The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas Read Free Book Online

of sand at once, since we don’t have much time.”
    He would have expressed gratitude, if he were not shaking too much to speak.
    She applied layers and layers of various ointments, dressed his wound, and offered him a handful of granules. “Gray ones for strength. Red ones for pain—otherwise you’ll still hurt too much to move.”
    He swallowed them whole.
    â€œStay where you are for a minute, for everything to take effect. Then we must get going.”
    â€œThank you,” he managed.
    â€œMy, words I thought I’d never hear from you,” she said.
    She checked and double-checked all the labels as she put the remedies back into her bag, with the care of a librarian reshelving books according to a particularly rigid reference code.
    Now that he knew she was a girl, he was astonished that he had thought her a boy until they had been pressed together from shoulders to knees. Yes, there had been the man’s clothes, the short hair, and the somewhat gravelly voice, but surely . . . He could only shake his head inwardly at the potency of assumption.
    She glanced up, caught him staring, and frowned—she had a rather fearsome frown. “What’s that cold thing inside your clothes?”
    He was only just beginning to become aware of a chill against his heart, which he had hardly noticed earlier, when the pain from his back had crowded out all other sensations. Gingerly, he put one hand under his jacket. His fingers came into contact with something icy.
    An attempt to move it chafed the back of his neck. That something was a pendant. He yanked the cord from around his neck.
    The pendant was the shape of half an oval. The other half was clearly missing. Where was it? Who had it? And did the temperature of his half of the pendant indicate that the other half was far, far away, perhaps on a different continent altogether?
    He sat up and examined his ruined clothes—jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. According to the labels sewn into the seams, they had been made by a tailor of Savile Row, London.
    He found the pocketknife he had used earlier, engraved with a coat of arms that had a dragon, a phoenix, a griffin, and a unicorn in the quadrants. The waistcoat yielded a watch, made of a cool, silver-gray metal, engraved with the same coat of arms. The jacket’s inside pocket contained a wallet—and again the same coat of arms.
    Inside the wallet was a negligible amount of nonmage currency, British, by the looks of the coins. But more important, there were several cards, all with the same coat of arms yet once more, and on the other side, the words H. S. H. Prince Titus of Saxe-Limburg .
    Was he this Prince Titus? What kind of place was Saxe-Limburg? There was no mage realm by that name. And as far as he knew, not a nonmage one either.
    She handed him a tunic from her satchel. He destroyed the ruined clothes, stowed the pendant inside the wallet, and shoved the wallet and the watch into his trouser pockets. A hot, unpleasant sensation tore across his back as he lifted his arms overhead to pull on the tunic, but it was ignorable.
    She tossed a waterskin his way. He drank nearly half of the contents of the waterskin, gave it back to her, and pointed at the broken strap of her satchel. “I can repair that for you.”
    â€œGo ahead, if it will make your conscience feel better.”
    He rejoined the two halves of the strap. “Why do you assume I have a conscience?”
    â€œIndeed. When will I stop being such a bumpkin?”
    She enlarged the space in which they found themselves and stood up. “ Linea orientalis. ”
    A faint line appeared underfoot, running due east.
    â€œWhere are you headed?” he asked, a better question than Where are we? He did not want to betray the fact that he had no idea of their location.
    â€œThe Nile.”
    So they were in the Sahara. “How far are we from the Nile?”
    â€œWhat do you think?”
    A cool