"Oh, and go see Quinn before you leave. He has something to tell you."
Lennox withdrew. He found Quinn at the top of the tall tower in the east corner of the keep.
"Lennox," Quinn said. "Welcome. Come in."
"My father said you wished to see me."
"The woman you brought, where is she?"
"With Marion, why?"
"You must not let her out of your sight after today."
"Care to explain why?"
Quinn shuffled over to Lennox. "She is more important than she realizes at this particular moment. Darkness is coming and she is the key that will unlock the light. You must retrieve the staff and give it to her."
"Retrieve the staff? Do you have any idea how hard that will be?"
Quinn acted as if he hadn’t spoken. "Take her to the stone circle in the Wildwood. She must touch the altar with the end of the staff if we are to stand a chance."
Lennox was lost. "I have no idea what you’re talking about."
"A great evil is on the verge of breaking free once more. He has been held in chains for a thousand years while the keys were buried. They have been found and he is on the brink of return. Only she can stop him bringing a pestilence to our lands."
"She’s just a woman, Quinn. You do realize that, don’t you? Not a druid."
"Only she can save us. It has been written. You must take her to the stone circle."
"And what if she doesn’t want to go?"
"Tell her the stone circle is her only chance to get home. She will go willingly enough."
"I won’t lie to her."
Quinn lit a candle in a sconce, looking into the flame for a moment as it turned blue. "It is no lie. Touching the altar with the staff will take her home. More or less. The staff and the circle lie on the way to Rievaulx Abbey. You will not even need to detour from your journey to Walter. Protect her with your life, Lennox."
"I will."
He headed back downstairs, his mind a whirl of thoughts. It was all well and good protecting her. But what was so special about her that he was going to have to risk his own life retrieving the staff?
5
There was something in the air in Marion's chamber that Rose couldn't identify. It wasn't just the unusual smells of the castle. It was something else.
She was now certain this was not a dream. As far as she could tell, that left her with two options. The first was that she had suffered some catastrophic brain injury and was at that very moment laid in a hospital bed, deep in the recesses of a coma from which she might never recover, this her mind's way of coping with the hideous trauma.
The alternative was that she had somehow traveled through time just like the characters in her books and now she was in a genuine medieval castle filled with actual medieval people.
She wasn't sure which option she wanted to be true. If this was real, it meant the universe was capable of laughing at the laws of time and space. Physics textbooks could be ripped up and replaced by a single sentence. Rose Winter traveled through time. Her mother’s stories had been true. That thought was terrifying beyond anything she could comprehend.
She felt the brain injury theory was more likely. If she had traveled through time, she shouldn't have been able to understand the words they spoke yet she could. That suggested this was all in her head. It wasn't as if she'd taken lessons in Middle English, Norman French, or Gaelic, the main languages of the country at that time.
Her head hurt when she thought about it all. Could she come up with such vividly real locations and people in a coma? The smells? Fire smoke, livestock, sweet hay, the garderobe in the corner of the room, half hidden behind a thick woolen curtain, all mixed with the heavy cloying perfume Marion wore.
Arriving at the castle, she had been struck almost dumb by the sight of it. It was so different to the castle she’d visited in her car what felt like a lifetime ago.
She compared MacGregor Castle as she knew it to the version she was standing in. The courtyard was not grassed. It was covered with mud and buildings all crammed in together.
