generation was said to have brought a dead volcano back to life, the eruption