Clare regarded the slightly bizarre spectacle that was Al: still dressed in sandals and a drapey Roman stola belonging to a woman who’d died almost two thousand years ago, hair half caught up in a twist of tiny braids. Strands fell into her eyes and she blew at them, making little horsey noises. Piper and Clare exchanged a glance.
“I saw that,” Al said and lurched a bit toward Clare.
Milo shook his head in exasperation, pitched the blue-stained towel onto the counter, and walked over to the worktable. Then he pushed his glasses up his nose, leaned on his elbows, and stared at his cousin.
“Allie,” he said, “you need to calm down just a bit. Okay? Look, I know you’re upset. But we need to really—and I mean really—think about what we’re going to do next. Where we go from here.”
“We go there.” Al eyed her cousin with muddled fierceness. “Then. I go then.”
2
It had taken Legionnaire Marcus Donatus a few moments after the failed shimmering attempt on Glastonbury Tor to get his bearings and work out what had just happened. Then it took a few more moments to piece together why. And who was responsible. But once he’d figured all that out, there was no doubt in his mind. He would make Stuart Morholt pay for everything he’d done.
It was only the day before that Marcus had buried the body of his commanding officer, a man he’d loved and respected. A mentor, practically a father figure, Praefect Quintus Phoenius Postumus had asked Marcus to be his murderer. Not just asked, but ordered him to sever his head from his body at the top of the Tor. It was the only thing that would break the blood curse cast on Postumus’s Legion by a Druid sorceress, a curse that had decimated his troops. His men had meant more to Postumus than his own life, and he’d been content to die if it meant a chance they might live. And so he’d bared his neck to his soldier’s blade.
Marcus hadn’t been able to do it.
But Suetonius Paulinus, the Roman governor of Britain and a brutal man, had arrived on the scene just when Marcus’s resolve had faltered. He’d had no such qualms. The moment was forever burned into Marcus’s memory: Postumus standing with his back turned and his neck exposed for the coming blow, Marcus’s own sword wavering … and then, from out of the darkness, Paulinus’s blade descending.
A streak of silver … then red.
Postumus’s head dropping to the ground …
None of that, of course, had been Morholt’s fault.
But what had come next most definitely was.
It was Allie McAllister who’d told Postumus of the sacrifice he’d need to make to break the curse. She’d been the one to find the praefect’s skull buried in the earth over two thousand years later. That discovery had sent Allie into the past where Marcus had found her, rescued her, argued—repeatedly and at great length—with her, and fallen for her. A little. Maybe …
Oh, who the hell am I kidding?
By the time she’d stood on the hill with him, watching Postumus die, Marcus was already smitten with the slight, dark-haired spitfire brainiac with the grey eyes and the smattering of freckles who’d been tough and resourceful enough to break out of a Roman military camp. It had taken almost no time at all for him to realize he had feelings for her. And then, in literally no time at all, she was gone. Vanished.
Because of Stuart Morholt.
Because just when Allie and her friends began to shimmer back to the future—Marcus’s hand firmly in Allie’s grip— Morholt had arrived on the scene and told Paulinus about the gold. And that Marcus was the only one who knew where it was.
His hand ripped from Allie’s grasping fingers, Marcus could only watch helplessly as she faded from view. He feared he’d never see her again, and that hurt more than having been on the very cusp of going back to his own world, his own time—give or take a decade or two—after he’d given up all hope of return.
Stuart Morholt had a lot to answer for.
And so, as Marcus descended into the cave where he’d been forced to lead Suetonius Paulinus and his men, he thought about how delicious his revenge would be.
“All these tunnels look the bloody same,” Morholt grumbled. In the gloom broken only by the lurid flickering of torch flames, he stumbled for the umpteenth time and muttered curses under his breath. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Marcus said. “I know how to remember what’s important.” The sound of the words, tinged with a hint of his native Scottish burr, sounded strange in his ears. He’d been speaking Latin for so long he’d started to believe he’d never need his first language again. That was before Allie McAllister had appeared before him, right out of thin air.
Allie …
Marcus’s pace slowed as he recalled the last moment he’d seen her face. The anguish in her eyes as she realized he was being left behind. At least, he thought he’d seen anguish. Hoped he had. Not, of course, because he wanted Allie to be hurt in any way, but because he desperately wanted to believe that the things he’d felt for her in their brief, blazing time together were the same things she’d been feeling for him. Surely he hadn’t imagined it—
“Keep moving!”
The flat of a sword blade slapped against his armoured shoulder, the thwack of iron on leather echoing off the rough cavern walls. Marcus simply held his torch higher, illuminating the mouth of another cavern, barely more than a fissure in the rock face and angling sharply downward. He stepped through, not pausing to see whether the others followed, and in the silence he could just make out the lilt of trickling water.
He let out a slow breath. Contrary to what he’d told Morholt, he hadn’t been entirely positive he was leading Paulinus and his entourage in the right direction. The Mendip Hills were riddled with networks of caves, and the last time Marcus had been there was at the tail end of a running fight with the scathach. He and his fellow legionnaires had been on a desperate quest to hide sacks—a baker’s dozen of them—of Celtic gold and silver. They’d been plundered from the Druid stronghold on the island of Mona in the days after Paulinus had burned the sacred groves and then rushed eastward with most of his troops to defeat Boudicca and her rebel army.
That was before Marcus had ever met Allie. But now he wondered if the gold might be the key to finding her again. Morholt had been muttering and chortling to himself on the long march into the hills, and as far as Marcus could make out, his one-time schoolmate was devising some kind of plot to double-cross Paulinus and transport the priceless Druid treasure into the future with him.
And if that was the case, Marcus wasn’t letting him out of his sight.
He didn’t really think Morholt had the resources—mental, physical, or mystical—to pull it off, but it was the only thing keeping him from taking a torch and bashing it over Morholt’s head: the absurd flicker of hope that, for all his viciously bumbling ways, Stuart Morholt might just be the key to transversing the temporal barrier that separated Marcus from Allie McAllister.
But first he’d have to find the gold.
He was fortunate that he’d been able to retrace his steps. And fortunate that he’d lived long enough to do so. Of all the legionnaires who’d been ordered on the mission to hide the treasure, Marcus had been the only one who’d survived the scathach attacks on the encampment at Glastonbury Tor in the days and weeks that followed.
So he wouldn’t now be killed by his own commanding officer. At least, not until the treasure was retrieved from the underground pool. At the edge of the darkly glimmering water, he lifted off his helmet and shrugged out of his legionnaire’s marching pack. Then he tugged at the buckles on the side of his breastplate and pulled the toughened bull’s hide shell over his head, setting it on the uneven floor of the cave beside his helmet and pack. He unwound a length of rope and handed an end to Junius, his fellow legionnaire. Then he stripped off his sandals, took up the other end of the rope, and with one long hop-step forward, plunged feet first into the icy cold pool.
As the water closed over his head Marcus could
almost imagine he heard voices, whispered warnings that swirled around him. The gold was cursed, he thought. Just like the torc that had been placed around his dead praefect Postumus’s neck by the Druid witch Mallora.
Cursed. Just like you …
He shook his head to clear it and opened his eyes. The torchlight did almost nothing to alleviate the Stygian gloom beneath the surface of the pool. Diving down, he groped blindly—and his fingers touched one of the canvas bags stuffed full of Druid loot. It was heavy, heavier than he remembered, but he managed to get the rope tied around it and return to the surface. The soldiers heaved it out of the water, untied it with brisk efficiency, and threw him back the rope. As he dove beneath the surface again, Marcus thought with bitter irony that if he was to travel with the treasure he’d finally get to see Rome. And how that was the last thing he wanted.
Funny, the unexpected things that can shift one’s perspective …
Weeks earlier, before the scathach had attacked—long before he’d even imagined meeting another time traveller like himself—Marcus had been marching in the convoy from Mona, wondering excitedly what it would be like to present the tribute to the emperor. In Rome. As a boy he’d read about the Imperial City, dreamed about it. Memorized its streets and temples and palaces. He’d studied the languages and customs spoken by its citizens and planned eagerly for the day when he’d visit its elegant ruins. Then, when he found himself in the employ of the emperor’s army, in a time when those ruins weren’t ruined, the prospect of walking those streets had been almost overwhelming.
Now? Now all Marcus wanted was to find a way to get home.
Rome was once more a faded dream. A face-to-face meeting with the ruler of the Empire … well, did he really want to bow and scrape before Nero? The tyrant? Nope. He had better things to do. He had a date. At least, he hoped he did. He wanted a hot shower and a proper shave and blue jeans. Ice cream sandwiches. An air-conditioned movie theatre—assuming they still had those in Allie’s time (Marcus remembered the growing plague of shoebox-sized multiplex theatres that had sprung up in the eighties and wondered if they’d done away with the things altogether). Maybe they could go to an outdoor concert of some kind. He’d have to let her pick the band, though, and he really hoped music was still just as fantastic as it had been back in his day … And he’d have to pick her up by taxi. He hadn’t been old enough (or interested enough) to get a driver’s licence before he’d been thrown back in time.
But damn it all, he was going to take that girl out for an evening she’d never forget. He had it all planned. There was a leather purse of Roman coins—his Legion pay—tucked away carefully beside his Walkman cassette player in the bottom of his marching pack. The coins were probably in the mintiest of mint condition a collector could ever hope to encounter and would fetch him a decent price in London when he got back. Enough money to live on while he looked for a job and reacclimatized to life in the modern world. The future.
His future.
For the first time in a long time, Marcus allowed himself to consider the possibility of living past the next few years of his life. Ever since the shock of his hurtle through time had worn off he’d been convinced he wouldn’t live to see adulthood in the strange and savage world in which he’d found himself. Even after Postumus had taken him under his wing and taught him how to be a soldier and survive, he’d still assumed that the next arrow, the next sword thrust, the next bad fall off a horse would be the end.
And it hadn’t really mattered. He’d accepted his lot with a kind of fatalism that was, if not exactly cheerful, not exactly grim, either. He’d shed his prior existence as Mark O’Donnell, language geek and de facto errand boy for fellow Cambridge student Stuart Morholt, and re-formed himself, helmet to hobnailed sandals, as Marcus Donatus, interpreter and soldier under the command of Quintus Phoenius Postumus. Now Postumus was dead and Morholt was rubbing his hands with villainous glee.
When the last of the booty was lifted out of the inky water, Paulinus tugged open the mouth of one of the bags. Torchlight reflecting off the glittering gold hoard turned the cavern walls the colour of melting butter and rendered everyone in the cave speechless. Everyone except Stuart Morholt, who began making high-pitched, squealy sounds of glee. He didn’t even shut up when Marcus dragged himself out of the pool— dripping wet, blue with cold, and almost six feet of solid, legionnaire-hardened muscles and simmering rage—and turned a flatly murderous glare on him.
“Oh, lighten up, Muscles,” Morholt sneered through the tangled, filthy beard that matted the lower half of his face. A half-mad glint was in his eye and Marcus wondered if Morholt even knew who he was. Who he really was.
“And anyway, you should thank me,” Morholt continued. “Look at you now. Not a trace of that old linguist geekery to be found.”
So he does know.
He knew exactly who Marcus was—who he’d been—and he felt not a trace of remorse. That made Marcus want to kill him all the more. With the rage that had been building around his heart threatening to spill over, he had to savagely clamp down on the desire to leap for Morholt’s throat. Or Paulinus’s. Either would make him feel infinitely better.
TWO DAYS LATER Marcus wasn’t feeling any less antipathy as he rode shotgun on a pony-drawn cart full of gold. It rumbled and rattled down a rutted track toward the shore where two merchant vessels were moored in the deep part of a river that emptied into the Severn Estuary. The governor had ordered Marcus Donatus, Stuart Morholt, and a dozen others who’d been under Quintus Postumus’s command to stay aboard the lead ship, the one he’d commandeered for transporting the Druid gold to Nero. To guard it from attack. And to keep Morholt offshore, his wafting scent seeming to grievously offend Paulinus’s nostrils.
Marcus, who understood the sentiment, stationed himself as far away from the man as humanly possible. The ship was huge and so that wasn’t hard. But its sheer size also made it an easy target for attack—if anyone had such a thing in mind. The legionnaires on board would sleep in two-hour shifts just in case.
The men who remained onshore would also stand guard in case the scathach tried to get their gold back. Even though the governor, not having experienced them firsthand, had barely refrained from scoffing at the accounts of the savage, mysterious warrior women.
Marcus would have felt even better if the ship’s masts hadn’t proven such advantageous perching ground for so many ravens. The feathered beasts hunched in twos and threes, more than a dozen of them on the high beams, staring silently down on the sailors and soldiers with unblinking, condemnatory gazes. He tried to remember what a group of ravens was called.
Oh, right.
“An unkindness of ravens,” he murmured. “Well … better than a murder of crows. I hope.”
As the last of the day’s light leached from the sky, Marcus settled himself on the deck and listened as a group of sailors sang a mournful song of a lost pretty girl. Then, exhausted by the tension and feeling sorry for himself, wishing Allie was there beside him to share the warmth of his cloak, his eyelids drooped slowly shut and his head lolled back. He was out like a snuffed candle.
Marcus didn’t hear the muffled gasps of the sailors as the ravens’ croaking transformed into the whispered voices of women.
The scathach hadn’t needed to board the ship under the cover of darkness.
They were already there.
3
Normally Clare would have been all over Al’s plan to return to the past. It would have been her plan. And it would have worked like a charm, just as it had before. Foolproof. Only … the thing was, Clare was starting to suspect that her “plans” hadn’t been “foolproof,” or really even “plans.” She had, in fact, been foolhardy. And double-damn lucky. And she was starting to suspect that going back could have far-reaching consequences. She wanted to dissuade Al from the attempt, even though the thought of it made her feel guilty.
When Al focused a bleary, basilisk glare on her best friend since grade school, Clare reache
d over to grab her hand. “Al,” she said gently. “Yes, you lost Marcus. And I am so, so sorry. But I barely hung on to you”—she glanced back and forth between Al and Milo—“both of you. And I’m not willing to do that again. I’m done with the time travel. I’m NOT going back.”
Al was shaking her head now, her eyes burning with emotion.
“You think I’m being selfish,” Clare went on, “because I don’t want to risk all our lives to go back for something you want. But when I wanted to go back for me, you thought I was being stupid.”
Clare turned her gaze on Milo.
“And when you tried to go back instead of letting me take care of it, you thought you were being noble.”
“And you thought I was being stupid,” he countered.
“You were!” Clare threw her hands up in frustration. “You had no way to get back, Milo! We are not doing this again! I’m not doing this again!”
As silence spun out into the room, Clare held her breath. “Fine,” Al muttered darkly. “You can stay here-and-now all you want.” She pulled her hand out from under Clare’s. “I can go there-and-then just fine on my own, y’know. I did it once before, din’ I? Just need to go find another skull or something, and zot! Am I right?” She looked to Piper for backup. (Al had been prickly about Piper’s usurping her role as Clare’s shimmer anchor in their latest round of Shenanigans, but Piper had also supplied her with the brandy, so all was apparently forgiven.)
Piper blinked and said, “Right. Zot.” She pushed back from the workbench and stood. “I’ll go put the kettle on. I think maybe a switch to a nice cup of strong tea might be in order.”
“I’m not drunk!” Al exclaimed. “I’m mad!”
“No argument,” Piper muttered, putting the kettle on despite Al’s protests. “As a Hatter, I’d say.”
“You’re funny,” Al said, then turned to Clare and Milo. “She’s funny. I can totally see why you replaced me with her.”