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could have had the dear boy carry his books around campus, I think he would have. I wish I could have stopped him. I wish I’d tried. I wish …” She sighed again and took another sip of her cider. “Ah, well …”
    The crispness returned to her gaze as she glanced around the table at the trio of young people she was about to leave in the place where, all those years ago, she’d lost Mark O’Donnell to the mists of time.
    “Now. Enough. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but you three will be careful while you’re here. Do you understand me?” The air almost crackled with the electric force of her stare.
    “Maggie?” Clare reached over and laid a hand on her aunt’s arm. “Believe me. If there’s anyone who understands that … I think it’s us. We’re probably the only ‘trowel monkeys’ Dr. Ashbourne has ever had working for him who know just how careful you have to be when you start digging up the past. Trust me. Nothing is going to go wrong. Nothing.”

4
    T he landlady at the Avalon Mists Bed and Breakfast insisted on making the girls a cup of tea before they toddled off to bed. “Dream Tea” she called it: a blend of chamomile and mugwort infused with valerian root and patchouli and various other hippie-sounding herbs and spices, guaranteed to help facilitate vivid dream experiences, she assured them. So they could better tap into the mystical “Dream Walks” that proximity to Glastonbury Tor bestowed upon the “seekers and the pilgrims.” Clare thought it was probably a bunch of New Age hooey—and the tea smelled a bit like cat pee and tasted like watery grass clippings—but she didn’t want to offend their purple-haired, crystal-festooned hostess, and so she forced herself to choke back a few tiny sips.
    Al, being quicker on the uptake, begged off, claiming herbal allergies.
    As it was, Clare went to bed that night dreaming of Milo. So much for the purported astral potency of Dream Tea, she thought, smug in her REM sleep state. She dreamt of Milo pretty much nightly these days and didn’t exactly require boggy-tasting tisanes to help in that arena.
    Clare sighed and settled into her visions of a Thames-side, lateafternoon stroll, hand in hand with the boy genius at her side … the dream-rich colours of sunshine and blue skies echoing in Milo’s blond hair and sparkling gaze … a gentle breeze wafting thesubtle, fresh scent of the soap he used … Clare losing herself in his eyes as Milo smiled down at her and leaned in for a kiss …
    Best. Dream. Ever.
    Riiight up until it wasn’t.
    With her dream-eyes closed for the purposes of dream-kissing, Clare wasn’t sure exactly when or how the scene had shifted all around her. But suddenly, jarringly, she realized that the dreamday had turned grimly overcast. She was no longer on a path that ran beside London’s famous river, but on a strand of grey beach pounded by the angry waves of a stormy, steel-grey sea. There was a heavy, briny smell in the air—salt and seaweed and wet sand. And Milo, who’d been right there with her, was suddenly nowhere to be found.
    Stupid Dream Tea …
    With a shock, Clare recognized the pungent dream-odour that assaulted her dream-nostrils. It was the same scent she’d detected in those few moments when she and Stuart Morholt had been locked together in a time-shimmer. In the instant before she’d let go of the Great Snettisham Torc and abandoned Morholt to his fate, trapped back in AD 61.
    Right on cue, Stu appeared over the horizon, a whirlwind tangle of arms and legs racing toward the beach and looking pretty much exactly how Clare had left him. In one hand he clutched the Snettisham Torc. In the other, a bulky bag of assorted artifacts also stolen from Boudicca’s tomb. And he was being chased by a handful of Celtic warriors astride swift, sturdy ponies. They were gaining on him fast.
    Clare curbed her own impulse to run as Morholt and the Celts headed straight for her. She knew that, in the way