Clare refrained from rolling her eyes, but only because she was becoming well and truly freaked out. Still, she could give Bloody Nicky a run for his money when it came to those three things.
“Go on,” she said. “I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to complicated, fantastical, and unbelievable. I promise I won’t laugh or anything.”
Milo grinned wanly. “She won’t. Trust me. Neither will I.”
Ashbourne and Piper exchanged a glance and the archaeologist shrugged.
“All right then,” he said. “I am not Nicholas Ashbourne. Well … that’s not strictly true, I suppose. I suppose I am he as much as I am anyone. But it is certainly not who I started out as. A long time ago, a young man by the name of Quintus Phoenius Postumus was born in the year AD 20 by our present calendar standards and grew up to become an officer in the Roman army, serving at the siege of the Druid stronghold of Mona under the command of one Gaius Suetonius—”
“Paulinus?” Clare interrupted, agog with astonishment and disgust. “Not that guy again! I’m seriously so sick of hearing about that bloody Roman wanker.”
Milo turned and raised a grimly amused eyebrow at her. It seemed that, in the few weeks she’d been across the pond, Clare had acclimated nicely. Peppering her speech with bon mots like “bloody” and “wanker” just like a native; Maggie would be proud. Ashbourne, for his part, did a double take.
“Spoken like someone with firsthand knowledge of the man,” he murmured.
“I am,” she snorted. “Oh, the good old days.”
“Clare … is special,” Milo explained. “In a lot of ways, but temporally speaking, really special.”
“Oh yes. I know all about that.”
“You do?”
“About the fact that Miss Reid carries a Druid blood curse in her veins?” He chuckled at Clare’s reaction. “Come now, Miss Reid, surely you don’t think you’re the only one who’s fallen prey to a centuries-spanning Druid blood curse?”
“Um. No?” Clare blinked. “Well … yes. I actually kind of did.”
She was startled to the core. But then her gaze locked with Ashbourne’s and it dawned on Clare that he knew about her … condition because it was something they shared.
“You,” she said quietly. “You were this Postumus guy …”
He nodded.
“… and the Druiddyn blood cursed you.”
Ashbourne’s mouth half-bent in a mirthless smile and he nodded faintly. “I suspect, though, that mine was rather more malicious than yours.”
“Yeah, well. I was a girl in a sundress who time-travelled by accident.” Clare couldn’t help the abruptly snarky tone; her mind had just flashed on the mental picture of him in full Roman armour, standing against a backdrop of fire and smoke. “You, on the other hand, were a commander in the army that was kind of busy trying to wipe out a large percentage of the native Briton population. I imagine that didn’t exactly stir up the warm fuzzies among the Druiddyn, y’know?”
Ashbourne sighed. “I’m sorry you think of me that way.”
“I’m sorry you make me think of you that way.”
Milo put a hand on her shoulder. “Clare … this isn’t getting us any closer to finding Allie. Dr. Ashbourne, please. Go on.”
“Sure. Right. Go on.” Clare bit her lip and struggled to keep a lid on her temper. She couldn’t help seeing Bloody Nicky Ashbourne not for who he was now but for what he’d been. Comorra had died—before Clare had altered the course of history just a teeny bit—because of the actions of men like him. A lot of the Iceni had died. Boudicca, her daughter Tasca, her husband … and those were just a few of the faces Clare could put to the dead. There’d been so many more. All because a bunch of stupid men from a stupid country thousands of miles away decided they wanted a little more space to spread out.
She simmered silently while Ashbourne told them about the siege of the Druid Isle of Mona, where the Roman governor, the brutal Suetonius Paulinus, had ordered the sacred oak groves burned before he had to hurry east to take care of Boudicca’s rebellious uprising.
“He commanded me to follow him once we were done with the job on Mona …”
“Job?” Clare muttered. “Is that what they called a massacre back in the day?”
Ashbourne’s shoulders stiffened, and a slight flush—whether of anger or shame, Clare couldn’t tell—suffused his face. But otherwise he ignored the dig.
“I declined to follow that order,” he continued.
Clare swallowed another knee-jerk snark.
“Declined?” Milo said. “You mean you disobeyed a direct order from your commander?”
“I did. But only because I had other orders—imperatives, really—from higher up the ladder. Paulinus was a … driven man, shall we say. He was single-minded in his quest to beat the Britons into submission—especially when it came to Boudicca and her rebels. And the Druiddyn. What happened on Mona was … not honourable. And I knew it would be even worse with the Iceni: Boudicca and her people would fight to the bitterest end, and Paulinus and his men would be merciless. The Fourteenth—the Legio Gemina—had a reputation as the most brutally efficient of all the Legions, and it was not an unearned one. Under the command of Paulinus, the Fourteenth was a well-oiled killing machine. My own men—the Second Augusta—had cultivated a different reputation. One of honour. We were in Britain as keepers of peace. Arbiters of civilization and progress.”
“Even if the Celts didn’t want you there?”
Ashbourne sighed. “Perhaps so. Yes. At the time I didn’t see it that way. None of us did.” He ran a hand over his face again, his expression betraying a bone-deep weariness, and Clare felt her righteous indignation faltering somewhat. “At any rate,” he continued, “I had no wish to put my own men in the middle of such a ruinous clash. And so I manufactured a viable excuse for avoiding the conflict. A golden excuse, one might say.”
“What was that?” Milo asked.
“Emperor Nero was a man thirsty for the riches of his provinces. And Britain was nothing if not rich. In gold. Druid gold. After Paulinus left to go fight Boudicca, my men and I discovered masses of the stuff, hidden in caves on Mona. Magnificent workmanship, torcs and brooches and bracelets … all manner of jewellery fit for kings and queens …”
Clare thought back to the treasure hoard buried along with the body of the queen in Boudicca’s grave barrow, and she knew that Ashbourne wasn’t exaggerating.
“I sent a missive to Paulinus describing the treasure caches and telling him that, as per the emperor’s mandate, my men and I would escort the captured booty to ships sailing for Rome. I thought I was being clever. But in trying to save my men from unnecessary slaughter and destruction, I succeeded only in damning them more thoroughly than I ever could have imagined.”
“What happened?” Clare leaned forward, fascinated in spite of herself.
“After we left Mona, we travelled south with a caravan of wagons to deliver the gold to one of the supply ships that anchored at a place called Parwydydd, on the south shore of the River Severn where it empties into the Bristol Channel. But the gold weighed us down. Slowed our progress. And, I suppose, fuelled an even greater anger in the Britons—who attacked us for having stolen their Druids’ sacred treasure. Eventually they laid a trap for us. We were ambushed in the Mendip Hills, not very far north of here. A lot of my men were killed in what became a long-running battle …”
His eyes went glassy with the memory and Clare felt a chill crawling across her scalp. She’d been caught in the middle of a Celt versus Roman battle once. She still had nightmares about it.
“Eventually we had to abandon all but one of the wagons, giving up the gold to be recaptured. Then, under cover of darkness one night, I sent my best men out with the remaining booty in sacks upon their backs. They were to hide the gold somewhere in the Mendips while the rest of us provided a distraction and then meet us again at the foot of Ynys Wyddryn—what you now know as Glastonbury Tor—and that’s what we did. Unfo
rtunately, we never made it back to retrieve the gold and we never made it any further. Instead, we set up camp in order to regroup. But when I tried to lead a patrol out, I was captured. Briefly.” Ashbourne’s expression darkened as he spoke. “I don’t remember much of what happened … only jumbled images of a shadowy place and a woman in a cloak of raven feathers standing over me, her eyes red and terrible …” He shook his head. “And then, the next morning, some of my men found me just outside the camp gate, unconscious. With a heavy gold torc wrapped around my neck that I could not remove no matter how hard I tried.”
Clare shuddered, remembering the dream she’d had—the one with Morholt and the scary chick in the feathered cloak. Obviously, it hadn’t been only a dream. Clare was still mystically tied to the torc, just as, it was now apparent, Ashbourne was tied to it. And she was tied to Al. And Al had found Ashbourne’s skull … She remembered watching as the woman took the Snettisham Great Torc from Morholt … and now she knew what had happened to it.
“The Great Torc,” Milo said, grasping the significance only a moment after Clare had. “Somehow it wound up on Mona instead of buried in a hole in the ground in Norfolk.”
“That’s correct,” Ashbourne said. “And Mallora—Boudicca’s Druidess sister—took what power the torc already had and … amplified it. Augmented it with her own magics and the magics of this place.” He waved a hand in the vague direction of the Tor. “From that moment on, we were doomed. Regular Celtic warriors we could fight our way through—with casualties, certainly, but our superior numbers and techniques would eventually win the day. But after they found me outside the gate, we were besieged—not by Celtic warriors, but by demons. The scathach. They appeared out of nowhere—literally nowhere, right out of thin air—and they kept us pinned down in that place.
“You see, Glastonbury itself is a mystical doorway that can be opened—or closed—with a key made of blood. After my capture, I had unwittingly become that key. And Mallora called forth those monsters with it. They were like … primeval berserkers. Wild-eyed and tattooed, they seemed almost from an earlier time. Perhaps they were—Celtic lore and legends are stuffed with accounts of mystically empowered women warriors from a shadowy time when the magic of the island was rife. Perhaps Mallora used me to bring them forward into her world. Used them to exact her revenge for the Roman predations upon her people. Revenge for our theft of their treasure … At any rate, I found myself the instrument through which the curse worked its will.”
“Welcome to the club,” Clare murmured.
“Yes.” Ashbourne leaned back in his chair and regarded Clare as if she were some kind of scientific curiosity. And then, even more annoyingly, he started talking about her that way. “Now, insofar as I understand Miss Reid’s abilities,” he said with a meaningful look at Piper, “she is temporally linked to certain objects that have been forged using minute amounts of her blood. Although I will admit that I am somewhat foggy on which came first: the time travel or the time-travel curse …”
“Don’t ask.” Milo put up a weary hand. “Because, frankly? I have a bank of microprocessors sitting in my apartment back in London that have been trying to sort out that conundrum for the last few weeks, and I think one of them is about to start singing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’ any day now.”
“You do?” Clare blinked, not entirely certain he was joking.
“Heh,” Piper snickered. “2001. Gotta love a movie with a homicidal computer—”
Clare glared her into silence.
“The upshot of the whole thing,” Milo went on, “is that—chicken/ egg conundrum notwithstanding—Clare wound up flipping back and forth between the present and the Boudiccan rebellion for a few days. And Boudicca’s spirit wound up following her back to modern-day London, briefly, where she proceeded to possess a museum curator, raise a bunch of bog-zombie warriors from the dead, and wreak a little havoc. Until Clare forcibly evicted her and everything went back to normal. Relatively.”
“Don’t forget, you got to share your brain with a Druid warrior prince who showed us a magical pathway between dimensions,” Clare chimed in. “Don’t forget that.”
“I’m unlikely to,” Milo said.
He shot Clare a look so intense it startled her. She wasn’t quite sure how to interpret it. But just then Ashbourne snapped his fingers.
“And that, my dear fellow,” he said, “is the very crux of the whole matter.”
Milo and Clare turned to him.
“You see, you, Mr. McAllister, are also a kind of key,” the archaeologist said. “The key to bringing your cousin home.”
Clare didn’t know quite what to think of that. In some ways, she’d wholly expected Dr. Ashbourne to throw the “Here is what you must do to save the day” curveball into the conversation. But she’d also assumed he would throw it at her. And she was feeling vaguely guilty for thinking she was kind of … irrelevant, all of a sudden.
“You mean … I’m the key. Me. Girl Time traveller over here.”
“No, Clare.” Milo shook his head. “Not this time.”
He’d said it quietly. And yet the way he’d said it was enough to make Clare spin around and stare at him, her mouth drifting open in astonishment at something she’d just figured out. Something that should have been apparent to her for weeks. Ever since the Shenanigans. Something she’d been actively ignoring, hoping it wasn’t true.
“What did I do to you?” she whispered.
It was just loud enough for Milo to hear and he half-turned, gazing at her over the rim of his glasses, a strange, haunted look in his eyes.
“God …” Clare put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. “What have I done? He’s still in your head, isn’t he? Connal?”
“No!” Milo protested. “No … It’s nothing. Just … he left behind some of his knowledge.”
“Knowledge? You mean magic?”
“I mean knowledge, Clare. Information. I like that stuff, remember?”
Milo stared down at the cup made by his laced fingers as if he held secrets there that only he could see. Maybe he did. The tiny gold hoop in Milo’s ear reflected off the work light on Piper’s table and winked at her. She still couldn’t remember if he’d always worn it. But she knew that Connal had worn one just like it. Two thousand years ago.
Clare had no idea what to say to Milo. It was she who had pleaded with him to host the disembodied spirit of Connal the Druid, and so it was her fault that Connal had left Milo changed. Altered in ways she couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Milo had done it for her.
And now?
She turned to Ashbourne, almost grabbing him by the front of his jacket. “What does Morholt say? About Milo. What did he write?”
“Miss Gimble,” Dr. Ashbourne said, “would you be so kind as to fetch the book? I’d like to show Miss Reid and Mr. McAllister what we’re talking about.”
Clare turned to see the other girl’s expression of concern for Milo. She almost lost it. If anyone was going to feel bad for Milo it was going to be her. Clare turned her Piper-glare up to withering.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Do indulge us, Miss Gimble. Fulfill your meddlesome evil-henchgirl stereotypical duties and fetch.”
Piper blinked in surprise and then frostied up a glare of her own. “Oh, please. Talk about meddlesome. I wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for you. And as for stereotypes? You’re a time traveller. If that isn’t a hackneyed B-movie stock-character role, I don’t know what is—”
“Ladies …” Milo sighed wearily, finally looking up. “Not helping.”
Piper’s mouth snapped shut. Then she tossed her pale ponytails and huffed over to the cabinet where she’d put the tin box earlier in the day. A moment passed while she opened the cabinet doors and rummaged around a bit. Another moment passed, and the rummaging increased in intensity. And then random articles began flying out of the cabinet as Piper started chucking stuff over her shoulders in a seeming panic. Now she was making high-
pitched chirping noises like some kind of baby animal in distress. Clare glanced over at Ashbourne, whose brow creased in a worried frown. He started to rise up off his stool just as Piper’s head poked around the cabinet door. She was deathly pale and her eyes were almost as big as when Clare had first seen them peering out of her magni-goggles.
“It’s gone!” she blurted.
Ashbourne finished his rise off his stool so fast the thing toppled over behind him with a loud crash.
“What in the name of all the gods do you mean ‘It’s gone’?” The ferocity of his snarl brought a sudden flush to Piper’s ashen complexion. Clare was starting to see the man behind the moustache very clearly now. The whole “marvellous,” genial, slightly bumbling, overdressed professor of archaeology act was just that. An act. Nicholas Ashbourne was an elaborately constructed persona. The reality behind that facade—the real man behind the facial-hair curtain—was a commander of men. A soldier. And capable of ruthlessness and cold calculation. Clare suddenly felt a bit—a tiny bit—sorry for Piper, who swallowed nervously and pointed to the cabinet.
“Gone,” she said again in a dry whisper. “I put it in there. Right there! For safekeeping. I hid it behind Nigel.”
“Nigel?” Clare asked.
“The badger!”
Piper threw the cabinet door wide and Clare realized she was talking about a moth-eaten stuffed badger mounted on a driftwood stand. Just another oddity in Piper’s emporium, the thing grinned hideously at her from an otherwise mostly empty cabinet. Clare stared at the other girl, speechless. When she glanced back at Milo, his expression was unreadable. She wanted to say something to him. Comfort him and utter all sorts of reassurances that Al would be fine. That they’d find his cousin and bring her home. But the hollow pit opening in the bottom of Clare’s stomach seemed to have swallowed up all her words. They’d been counting on the diary to give them some kind of answer. Clues as to how to get Al back. But now that possibility was slipping further and further from Clare’s grasp. Just as Milo seemed to be drifting beyond her reach.