“Use the walkie and let us in on the conversation!” Clare blurted. “And then—”
“Try and get him to spill the beans on his plans!” Al said. “Exactly! And then—”
“See if we can’t somehow use that to our advantage,” Clare continued, “while you break Llassar out of Legion jail and get him to the rendezvous so that he and the gold can get home—”
“And send Paulinus packing at the same time—”
“Right! Awesome! You’re—”
“We’re—”
“Geniuses.” Clare grinned widely. “I know.”
Marcus, his jaw hanging open, looked back and forth between the Korg 70,000 and Clare. As if he’d found himself in the presence of sorcerors. “Do you two do this kind of thing all the time?”
“Since grade school. Yeah.” Clare waved her hand airily. “You might wanna get used to it. So?” she said into the handset. “Can you do that? Rig the walkie?”
“Uh …”
They heard the sounds of Al rummaging around.
“Yeah,” she said a bit breathlessly. “I have band-aids and a hair elastic. I think I can do it with that.”
“That’s my genius sidekick.”
“Partner in crime.”
“Time crime.” Clare grinned despite her trepidation. “And time’s a wastin’. Get to work, partner.”
The transmission kicked in and out as Al went about the task of rigging the talkie button on the handset. Clare crossed her fingers and hoped the batteries on the cheesy little toy would hold out long enough.
“Allie?” Marcus said into the handset, turning a little away from Clare.
“Yeah?”
“I still think you’re magic.”
“Meep …”
“Gawd,” Clare snorted. “I can actually hear her blushing—”
“Ssh!” Al hissed suddenly. “I think they’re coming back.”
There was a noise like Al was stuffing the walkie back in her bag and then the sound went a bit muffled, but it was still clear enough to make out Paulinus’s distinctive voice. The only problem was that he was speaking in Latin. Clare frowned in confusion. When she was face to face with him the shimmer magic kicked in and rendered his speech understandable. But filtered through even the primitive technology of the Korg 70,000, the words remained a garble of dead Romance language.
“Damn it!” Clare swore. “I can’t understand him. The Latin doesn’t auto-translate long distance!”
“And that’s where I come in handy,” Marcus said, and held out his hand for the walkie.
Clare hesitated and then handed it over. Marcus was part of the team now. Besides, with Al on location playing the role of spy in the house of Rome, she needed him. He leaned in close, a look of fierce concentration on his face. Paulinus was speaking and Marcus began to translate in a low, steady murmur. It was a little eerie, Clare thought—as if the shimmermagic translation function had wriggled free of her head and now existed independently.
At the same time, it was kind of exciting. Like they were involved in one of those ridiculously complicated movie capers that together—with a lot of luck and a whole lot of timing— they might just manage to pull off. Clare crossed the rest of her fingers, sat back, and listened while Al went to work.
BEHIND HER BACK, Allie crossed all her fingers and hoped like hell her idea would work. With the Talk button rigged to stay down she had no way of knowing if Clare and Marcus were actually picking up the conversation. She just had to hope they were.
“What do you know of this place?” Paulinus asked, getting straight to the point.
He shifted his eagle-topped swagger stick from one hand to the other and paced a slow path in front of her. His tone was polite, collegial even—as it had been for those few moments on the galley—but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being in a scene from a movie, interrogated by the charming villain.
“I only know that you’re not supposed to be here,” she answered. “I’m probably not supposed to be here either, for that matter. It’s supposed to be off-limits. A sacred place to the people who live on the other islands.”
Paulinus tilted his head as he regarded her. “Is it?” he said. “Indeed.”
He fell silent for a long moment, pacing back and forth, seemingly lost in thought. “I and some of my men went ashore on one of those other islands. After we sailed from the cove.”
Allie groaned. “Please tell me you didn’t pillage anything.”
“No … no.” He shrugged. “We did encounter the local inhabitants, however briefly.”
“Well, I hope you were polite.”
Paulinus’s lip quirked upward in faint amusement. Then he began to pace again. “I have come to a conclusion, I think,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “Without the use of the vertices, my men and I are unlikely to see Britannia or the Empire again. Wouldn’t you say?”
Over in the corner of the tent, Junius the Legionnaire’s glower deepened. Never having had direct physical contact with Allie—superstitious brute that he was, he’d only ever gotten close enough to prod her with a spear point—he understood only his commander’s half of the conversation. But that part seemed to disagree with him.
As Allie wondered just how to respond, all she could come up with was the truth. “Yeah. It would be a hell of a stretch to get back across the ocean under sail power alone. Adequate food and water, for one thing, would be a pretty serious problem.”
“I thought as much.” Paulinus nodded. “And the vertices themselves?”
Allie thought about Mallora and the depletion of her Druid magic. She also thought about Clare’s plans to recreate one great big vertex on her own. “Out of commission, as I understand it.”
“Then we are trapped here.” Paulinus tucked the swagger stick under his arm and pulled the plumed helmet off his head. He ran his hands over the bristles of his military haircut and sighed. “I set out to bring my emperor riches. Instead I found a rich new land ripe for the Empire. And I have no way to present him with either. Even if I retrieve the Mona treasure, you’re telling me there is nothing for me to do with it because I cannot transport it home.”
Allie lifted a shoulder apologetically.
And yet the governor didn’t seem particularly devastated by these revelations. There was a calmness about him. A placid acceptance that made her downright nervous.
“What are you going to do?” she asked warily.
He smiled at her. “I will remain true to the spirit of the Empire. My men and I will remain here, in this place, and we will build a camp. Eventually, we will build a town. A life. A civilization. I may not have the command of a full Legion, but those people?” He waved in the direction of the islands to the west. “They didn’t even have steel. I have engineers and soldiers and knowledge. We will rule here as benevolent leaders, and in time the barbarians of this place will come to accept us, revere us, and bring us tribute. I will shed the title of governor and become an emperor in my own right. I and my men will build the world anew. Like Romulus and Remus at the birth of Rome.”
Allie could only stare at him in disbelief. Back on the galley she’d begun to nurture a kernel of respect for Paulinus. But now she saw how delusional he was.
“Okay …” she said warily. “Look—I get it. I mean, I can sort of see how saying stuff like that might keep your men from mutinying. But I also think the ‘barbarians’ might have a few strongly held opinions about your hostile-takeover plan.”
Paulinus’s smile turned ever so slightly predatory. Like a shark spotting a windsurfer on a windless day. “Of course they would,” he said. “They always do. And they always fall. I’m not a cruel man, you know. I’m a pragmatic one. This island is sacred to them, you say? A place of power? Then I will teach them that I and my men are more powerful than that. I can subdue this place, these people, without spilling a single drop of blood.”
“How?”
He put his helmet back onto his head and touched the brim with the swagg
er stick.
“By lighting a fire that all the people of this dark world will see.”
Then he turned on his hobnailed sandal heel and swept out of the tent.
Allie waited to make sure he wasn’t coming back and then let herself deflate a little. When Manaw the Manimal had suggested—strongly suggested, in a no-other-option kind of way—that she infiltrate the Roman camp and find out what they had in mind, she hadn’t really thought it would work. Or that she’d even survive long enough to glean anything useful. Now, however, she was glad they’d persuaded her to be chased by a bear.
She glanced over at Junius, wondering if he fully understood what Paulinus was intending, but he was staring out the tent flap in the direction his commander had gone. Allie crouched down, her back turned to him, and opened up her messenger bag. She pulled out the walkie, peeling off the band-aids and elastic, and turned the volume to low.
“Clare?” she whispered.
A faint crackle of static came over the line and for a moment Allie worried that Clare and Marcus hadn’t heard the exchange. But then Clare’s tense voice filtered through the handset.
“Al! We heard. We heard it all.”
“Good. What do you think Paulinus meant by lighting a fire—”
Another burst of static, fainter this time, cut her off mid-sentence. Then the walkie went silent. Allie cursed under her breath, stuffed it back in her bag, and stood, turning back to observe her taciturn tent buddy.
“What do you think about all this?” she asked, walking a few steps toward him. “Are you really buying what Paulinus is selling? You want to build a sod hut, hang up your sword, and settle down with a lovely local?”
He glowered even more deeply and Allie sighed, having forgotten for a moment that he hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying. Acting on pure impulse, she suddenly thrust out her hand and smacked the burly legionnaire on the shoulder. Then came a jolt of mystic electricity as the shimmer magic forged a conduit between them and Junius yelped like a startled puppy. Allie jumped back a foot or two but Junius just stared at her, wide-eyed and wary.
“Hi …” she said. “Um … My name is Allie.”
His eyes went even wider and one hand lifted to scratch at his ear as if an insect had just flown into it.
“Jupiter’s beard! You are a witch,” he muttered in Latin. “I knew it.”
“I’m not gonna argue,” Allie said, a flicker of an idea forming in her mind. Junius, she thought, just might come in handy in her quest to get herself, and Llassar, to the sundown hilltop rendezvous. “Because, from your perspective, yeah, I probably am. I’ll just say this … I’m a good witch. Okay?”
Junius blinked at her.
“And, buddy? You owe me one.”
“LIGHT A FIRE?” Clare said, staring down at the silent walkie talkie in her hand. “What’s so scary about that? Does he have exploding marshmallows? Or is he just yapping in metaphor—because all that kind of crap is really starting to burn my cheese. Er. So to speak.”
Marcus was stone-faced. “They’re going to need our help.”
“What?” Clare frowned. “Why? Didn’t you say these skraeling guys were the same ones who drove the Vikings back to Greenland?”
“They did.”
“Okay! Those were freaking Vikings! So—”
“The Vikings were great fighters, Clare,” Marcus interrupted. “But they weren’t an army. Certainly not an army like the kind Rome produced.”
Clare thought about that for a minute. Then she began to understand where Marcus was coming from. “You mean …”
“I know what Paulinus is going to do,” he said. “He’s going to invade this island.”
“What a moron!” Clare scoffed. “You had me worried for a second there. You know no one actually lives here, right? He’s invading a deserted island?”
“Just because it isn’t inhabited doesn’t mean it isn’t important,” Marcus countered. “Look at what he did to Mona. Not to the people on the island, but to the island itself. He desecrated it. And he’s going to try to do the same thing here.”
20
As they headed back to the edge of the cliff, Clare looked around her. A pristine landscape stretched out in every direction. The island was a gently rolling sea of emerald green in the middle of a sea of blue. It was one of the prettiest, most pastoral places Clare had ever seen. But she could also feel a subtle, powerful vibration beneath her feet, as if she were walking across the shoulder of a sleeping giant. The island was definitely a place of power. Power that needed protecting. And as she imagined the landscape ablaze, the anger behind her eyes made it feel as if the flames inside her mind were real.
Clare glanced nervously into the sky. The magic funfest they were planning was scheduled for twilight, but she didn’t think Paulinus would wait that long. “We’re screwed if he invades before sundown. This place will be a bonfire by then.”
Marcus frowned. “Actually, I think he’ll wait until after sundown before he makes his move. It’s what he did at Mona and I’d bet my favourite mix tape it’s what he’ll do here.”
“Isn’t attacking at night kind of dangerous?” Clare asked. “I mean, think of the tripping hazards. What does he gain by it?”
“It’s risky, sure,” Marcus said grimly. “But what you have to understand is that Suetonius Paulinus wants to send a message to the people living on the mainland. Just as he did at Mona. And what better way than to start a bonfire at night? When they burned the sacred oak groves you could see the flames for miles.”
Clare stopped in her tracks. “Damn,” she said softly as a blinding anger washed over her again. “You know, on the ship I was starting to think that maybe I didn’t totally hate that guy. But I totally hate that guy.”
It was diabolical. And strategically brilliant. Cold, calculating, and everything that was wrong with war. Clare thought of how Boudicca, for all her passion and determination, had never stood a chance against a mind like that of Suetonius Paulinus.
“He’ll march on Big Hill at sundown and then set it alight.” Marcus pointed to the rise of land off to their left. “As far as I can see it’s the highest point in the whole archipelago, and I’ve no doubt you can see it from miles around. He’ll have skins full of fuel with him—lamp oil most likely. It makes for a bright, angry flame.”
“And hey—bonus convenience—that’s where Milo and Connal and I will be opening the rifts. You know? That might just work in our favour.” Clare looked around. Off to the west, the rolling hills dropped off toward a broad, undulating lowland that swept toward the sea. “Only … what if Paulinus doesn’t go that far? What if he just starts a fire on the downs and calls it a day, hoping the whole place’ll go up?”
Marcus shook his head. “I don’t think so. The sun’s been doing a good job of drying things out, but with all that heavy rain last night Paulinus won’t risk trying to set any of the lower hills ablaze. If it doesn’t catch, or the flames douse in a damp hollow, he’ll have wasted his one good move. No. He’ll risk it all on a push to the hill. I know he will. If he plans to set up permanent shop here, he’s got to start things off with a pretty big bang.”
“Wow. Does being a soldier in the Roman army actually train you to think like that? Yuck.” When Marcus’s expression turned rueful, she felt bad for saying that. “I mean … uh, that’s useful intel. Good to know. If that’s where he’s headed, then that’s where we’ll let him go.” As they resumed walking she was silent for a while. “I hope we can count on Al to get herself and Llassar to the festivities …”
“She’ll do it, Clare.” Marcus turned a confident smile on her. “She’s escaped from a Roman prison tent before. She can do it again.”
“Yeah …” Clare nodded, remembering the time Al had escaped from Morholt’s warehouse and managed to steal, then wreck, his car. “She’s good with the Houdini like that. You’re right. She’ll be there.”
“Once Paulinus’s men start to march on the hill,” Marcus continue
d, “I can lead the Celts, and what’s left of Mallora’s skraeling, around to flank them. I’m sure the skraeling will be more than eager to help once they see what we’re doing. If the Legion balks on their way to the summit, we can drive them toward it if necessary.”
“Right,” Clare said. “And then, with Connal and Milo’s help, I can send Gaius Suetonius Paulinus’s sorry, soon to be ex-governor’s ass back to Somerset. Along with his men. And then Llassar will be free to head back to Norfolk with the stolen loot.”
She felt in her pocket for the map Milo had drawn, sensing a rightness in the plan and a growing hope. Generally speaking, Clare was lousy at planning. But this … this was going to work. And fix the world. And then they could all go home.
That is, Clare thought, once we find Al and her skinwalker pals—
“Clare! Down!”
The long grass in front of Clare parted and all she saw was teeth and claws. And big, black eyes. In a flash of yellow fur and muscle she found herself flying through the air, her arms wrapped around her head to protect her face from the daggerlike teeth of the massive feline that had tackled her. Not that it would do any good. She braced herself for the mauling once they hit the ground, but was shocked when the cat—a cougar—twisted in mid-air and took the brunt of the fall on its flank. Before Clare could even catch a breath it twisted again and leaped to its feet, massive paws braced wide, head down and snarling at her as if warning her not to move. Even if she hadn’t been tangled hopelessly in her borrowed cloak, Clare wouldn’t have twitched a muscle.
Only a few feet away, Marcus’s muscles were doing a great deal more than twitching. He was engaged in a strenuous hand-to-hand—or rather, hand-to-paw—struggle with a bear.
A bear.
A black bear. It didn’t seem completely full-grown—it was still lean and long-limbed and didn’t have the roly-poly shape of the bears Clare had seen wandering around near a motorists’ rest stop on vacation with her parents in the Rockies once—but it was still a freaking bear. As Marcus grappled with the creature, trying to reach the sword that was sheathed at his side, Clare saw that the bear was favouring its left front leg. Dried blood was matted on its fur. When it tried to put weight on it, the limb buckled and Marcus was able to break away. He reached for his sword and drew, lifting it high above his head, his expression pure Legion killing machine.