Free The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas Page B

whose official title was Lord High Commander of the Great Realm of New Atlantis. Unlike the Inquisitor, whom people did talk about, if in hushed whispers, regarding the Bane there was a conspicuous silence.
    â€œWhat does the Bane want me for?”
    â€œFor your powers,” said the prince.
    It was the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to her. “But the Bane is already the most powerful mage on earth.”
    â€œAnd he would like to remain so—which is only possible with you,” said the prince. “You are crushing your sandwich, by the way.”
    She willed her stiff fingers to unclench. “How? How do I have anything to do with the Bane remaining powerful?”
    â€œDo you know how old he is?”
    She shook her head and raised her teacup to her lips. She needed something to wash down the sandwich in her mouth, which had become a dry paste she couldn’t quite swallow.
    â€œClose to two hundred. Possibly more.”
    She stared at him, the tea forgotten. “Can anyone live that long?”
    â€œNot by natural means. Agents of Atlantis watch all the realms under their control for unusually powerful elemental mages. When they locate such a mage, he or she is secretly shipped to Atlantis, never to be heard from again. I am ignorant of how exactly the Bane makes use of those elemental mages, but I do not doubt that he does make use of them.”
    If she clutched her teacup any harder, the handle would break. She set it down. “What precisely is the definition of an unusually powerful elemental mage? I have no control over air.”
    The prince leaned forward in his chair. “Are you sure? When was the last time you tried to manipulate air?”
    She frowned: she couldn’t remember. “Someone tried to kill me by removing all the air from the end portal. If I had any affinity for air, I’d have stopped it, wouldn’t I?”
    It became his turn to frown. “Were you not born on either the thirteenth or fourteenth of November 1866—I mean, Year of the Domain 1014?”
    â€œNo, I was born earlier, in September.”
    Her birthday was a day after his, in fact. It had been fun, when she’d been small, to pretend that the festivities surrounding his birthday had been for her also.
    â€œShow me your birth chart.”
    A birth chart plotted the precise alignment of stars and planets at the moment of a mage’s birth. It was once a crucial document, for everything from the choice of school to the choice of mate: the stars must align. In recent years it had become fashionable in places like Delamer to break with tradition and leave one’s birth chart to molder. But not so in Little Grind. When Iolanthe had volunteered to contribute the fire hazards for the village’s annual obstacle course run last autumn, her chart, along with those of all the participants, had been requisitioned to determine the most auspicious date on which to hold the competition.
    As she dug the cylindrical container out of the mostly empty satchel, it occurred to her that if she had used her birth chart only months ago, then it could not possibly be in the satchel, the contents of which hadn’t been disturbed in more than a decade.
    She’d unrolled only the top six inches of the birth chart earlier, when she’d checked to see that it was a birth chart. Fully unfurled, the three-foot-long chart had no name at the center, only the time of birth, five minutes past two o’clock in the morning on the fourteenth of November, YD 1014.
    Something gonged in her ears. “But I was born in September. I’ve seen my chart before—many times—and it’s not this one.”
    â€œAnd yet this is the one that had been packed, for when the truth came out and you were forced to leave,” said the prince. 
    â€œAre you saying that my guardian counterfeited the other? Why?”
    â€œThere was a meteor storm that night. Stars fell like