Allie stifled a laugh. “Trust me. Trust her.” She nodded at Clare.
Suddenly, Marcus glanced at the sky and the shadow of a frown creased his brow. “Speaking of time, I seem to have lost track of it. Whatever we’re going to do, we should hurry,” he said. “There are sometimes demons about after full dark and I’d rather not take any chances.”
“You mean the scathach?” Clare asked. “Those are the scarymonster warrior chicks, right?”
Allie nodded and explained, illustrating with the metaphor she’d already devised for herself: “Think of them like a whole buncha Boudiccas hopped up on mystical Red Bull and steroids, only lacking the politeness factor.”
Clare got the picture immediately. So did Milo.
“Right. And the sun’s already sett— Wait …” Clare held up both hands and pointed in opposite directions. “Doesn’t the sun set in the west?”
“Last time I checked,” Milo said.
“Isn’t that west?” She pointed to her left.
“Yeah …” Allie turned to look in that direction. “And, lo, the sun.”
“Okay. But then why does the horizon look like it’s on fire over there?” Clare pointed to the right.
Marcus ran to the edge of the summit plateau and looked down.
“Because it is!” he shouted back. “Damn! The camp is under attack! The scathach must have seen the rift you caused. It’s riled them up. I have to get back …”
The others ran to join him, and looking down, saw that the camp was indeed besieged by a fearsome horde of howling-mad scathach warrior women. And this time, they’d brought fire. Lots of fire.
“Those are our bloody catapults,” Marcus snarled as another flaming projectile flew through the air and slammed into the camp’s front embankment. “They captured a few of them weeks ago, but we didn’t think they’d ever use them.”
“There’s a Star Trek ‘Prime Directive’ lesson to be learned here about letting advanced technology fall into the hands of a less advanced culture …” Allie muttered.
Beside her, Milo grunted in acknowledgment. “Yup. And that lesson is—sooner or later, the less advanced culture will kick your ass with your own gear.” He grabbed Marcus by the arm and pointed to the shadowed area at the back of the camp. “Is that a rear-entry gate?”
“Yeah.” Marcus nodded. “But the scathach only ever attack from the front. It’s like a—a sort of rule of engagement. Their twisted sense of honour.”
“Okay, how is a direct attack not honourable?” Clare asked, bristling.
Allie suspected it was the Legion gear that made Clare prickly about what Marcus had just said. After what she’d been through with the Romans and the Iceni, Allie couldn’t necessarily blame her.
“When they use their magic against our muscle,” Marcus answered. “The way they fight, it doesn’t matter what direction they come from. They still win. See?”
He pointed at a tiny figure at the front of the marauding scathach—a woman cloaked in darkness, holding fiery spears in both fists and howling imprecations at the Romans. Her words seethed and thrummed with power. Even from that distance. And the darkness and fire seemed almost to leap and twist to obey her commands.
“Mallora?” Clare asked Marcus, who nodded grimly.
“She’s the chick who tried to flambé me when I first got here.” Allie glared at the distant figure. “She’s also Stu’s girlfriend.”
“I know,” Clare said.
The girls shuddered in tandem.
Allie shook her head, her lip curling in disgust. “I don’t even—”
Clare held up a hand. “No. Don’t.”
“She’s the one who cursed Postumus,” Marcus said.
“She’s also Boudicca’s sister,” Milo noted.
Allie thought about that for a second. “Ah. It all sort of makes an insane kind of sense now …”
“So. Morholt. And Llassar,” Clare said, frowning down at the rampant chaos as the Legion troops struggled to drive the scathach back from the embankment. “Marcus … you say they’re down there?”
“In that double tent,” he answered, pointing. “Third from the back gate, southeast quadrant.”
“Can you get us in there without being seen?”
“You already said I could,” Marcus said. “So I’m going to say yes.”
“Good,” Clare said and directed his attention to where the scathach were hurling all manner of projectiles at the beleaguered legionnaires. “The battling biker babes might just prove to be the handy distraction we need to get down there. Your buddies look like they’ve got their hands way too full with what’s going on outside the camp to worry about what’s going on inside. All we have to do is get through the rear gate.”
Marcus nodded tersely. “Done.” He stepped off the edge of the plateau, motioning the others to follow as he started down the hill. Milo was right behind him.
Allie and Clare exchanged a glance. Clare shrugged and Allie hitched up the edges of her stola, tucking the silky material into the belt around her waist to free up her legs. The Tor was dotted here and there with stands of trees, which the four of them used for cover on the way down its shadow-cast slope.
“Wow …” Clare panted when they were about halfway to the bottom. She gestured toward Marcus as he smoothly negotiated a particularly steep bit of hill, his spine ramrod straight and the leather straps of his skirt slapping against his legs. “He really is just like one of them, isn’t he? A Roman.”
“For four years, he has been,” Allie said, sensing the disapproval in Clare’s voice. “I mean … think about it. That’s as long as our entire high school existence. And doesn’t that seem like it’s been a lifetime? He’s kind of grown up here. The soldiers are his friends, his brothers-in-arms … the commander is practically a father figure to him. He’s the one who gave Marcus these clothes for me to wear …” Allie stopped on the hillside when she saw Clare’s frown. “What?”
“Um, right … I don’t know if you happened to notice this, but the commander of the camp—the one he said was cursed?—is actually—”
“Bloody Nicky Ashbourne?” Allie finished Clare’s sentence. “Uh-huh. I know. Weird, right?”
“Yeah … And soon to be bloodier than expected.” Clare grimaced and motioned Allie to hang back a bit, out of Marcus’s earshot. “Al, when we get into the camp, you have to find him. Ashbourne—I mean, Postumus. And … you have to give him a message. A couple of messages, actually,” she added, and made a weird guilty-feelings face that only someone who knew Clare as well as Allie did would ever recognize.
“I do?” Allie asked. “Why?”
“Because you already did.”
“Oh. Sigh. Stupid time paradox. Okay.” Allie nodded. “What’s the message?”
Clare hesitated. Allie watched her hesitate. And got a really bad feeling about what she was about to say.
Which was: “Al … you have to tell Quintus Postumus to order Marcus to cut off Postumus’s head. And then you have to tell him that, in the future … in 1986, when the Free Peoples of Prydain climb Glastonbury Tor, he has to be there waiting for them. And when everything starts to go haywire … he has to be the one who shoves Mark O’Donnell into the time vortex on that night he disappeared.”
“Oh …” Allie felt all the blood drain from her face. “Damn.”
22
Morholt was sitting in the darkness, scribbling away, when Clare burst through the flap of the prisoner’s tent and snatched the diary from his hand before he’d even realized she was there.
“Gimme that!” Clare said, just as she’d imagined she had. So there.
And, just as she’d expected, there on the page was the last thing he’d written, a pronouncement made in all its egotastic glory:
My master plan now—obviously—set in motion, I will commit this diary to safekeeping in the hands of Llassar, the Druid smi~~
“Pen,” she snapped at Morholt, and he was far too flustered to argue. He handed it over
without a word of protest and only a tiny bit of spluttering, the manacles around his wrists clanking as he did.
“Milo?” Clare said over her shoulder. “Can you get the chains off these people? Start with Llassar, he’s the big dude over there—Hi, Llassar! Long time no see!—and he can help you with the others.” She waved at the big smith, assuming he could still understand her.
Milo nodded at Llassar and hefted a heavy, hammer-axe thing they’d picked up running past the horse stalls, just before they’d split off from Marcus and Al. The plan was for Clare and Milo to round up Llassar and Morholt—procuring Morholt’s diary and having Llassar transform it into a shimmer trigger—and then meet back up, topside on the Tor, with Al and Marcus. Who—if everything went according to plan—would have convinced Postumus that the only way to break the curse of Mallora and her scathach and free the rest of the Second Augusta was to sacrifice himself and bare his neck to the edge of Marcus’s blade.
Dead easy.
While Clare rifled through Morholt’s notebook, Milo raised the hammer-axe, bringing it down on the chain links between Llassar’s irons and setting him free. After thanking Milo politely, the smith took up the axe himself, making quick, bulgy-muscled work out of freeing the other Celts.
Then they all stood, silent and wraithlike, watching Clare.
First, she took from her pocket the piece of paper with the code key she’d written down back at the B&B with Piper. Then, since she’d already copied it, she was able to swiftly scribble her cryptic sentences to herself in Morholt’s diary, the tip of her tongue stuck out one side of her mouth as she wrote. She’d trained herself not to actually think about things like the circular temporal loop she’d just closed in doing so. The whole “which came first, the copy of the code or the code itself” conundrum would just make her head hurt, and frankly, she didn’t need the distraction. When she finished, she drew the curlicue scribble of the thumbprint on the bottom of the page and plucked the letter opener back out of her bag.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she jammed the tip of the opener into her thumb, barked a single-syllable swear word, and blotted a drop of her blood on the page, right in the middle of the squiggledoodle.
“That’s a limited-edition deluxe Moleskine!” Morholt squawked.
“Yup,” Clare nodded, sucking on her thumb. “Worth every pound you spent on its acid-free pages.”
He glared at her in suspicious confusion, which she blithely ignored.
“Gimme the emergency road tin you’re carrying in your pocket.” She held out her hand.
The suspicious glare deepened. “What emergency road—”
“Did you …” Clare took a deep breath to defuse her temper and keep from rifling through his pockets herself. “Or did you not leave me that diary so that I could come back here and rescue your insanely sorry ass?”
“Er.”
“Right. So if you want that book to survive long enough for this moment to come to pass, then hand it over. And don’t argue with me, because we both know you already do.”
He did. Clare opened the tin and turned it upside down, emptying out its contents: a couple of candles, some matches in a zipper baggie (she kept the baggie), and a little leather bag that jingled a bit. Clare hefted it in the palm of her hand and could feel coins inside.
“Heh.” Morholt shrugged. “Just a bit of ‘mad money,’ you know. And before you harangue me, I didn’t steal it from—”
“I don’t care,” Clare said and tossed the bag to Llassar.
Next, Clare gave the tin back to Morholt, told him the exact wording of the snotty sentence he was about to scratch on the surface of it, and handed over her purloined letter opener for the purpose. It galled her to have to recite the “meddlesome brat” part, but she’d probably done that as a way of convincing her future … er, past self that the thing really had come from Morholt. The same logic must have been behind the whole coded “do not tell Milo you can read this” thing. She’d written that so that she wouldn’t, so that … well … so that things would fall out the way they had. Because they had.
Stupid time paradoxes …
While Morholt transcribed, Clare tore the black zippered shoulder pocket from his silly suit. It made a satisfying ripping noise. After Stu finished sputtering in outrage, Clare packaged up the diary and showed it to Llassar.
“I want you to come to the top of the Tor with us,” she told him. “But first, I need you to magic up this book so that it can get me and my friends back to our own time. Can you do that for me?”
The burly man nodded his enormous head.
“Awesome. I knew you’d come through, Llassar. You’re one of the good guys. Me and my friends are going home now, and this time we’re going to stay there for good. After we’re gone, I want you to take the book back to what has got to be the only woman in all of history who was crazy enough to sleep with that guy”—she pointed at Morholt—“and she’ll know what to do from there. Or so I gather. Apparently she can see the future or something and already knows this is coming down the pipe. Along with a bouncing Baby Morholt.” Clare shuddered. “Oh—and while you’re at it, tell Mallora she can also back the hell off with the temporal incursions and blood curses and raging against the Romans and all.” When Llassar blinked at her, she added, “It’s not like she should be out there lobbing flaming spears in her delicate condition anyway, but you tell her. Tell her that if she or her wild women ever manage to set one woad-painted digit in my century, they will have me and Al and Milo to deal with. And if that happens? They. Will. Lose.”
Llassar’s face broke into a wide, slow smile beneath the singed tangles of his beard.
“We square?” she asked.
He frowned down at her for a moment, probably parsing exactly what she meant by that, and then nodded solemnly. Clare gave him a long, fierce hug.
Then she turned to survey the occupants of the tent. In one corner, Llassar’s Celtic pals stood in a loose group, waiting silently. In the other, Milo was taking the hammer to Morholt’s chains. (There’d been some half-hearted talk of leaving Morholt to his own devices, but Clare’s conscience just wouldn’t let her.) In another moment they would all be free to go, thanks to her blood and Llassar’s Druid magic. Clare glanced down at her thumb. It still stung, and when she applied a bit of pressure, a bright red bead welled up.
Then her gaze fell on the little bag of coins Llassar held in his meaty palm. Clare thought for a second. Tugging the Druid smith by the sleeve, she pulled him away from the others and murmured one more request, for him alone to hear. Then she turned back to see Morholt climbing awkwardly to his feet, freed from his shackles.
Stu drew himself up with all the unearned dignity he could muster, upper lip curled in his customary sneer. “Right. Well done then, Miss Reid,” he proclaimed airily. “I see you’ve followed my instructions adequately. Mission accomplished.”
Clare rolled her eyes and, without a word, stalked out of the tent before she plowed him one right in the kisser.
Mission Accomplished.
Sure. So far. And that part of the whole operation, from the time she’d entered the tent, had probably taken just under twenty minutes. What was it Al had once said to her—back before all the crazy Shenanigans, and, appropriately enough, in Latin? Right …
Tempus fugit.
Time flies.
When you’re having fun … it sure does.
Or, alternatively, when you’re surrounded by first-century hostiles and you kind of already know what you have to do to save your own delicate skin. Not to mention your best friend’s newly freckled skin and the blue-painted epidermis of the boy who was determined to save yours no matter how dumb an idea that was.
Speaking of which …
Once they were both outside the tent, just before they went to rendezvous with Al and Marcus, Clare pulled Milo aside. And by the light of the scathach’s fires, she called him on that very thing.
“Milo …” She looked up into his eyes—they wer
e sapphire and sea-deep in the flame-lit gloom, and she’d much rather kiss him just then than chastise him. “No pun intended, but … what possessed you to pull a crazy stunt like opening up the portal without me?”
He bit his lip and shrugged. “I didn’t want you to risk going back again, Clare. So I figured out a way to change that scenario. At least I thought I had. I guess I should have known better.” He shook his head and stared at his feet, his expression rueful. “You seem to be the only one who’s any good at monkeying with the time stream. Piper was right. It’s a gift.”
Clare made him look at her again. “Why did you think I’d come back here in the first place? Without a shimmer trigger, I didn’t even think it was possible. How did you know?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You think I didn’t recognize your handwriting in the back of Morholt’s diary?”
“Oh.” She blinked. “You could tell that was me?”
Milo laughed. “Don’t you remember the day I asked you to write down your cell number for me—and then I had to call Allie to figure out what it actually said? You have famously crappy handwriting, Clare de Lune. And even if I couldn’t actually decipher that code, I knew that since your chicken scratch managed to show up in Morholt’s book, you’d gone back again. I wanted to stop that from happening.”
“But … what about the whole ‘let’s not monkey with the time stream’ thing?”
“You changed the past once. You brought Comorra back from the dead. I wanted to be able to bring Allie home myself. Without you having to put yourself in danger.” Milo’s voice dropped down to a throaty whisper as he said, “Because that’s what you do when you love someone. You try, more than anything else, to keep them safe.”
“Yeah but I—”
Clare’s brain suddenly caught up with her ears and a spectacular sort of synaptic cascade failure took place in her cerebral cortex as she processed exactly—word for word—what Milo had just said. All of her higher cognitive functions winked out and she just stared up at him, mouth drifting open.