Once Every Never Part 23

"Hey, look. I'm guessing you cast one of your magic spells on that thing using my blood, didn't you?"

The two men exchanged a wary glance. Lla.s.sar had the good manners to look vaguely guilty about it.

"Right. Well, so, you shouldn't be surprised that I know about it then. And don't worry. It worked. The grave remains undisturbed."

Lla.s.sar seemed relieved, not only that the enchantment, according to Clare, had worked, but that she hadn't wrought some horrible vengeance on him for using her "tylwyth teg" blood in the process.

"Let me ask you something, though." Clare frowned, puzzling. "When you close up the tomb, are you going leave the torc with the queen? The big gold one she's wearing now?"

"Yes!" Lla.s.sar said in alarm. "The torc must stay with her. It is ..."

"What?" she said with a sinking feeling. "Cursed?"

He nodded his big, s.h.a.ggy head. "Aye. It was Boudicca's doing. Not just enspelled. But cursed. Blood cursed."

"d.a.m.n." Clare put a hand to her neck, remembering the sight of her blood on the cloth Connal had used to clean the wound. Stupid sc.r.a.p of cloth ... "She used my blood in that one, too, didn't she?"

"And her own," Lla.s.sar said. "It was a dark spell. An evil spell. I counselled her against it but she would not be dissuaded. Her grief had made her mad. That is why I created the grave s.h.i.+eld-so that I could bury her vengeance with her where it would never be found."

Great, Clare thought. Nice try. Except that it had been found. In a hole in the ground in Snettisham.

Clare took a deep breath and explained, as simply as she could, that in her world the torc was on the loose. The pa.s.sage of time really did seem an abstract concept to the Druiddyn, but Lla.s.sar and Connal seemed to get the gist of it. As she spoke their confusion turned to alarm.

"Connal," Lla.s.sar rumbled. "This is ill luck. Clare has only ever sought to help us. For Boudicca's vengeance to be inflicted on her world ... it is not just. Not right."

"You say the barrow remains hidden, Clarinet," Connal said. "Undisturbed. How do you know that? Unless you yourself have found it there?"

"Oh. Yeah." Clare shrugged. "Well, Milo was the one who actually found it. And he's sort of a genius. But like I said, it's undisturbed and we won't tell anyone. In fact, we're actively trying to keep it a secret. That's why I'm here talking to you guys."

"Who is Milo?" Connal asked.

"He's ... a friend." Clare blushed and felt ridiculous for it. "He's been trying to help me through all this. Although I'm still not really sure why. All I've done so far is gotten him hit on the head and had a gun pointed at him-"

"The queen's torc must never be worn again, Lady," Lla.s.sar interrupted. "You must return it to her barrow. It must lie here with her-or it will carry her spirit out into the world and Boudicca will wreak her vengeance anew. I have seen what my queen is capable of." He looked at Connal. "We both have. It must not happen again."

"How am I supposed to do that?" Clare stared at the smith in disbelief. "Even if I take the torc to the barrow, there's no way to get it inside the grave chamber."

"Connal might be able to help," Lla.s.sar said quietly, turning to look at the young Druid. "If he is willing."

"Wait," Clare said. "What? He can?" She turned to Connal. "You can?"

Connal looked at the sorcerer smith with a question in his red-rimmed eyes.

"Boudicca meant for you to be her spirit warrior," Lla.s.sar said, putting a hand on Connal's shoulder. "But this s.h.i.+ning One kept that from happening."

"Oh ..." Clare grimaced. "You saw me in the boat too, huh?"

Lla.s.sar nodded.

"Um." Clare dropped her gaze to the ground. "Yeah. Comorra also had a hand in it. We didn't mean any harm."

"I know. That is why I never told the queen what I saw that night. If Andrasta had wished it so, Clarinet," Lla.s.sar said, "it would have been so."

Clare didn't argue.

"I think the Raven G.o.ddess has had other plans for you all along, Connal." His gaze s.h.i.+fted to the silver bracelet the Druid prince wore. "I made those cuffs for you at Boudicca's request, and there is strong magic in them. Her magic." He nodded his bearded chin at Clare. "They were to be your talis-mans, Connal, and through them Andrasta was to give you the gift of walking the spirit ways-just as she opens those ways to Clarinet."

"Right," Clare put in, as if she knew Andrasta personally. Lla.s.sar and the rest of her Iceni pals seemed to think she and the war G.o.ddess did coffee dates in the Otherworld.

"The spirit warrior ritual was never completed," Lla.s.sar continued, speaking directly to Connal. "Your spirit was readied for travel, but it was not released. It is within you still, but it is unbound. Unfettered. It can go forth now ... and then return again. And, once in her world, your spirit can guide Clarinet along another way-along the spiral path that is the unseen road leading into the heart of the queen's barrow."

Clare knew she was staring at Lla.s.sar wide-eyed. But, really? Was it so much of a stretch for a Toronto girl who'd been bouncing back and forth in time for the last few days? She turned to look at Connal. There was a wildness still in his eyes, but he'd taken on a look of rigid determination. He nodded once, curtly. Clare got the uneasy feeling that he was agreeing to what Lla.s.sar had proposed only because he had nothing to lose.

"You don't have to do this," Clare said.

He shook his head. "Lla.s.sar is right. It is Andrasta's will. I will go with you when you return to your world and I will be your guide." He slipped the silver cuff off his wrist and held it out to Lla.s.sar. Clare remembered how the talisman had sparked and triggered her own magic when she'd touched it. "Make the magic, Lla.s.sar."

"I can," the Druid smith said. "But I'll need help."

"What kind of help?" Clare asked.

Lla.s.sar's gaze met hers and, beneath his beard, his mouth quirked upward in a humourless grin. "How good a friend is this ... Milo?"

22.

"Oh, sure. That doesn't sound like a recipe for disaster at all," Al said. And then added, in net-speak, "End sarcasm." Just in case Clare hadn't picked up on it.

Lla.s.sar had told Clare what needed to happen if his magic was to work in her world. Clare had conveyed the plan, with all its details and dangers, to Al and Milo. Milo fell silent, mulling the idea, while Al frothed over with proclamations of impending doom.

When Connal had placed his silver wrist cuff in Boudicca's tomb, Clare had a.s.sumed it was simply a gesture. Of course, that was before Lla.s.sar had enlightened her; otherwise, she never would have guessed that Connal's disembodied spirit was actually tethered to his accessories-one of which was now sitting on Milo's coffee table. It looked innocent enough, but Clare had watched Lla.s.sar perform the ritual. She had felt the night air crackle with the power the Druid smith called down and had watched as the cuff began to glow with eerie, eldritch light in the moments before Connal slumped to the ground, senseless. And Clare knew that the bracelet she'd carried back with her through time was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Connal's disembodied spirit-just waiting to be released so that it could play tour guide at Bartlow Hills.

But there was only one way for it to do that.

"Do you have a better idea?" Clare sighed. She shared Al's concerns.

"No." Al sat glaring suspiciously at the harmless-looking piece of jewellery. "But I'm so not keen on risking the health and well-being of the only guy in London who will drive us places this summer."

Milo snorted. "Thanks, Allie."

Al waved a dismissive hand at him. "Plus he's my cousin and I love him yada yada. This is a bad idea. There cannot possibly be any worse ideas than this one."

"Fine," Clare snapped. "Okay. I know what we're gonna do instead."

"What?"

Clare stood up and pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves that Milo had lent her so that she could handle the silver artifact-and any other s.h.i.+mmer triggers-without risk of coming into contact and setting off a time trip. She put the cuff back in her jacket pocket where Lla.s.sar had placed it and turned to Al. "We're going to take Boudicca's torc back to the museum, give it to my aunt, and tell her the whole weird-a.s.s story, top to bottom. And then she's going to tell us what the h.e.l.l to do."

"Okay," Al said. "I give up. You win. That is a much, much worse idea."

AL AND MILO had both honestly thought she'd been joking when Clare had made the suggestion back in Milo's apartment. Maggie had thought she'd been joking when she'd started to tell her about the last few days.

None of them thought she was joking now.

But the fact that Maggie thought Clare was being serious didn't exactly mean she was having an easy time wrapping her cerebral faculties around her niece's story. She had tried breaking it down into its component minutiae and focusing on the details one at a time, but that held its own share of problems.

"Wait just one minute, young lady!" Maggie had squawked abruptly at one point in the telling. She shot out of her desk chair and stalked across the room, closing the door to her office and throwing the bolt lock for good measure. "Clare-do you mean to say you've actually met Claxton Man?"

"Yes."

"More like 'Claxton Hottie,'" Al murmured.

Clare kicked her under the table. Over in the corner, standing beside a shelf groaning with books and what looked like a real human skull, Milo frowned faintly.

"The Claxton Man?" Maggie asked again.

"Yes."

"The Bog Man Claxton Man?"

"His real name is Connal-"

"Oh dear ..." Maggie got a bit on the breathy side. "What was he like?"

"Really cute, apparently," Al chimed in.

Clare squeezed her eyes shut. Al seemed to be exacting some kind of penance for Clare's having made time with a dead Druid while Milo got his lights punched out on her behalf. On the one hand, Clare could actually appreciate Al's loyalty to her cousin. On the other, she really wished Al would just shut up.

"Dark smouldering gaze, nice chest, square jaw ..." Al was on a roll. "Soft lips. Occasionally painted blue-"

"Soft ..." Maggie's eyes went window-wide with shock. "Clarinet Imogen Reid! Were you snogging a Bog Man?"

Milo's blue eyes glittered with grim amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Uh-yeah." Clare glared at Milo defiantly for a moment. She wasn't about to apologize to him. He'd had five whole years to declare his affections, after all. She turned her attention back to her aunt. "Yes. A bit. And it wasn't my idea. Also, he was pre-bog. But, y'know, thanks for the mental picture ..."

"I haven't even met this boy," Maggie protested weakly, wandering back behind her desk where she wilted down into her chair. Maggie had somehow seized on this one issue and defaulted into parental-subst.i.tute mode. "You're not to have boyfriends unless I've at least met them ..."

"He is not my boyfriend. He is so not!" Clare protested hotly. "Look-you can ground me later if you really feel the need, okay-"

"I may just do that."

"-but right now there are slightly more important things to worry about than which archaeological curiosity I've been sucking face with!" Clare glanced over at Milo. "That goes for you, too!"

Clare's outburst seemed to snap Maggie back to reality somewhat. She raked a hand through her hair, throwing one side of her neatly swept updo into disarray. "I just don't know what you expect me to make of all this, Clare. The whole story is ... well, it's ..."

"Mags," Clare said quietly, "Please. I know you used to hang around with Stuart Morholt. He had no trouble believing any of it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, deep down, you don't either."

Maggie regarded Clare sharply for a long silent moment, an obvious struggle going on behind her eyes.

"Do you?" Clare asked.

"I ..." Maggie sighed and slumped forward, leaning on her desk. "... No. You're right, Clare. I've ... seen things. Done things. A long time ago."

"You were one of the Order of the Free Peoples of Prydein, weren't you, Dr. Wallace?" Milo asked.

Clare and Al turned to stare at him. And then back at Maggie.

"I was very young. Inexcusably stupid. Also a bit smitten ..." Maggie smiled bitterly. "We were all antiquities students at Cambridge, and-just purely for fun, you understand-a bunch of us formed a little secret club. In the beginning it was just a silly excuse to dress up and have parties in fields. But for a core group of us, it became something more. One time, in second year, we decided to take a road trip to Glas...o...b..ry Tor."

"That big hill in the Midlands where they have the hippie music festival every year?" Clare's parents had actually gone to it once, back in the throes of their bizarre musical youth, and she'd seen pictures of them standing knee-deep in mud and paisley polyester at the base of the hill.

"Yes." Maggie nodded. "There's always been a theory-not exactly a scientific one, mind you-that says if you walk the path the right way, you open up a mystical portal to another world."

"I did some recent aerial survey conversions of that area," Milo said. "In overhead photographs you can see ridges in the hillside that wind around in a kind of switchback pattern. Like a maze."

"Exactly like a maze." Maggie nodded. "Some people think King Arthur's buried there. Others think it's a gateway to h.e.l.l. Or the Underworld." She looked at Clare. "Or the past."

Clare s.h.i.+vered.

"At any rate, there was one young man who was part of our group, and he wors.h.i.+pped Stuart, who treated him as a lackey, of course." Maggie's gaze went unfocused as she began to remember. "There was ... an incident. Stuart performed a ritual he'd discovered in some arcane text with one of the artifacts we'd found on a student dig. The young man-he was just a boy, really, a Romance Languages major-he just ... disappeared. Vanished into thin air right in front of our eyes. We never saw him again."

"Did you go to the police?"

Maggie shook her head. "I'm thoroughly ashamed to say we didn't. I didn't. Stuart convinced us straightaway that we'd be laughed out of the university. Or worse-charged with some sort of crime. So we all agreed to never speak of it again. The poor lad's disappearance was chalked up to a runaway due to academic stress." She sighed, and it was the saddest sound Clare had ever heard her aunt make. "But every year on that date I drive out to Glas...o...b..ry. And I can hear him. Feel him there. He's not gone. He's just ..."

"Elsewhere," Clare said. "Elsewhen. I know. I've been there." "Yes." Maggie's gaze snapped back to her niece. "And you have a lot to answer for young lady, after all this is said and done! What have I always told you about antiquities? NO TOUCHING."

Clare refrained from pointing out that touching antiquities was what Maggie did all the time and, in fact, she'd developed a nicely lucrative little career for herself in the process. "So what do we do, Mags? Do we give the torc back to the museum? Hand it over to Dr. Jenkins? Tell her to increase security by about a billion percent?"

Maggie took her gla.s.ses off her head and tossed them on the desk, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I haven't seen Ceciley all day. And frankly, I'm rather disappointed in her. She vehemently denied that Stuart Morholt is even alive-let alone responsible for the theft-even after I showed her the note he left behind. But she knows as well as I do what he's capable of."

"What is he capable of?"

"Exploding things, mostly. After the incident at Glas...o...b..ry he went a bit off the rails. I mean, mentally. We parted ways-rather acrimoniously-and I haven't had any direct contact with him since. Not until the torc was stolen and he saw fit to send me a mocking little note letting me know he was the one who'd stolen it."

"Why'd you guys break up?"

"Because after Glas...o...b..ry I decided to leave the whole of that nonsense behind me and concentrate on real history and real science. No more mystic mumbo jumbo for me. As for Stuart, in the early eighties he became notorious-wanted by Scotland Yard for several instances of what, in today's par-lance, would be known as 'domestic terrorism.' He was responsible for blowing up the offices of developers and politicians who were razing sites he deemed of historical significance. Even if they were of no real worth whatsoever to the scholarly community. He once broke into a construction site near Tewkesbury and torched an entire fleet of bulldozers because a road-widening project was going to require the removal of an ancient yew tree that Stuart had decided was once sacred to the Druiddyn."

"Really. How would he know?"