Every Never After (16 page)

He dragged her past the lines of neatly laid-out tents toward the centre of the encampment. Behind her curtain of tangled hair, Allie glanced around as she stumbled in his wake. She could see where they’d dug a ditch around the entire circumference of the square-shaped camp and used the dug-up earth to form a defensive embankment inside the ditch. It was topped at intervals by sharpened wooden stakes pointing outward at angles to deter any hostiles from rushing the earthen wall.

These things were meant to be temporary camps, Allie knew from what she’d read about Legion methods and techniques. Except that this one had a slightly more permanent air. She remembered what she’d heard the two soldiers saying about the siege tactics
the Celts had been using against them. Rough wooden palisade gates made of lashed, sharpened tree trunks had been put up at the camp’s two entrances, and a watch platform seemed to have been hastily erected at the north end of the camp. The south end was protected by the sloping sides of Glastonbury Tor itself.

When they reached the praefect’s empty tent, the centurion ordered Allie’s manacles to be secured to the central tent pole. He set a sentry guard outside the entrance, then left Marcus alone to deal with his prisoner, citing vastly more gripping things to do than watch the young legionnaire try to wring sense out of a “skinny-arsed barbarian waif.”

Allie tried not to collapse in a heap. She needed to focus. To concentrate on the situation at hand, and how the hell she was going to get herself out of it. She needed information. And she needed to know just where (she already knew
when
) Marcus Donatus was coming from.

He stood for a moment after the centurion left, looking down at his hands. They were smeared with dried mud. And blood. So was his uniform, beneath his cloak. It looked as though he hadn’t had a chance to clean up after the fight the night before. When he’d saved Allie from a flaming shish-kabob fate.

“Good god, what a mess,” he muttered to himself in English.

And he
totally
had a faint Scottish accent. It was ridiculously sexy. Sexier, even, than when he’d been speaking Latin.

Could we focus on the situation at hand, here, Little Miss Easily Distracted?

Allie wondered if Clare had experienced something similar when she met Connal, her blue-painted Druid hottie, on her first shimmer trip. She decided to ask the next time she saw her. For the moment, there was a bit more to worry about. Especially since her own hottie didn’t seem the least bit inclined to even be polite.

She decided to confirm her theory as to his identity. She was still having difficulties reconciling Mark O’Donnell and Marcus Donatus as far as appearances went. Was
that
what forced marches,
fresh air, and legion rations did to teenage boys? Wow. And she thought the high school football team grew up fast.

Allie cleared her throat. “Don’t you mean ‘By Jupiter, what a mess’?”

Ignoring her, he strode over to a folding stand that held a bronze bowl and pitcher. He poured water into the bowl and began to wash the dirt from his hands.

“I mean … that
would
be the first-century-Roman thing to say, wouldn’t it?” Allie pressed.

He kept washing his hands silently, his shoulders hunched around his ears.

Okaaay … let’s try a different angle, shall we?

“Um. So. How long have you been in the army?”

He scrubbed even harder at the dirt.

Allie watched as the skin of his knuckles started to turn red. She tried one more time, only
this
time, she tried it in Latin.

“I
said
,” she said loudly,
“Quamdiu militem eras?”

She was pretty sure her accent sucked big time and her conjugation was a mess, but the attempt had the desired result. And
then
some. Legionnaire Donatus’s helmeted head snapped around and his eyes blazed with emotion—anger? fear?—as he glared at her.

“Since they found me,” he said in English. “And
don’t
do that again.”

“What?”

“Speak Latin.”

He threw down the cloth he’d been drying his hands with and stalked back toward her, yanking the tent flap closed on his way.

“What if someone overheard that?” he murmured, gesturing in the direction of the guard, whose shadow Allie could see on the tent wall. “If
they
know you speak their language, they won’t need me to interpret for them. That centurion could interrogate you himself, and then I wouldn’t be around to make him be nice about it. I don’t think you want that.”

“Oh. Right. No …” Allie swallowed painfully. He was right. She’d been stupid. Which was really,
really
unlike her. She couldn’t
afford to be stupid—it could cost her her life. She felt tears of frustration welling behind her eyes.

Marcus stood staring at her. After a moment, he sighed. “Besides which,” he said in a slightly less berating tone, “your accent is like a cheese grater to the ears. And your conjugation is a mess.”

She glanced up, scowling in indignation, to see him grinning sardonically at her. Allie bit back the sharp retort that was on the tip of her tongue. He
was
trying to help her get the best out of an impossibly bad situation, it seemed. And he did have a vastly superior accent. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from him. Especially if she could manage to ignore how the sound of his voice made the soles of her feet tingle every time he rolled one of his
r’
s.

He shrugged and turned away from her. There was a camp desk in the middle of the sparsely appointed tent and Marcus stared down at one of the parchment maps that lay on its surface. He traced the fingers of one hand over the spidery lines.

“To answer your question,” he said in a flat, faraway voice, “I’ve been with the Second Augusta Legion ever since Quintus Phoenius Postumus, the praefect whose tent pole you’re currently shackled to, found me starving to death in the mud below that godforsaken hill out there.”

“Oh. Okay. And … um … how long ago was that?”

“Four years.”

“So you were … what?” Al prodded gently. “Fifteen? Is that right … Mark?”

He turned to her, his eyes haunted by the boy he used to be. And it was, Allie thought, the first time he had truly looked at her.

“That’s your name, right? Mark O’Donnell? Your
real
name.”

He let his breath out in a shaky sigh. “I’m not imagining you …”

“Uh. No?”

“And I’m
not
mad, then.” It was almost a question.

“I don’t think so …”

“Which means you’re really from—” He winced suddenly and turned sharply away, his nostrils flaring like those of an animal scenting danger on the wind. He shook his head as if he was having some sort of silent, heated argument with himself. “No,” he murmured. “I can’t believe that after all this time … No. If it’s true, then why wouldn’t someone have come for me before? I don’t even know you. Why didn’t my— No! I know what this is. It’s that damned Druidess. She’s sent you to torment me and I’ll have none of it!”

He turned on the heel of his sandal and stalked out the door.

It was so sudden, so abrupt, that all Allie could do was watch him go. And once he was gone, she sank to the dirt floor of the tent, hugging the pole that kept her captive. She had never in all her life felt so alone.

“Clare …” she murmured. “I’m
really
ready to come home now …”

But the answer to her plea was silence, broken only by the creaking of her sentry’s leather armour just outside the Roman praefect’s tent.

12

M
ilo’s face wore an expression that wavered between disbelief, grudging respect, and outright annoyance. “He planned it. The whole thing.”

“Sure.” Piper shrugged. “With the mystical help and half the biology of some whacked-out Druid sorceress ancestor-chick of mine who could see the future.”

Clare was trying not to think about Boudicca’s Druidess sister. That was just too much for her brain at the moment. “You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s
Morholt
. His schemes don’t work. Ever. For him to even con
ceive
of a plan—”

“I think it was Mallora who did the actual conceiving,” Milo muttered.

“GAH!” Clare covered her ears. “Seriously!”

“Sorry.”

“You really find it that unlikely a scenario?” Piper asked.

Clare turned and blinked at her. “I know you’ve never met the guy, so trust me, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.”

She sighed and shook her head, staring at the little book as Milo carefully turned its pages, his eyes scanning what Morholt had written there. “Yup,” he said. “A Stuart Morholt plan worked. My worldview is seriously compromised.”

“Oh now, mustn’t think like that,” Piper laughed sarcastically. “I mean, it’s only worked up to a point. The book has found its way
to you, but it’s not as if you’ve found your way back to Morholt yet, is it? And isn’t that his whole point in sending the book forward in time?”

Clare turned to Milo anxiously. “Does he say how? Are there actually instructions on how to go back with
out
a shimmer trigger? Because I don’t know how the heck Al managed it … and without a trigger, I’m not going anywhere. Does Morholt offer any insights?” She waved at the diary in Milo’s hands.

“Um … not exactly,” Milo said, shaking his head. “He rambles like a madman. I think being stuck back there in the past really did a number on ol’ Stu’s brainpan.”

“I know, right?” Piper nodded. “Like … what the hell does the last page mean?”

Milo flipped to the back of the book and frowned.

“See? That.” Piper gestured to the page, which seemed to consist of nothing more than a few lines of scribbled numbers. “I could never figure that one out myself. Those numbers range from one to twenty-two. But as far as I can see, there’s no pattern. The order and grouping seem totally random.”

Clare leaned over Milo’s shoulder and scanned the first line. Except that to her eyes there was nothing “random” about them at all.
And
they were written in
her
distinctly crappy penmanship. The message they conveyed leaped out at Clare, plain as day:

19-8 9-8-5 5-18-11-11 10-14-11-8 1-8-4 20-22-9 7-18-

22-19 5-15-14-6

But her brain swiftly, automatically,
shockingly
interpreted it:

do not tell milo you can read this

Milo, who was looking at the same message, only without the necessary information to understand it. Milo, who Clare trusted with her life. And maybe even her heart.

Milo …

Why the warning, written in a ridiculous grade-school cipher that only Clare would recognize for what it was? The “code”—and it barely even qualified as that—was something Clare and Al had made up in grade four—or maybe it was five—when using secret codes was both fun and a means of avoiding detention when passing notes in class. It consisted of twenty-two numbers, each one corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, starting in reverse. And just to throw anyone off the trail, Clare and Al had omitted assigning numbers to the letters Q, Z, X, and P. They hardly ever used those, and if the notes were ever intercepted, anyone who saw that there were only twenty-two repeating numbers probably wouldn’t think to match them alphabetically. And if they tried, the unknown letters the girls had omitted would screw up any attempt at deciphering.

But that had been grade school. The question now was, How on earth had Clare come to write herself a note in Morholt’s ancient diary, and why on earth had she found it necessary to write it in code? Whatever it was, it must have been important. But it would take her a bit of time to decipher it all, and meanwhile she couldn’t let Milo know she could. She also couldn’t risk letting him use his big brain to crack the message. Not until she’d read the whole thing through and figured out why she was warning herself.

“Huh. Random numbers,” she said, reaching over to take the book from Milo, casually ignoring his attempts to keep reading, as if she hadn’t noticed. “Probably just Morholt playing Sudoku to pass the time. Look—there’s even a doodle.” She pointed to an elongated squiggly spiral at the bottom of the page, partially obscured by a smudge of brownish dirt, that vaguely resembled the shape of Glastonbury Tor as seen from above. The doodle was in Clare’s hand, too.

What the hell?

Beside her, Milo was still peering intently at the numbers. Clare could see his brain trying to work out patterns.

“Tell me something …” She nonchalantly closed the pages and turned toward Piper, holding the notebook up between them. “Why did you open the tin?”

“Because I’m the only one who would.” Piper plucked the book delicately from Clare’s fingertips and began to rewrap it in its zipper-cloth and baggie. “You really should be wearing gloves, you know … You want the real reason why this thing has stayed in such marvellous shape? Because for the better part of the last two hundred years it has sat in a dust-free, climate-controlled safe deposit box in a London bank vault. Everyone in my family had heard about it … and
no
one cared. No one in my family displayed the necessary intellectual curiosity, or the bravery, or even the … the
mendacity
to open the damned thing. No one except me.”