by Kim McMahon
The headlines were circled in red ink, and accompanied by a stern note from Artemis’s father, Lord Geoffrey: “Hope this makes it clear to you lads why you weren’t allowed to attend this debacle. Bunch of hooligans—shameful! High time for you to learn that adults aren’t always wrong.”
Adam worked on swallowing a lump in his throat that was becoming familiar. At least Geoffrey wasn’t here to lecture them in person—the note was plenty bad enough. Barry scuttled into his seat and started eating, keeping his gaze on his plate—probably afraid that Artemis would see right through him.
“I think that’s rather unfair of Daddy—of course you two never even went near that place, now did you?” she said innocently.
“How could we?” Barry muttered through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “It’s miles from here.”
“Precisely—it would have been impossible unless you’d had some kind of motorized transportation.”
Barry’s fork froze in place halfway to his mouth.
“But I’m sure you never gave it a thought, anyway. Oh, well,” she added with a sigh, “sometimes we just have to put up with the P’s, same as they do with us.”
Adam figured she was deliberately making Barry nervous so he wouldn’t want to hang around with them this morning. But it made him nervous, too. He didn’t see any way for those thugs to find them—they hadn’t even known that the boys were there, besides which there’d been thousands of other young people wandering around—but he still didn’t like thinking about it.
Nobody talked during the rest of breakfast, which only took a couple of minutes because Barry and Adam were shoveling it away as fast as they could and Artemis was barely eating at all. When they finished, they took their plates to the kitchen to rinse and leave for Sophie.
As Barry forged ahead, Artemis held back and caught Adam’s eye. “Remember, play along,” she whispered. He nodded.
“Well, cousin and guest, any special plans for the day?” she said, with a bright smile. “Because I could really use some help—the stable where I keep my horse needs to be mucked out. It’s not the most pleasant job, but with three of us it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”
Barry’s face got an expression like somebody was trying to hand him a hot brick.
“Sorry—I’m not feeling well,” he mumbled.
“Really? It didn’t seem to affect your appetite.”
“It’s not my stomach, it’s my back.”
Right, Adam thought. He knew older men who really did have bad backs, usually from years of hard work at things like ranching or logging. But this was the first time he’d ever heard Barry mention it.
“I don’t mind helping,” Adam said. “I do it at home all the time.”
“Lovely,” she said. “Barry, you’ll probably want to spend the day studying in our library as usual. What’s your current passion—philosophy, history, literature?”
“Yeah, you bet, that’s exactly where I’ll be.” Then, like a naughty child, he threw out the taunt, “Artie,” and dashed away up the stairs.
She shook her head with adult resignation. “He thinks it nettles me when he calls me that. I don’t quite have the heart to tell him I don’t mind it. I really feel kind of sorry for him. He’s unhappy, deep down, and he tries to cover it with all that blustering and sneering.”
Adam thought exactly the same thing—although seeing as how Barry had just about everything a kid could possibly want, it was hard to feel too sorry for him. Anyway, they wouldn’t have to worry about him for a few hours—he’d hole up in his room with TV and video games, and avoid the work like the black plague.
“So are we really going to the stable?” Adam asked, lowering his voice in case Sophie was somewhere nearby.
“Yes, but don’t worry, it’s clean—the horse has been out to pasture for weeks,” she whispered back. “Meet me in the front garden in a few minutes. I’ll bring our little friend.” They reached the top of the stairs and split off to their own rooms.
Then, as Adam was stepping into his, he was startled by Barry poking his head out of the door across the hall.
“See what I mean about her being a freak?” he demanded.
“No, I don’t,” Adam said coolly. “And quit calling her that, okay? Just because somebody’s got brains and doesn’t dress like a cheerleader, that doesn’t make them a freak.”
“Yeah, sure—one freak sticking up for another,” Barry said sarcastically. “You two should get along fine—we’ll have a regular freak show around here.”
Adam tried to follow Artemis’s example and not get mad, although it wasn’t easy. He shrugged and started to turn away.
But then Barry surprised him again, this time in a way that Adam never would have expected in a million years.
“You’re good with girls and I’m not,” Barry said, suddenly redfaced—then ducked back into his room and slammed the door.
TWELVE
Adam hurried down to the back garden and got there just as Artemis was coming out of the house. She’d put on a wool shawl against the chill—black, of course—which spread around her like wings and gave her a vaguely raven-like look. The two of them started walking toward the stable, a hundred yards or so from the main house.
As soon as they were sure they were out of view, she opened her oversized tote bag and lifted up Orpheus, setting him in a pouch just inside the top rim. He gave Adam an affable nod and squinted around at the foggy morning, seeming in a good mood.
“How’s it going with the Internet, Orpheus?” Adam asked, thinking that might have something to do with it. He was right.
“Plodding along, plodding along—that’s it doing the plodding, not me,” Orpheus bragged, and explained that he’d quickly figured out how to bypass Adam’s netbook and connect himself online directly, wireless. He was a supercomputer, after all.
“I’ve just about absorbed the contents,” he went on. “There’s not much I didn’t already know anyway, except in the last couple of centuries. And there’s a lot I know that it doesn’t, I don’t mind saying,” he added—obviously, not minding it a bit.
Adam and Artemis both blinked in astonishment.
“You absorbed the whole Internet in, like, a few hours?” Adam said.
“I’d have done it in, like, a few seconds except it’s so slow to download.”
The kids exchanged glances, rolling their eyes. With Orpheus already tossing out terms like “download,” what came next? He’d start calling them “dog?”
Suddenly, Artemis drew in her breath in a little gasp, with her head swinging sharply to stare out across the field ahead.
“Oh, dear—duck, Orph, quick!” she hissed.
With survival instincts honed fine over thousands of years and countless narrow escapes, Orpheus didn’t either ask why or try to see for himself—he dove down into the tote so fast he actually seemed to vaporize.
A figure had appeared out of the fog, walking toward them—a woman, tall and spare, with long iron-gray hair. She was dressed in an ankle-length robe or cloak, and she carried a gnarled, polished walking stick like an Irish shillelagh.
“She’s known as Rainy Jane, because she’s always out walking the countryside, even if it’s pouring,” Artemis whispered. “Some of the older people believe she has powers—second sight, healing, that sort of thing. They don’t exactly call her a witch, although it’s what they think. But she’s never harmed anyone—only helped. And—well, this is silly, but some even think she’s friendly with the little folk.”
“Little folk?” Adam whispered back, gazing wide-eyed at the stately apparition coming toward them. Rainy Jane didn’t appear to be hurrying, but she was covering the ground fast.
“Oh, you know—fairies, elves, like that. I must say, I find it rather hard to believe in them—but then, who’d believe in Orpheus unless they saw him?”
Some connection was tugging at Adam’s brain, trying to get his attention. But before it could, Rainy Jane was within speaking distance.
“Good morning, Miss Jane,” Artemis said—respectfully, and even a little timidly. It was easy to see why. The older woman wasn’t exactly fierce looking, but there was something about her steady gaze that made you want to be very careful not to say anything stupid. She wasn’t pretty, but not ugly, either—not at all like a wrinkled old crone with a hooked nose and long chin. But she was definitely unusual looking, with a face that was all planes and angles, like skin stretched over bones. The rest of her almost seemed composed of the elements, with her cloak a blend of the muted grays, greens, and browns of the fields, and even her eyes the same color as the fog.
“Hello, my dears,” she answered. “Fine morning for a walk.”
Artemis and Adam nodded agreement, although his idea of fine weather wasn’t exactly the same. Rainy Jane probably meant anything this side of an all-out blizzard.
Then things got weird. No—weirder.
Rainy Jane turned and raised her walking stick, pointing west toward the coast, and a little north—precisely in the direction of the Watching Druids concert last night.
“Do you know why those great stones face the western sea?” she said. “It was there MaelTarna lay, and the stones here and the stones there called the tidings back and forth.”
MaelTarna! That was the place where Orpheus had been created—an ancient land that sank into the sea. Neither of the kids had ever heard of it before last night—even Artemis, who’d lived here all her life and knew all the legends and lore.
But now Rainy Jane was talking about it as matter-of-factly as if it was a village down the road—and saying that stones like the Watching Druids were like a telephone system, sending messages back and forth.
Her steady gaze didn’t change as she watched their surprise. It took Adam a couple of seconds to absorb what she’d said, and he just had time to start wondering why she’d said it—it didn’t seem possible that she’d just shown up here by coincidence, and picked a topic like MaelTarna out of the blue. But then she spoke again.
“The night that you were born, child—the spring rite of Beltane—I heard the stones singing,” she said to Artemis. Then she turned her gaze to Adam. “They sang for you, too, young voyager from the land of mountains and ice—just half the year before her, when Samhain leads autumn into winter.”
This time, Adam was so stunned his hair almost stood on end, and he saw Artemis’s mouth drop open. He didn’t know what Beltane or Samhain were, or the date of her birthday. But his was November 1, and if you had to pick a time when fall started really making the turn toward winter, that was a pretty good call, at least in Montana.
Where there were plenty of mountains and ice.
But the other thing Rainy Jane had said—that the great stones were singing when both kids were born—that was beyond mind-boggling!
Artemis managed to recover herself enough to talk, although her voice had a tremor in it.
“What does that mean, Miss Jane?”
The older woman’s face seemed to soften a little, with sympathy—or worry.
“It means you have more journeys ahead, my dears,” she said gently. “The stones have been singing again. Seek out the thin spots—like the field where the Watching Druids stand.”
Then, without another word, she turned and walked back the way she’d come. The kids stared after her as her shape faded into the fog.
“Were you really born on Samhain—the day after Halloween?” Artemis asked breathlessly.
Adam nodded, still feeling dazed. “Yeah—what is Samhain?”
“An ancient Celtic festival. So is Beltane, May first—and she’s right about that, too. You’re exactly six months older, and we’re exact astrological opposites.” She frowned. “I can see how she’d know my birthday, with both her and me living right here. But how would she know yours?”
“Maybe she Googled us.”
“Somehow I don’t think so,” Artemis said. “Could it be true? That she does have second sight, and the stones really did sing?”
“But why for us—just because we were born on those days? A lot of other kids must have been, too,” Adam said. He was thinking uneasily about the worry he’d sensed in Rainy Jane’s face—and getting the feeling that the reason she’d come here was to warn them about something, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them what. Just saying they had more traveling to do didn’t help much.
“Let’s ask Mr. Know-It-All,” Artemis said, opening the tote bag and peering inside. “You can come up now, Orpheus.”
“Are you sure?” sounded a small, suspicious voice.
“Quite sure.” She reached inside, rummaging around, and found him burrowed under a packet of tissues. He’d turned himself as dark as the bag’s interior, but when she lifted him up to the pouch again, he quickly started taking on the color of the misty outside air.
“You must have heard what Rainy Jane said—what do you think?” Artemis asked.
Orpheus didn’t look happy, probably because he was back in a position where he didn’t have all the answers.
“Yes, well, very interesting,” he muttered—trying to dodge the issue, it sounded like to Adam. “I can hardly believe she knows the name MaelTarna—it faded away so long ago, I haven’t heard anybody else use it for a couple of thousand years. As for the stones, I just don’t know—like I told you, I was kept in a laboratory, completely out of touch with the outside world, until the place sank.”
“Do you think she could have second sight?” Artemis asked, as they started walking toward the stable again. “Do you believe in it? Psychic powers, magic, all that?”
“Most of what people call magic is one of two things—pure hokum or science they don’t understand,” Orpheus said promptly, with the tone of starting a lecture. “Go back to early times and even simple technology, like gunpowder, seemed magical. And remember, science didn’t really take hold in any big way until a few centuries ago.
“Even a genius like Galileo—he was a little on the crotchety side, but a good heart—if he saw a computer accessing photos from the Hubbell telescope millions of miles out in space, what would his first thought be? Angels and demons! Suppose my old pal Will Shakesepeare walked into a Cineplex 20 with Surround-Sound and 3-D? It could only be a miracle. Whereas we, my young human pets, realize that it’s science.”
Pets? That had the same ring as boy. But Adam let it go—it was just Orpheus preening and getting a little snooty. There was no use getting mad about it every time it happened, because it was going to happen a lot.
“But—” Orpheus let the word hover dramatically for a few seconds— “that doesn’t mean I just dismiss magic out of hand. I’ve seen too many strange things that even my intellect can’t explain rationally.” His eyebrows knitted together darkly and his voice dropped to a hush. “Like when I was working as an advisor to King Saul, and he insisted on having the Witch of Endor raise the prophet Samuel’s ghost. I tried to talk him out of it. ‘You’re not going to like the message,’ I warned him.
“But did he listen? Oh, noohhh—like so many other humans who thought they were so superior to me just because they had arms and legs, as if that had anything to do with it—”
He was practically sputtering with indignation by the time they got to the stable.
“Yes, of course, we understand—but here we are,” Artemis interrupted soothingly. “Let’s all get back on task, shall we?”
THIRTEEN
The stable at Blackthorn Manor was very different than the rough wooden barns Adam was used to in Montana. It was low and ancient looking, made of fieldstones covered with vines, and had arched double doors with small ornamental windows. But as he followed Artemis inside, he caught the same familiar, comforting smells of hay and big warm animals, now turned out to pasture but the feel of them still lingering.
He closed the doors behind them, just to be careful. They should be completely alone by now, with the maid gone home and Barry chained to his Xbox, but there was still a chance that someone e
lse like Rainy Jane might come wandering by, or that Reg was too hung over to realize he had the day off.
The stable was dark inside anyway and the closed doors made it darker, but it was quiet and private, perfect for their talk. The kids peered around for a place to settle down and found a couple of hay bales to sit on. Then, as Artemis was lifting Orpheus out of her purse, a sudden rustling sound in the deep shadows made all three of them turn nervously.
A scrawny, one-eyed albino cat came trotting toward them proudly, with a mouse hanging limp in its mouth. They all sighed with relief.
“I call her Pallas, because of her color,” Artemis explained. “It’s a play on Poe’s poem, The Raven—you know, the pallid bust of Pallas. She’s a stray—just wandered by one day and moved into the stable. But she’s no trouble and good at keeping the vermin down.” That made Adam feel another notch at home. There were barn cats on the ranch, too, and when they caught a critter they liked to show it off, to let you know they were on the job.
“Okay, let’s try to come up with a plan,” he said.
But he’d guessed right—stubborn little Artemis had her own ideas about that, and she wasn’t about to give up.
“Orpheus, first take just a moment and explain how you do the time travel, won’t you? It’s so fascinating.” She’d obviously been thinking about her pitch and she was starting out casually, like she was just curious about it—but Adam could tell where she was headed.
Orpheus sighed, like, Where do I even start? “Let’s just say that time and space form a near-infinite matrix in which progress is ordinarily linear—but with some very fancy math, you can alter that and re-route a vector to a particular target point. Say you threw a baseball from left field to home plate at Yankee Stadium—but on the way, it suddenly took a dimensional hop and ended up giving Plato a black eye instead.”
That sounded like wormholes, Adam realized excitedly, just like he’d been thinking about last night.
“But as to the specifics of how I do it,” Orpheus went on, “I’m afraid you put your finger on my Achilles heel, so to speak. There’s a lot about my own inner programming that I don’t have access to. I can use the information, but I can’t actually see the nuts and bolts—those files are locked. Maybe someday I’ll find someone who can get into them. But for now, I just know the general principles and how to operate the mechanism.”