CHAPTER ONEKLARA
1568
Light searing her eyes with excruciating brilliance. Fine woolen bunched in her fist. Plummeting through time and space, tumbling head over heels, her stomach twisting violently—
Then slowing, drifting.
Klara’s feet settled on the ground as if she was the queen in Dad’s old chess set, placed in its square in a game-ending move. Checkmate.
She blinked rapidly, peering through the mist that swirled around her, crouching in the fighting stance Callum had taught her. This trick still felt like a cheat, or maybe a curse—Klara was no closer than the first time to knowing where she might end up.
The answers are always there. A whisper in the rushing winds brushed past Klara’s ear; her mother’s voice. Loreena Spalding always said that every antique in her precious collection offered clues to where it came from—an etched design popular in the sixteenth century, a particular alloy in use in the eighteenth. To Klara’s scientific mind, Loreena’s words were a reminder to distill facts from impressions.
So: One, the air was cold. Two, it carried a sharp whiff of lye soap and a faint, greasy note of coal smoke. Three, beneath the soles of her sneakers were smoothed, cobbled stones. Four, above her in the night sky, Corona Borealis—the “Silver Wheel”—was in its summer home north of the celestial equator, tucked between the constellations Boötes and Hercules. Five, her right hand was still wrapped around the familiar gold and iron grip of her sword, and six—“Gah!”—her other hand clenched nothing. She’d lost her grip on Llaw’s cloak.
Klara’s heart lurched, but the truth was that it didn’t really matter where the demigod had gone, since he was dead. Llaw would haunt his precious Otherworld now—and only if the gods were feeling merciful.
“You?”
The mist fell away—not like the early-morning fog in Hudson River Park that burned off by the time Klara finished her run, but in a scattering of glinting dust. The incredulous voice belonged to a young man with a weapon in his hand, shadowed in the dim glow of a street lamp, and for a brief, breathless second Klara allowed herself to hope.
“Callum?”
Then he stepped into the light, dirk dangling from his hand, and Klara’s hope was torn from her chest. His face was just as handsome, but in place of Callum’s unruly dark curls and piercing, unusual gaze were fiery hair, a scattering of freckles and fine, sculpted lips. This was the boy from her vision in the tomb of Maeshowe.
“Thomas! But how—” Klara paused, wondering if she could trust her eyes. “Do you know who I am?”
It was his turn to look uncertain. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I thought I did, but—I must have mistook you for someone else.”
His thick Scottish brogue was so like Callum’s, but there the resemblance ended. Klara’s eyes fell to his dirk, the blade dark with blood, and remembered the drawing in his notebook, how Thomas had perfectly captured her likeness. “Thomas—it is me. Klara Spalding. The...last Pillar?”
His face turned white. “Crivvens—you’re alive!”
“Me? Of course. But Llaw killed you.” Nothing was making sense. Thomas was supposed to be lying in a pool of his own blood, still as the stones beneath him. “Callum saw you...”
The sword’s pommel pulsed in Klara’s hand, emeralds glinting, and she remembered it being nearly ripped from her grasp. Remembered Llaw’s tormented dark eyes widening as he seized the blade and plunged it into his own chest...remembered grabbing for his cloak as he began to spin.
“Callum?” Thomas repeated sharply. “What do you know of him?”
How to explain? Too much had happened in the week since Klara had nearly run over a stranger lying broken and unconscious in the middle of the road. “It’s a long story,” she sighed. “But when I met him, he was trying to avenge your death.”
Thomas gave her a hard look, taking in her T-shirt and jeans. “You are not from here. Why would Callum...”
“Same reason I’m here now.” She really didn’t feel like talking about it. “A demigod who’s careless about who he brings along when traveling through time. He’s dead,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“Llaw.” Thomas’s voice was grim. “I know.”
Now it was Klara’s turn to stare. “He was the one who—?”
“He almost killed me. But he was careless. After he stabbed me, I fell to the ground, hit my head on a cobblestone.” Thomas tugged at the rough wool of his coat. “Knocked me out, but, head wounds always bleed, and it turns out he merely nicked my ribs. When I came to, I could still see him, standing in front of a portal. So I killed him. As you say, he is gone.”
“No.” Klara shook her head, trying to make sense of what Thomas was telling her. Though the truth was just as strange. “I saw him take his own life. He...fell upon my blade.”
Thomas was staring at her sword, at the gem-encrusted hilt. Klara gripped it a little more tightly. It was one of Grams’s most precious possessions, brought out only once before the day she gave it to Klara.
“Where?” Thomas demanded. “And when?”
There was a strange light in his eyes, and Klara remembered what Callum had said about the weeks before Thomas’s death, how strange his behavior had become. Disappearing for days at a time, staring without seeing, muttering of evil creatures and death.
“The Ring of Brodgar,” she said flatly. “In the year 2022.”
Thomas’s mouth worked, whether in shock or calculation Klara couldn’t tell. And then his face softened, his eyes losing their metallic glint and fading to a soft blue as he bowed from the waist. He sheathed his dirk and wiped his hands on his pants.
“So you are a Pillar,” he said formally, “like me.”
And with these words, the facts shifted in Klara’s mind like the rearrangement of atoms in an intermolecular reaction. Same parts, different shape. Right now, this wasn’t about losing Callum, or the place she’d left behind. It couldn’t be.
“We are the last ones,” she affirmed. “Llaw is dead, by your hand or his own—” she wouldn’t debate the question now, though she knew what she had seen “—and so it’s over. But what about his powers?” Klara looked at her hands as though the answer might lie there, but nothing felt different.
“I acted on pure instinct when he attacked me,” Thomas said slowly. “Llaw arranged to meet me here tonight. I’ve been following him—but he was always a step ahead. When he sent for me, I realized he knew I was after him all along.”
So Callum had been right about Llaw getting too close to the truth. Klara fitted this new piece into the mosaic. “He’s a demigod, with a goddess mother—I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that he figured it out.”
“A demigod,” Thomas repeated bitterly. “With a mortal father. Who should not have the power to travel in time. Or of Sight, or of passing between worlds, or anything else. It is a sinister magic he stole.”
Something clicked into place in Klara’s mind. Pillars were only meant to house Arianrhod’s powers, not use them. Neither she nor Thomas should have been able to travel through time either—not without that same goddess’s intervention and guidance. That meant—
“Arianrhod came to you, too.” She didn’t mean it to come out like an accusation. “She wanted us both to kill Llaw.”
Thomas assessed her, then nodded. “Telling neither of us about the other.”
Klara knew she had no right to feel duped. She’d been told that the gods’ actions weren’t always what they seemed—Cernunnos, the god of the forest, had taught her that in his own circuitous way. The gods rarely moved along a straight path when a tangled one would do.
“It’s just like a goddess to give her powers to random humans without anyone’s consent,” she said bitterly.
Thomas gave a rueful smile. “Aye, the gods have never made much sense to me, either.
“And...here we are.”
Klara took in the cobbled street in Kelpie’s Close, the shuttered doors and darkened alleys, the bleary eyes of the sleepless and the guilty behind faded curtains.
“So, to recap,” she said wearily, “you killed him tonight, in the year of our lord 1568.” The old way of speaking came to Klara’s lips unbidden, an echo of Callum. “At the same moment he took my blade and—”
“We killed him at the same time?” Thomas was in a pose of deep concentration, one hand pinching his chin in thought. “He left me for dead and went to your time to kill you. The last Pillar. But that would mean he could straddle two times at once, which seems impossible.” He looked up suddenly, examining her face.
The final piece slid into place.
“Could it have been my doing?” Why did it feel like a confession? Thomas’s brows rose in surprise, a smile beginning on his lips, but Klara knew it wasn’t good news. “I had to save Callum.” An unwelcome memory of the beast flashed in her mind, sinking its yellowed, broken teeth into Callum’s side. His blood spilling into the earth. The memory twisted Klara’s heart.
“I tried to turn back time,” she explained raggedly. “To save him. Only a few minutes—”
“He wasn’t in two times, ye mean? You mean you brought him here, to me, by accident?”
She and Thomas stared at each other, Klara immobilized by the enormity of what she’d done—and of what had been averted. “The death of each Pillar infused Llaw with new power... By stabbing him at that moment...could I have...like, released all that power, and hyperjumped too far?”
Thomas leaned back, assessing her hypothesis. “Maybe. It seems we each have a story to tell. Or rather...” Thomas gazed at Klara’s sword. “Half a story. But this is not the place. It isn’t safe for a lady.”
The “lady” thing was going to have to stop, but Klara was too exhausted to bristle. She pulled her jacket more tightly around her, tucked the sword into the bag slung across her body, and followed Thomas out of the alley toward the heart of Rosemere.
It was as unfamiliar as a new city.
The buildings looked new but, in the same glance, old as time. The stones shone brighter, but the surroundings dimmed their raw edge. It was less built-up as it was in her time...which seemed odd, since Rosemere was classified as a World Heritage Site back in the early 1970s. Now it looked as unfamiliar as a distant city to which she’d never been.
Quaint houses. Plumes of smoke billowing from chimneys. And streets that if you took a single misstep, you’d be met by it head-on.
This landscape was anything but familiar.
But for some reason, it still felt like home.
CHAPTER TWOKLARA
“The thing I can’t work out,” Thomas said a while later, as they tore into the soft, warm loaf that he’d nicked from a baker’s cart. “You called it your sword. But it’s the same sword that Llaw used to steal the Pillars’ power when he killed them.”
“That wasn’t my sword—this is its twin. I was as surprised as you when I saw it. It looks just like mine.” Which Arianrhod hadn’t thought to mention, come to think of it. Another pointless omission.
They were sitting on the step outside a shop displaying bolts of fabric in the window, and Klara’s butt was freezing on the cold stone. The bread tasted like sawdust. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten and still she had to force it past her lips, past her heavy heart. “It’s been in my family for ages. My grandmother gave it to me.”
“But how did your ancestors come to have it?”
Klara shrugged. “My Grams might know, but she never told me.” Something Thomas said earlier caught up to her. “Wait—what do you mean the sword stole the power?”
“Arianrhod didn’t tell you?”
“She didn’t tell me quite a bit, it turns out.”
“Llaw’s sword was powerful. When it killed any being with any sort of magic, it stole that ability from its victim. That’s how Llaw got all his power, and why he became more powerful with each kill.” Klara gazed down at her own sword, stroking the face of an amethyst, wondering. She guessed it made a lot of sense.
“May I take a look at it?”
Klara hesitated. The thought of letting it out of her hands, even for a moment, filled her with anxiety.
She reminded herself that Thomas was Callum’s best friend, that they’d grown up together. Callum had taught her how to use the sword, had carried it for her, and had even defended himself with it when he was attacked by one of the beasts Llaw had summoned from between worlds. “Sure,” she said, hiding her reluctance as she pulled the sword from the beaten hockey stick bag that had come to feel like a second skin.
She gripped the sword in her hands. A wash of sadness hitting her like a rogue wave.
Callum.
Her eyes began to water against her will but the sword was a sturdy comfort. Like how she felt when her mother would give her a hug after a hard day. It was strange, to feel such a deep connection to the object that couldn’t easily be described. But in the absence of Callum and her mother...she was grateful for it. She handed it to Thomas, the brief feeling leaving her as she passed it to him.
When Thomas tried to examine the jewel-encrusted pommel more closely, he yelped and the heavy blade fell to the ground.
“Oh God, are you okay?” Klara gasped, her heart skipping a few beats until she saw that Thomas was unhurt.
“Yes, just—the prongs are sharper than they look,” Thomas said ruefully, examining his hands. Klara lifted the sword from the ground, immediately feeling less anxious to be in contact with it, and examined the pommel. “The jewels’ settings might need looking at.”
Klara examined the thistle design, the purple amethysts and green emeralds embedded in finely worked gold and steel, perplexed. She’d never noticed any of the settings being loose, but the thought of losing even one of the ancient gemstones was worrisome, especially since generations of her family had kept the piece in such perfect condition. “I’ll have it looked at as soon as I have the chance.”
As soon as I get home, she meant; Grams undoubtedly knew someone who restored fine antiques. But that wouldn’t happen until Klara figured out how to get back to the future.
Thomas was still staring at the sword intently. “Does it have the same powers as Llaw’s?”
“How would I know?” Klara said, slightly annoyed. It wasn’t like she had been going around killing Pillars. “Arianrhod told me that when Pillars died, their powers returned to the earth, so that was obviously a big old lie. But if you’re asking me if I got Llaw’s powers when he died, I’d think the answer would be obvious. If I could bend time and space at will, I’d be home right now.”
In her own bed in Kingshill Manor, with Finley nestled against her back, paws twitching in dreams of chasing squirrels.
Five hundred years in the future.
Llaw had killed eight of the Pillars. Eight of the ten mortals chosen by Arianrhod to unknowingly carry her powers until their deaths, to keep them safe from her fellow gods’ envy and mischief.
Had Llaw succeeded in killing Thomas and her, the last of his mother’s powers would have flowed into him, and Llaw would have taken Arianrhod’s place with the rest of the gods in the Otherworld. Arianrhod had warned that if this came to pass, the delicate balance between worlds—and indeed, time itself—would be destroyed. Llaw would bask in his stolen glory while time in the mortal realm collapsed, and the human world burned.
It was a difficult concept to fit into Klara’s scientific outlook—but as best she could understand, she likened it to the death of a star, its planets destroyed in the red giant engulfment. A month ago, Klara would have argued there was no other reasonable way to think about the universe—but after the things she’d seen and experienced since meeting Callum and time traveling five hundred years into the past, everything she believed had been turned upside down.
Misunderstanding her silence, Thomas only made things worse. “It’s Callum you’re thinking of, isn’t it.”
Klara sighed. She supposed she ought to tell him. “He and I...became close. Callum talked about you all the time,” she added, wanting to change the subject.
Thomas let out a short laugh.
“He sure has a mouth that could talk,” he said. “I just hope what he said painted me in a decent light.”
His voice was light, and it pained Klara to know how that would change if she told him about Callum’s fate. She could hardly bear thinking about it herself, let alone share it with the one person who probably knew Callum better than he knew himself.
“Don’t worry,” she said, trying to push away the pang that stabbed at her chest. “He only mentioned how loudly you snore at night...oh and how he didn’t miss your smelly feet,” she joked. She was surprised how easy it was to talk to Thomas, especially when having a lighthearted conversation about Callum. But talking about him with Thomas, someone Callum knew so well, felt comforting.
His eyes went wide in horror. “My feet dinnae smell!”
“I’m just playing with you,” Klara clarified. “He told me about what it was like growing up. And how you were each other’s only family.”
Thomas let out a relieved sigh.
“Aye, we were that.” A shadow fell across Thomas’s expression. “You cannae choose your family but I am glad he became mine.”
“Looks like he was dropped into both our lives without notice.” Klara smiled softly as she spoke. “But at the perfect time.”
She could relate to Thomas, foolish as it sounded. He had known Callum longer but
the love she felt for Callum spanned beyond time. That was one thing she knew for sure.
Thomas’s eyes were distant when he spoke next. “I was four years old when the fae merchant brought him, just a wee baby. I dinnae remember much from back then, but I do remember how nice it felt to not be alone.”
Klara’s head snapped up. Callum had told her it was his mother who had abandoned him to Brice MacDonald. “What do you mean, the fae brought him?”
Thomas shrugged. “Just some trader, one of the olc síth. The dark fae. Brice bought him because he was big and healthy and he could train him starting in childhood.”
Grams had told Klara stories about the dark fae. She’d had a way of making the old tales seem real, entrancing Klara for hours at a time when she visited Edinburgh as a child. The olc síth feed on fear and fortune. Some say they are the descendants of the fallen angels.
“There’s a faerie market,” Thomas continued. “Mostly only magical creatures trade there, but if a man—or woman—can find a fae to vouch for him...” His voice trailed off, giving the impression that he had firsthand knowledge.
“They sell children? But I thought Callum’s mother—”
“—went to the market and asked a fae for help,” Thomas said, bitterness in his voice. “She probably couldn’t feed herself, much less a baby. Not everyone has a house and food on the table.”
Too late Klara remembered that Thomas’s family, too, had sold him. No wonder the subject was a sore one.
“The olc síth pay in coin for strong, healthy boys,” Thomas continued. “And sell them to Master Brice for twice the sum.”
Callum had told Klara how he and Thomas suffered in Brice’s care, goaded and starved and forced to practice until their knuckles were bloody, all the years of their too-short childhoods. But that training had molded them into the finest fighters in the taverns and pubs of Rosemere, earning Brice his fortune from those who came to bet on his boys.
Master, keeper, devil, father, Callum had called Brice. Klara had dared to hope that someday her own father might offer Callum the kindness and encouragement he’d never had, that Callum would become like a son to him. But now that day would never come.
Klara furtively wiped a tear away, but not before Thomas had noticed.
“I need to get back to my own time,” she said before he could mention it.
Thomas frowned. “But what is stopping you? Even if you do not have the power of the eight other Pillars, you still have Arianrhod’s gifts, do ye not? You can travel through time.” A statement, not a question.
“I can’t...control the powers yet,” Klara said, embarrassed. “Not like you.”
Thomas raised a brow. “What do you mean?”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him—but it hardly mattered anymore. “The first time
I felt Arianrhod’s powers was when Llaw tried to kill me, and I...I felt something rise up inside me, and he went flying back. I had no idea what had happened.”
Llaw had appeared from a grayish mist and seized Klara’s throat, choking her, and something inside her snapped, a powerful burst of energy that sparked into a bright, white light.
“What else?”
“I’ve...summoned a god. I dreamed of the Stag God, Cernunnos, and he appeared to me between worlds, but he spun an illusion—a misty clearing. Another time I summoned Llaw, and he didn’t bother with illusions.” Klara shuddered, remembering the gauzy substance that clung to her skin and clothes, what Llaw had called the “matter between worlds.”
“But what about when you were awake?”
“I feel this pull inside me,” Klara said, words inadequate to describe it. “I can’t control it, but I can’t stop it, either. Especially when Callum and I visited the mystic centers, the ones in your notebook. When we were in Maeshowe, I had a vision of going back in time, like I was watching all of history unfold—but I don’t think I actually time traveled.”
Klara remembered something else that had happened at Maeshowe, after the dizzying slide show of the past—a brief vision of a handsome boy with bright blue eyes and a shock of red hair. Are you like me? he’d asked wonderingly, reaching his strong, scarred hand toward her. What power you must hold...
Thomas was rubbing his forehead ruefully. “I forgot that I gave my notebook to Callum.”
“The night you met with Llaw. Callum thought you wanted him to keep it safe, in case...” Klara trailed off. It felt rude somehow to remind Thomas how close he’d come to dying.
“In case something happened to me,” Thomas said, nodding. “But I’m surprised he could make sense of my sketches. ...
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