Now and for Never

by Lesley Livingston

  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.

  The fight started off as reasonably well matched but things went downhill rather rapidly for poor old Suetonius Paulinus. With a bunch of sentient animals executing coordinated attacks on his troop flanks and a sky full of enormous, dagger-beaked birds snatching the firebrands right out of the hands of the terrified sailors—most of whom dropped to the ground and covered their heads, wailing pitifully—all that famous Roman discipline kind of hit the road, tires squealing. Eventually they were cornered, their backs to the green sloping wall of Big Hill. Suetonius ordered and threatened and swore until he was purple-faced, thunderously berating his men to keep fighting. Then suddenly the brutish legionnaire Junius broke ranks. He stepped forward into the open space between the Romans and the hill.

  “No!” he shouted, his voice carrying across the darkened battlefield. “I will fight no more in this demon-plagued green hell at the end of the world.” He threw his sword to the ground where it stuck in the earth, point down and wavering. “I want no more of this place,” he said. “I only want to go home.”

  “YOUR WISH, BIG FELLA, is my command,” Clare said.

  She felt the power of Boudicca’s blood magic gathering beneath her skin. She’d always thought of it as a blood curse, but now she felt what it was like to know the pure potent fire of it, burning bright, fuelled not by Boudicca’s dark tragic rage but driven and controlled by Clare’s own will and her flaming desire to put things right. With her mind, she pushed the shimmering down through her arms and into the palms of her hands …

  “Milo …” she said, and heard her own voice thrumming with power in the dusky air. “Connal … Open the doors, boys—let’s get this farewell party started!”

  She thrust out her hands, slapping her palms flat on Connal’s painted chest, and watched in awe as crimson light flowed out from her fingertips into the blue-painted designs on his skin, the swirling lines sparkling and shading to vibrant purple pulses of light. Connal opened his arms wide as if he was opening a huge set of double doors, and Clare could actually see Milo—standing on his hill, in the far-distant future—doing the very same thing.

  Between the three of them, they manifested a kind of super conduit—a vertex supremo—connecting themselves through time and, more importantly, through space. And now it was up to Clare to direct all that power flowing between them so that she could shape not the when but the where.

  She felt herself begin to shimmer, but there was nowhere for her to shimmer to. She was right where she was supposed to be. Instead, she reached out to the places where everyone else was supposed to be.

  She pictured Glastonbury Tor as it had looked on the night they’d gone to rescue Al, only with less fire and destruction. Just an empty, lonely hill. A place where she could dump a bunch of Roman soldiers that had just had the fight knocked out of them by Clare’s kickass best friend and a bunch of wild things. She would send Suetonius and his men back there. Then he could figure out how to explain to his buddy the emperor just exactly how he lost two ginormous cargo ships supposedly full of expensive trade goods and a whack-load of Celtic gold. And, she figured, if any of his men ever decided to spill the beans about their little transoceanic adventure, they’d probably be run out of the army on the grounds of bonkerdom.

  As the conduit coalesced, Clare shouted out, “There is the place you left, Junius!”

  He spun around and his eyes went wide beneath the brim of his helmet as he beheld the shimmering vision of the Tor in the middle of Somerset, seemingly close enough to walk to.

  “Go back there now to those lands and make amends!” Clare continued. “Make peace with the Britons. Build, don’t dest
roy. But go now! Or stay here forever and be erased from all living memory.”

  It didn’t take long for Junius and the rest of the Romans to decide.

  They had lived through weeks of similar temporal vortexes. But this one could get them right back to the place they never should have left. It was kind of a no-brainer. Even to a guy like Suetonius Paulinus. For a moment it looked as though his men would either drag him through or leave him to his fate. But then the governor—soon-to-be ex-governor, but Clare wasn’t about to tell him that—stood tall, threw the scarlet cloak back over his shoulders, and stalked through the rift at the head of his column of men. As if it had been his idea all along.

  Jerkass, Clare thought, and in the vault of her skull she heard Al thinking the same thing.

  “Okay,” she thought in Al’s direction. “Playtime’s over! Get yourself and Llassar up here, pal. On the double!”

  “Roger roger!”

  After the last of the legionnaires and the bewildered sailors had stepped through the conduit’s mouth, Clare let the image of Glastonbury flicker and fade from her mind.

  And for my next trick, Clare thought … and called up the picture of Bartlow Hills, the place where Boudicca was buried, vivid and bright in her mind’s eye. That image was reflected in a second conduit that shimmered and wavered, blooming in the air before her.

  “Go!” She nodded to her boat-hauling Celtic contingent. “Send it through, guys.”

  Together they heaved on the paddles lashed to the canoe and the booty-laden boat glided across the grassy hilltop and through the portal along with the men who would help Llassar dig all those holes in Snettisham.

  “Llassar!” she called. “Get up here, buddy!”

  Marcus ran to help Allie get the blacksmith the rest of the way up the hill, but it was Morholt, surprisingly, who got there first and gave Llassar his arm. But then, when the moment came for him to hand over the great golden torc so that the Druid master smith could take it with him back to Snettisham, Clare saw him hesitate. By the coruscating light of the undulating rift, she watched the conflicting surges of emotion chase each other across his face. She felt a brief rush of panic as Morholt lifted the torc up in front of his face and stared at it as if mesmerized. She remembered vividly the influence the thing had exerted on Dr. Ceciley Jenkins.

  That’s not going to happen this time.

  Clare was determined to use Boudicca’s blood magic for good this time. She would knit things back together rather than tear them apart. And Stuart Morholt was not—repeat not—going to derail that!

  She glanced at Connal/Milo and saw that they were at the same near-breaking point. But as Morholt helped the Druid smith closer to the portal, his footsteps seemed to falter. He gazed down at the golden masterpiece clutched in his hand and his features washed over with naked longing.

  “Give him the torc, Morholt, damn it!” Clare exclaimed through clenched teeth.

  She half expected him to renege on their bargain in that last moment. But then Stuart Morholt did something that really quite surprised her. He turned to the Druid smith and, reaching out to grab his hand, shook it heartily.

  Before handing over the torc, as if that had been his plan all along.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, his voice warm. “It’s been … an experience. Take care of yourself, won’t you? Keep making magic. The world needs that, you know.”

  Llassar nodded his thanks, his giant sausage fingers closing around the contours of the torc with gentle familiarity.

  “You do good work, Master Smith.” Morholt clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I won’t have the chance to appreciate more of it up close.”

  By “appreciate” Clare figured he really meant “profit handsomely by,” but under the circumstances she wasn’t about to call him on it. Llassar tucked the torc into a fold of his tunic. Clare thought he’d probably appreciate the fact that, for a time, it had been a showpiece in the British Museum and had drawn the appreciation of the world. But that it had also, perhaps fittingly, ultimately been lost to the mists of time and the spinning of time spirals.

  “You need to get the torc and all the rest of the treasure to Snettisham, Llassar!” she called out. “Bury it! Stu! Give him the map!”

  “What? Oh! Right!” Morholt dug around in a pocket of his tattered jumpsuit and found the map Clare had given him, complete with X-marks-the-spot pirate detailing.

  Clare had never been to Snettisham and so couldn’t send Llassar exactly there, but Boudicca’s barrow was close, and she figured the blacksmith was certainly resourceful enough to get himself the rest of the way. Especially with the meticulously drawn little map Milo had provided her before she’d even left Glastonbury.

  The burly Druid smith took the map and nodded to Clare. Then he smiled, reaching into a pouch at his belt and drawing forth the coin that Clare had asked him to magic up and turn into the shimmer trigger that would send her and her friends home. Llassar waited, standing on the threshold of the rift that would lead him back to Norfolk. Back to where it had all started. If not exactly when.

  The earth-shattering sounds of the cosmos at war with itself tugged once more at Clare’s awareness. She turned to see Connal/Milo running with sweat and almost vibrating with the effort of manifesting the conduits. The spiral designs on Connal and Milo looked like they were glowing with the light from swallowed fireballs. The entire island was awash in cycling bands of phosphorescence, as if the aurora borealis itself had landed on the high hill and decided to hold a rave.

  “Milo!” Clare gasped to see Milo’s ghosting image begin to flicker and spark. His eyes were open and staring and the patterns on his skin glowed. “Milo! You guys need to turn off the magic taps now or this whole island’s going to tear itself apart and you two with it. Tell Piper that’s her cue to get us all the hell out of here …”

  To get them all together, Clare would have to break the circle. And that would break the connection between Milo and Connal. The conduits would fade soon after, and the only way to get home would be for Goggles to step up, or rather fly up, to the plate and call them home.

  Which she did, brilliantly.

  Clare scuffed the toe of her boot across the blood and sand circle and felt a shock wave expand outward as she did. Behind her Connal fell to his knees. Clare ran to join hands with Al, who’d already linked up with Marcus and Morholt. They stood before Llassar, who had one foot in the slowly fading conduit and held the shimmer coin high in the air so that Goggles could use it as a homing beacon to find the little band of travellers. There was a long moment of nothing … and then, out of the darkness above the chaos, the snow-white wings of an owl stretched out and the hunting bird floated silently across the sky.

  It called once, twice …

  Good, Clare thought. Way to go, Goggles. Piper …

  A third time.

  Llassar waited until the moment when Clare, Al, Marcus (holding on to Al via death grip), and Morholt (holding on to Marcus via death grip) began to shimmer. Then the Druid master smith stepped through the fading conduit and disappeared home.

  Fireworks went off behind Clare’s eyes and her limbs began to tingle. Everything was working out totally according to plan. And then she remembered what it was she’d forgotten to do back in the cave when she’d packed her bags.

  “Oh … damn,” she whimpered.

  And let go of Al’s hand.

  22

  “Allie!” Milo hugged her the instant she shimmered into a fully corporeal state—the first of the bunch to do so. Then, “Mark! Buddy!” he enthused. Even, “Stu! Hey! Glad you’re back.”

  The summit of Big Hill was a babble of noise, Piper jumping up and down and crying “I did it! I did it!” and “Bloody hell— you’re Stu Morholt, aren’t you?”

  “It’s Stuart—”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you!”

  Marcus whooped delightedly, rejoicing over a return to a world he never thought he’d see again. And then … the shimmer lights
faded, and a sudden, shocking silence descended.

  “Clare?”

  Milo looked at Allie and saw that she’d gone completely white.

  She looked down at her hand … her empty hand … and started to cry.

  “No …” Milo glanced wildly around as if he’d somehow missed seeing Clare in all that wide-open space. “No! This is not. Happening. AGAIN! Not again …” His voice dropped to a ragged whisper. “What do we do? How do we get her back?”

  Piper shrugged helplessly. The torc had been reinstated in the timeline. The circle that was broken had been mended. But Clare had been left behind.

  “How?” Morholt asked, his expression stricken. “Why?”

  “She let go,” Allie murmured. “She just … let go.”

  They waited. For three hours they waited on the hilltop. Silent, pacing, screaming Clare’s name at intervals and hearing only the seabirds scream back. Both Allie and Piper tried to summon up their summoning powers to utterly no avail. They had no shimmer trigger to use as a beacon. Nothing to pinpoint Clare to call her home. The coin had gone with Llassar back to Britain and Clare was left with nothing.

  Eventually—and Marcus and Milo almost came to blows over it—they came to the consensus that Clare wasn’t going to reappear on the summit of Big Hill. It was full dark as they headed back to the little rented cottage, but a harvest moon cast a silver fairyland glow on the landscape, beguiling and ethereal. None of them noticed.

  Milo’s shoulders slumped as he unlocked the door of the cottage and they all stepped inside. “Piper,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind some tea right now …”

  She dug the silver flask out of her pocket and wordlessly handed it over without even the pretense of a teacup. Milo took a long swallow—and almost choked on it when he heard a noise in the living room.