Now and for Never (29 page)

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 swagger 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

A
s 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.