Once Every Never

  Milo loosened his death grip hug—a little—and turned to look after Al. “What’s she on about?”

  “Nothing,” Clare smiled and reached up to where Milo had the shadow of a bruise on his forehead. He must have hit his head when Morholt knocked him out. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He dropped his gaze, his expression rueful. “Sorry about letting that creep get the drop on me …”

  “Hey, Milo. It’s okay. He had a gun. I don’t want you being a hero and getting hurt, you know.”

  “Oh.” He frowned. “You don’t?”

  “Well … not badly hurt. No.” Clare may have liked the idea that Milo wanted to be a hero for her, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She didn’t want him doing anything stupid for her sake.

  “Are you really okay?” He tilted her face up so he could look into her eyes. “He didn’t lay a hand on you, did he?”

  For a second Clare thought he was talking about Connal instead of Morholt. But that was silly. Still, she couldn’t get over what Al had said about Clare having … feelings for Connal. She didn’t. At least, she didn’t think she did.

  Right. You always kiss guys you don’t care about …

  Milo’s face was so close to hers she could have kissed him in that moment. His blue eyes behind those black-framed glasses were filled with concern. “I’ll kill him if he hurt you,” Milo said softly. He sounded as if he meant it. It sounded like something Connal might have said.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Really. You don’t need to kill anybody for me just yet.”

  Milo relaxed his grip on her and smiled. “Okay.” Suddenly he seemed to realize that he’d been kind of man-handling Clare. He let go of her and took off his glasses to polish the lenses with the edge of his T-shirt—thereby conveniently avoiding further eye contact—but it was too late. Clare could tell he’d been worried about her. It gave her a warm feeling deep in her chest.

  “Come on,” he said, a semblance of his usual, easy grin sliding back into place, “I think I figured something out while you were gone.”

  Inside Milo’s apartment the furnishings were sparse: a huge desk, a leather couch, and some chairs. There were also some lovingly detailed scale models of spaceships hanging from the ceiling—the Millennium Falcon and the original-series Enterprise were ones that Clare recognized—several computers, and an entire wall devoted to maps, including a large, full-colour map of Britain stuck with a handful of coloured push-pins.

  “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what the connection was between the shimmer triggers.”

  “That’s easy,” Clare said sourly. “It’s me and my super-shimmery DNA.”

  Al and Milo gave her identical looks that would have been comical if Clare had actually been joking. She filled them in on what Connal had told her about Boudicca and the blood magic.

  Milo whistled low when she finished. “That’s heavy.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Al. “They think you’re, like, some kind of tribal totemic demi-goddess or something.”

  “Yup.” Clare sighed. “When, as far as I can make out, it’s just the fact that Boudicca put the whammy on me in the first place that gives me any magic at all.”

  “Wow. Isn’t that kind of like the time-loop paradox in that Heinlein story, Milo?” Al mused.

  “I don’t even wanna know what you’re talking about,” Clare said.

  “It’s sci-fi. About a guy who time-travels in loops and keeps running into himself—”

  Clare held up a hand. “Stop. Seriously—I can’t even think about this stuff for extended periods. I start to feel like a puppy that chases its own tail for so long it gets dizzy and throws up.” She turned back to Milo. “Anyway. Now you know. So how does this new info play into your theory?”

  “Perfectly, actually,” he said, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. “Like I said—I was trying to see the connections. I mean, we know—definitively now—that they’re all connected to you, but why those particular objects, right? The torc and the brooch … that’s easy. They’re symbolic ornaments. Worn, in part, for protection. And, as you said before, they’re personal. But the shield?”

  “Right. It really doesn’t seem to fit the same profile.”

  Milo held up one finger, his blue eyes sparking with excitement. “Well, in a way, it does. I think it’s a symbol, too—a sort of grave marker. But more than that.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “What does a shield do?” he asked.

  “It protects things,” Clare answered. “People. Keeps them safe. Um … hidden, maybe? Am I getting warmer?”

  “Bang on, in fact.” Milo’s grin widened. “Is Boudicca still safe and hidden?”

  “You mean, in her grave?” Clare shrugged. “I guess—Oh, I see where you’re going with this. The shield’s magic keeps her hidden.”

  “Yup. That’s my theory anyway. I figure this blood magic stuff acts kind of like the Romulan Cloaking Device on Star Trek.”

  Clare raised an eyebrow.

  Milo grinned. “Or something like that. And, at the same time, the shield itself tells us exactly where the grave is located. It’s like a voodoo doll—a miniaturized version of the thing you’ve cast a spell on. It’s representative. Work magic on the one, and it affects the other sort of by remote control.”

  “So it hides the grave while pointing out where the grave is.”

  “Or, at least, what it looks like. Yeah.”

  Al wasn’t convinced. “Mind explaining how you came up with this—might I point out, weirdly contradictory—theory?”

  “Something had been nagging me about this so-called shield. The round shapes on it … their placement … When we got talking about it earlier, I looked it up on the museum website. And I kept thinking it reminded me of something. I finally figured out what that is.”

  Al and Clare waited.

  “Tumuli.”

  “Geshundheit,” Clare said.

  Al snorted, but then something sparked in her gaze. “Wait,” she said, staring keenly at Milo. “You’re talking about barrows.” She glanced at Clare and shrugged. “Hey. I watch the History Channel, too.”

  Milo spread his hands wide and bowed his head like a stage magician. “I speaketh as the Maker of Maps. Dunno why it didn’t click right away—it’s not as if I spend days looking at the damn things for a living or anything!”

  “Aaaand … you’ve lost me, eggheads,” Clare sighed.

  Al walked over to the wall full of maps. “Barrows are heaps of earth—the technical term is ‘tumuli’—that are manmade constructs. Most of those barrows are grave chambers. Burial mounds. They’re all over Britain.” She circled a finger over an area of the map.

  “Really, how do you know all this stuff?” Clare asked.

  “Like I said. History Channel. Also? There’s this thing? Called ‘the internet’? You should really look into it. I think it’s gonna be a big hit.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. “Right. I’ll shut up now. Carry on.”

  Milo took pity on her and picked up the explanation. “Like Al said, these ancient tomb barrows are scattered all over Britain—the plains around Stonehenge are lousy with ’em—hundreds of the things, in all kinds of configurations and cluster groupings. A lot of them have been excavated or destroyed by development, but the majority just sit there untouched. I think Boudicca is buried under the one—well, a grouping of three to be precise—that conforms exactly to the dimensions of the Battersea Shield.”

  Now it was Clare’s turn to be skeptical. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say the shield is some kind of Iron Age treasure map. How the hell are we going to find the exact configuration where X marks the spot? You say there are hundreds of these things. And we don’t even know where to look.”

  “Not necessarily,” Al chimed in. “I mean, we know where to start … right, Mi?”

  “Right. Let’s make the reasonable assumption that Boudicca would have been buried
on or near her own stomping grounds.”

  “Reasonable,” Clare agreed. “But we are probably talking a pretty hefty chunk of real estate, here, right?”

  Al shrugged one shoulder. “Well … according to my research, the Iceni territory corresponded roughly to what is now modern-day Norfolk. So that’s kinda biggish, yeah.”

  “That’s my point.” Clare shook her head. “The Roman Freaking Legions couldn’t find her tomb. And I’m pretty sure they gave it the old college try.”

  Milo nodded. “From ground level the barrows all look pretty much the same. Just bumps of land. They would have had no way of knowing which one was hers.”

  “But you do?”

  “Well, yeah.” He turned and pointed at the wall. “See, the Romans didn’t have aerial photography.”

  Clare blinked and saw the maps again as if for the first time. “Oh …”

  “Check this out!”

  Milo threw himself into the chair in front of one of the computer terminals with what Clare thought was adorably boyish gusto. She found herself doing a compare-and-contrast between him and Connal. The Druid prince was undeniably magnetic. But Milo was … kind of awesome.

  Clare and Al moved to stand behind his chair.

  “All I needed was to figure out the shield’s dimensions—”

  “How on earth did you do that when it’s at the museum,” Clare asked, “probably under more security than ever?”

  Milo grinned, pulled up a search engine, and started mouse-clicking away at light speed. The girls watched as he called up the online pictures of the Battersea Shield from the British Museum’s website. His fingers danced over keyboard and mouse and a high-quality enlargement photo of the shield popped up on the high-def screen.

  “Cool,” Al said. “I’m betting you converted that graphic into a 3D wireframe model the same way you do for an aerial topography shot, right?”

  Milo clicked and tapped and scrolled. “Bingo.”

  “They don’t call you Wunderkind for nothing.” Al grinned.

  “No ma’am, they do not.” Milo leaned closer to the screen. “Now … I can take this vector graphic and use the Heritage Society Land Monument archives to find a close topographical match. Size, shape, relative placement of the tumuli—the works …”

  Clare watched in rapt fascination as Milo worked. Image after image sprang up on the screen and Milo’s long, tapered fingers made them dance as if to unheard music. It was like watching a concert pianist play. It was also, Clare thought, weirdly sexy. She had to restrain herself from reaching out and tracing the contours of Milo’s shoulder blades through his T-shirt as they slid back and forth.

  “Bull’s eye.”

  Clare and Al crowded in on either side of Milo and stared at the results.

  “Ordnance Survey Map reference number TL586453.” Milo leaned back in his swivel chair, crossing his arms over his chest and looking extremely pleased with himself.

  “Bartlow Hills …” Al breathed the name as if it were a magical incantation.

  Clare was thunderstruck.

  Images of the Bartlow Hills, a group of three hillocks—tumuli, as Milo and Al had called them—swam up on the screen. The middle image rotated at a stately pace, giving Clare a three-dimensional aerial view of the barrows. She gasped, astonished at how closely the contours of the landmarks seemed to correspond with the Battersea Shield. Milo overlaid a transparent image of the shield on the rotating topography and Clare could see how the high-domed bump, or “boss” as Milo called it, in the middle of the ancient artifact, and the two smaller, swirling roundels top and bottom, over-laid the grass-covered humps almost exactly.

  “X marks the spot,” Milo murmured, calling up an information page on the site as the girls stared at the monitor. “Wanna know what’s even weirder? Those three hills just happen to be the only ones left out of a whole group of barrows that were plowed under to make way for an old railway line back at the turn of the century. The three Boudiccan Tumuli—that’s what I’m gonna call them—remained untouched when the others were levelled. Almost as if they were—”

  “Protected by magic!” Al and Clare exclaimed in unison.

  “Right. And nowadays the English Heritage Society doesn’t let developers just go around levelling those suckers, so there they sit. I’m willing to bet that our redheaded girl slumbers deep beneath, just waiting to be found.”

  Clare shivered. “That is not exactly an unchilling prospect.”

  “Nice use of the double negative.” Al elbowed Clare and grinned.

  “Thank you.”

  They could see from the aerial shot of the tumuli that a wooden staircase had been constructed up one side of the highest hill so that tourists wishing to climb to its summit could do so without contributing to erosion. Other than that, the barrows looked relatively untouched.

  Queen Boudicca’s burial site.

  Clare tore her gaze away from the screen and hugged her elbows. In the back of her mind she thought she heard a throaty voice, like the harsh croak of a raven, calling her name. She knew what she was going to do. What she had to do.

  21

  “You don’t have to go back again. You know Milo’s right.”

  “I know he’s probably right. I need to be sure.”

  “Why? So you can go tell Morholt where to dig?”

  Clare sighed and looked at Al, who stood between her and the rosewood box. Al only ever got this snappish when she was truly freaked out about something. She wasn’t angry with Clare, she was afraid for her.

  “No, Al,” she said. “I need to be sure so that I can tell Morholt to dig anywhere but there. You know he’s not going to give up on this anytime soon. And if we know—absolutely know—the exact whereabouts of the tomb, we can do everything possible to protect that place. We just need to make sure it’s the right place. I need to make sure.”

  “Are you really able to direct your shimmering that closely, Clare?” Milo asked from where he leaned on the edge of his desk, arms crossed over his chest and a faint frown on his face. He wasn’t happy about the idea of Clare taking another shimmer trip either, she could tell, but he also hadn’t said anything to stop her. She kind of appreciated that. “I mean, do you think you can manage to hit the barrows at the right time?”

  “I can try. Hey—the last time, Al said ‘flaming arrows.’ And what did I get?”

  “Yeah,” Al muttered. “Really sorry about that …”

  Suddenly Milo was across the room and gripping Clare’s arms. Hard. “Listen to me, Clare.” His stare seemed to stab through to the back of her skull. “You listen to me. I’m not going to stop you from doing this. It’s your gift and you have every right to use it as you see fit. I also know that you seem to need to go back there for … well, for whatever reason. That’s fine. But you’d damned well better promise me you’ll be careful. You’ve been luckier than you’ve had any right to expect, but I don’t think you can exactly place your faith in people who see you as some kind of blood-magic vending machine.”

  Clare stared back into the depths of those blue-sky eyes. Milo was worried about her. Deeply, passionately worried about her. And it thrilled her more than just a little to know that. “One quick trip. That’s all this is. And it’s the last.”

  Here’s hoping those aren’t stupid famous last words. She told herself to shut up and offered a reassuring smile to Milo.

  “I promise.”

  THE FACT THAT Clare did sort of wind up in the right place was actually pretty astonishing to her. Maybe she really was starting to figure out how to direct her shimmering. That thought did nothing to comfort her, however, once she realized that she’d rematerialized not just at Boudicca’s tomb … but in Boudicca’s tomb.

  As she felt herself growing heavier, more solid than the air around her, Clare realized that the darkness of her in-between-time journey wasn’t dissipating. For a moment she panicked, thinking she was stuck—caught between worlds. But then she realized that, although she might
not be able to see anything, her sense of smell was working just fine—and it was telling her that she was underground. Clare breathed deeply, inhaling the cold, earthy air and trying to calm her jangling nerves.

  Slowly, as her eyes adjusted, she became aware that she was in a passageway, and that light, dim and flickering, was coming from somewhere in front of her. And sound.

  Singing.

  Clare moved toward it slowly, silent as a ghost in the gloom of the underground tunnel. She hugged the rough-hewn stone and earthen walls, stepping carefully on an uneven floor puddled with shadows. Up ahead the corridor seemed to widen, and she could make out the shape of an archway leading to a chamber.

  Eerie, broken music echoed around her and Clare shivered in apprehension.

  Don’t panic, she told herself, you’re invisible.

  She reached the mouth of the tunnel and saw that it opened up into a round, domed grave chamber, lit by torches on poles that cast an uncertain, flickering glow—just enough for Clare to make out someone—a man—standing in front of a body laid out upon a stone bier. He was singing. And it was obvious from the tight, strained quality of his rich voice that he was also weeping. But even through the heartbreaking pall of sorrow, Clare recognized the voice.

  “Connal?” she whispered.

  Instantly, the ragged music stopped in his throat. Connal lifted his head and turned slowly to look at Clare where she stood in the doorway. Beneath a plain woollen cloak he still wore only breeches, a sleeveless sheepskin vest, and a fox-fur armband. His torc was a simple double strand of twisted silver and the matched pair of silver fox-and-raven cuffs still circled his muscle-corded wrists. Blood and dirt covered his hands and arms and dried blood striped his face in rust-coloured streaks. His auburn hair had mostly come loose from his leather tie-back and it hung around his face in tangles. His left arm hung awkwardly, and Clare saw that he bore a shoulder wound that was seeping fresh crimson through a tattered bandage already stained dark.