Now and for Never (31 page)

What? You don't know?

No! I— Oh no,
Milo thought.
Not that …

A wave of anxiety washed over him as he remembered how effortless her flirty act had seemed at Dan's place. How she'd told him what a great team she thought they made … Had Piper Gimble actually been crushing on him the whole time they'd been together?

Damn. Way to be sensitive, supergeek!

Why hadn't he seen it? He'd done nothing but talk about Clare and how much he missed her. He could have been a little more attentive to Piper's emotional state.

“Piper,” he said gently, “I'm so sorry. I didn't realize.”

“What?”

“That you felt that way about me.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “It's just that Clare is—”

Piper let out a snort-guffaw.

“You idiot,” she sniffled through her tears. Then she punched him on the shoulder. “You're not what's got me upset!”

Milo felt his face growing hot. He really was going to have to practise the whole interacting with females who weren't his cousin thing a little more. “What are you upset about, then?”

“Family,” she said.

“Um. Family?”

“Yeah.” Piper flipped up her lenses and scrubbed a sleeve across her face. “I mean, you've been nattering on about it
in one way or another for most of this whole bloody trek and it's just … well … I don't have that. I have me. I just thought … it might be nice to have someone else for a change. And I don't mean you.” She sniffed again and grinned. “I mean, you're lovely and all—and I have to admit, I've had a bit of fun making Clare scorching jealous—but I mean … I want family.”

“Oh.” Milo winced at his presumption. “Right. Well—”

“And I think I know what I'm going to do the second I get home,” Piper continued, mercifully relieving him of the need to stammer an apology.

“What's that?” Milo asked warily, remembering the touchy familial situation Piper had left behind.

“I'm going to march right into Nicholas Ashbourne's silly little field tent and I'm going to sit down at that desk of his.” She blinked back the watery sheen on her eyes. “And I'm not leaving until he's told me every one of his stories. And he's not leaving until he's heard every one of mine. I'm going to have a family, Milo. Like all of you have. I'm going to
be
family. Not just a bloodline.”

Milo smiled at her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, giving her a hug. “Come on then,” he said. “Let's go finish this story so that you can tell him all about it when we get back.”

Piper looked up at him and nodded.

“You know …” Milo said, “if Clare manages to bring Stuart Morholt back with her, you're going to have a
lot
more family than you thought.”

Piper considered that for a moment. “Well. That should make things right interesting, then, shouldn't it?”

“Careful what you wish for.”

She grinned back at him and held up the silver shimmertrigger coin Milo had given her to call the others home. “Live dangerously.”

Then she stepped forward and led the way, trailing in the footsteps of her ancestor, whistling as she went.

THEY REACHED THE SUMMIT
of Big Hill about half an hour before sunset: Connal, Clare, and Morholt, along with the six lean-muscled Celts who'd hauled up the little boat full of loot and now crouched beside it, waiting for the moment when they'd drive it forward into a spatio-temporal rift. The warrior contingent of their little band, Marcus and Comorra, had split off to head in the opposite direction, toward where Paulinus would be marshalling his war machine. Clare glanced nervously at the sky. Once the festivities below the hill began she'd have the boys fire up the spatial conduits, and then she herself would get about the business of conducting the orchestra.

No pressure.

Her stomach was in knots as Connal pulled out a bag of beach sand he'd collected and, after carefully pouring it out, drew a circle in the scrubby grass crowning the hill. Clare and Connal would enter the warded circle at their end, Milo at his. As long as the two circles remained unbroken, the spatio-temporal magic would stay sufficiently concentrated for Clare to bend it to her will. Then, once everyone else was headed back to where they belonged, she'd have to break the circle. To step outside it and join hands with Al—who, of course, would have made her timely escape and made it up the hill by then, right? Right!—and Marcus, and Morholt. They would have only seconds then before the conduit bearing Llassar—who, of course, Al would have brought with her, right? Right!—the treasure, and the shimmer coin closed behind the Druid master smith. And in
those
seconds it would be up to Piper to bring them home.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Clare looked over at Morholt, who waited outside the circle near the loot boat, ready to hand over the soon-to-be Snettisham Torc to Llassar. At least he'd better, Clare thought. His grip on the golden ring was pretty white-knuckled.

The leading edge of the sun had dipped below the horizon and the whole western quadrant of the sky was ablaze with orange, crimson, and purple. Over Clare's shoulder, the moon was just rising. Connal glanced at her and nodded encouragement. Then Clare fished the vial of blood out of her bag. She unstoppered it and, as Mallora had instructed, poured out drops on the four compass points of the circle he'd drawn.

A compass to show me the way,
she thought, giving in to Mallora's admonition to go with her instincts. Then she held out the vial to Connal, who stood unselfconsciously naked from the waist up and covered in swirling blue symbols. Just as Milo would be, Clare thought with a flush of warmth, standing in the same place almost two thousand years from that moment. She grabbed her hair and piled it on top of her head in a messy bun, securing it with an elastic from around her wrist.

Boudicca's blood-cursed torc had been responsible for much of the spatio-temporal Shenanigans, Clare thought. And while she couldn't lay hands on the actual torc—that needed to make its way back to Snettisham while she was in the middle of her ritual—she'd had another flash of insight. Mallora had really been on to something with the whole go with your gut thing.

Even if that “something” is way far gone on the “eeeew” scale …

She swallowed thickly and told Connal what to do.

Then she stood and waited, shuddering a bit, as Connal dipped his finger into the Cursed Vial of Icky Liquid and, walking clockwise around her, drew a circle around her neck. Just like a torc. And when he joined the two ends together
in the hollow at the base of her throat, just above where the Celtic pendant Milo had given her hung …

“Whoa!”

Clare lit up like a comet and the world burst into a fireworks display like nothing she'd ever seen. She gasped in wonder as the whole of the hill seemed to come alive with light, a swirling, spiral dance of firefly trails. Not the static paths she'd seen that time on Bartlow High Hill when they'd walked the Way to Boudicca's grave barrow, but moving, shifting, dancing patterns. She wondered if Connal could see them too.

She looked at him and he smiled.

Then his face shifted, and a double-exposure image of Milo seemed to slide over his features like a transparent mask.

“Milo …?”

The green/blue eyes that gazed on her were alight with excitement.

“Clare de Lune …” Milo's voice echoed out of Connal's mouth.

And then, somewhere in the distance, Clare could hear the faint thrum of marching feet. She could see the hazy glow of torchlight. She crossed her fingers and whispered, “Okay, Al … that's your cue!”

THE SUN WAS SETTING
as they marched inexorably across the broad sweep of rolling meadowland. In the distance, over the helmeted heads of the regimented ranks of legionnaires in front of her, Allie could just make out the place where the ground began to undulate upward, sloping toward the summit of Big Hill. She looked at Llassar where he shuffled along beside her and he shot her a grim smile that bent the crinkled, singed hairs of his moustache upward. Allie had convinced Junius to convince Paulinus to bring the two of them along. It seemed the bruiser legionnaire really
did
have some sense of
honour—one that demanded he repay her for saving his life. He'd persuaded the governor that the two prisoners might be useful bargaining tools if they encountered any resistance on their merry way to turn Big Hill into a giant smoking ember. They might even be able to trade them for some of that gold, he speculated, which—down the road—could prove handy in trading with the indigenous folk as they went about setting up their mini-empire.

In Canada, of all places. Jeez …

Allie figured Paulinus was probably just humouring Junius. Still, the men seemed to respect the centurion, and so Paulinus needed him in his corner. There were only eighty, maybe a hundred soldiers in all, marching. Plus the entire contingent of mariners from both galleys. Small numbers for an invading army, maybe, but Allie knew what kind of damage the soldiers of Rome could do. Boudicca's army of tribes had vastly outnumbered Paulinus's Legions, but under his command those soldiers had decimated their opponents. The Iceni had been virtually wiped from the face of the map.

The Romans had trampling feet and they had fire. Lots of it—rows of torches just waiting to set the island alight. When she'd finally parsed Paulinus's actual strategy, Allie had been horrified. That horror swiftly calcified into a hard, sharp knot of incandescent anger in her stomach. She hoped desperately that Marcus and Clare had guessed what the governor's plan was, too—and that they'd be ready.

Marcus will know,
she thought.
He'll remember Mona and he'll figure it out. I hope …

Near the front ranks were men carrying large skins on their shoulders full of what was doubtless some kind of accelerant. The thunder of hobnailed sandals marching in formation shook the ground as they got closer.

Allie felt a sudden tingling along her spine and craned her neck to look up at the hill. She thought she could almost
discern a faint glimmering emanating from the summit, but it might have been a trick of the failing evening light. Then she heard Clare's voice, clear as a bell in her head—“Okay, Al … that's your cue!”—and she sucked in a sharp breath. Her best friend had once more levelled up in the magic-user ranks and no longer required a Korg 70,000
BC
walkie talkie to communicate. She and Allie, it seemed, now had a direct shimmer link—at least for the duration of that evening's gala performance—and Clare had just called “Show Time!”

Allie threw wide her raven-feathered cloak and it spread out and up like wings on a sudden, wild wind that sprang up out of nowhere. She cast her mind back to each occasion she'd called Clare back home across the depths of time and space. She thought of the raven brooch that Llassar had created, the Raven Goddess represented by the twisting, spiralling designs. She thought of the first time she'd ever seen the scathach, on a battlefield at night. In her mind she saw darkness and heard the deafening roar of a multitude of flapping wings.

She filled her lungs with air … and then snapped her mouth shut when she heard Clare's voice echoing through the dusky evening.

“Yoo hoo!” Clare called. “Hey! Governor Moronicus! What do you think you're doing?”

Clare's voice carried like a tolling bell out over the rolling downs, and Allie saw Suetonius Paulinus raise a hand, signalling his troops to a halt.

“I think I'm winning!” Paulinus shouted jovially back, unfazed by Clare's insult.

Maybe “moron” didn't translate into Latin,
Allie thought.

“I burned the sorcery out of the soil of Mona and Boudicca's army shattered,” he called. “I can do the same here. Without their dark gods the defenders of this place too will fall and Rome will make of this land a civilization.”

“This land,” Clare shouted back, “and its defenders are going to kick your so-called civilized butt, you walking pop can!”

“Hit it, Al!”

Drawing on a deep-seated, unrequited love of dramatics, Allie mined her summer drama-camp experiences of years gone by—or rather, yet to come—and, filling her lungs with air again, called out at the top of her voice,
“For Andrastaaaaa!”

Appearing as if by magic, leaping from the concealment of hollows and stands of long waving grass the marching Romans had already passed by, Marcus and the scathach, their ranks swelled by the princess Comorra and her Iceni warriors, rushed at the rearward flank of the Legion formation. The legionnaires, moving with mindless precision, pivoted half of their numbers and formed a square around Allie and Llassar, spreading out on either side to put up a solid shield wall in the hopes of stalling the attacking Celts while the rest of the soldiers and the sailors with their oilskins ran for the hilltop.

They didn't even make it halfway.

Caught in the middle of the square formation, Allie suddenly felt as if she'd been struck by lightning. A wave of power coursed through her, and in the wake of her shouted invocation, a shrieking cacophony—the angry cries of what sounded like every raven that called the Maritimes home—filled the air with a deafening noise. The huge black birds came from all directions, blotting out the twilight-purple sky. They hid the face of the rising moon. The beating of their wings as they swooped and dove at the troops of soldiers evoked the sound of kettle drums beating out a war tattoo.

“There's our air support, Llassar!” Allie shouted triumphantly as the legionnaires threw their shields up over their heads and dove for cover. A gap appeared in the soldiers' ranks and Allie grabbed the burly Druid blacksmith by the hand. “Let's go!”

As they ran, Manaw and his furry skraeling buddies suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, springing up from more hollows and divots in the ground, blurring like smoke on the wind as they transformed into their various beastie guises and scared the strappy leather skirts right off the Romans, who, if Allie remembered correctly, were a fairly superstitious lot to begin with.