Now and for Never

  RAZORBILL

  NOW AND FOR NEVER

  LESLEY LIVINGSTON is a writer and actress living in Toronto. She has a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Arthurian literature and Shakespeare. She is the author of several trilogies for teens, including the Wondrous Strange series (winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award and Ontario Library Association White Pine Honour Book), the Never series (winner of the Copper Cylinder Award, two years running), and the Starling series. She is also co-writer of the middle-grade series The Wiggins Weird with Jonathan Llyr. Visit Lesley online at www.lesleylivingston.com.

  ALSO BY LESLEY LIVINGSTON

  The Never Trilogy

  Every Never After (Book 2)

  Once Every Never (Book 1)

  The Starling Trilogy

  Descendant (Book 2)

  Starling (Book 1)

  The Wondrous Strange Trilogy

  Tempestuous (Book 3)

  Darklight (Book 2)

  Wondrous Strange (Book 1)

  For younger readers

  How to Curse in Hieroglyphics (with Jonathan Llyr)

  NOW AND

  FOR NEVER

  Lesley Livingston

  For Jessica

  AD 61

  S tuart Morholt awoke on a boat.

  He had no idea where he was, or when … or why on earth the smell of fish was so heavy in his nostrils, which flared at the offence. Which only let in more of the fish stink, and lent a sneering quality—sneerier than usual, if that was possible—to Morholt’s countenance.

  Good god, he thought blearily, running a hand over the scrub-brush growth of his tangled beard, what I wouldn’t give for a proper barber. Or even—unthinkable, except under the most extreme of circumstances, which these were well beyond—a disposable razor. Or perhaps a time machine. Yes. That would nicely solve all my problems.

  He frowned and blinked in befuddlement at that last thought.

  Why on earth would I need a time … machine … Oh. Right. I remember now …

  He’d been so deep in an exhausted state of sleep (his only refuge from hunger, thirst, nausea, and desperation) that he’d quite forgotten he was trapped on a Roman merchant galley somewhere in the middle of a vast expanse of heaving ocean in the second half of the first century. As he’d clambered back to consciousness, for a brief, blissful moment Morholt thought it had all been a dream.

  Or maybe a nightmare.

  After all, following a rather distressing argument, he’d nodded off during a spectacular supernatural phenomenon—the latest in a series of powerful, all-encompassing, awe-and-terror-inspiring magical interludes that had descended periodically on the ship, interrupting its journey by turning the sea to black glass and the sky to a coruscating aurora that engulfed them in a vast, spinning tunnel.

  Those episodes definitely lent credence to the dream/nightmare theory.

  If only …

  But it wasn’t a dream. None of it was.

  And so, as had become his custom, Stuart Morholt began the day (not that he could tell what time it was) by having a good stretch and loudly cursing the names Clarinet Reid and Allie McAllister. Then he lay there swallowing against the bile rising in his throat. The heaving of the waves neatly matched the roiling of his stomach and, as had also become his custom, he wondered if he was about to lose his most recent meal— meagre as it had been—over the side of the ship.

  He pushed himself up onto one elbow and eyed the nearby railing.

  “I’d try hard not to do that if I were you,” a voice said from somewhere behind him.

  Morholt glanced around, blinking the sleep-fog from his eyes, until he spotted the handsome, ridiculously muscled soldier sitting on a stack of coiled hemp rope.

  “Do what?” he grumbled.

  “Hurl.” The young man spoke with a hint of Scottish brogue—mixed with a rolling, Latinate flavour that confused his intonation somewhat—but his tone was definitely hostile. “Those Roman rations loaded aboard in Parwydydd are gone as of yesterday and your psychotic warrior women don’t seem particularly concerned with trawling the depths for a feast of flounder. So whatever you ate last will have to sustain you till we make landfall. If we make landfall.”

  Morholt found the prospect of starvation infinitely preferable to chowing down on a plate of fish, but what were the odds he’d even survive long enough to starve to death? Not good, if Legionnaire Marcus Donatus gave in to his less noble inclinations.

  “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss, Soldier Boy,” Morholt sneered, shoring up his facade of superiority. After all, it was Marcus who was the prisoner, not him.

  That’s right. I’m the one with the power here, he thought. Me.

  So why did he feel the exact opposite?

  Because even without that comically oversharpened sword of his, that little ex-nerd lackey of mine is bloody intimidating.

  It was infuriating. And Morholt wasn’t about to let Marcus know it. Even if the argument he’d had earlier with the young man had shaken him to the core and made him question his heretofore unquestionable brilliance. No, no. He had to keep up appearances.

  Speaking of which …

  He reached up to run a hand through his hair in an attempt to impose some kind of order on the matted mess. When it felt as though he wouldn’t be able to extract his fingers, he turned the tugging gesture into a dismissive wave.

  “You always said you wanted a life of adventure when you were a boy,” he drawled. “Now look at you. All manly warrior and on the adventure of a lifetime—several lifetimes—which you’d never have had if it weren’t for me.”

  “Since you’re responsible for stranding me in the far-distant past,” Marcus said dryly. “Twice.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And almost getting me killed at least that many times.”

  “Right.”

  “Not to mention getting me stuck on this ship full of vengeful Druids,” Marcus continued, “hunted by another ship full of angry Romans. With, god help me, you as my only company.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I really should just throw you over the side.”

  “So you’ve said.” Morholt rolled his eyes, but stopped when that made him even queasier. “At least a dozen times now. So you might as well give up on the empty threats. I know from experience: never make your threats empty; you’ll wind up in a barbaric era without a shaving kit or a bottle of Gravol.” He waved one hand desultorily at the young man who had murder in his eyes. “If you were really going to kill me you’d have gotten around to it by now, I should think.”

  “Well … I may not have to. They might do it for me.”

  Marcus nodded at the half-dozen spookily silent women who stood guard around the weapons they’d seized from the galley’s few Roman soldiers—thereby preventing those Romans from taking back the ship that had been so effortlessly wrested from their control. The women’s lean-muscled arms were painted in strange, swirling designs and bristled with what Morholt thought were an unseemly number of sharp implements of their own, from knives to swords to spears.

  “Your star seems to have dimmed a bit in their eyes, I’ve noticed,” Marcus continued.

  The silent guard were the scathach—quasi-mystical, berserker warrior women conjured from some dark past dimension by the Druid priestess Mallora to torment an invading Roman Legion—a Legion in which, until recently, Marcus Donatus had been gainfully employed. Morholt watched the young man—no longer the skinny, awkward, bookish boy named Mark O’Donnell he’d known in Cambridge in the eighties—as he stared at the scathach with narrowed eyes.

  Morholt was about to roll out another stinging witticism when Marcus’s attention shifted. In an i
nstant he was on his feet and gripping the ship’s railing, a wave of inexplicable excitement washing his features.

  “Then again, if the scathach don’t kill you,” Marcus continued, “I’m reasonably certain that a very pissed-off lass by the name of Allie McAllister will be more than happy to do the job.”

  “Ha! That little autowrecker still has you googly-eyed, eh?” Morholt felt his blood pressure spike at the mere thought of what Allie had done to his beloved Bentley. “Well, I’m sure she’s forgotten all about you by now. You’re outdated technology for a girl like that.”

  Marcus shrugged a shoulder, not rising to the bait as he usually did. “You might be right.” A strangely fierce little grin curled the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps she and Clare just came back to finish you off, then.”

  “Eh?” Morholt frowned, not sure he’d heard right. “She and what? What?”

  He climbed unsteadily to his feet and lurched toward the railing where Marcus stared intently out over the sea’s wide expanse. The leather straps of his armour creaked as Marcus raised an arm and pointed to where the sunlight reflected off the distant shape of a wind-bellied sail.

  A ship. The other ship. It was finally catching up with them.

  Along with its angry, stab-happy Romans—Morholt could see them lining the deck rails—but that wasn’t all.

  Although he’d been expecting this—a turn of events crucial to his designs—Morholt still felt his stomach flip over. Peering hard into the distance, he decided he just might, as Marcus had so succinctly put it, hurl.

  They were too far away to make out any details, but he knew. Instantly. Just as Marcus, smiling in grim triumph beside him, had known. The two matchstick-tiny figures standing at the prow of the wave-devouring ship were unmistakable.

  Clarinet Reid and Allie McAllister.

  “Right …” Morholt said, his voice a queasy warble. “Here we go then.”

  Bloody hell. This had better work …

  1

  “Body bag!”

  Clarinet Reid froze and stared in alarm at the ravenhaired seventeen-year-old who sat on a high stool in the cluttered back room of the antiques shop. “Al—”

  “I’m gonna put Stuart Morholt in a body bag!” Allie McAllister slammed her palm onto the worktable, sending a half-dozen bits of antique knick-knackery into the air. “No fender dents, no snarky putdowns—he likes wearing black with zippers so much? Let’s see how he likes it in morgue couture!”

  “You’re—”

  “I’m not punning!” Al spun around to face Clare, her hands making grasping gestures as if their target were standing between them, ready and waiting to have the life choked out of his lying-weasel throat. “I’m not playing games. And I’m not kidding—”

  “I know.”

  “I’m—”

  “I was going to say ‘You’re freaking out.’” Clare reached for Al’s hands and held them tightly in her own to keep her best friend from getting even more tangled up in the Roman stola that wrapped around her torso like a shroud. “And then I was going to say you’re back in Glastonbury. And you’re all right. Everything is back to normal.”

  “No, Clare. It isn’t.”

  “Al—”

  “I lost him.”

  On the far side of the room Piper Gimble, teenage proprietor of Gimble’s Antiquarian Shoppe, sat on another high stool and turned Stuart Morholt’s ancient, battered diary over and over in her hands. Goggles, as Clare was fond of calling her— thanks to the assortment of protective eyewear the girl was so fond of wearing—had a kind of jittery death grip on the little Moleskine notebook. She’d been like that ever since, at Piper’s own calling, Clare, Allie, and Milo had rematerialized at the top of Glastonbury Tor. It was as if she thought the thing might vanish again right before her eyes.

  Over near the little sink in the workroom’s kitchenette, Milo McAllister scrubbed with a towel at the swirling blue, faintly sparkly designs painted all over his torso and arms, looking both vaguely embarrassed and secretly pleased every time Clare’s gaze drifted over to follow the circular motion of the towel as it buffed his skin. Earlier that night, Milo— in an attempt to single-handedly rescue his time-trapped cousin—had opened up a mystical temporal portal on top of Glastonbury Tor in the middle of England’s Somerset County. He’d done it using the ancient wisdom that remained lodged in his handsome blond head after a Druid’s consciousness had taken up temporary residence there. That Druid—a charming warrior prince named Connal whom Clare had gotten to know over the course of her temporal travels—had sent his spirit forward in time to help Clare stop Boudicca, the Celtic warrior queen, from blowing up the British Museum. That was after Boudicca’s own spirit had taken up residence in the noggin of the museum curator, Dr. Ceciley Jenkins.

  Milo had had his reasons for going it alone. On those occasions when Clare had called upon her unique ability to travel back in time, he’d been left wondering if he’d ever see her again. This time, he’d decided to use Connal’s Druid whammy to take care of things himself.

  At least, that had been the plan.

  When Clare, not keen on Milo risking his neck either, had called upon her shimmer powers to head him off at the temporal pass, Milo and Clare had both wound up back in the first century. But with Piper acting as Clare’s temporal anchor, Milo, Clare, and Al had safely made it back to present day. Or rather, present night. The one they were supposed to be in.

  But they’d lost someone along the way—a boy Al had met who, it turned out, was already lost. Marcus Donatus was a young soldier in the Roman Legion, but he’d once been Mark O’Donnell, an even younger linguistics prodigy at Cambridge and a fellow student of Clare’s aunt Maggie. That had been in the eighties. Through a series of synapse-numbing temporal twists, Mark/Marcus had been swallowed up in a time portal. By the time he met Al he’d already spent a few years in the first century, but from what Clare had seen he’d clearly put the time to good use. The boy had gone from awkward eighties bookworm to awesome ancient hardbody.

  He’d also developed an obvious affection for Al in the (pretty damn brief) time they’d known each other. A time that, if Clare understood even half of what Al had been going on about, had included throwing her over a horse and chaining her to a tent pole as a prisoner of the Roman army.

  It doesn’t sound romantic, Clare thought, but hey, what do I know?

  Marcus was supposed to come back with them—and then Stuart Morholt had thrown a wrench into the monkeyworks. The problem was that Clare’s time-shimmering worked on others only if the physical contact between them remained unbroken. But just as Clare’s power had activated, Marcus’s hand had been torn from Al’s grasp. Clare had barely managed to hang on to Milo with one hand and Al with the other.

  It wasn’t Clare’s fault. It was Morholt’s.

  Just as the shimmer magic had begun to take hold, he’d frantically ratted out Marcus as having sole knowledge of where a much-sought stash of Druid gold lay hidden. The Roman commander, Suetonius Paulinus, had lunged for the young soldier, tearing him away from Al and thus leaving him behind. Clare winced, rubbing her strained shoulder muscles at the memory of the jolting shock that had run through them all.

  Al, meanwhile, was continuing to Freak. Right. Out.

  “The dent I left in Morholt’s stupid Bentley is nothing compared to the one I’m gonna leave in his skull!” she snarled.

  “Under normal circumstances—and, who am I kidding, when was the last time that happened—I’d help you,” Clare said. “With gleeful enthusiasm.”

  “So would I,” Milo added grimly, scrubbing at a triskelion swirl on his right shoulder. “With even more gleeful enthusiasm.”

  “I’d probably just watch,” said Piper.

  Her dark eyes stared out at them from behind a pair of ruby-red goggles. Combined with the white-blond ponytails that fanned out on either side of her head, the effect reminded Clare of the white-winged owl with the crimson eyes that had glided out of the night sky ov
er Glastonbury Tor in the far distant past to call her—and Al and Milo and … not Marcus— home to the present. Piper had done an admirable job in her role as Clare’s temporal homing beacon.

  “With, you know, enthusiastic glee,” Piper went on with a twitchy shrug. “Cheer you lot on from the sidelines. Feels a bit improper to actually help, though. Seeing as how Stuart Morholt is, um, my … ancestor-thingie. And all.”

  Al was rendered speechless for the first time. She blinked, mentally processing that bit of information—Clare hadn’t really had the chance to explain things clearly to her— and reached again for the little silver hip flask that lay on the workbench, tipping more pungent amber liquid into her teacup.

  Piper’s emergency supply of brandy was all that had kept Al from going completely off the rails in the wake of their return. Except that after more than a few healthy swigs Al now seemed in danger of tipping sideways off her stool. Clare reached over and gently pried the cup from her hands, recalling with sudden clarity how, during the stupid Facebook party that had gotten Clare exiled to Jolly Olde England for the summer in the first place, Al had been notably missing in action. At three o’clock in the morning Clare had found her curled up in a gently snoring ball behind the set of kettledrums in Clare’s dad’s practice room—an empty bottle of “lite” beer in her hand. The fact that she’d been out of commission so early on was probably why Clare had caught so much hell for that bash. Al operating at peak efficiency would have likely mitigated some of the mayhem and/or property damage that had resulted from the severely over-capacity crowd.

  That was what Al did. She fixed stuff. Which was, Clare supposed, what she was intent on doing now. Fixing a situation—even if it might not be the safest thing to do.

  No, Clare thought, recalling her own temporal meddling. Just maybe the right thing …

  “I promised him,” Al said with a noticeable brandy slur. “Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I never said ‘Hey, handsome! You with the thews. I promise I’ll get you home somehow’—I mean maybe I never said those exact words out loud and in that order—but I did!”