Olive had gone stiff.
It was Bonnie’s river analogy—as rambling and windy as a Highland waterway—which had triggered something deep in her mind. Perhaps it was because the analogy—it reallywasa terrible analogy—had come so close on the heels of her thinking about the excavation, but whatever it was, Olive was having A Thought.
A rather important one.
“Olive? Olive, you can cease shutting up now and say something.”
“A bend in the river,” Olive whispered, her eyes wide. “Where the current sweeps things, then slows and deposits them along the riverbank.”
“Um…yes?”
“Where they sink into the mud, quite a distance down from where they are supposed to be, and are hidden by more mud?”
Bonnie winced. “Well, I think you are belaboring what was a rather inept analogy to begin with, but I suppose that could be true.”
But Olive wasn’t seeing her friend. In her mind’s eye, she was tracing the map of the excavation.
Outside, much more than a thousand years ago, the riverhadbordered the little Roman outpost. The original excavators had assumed the edge of the town was built up against a street, but she and Phineas now knew it was the riverbank. And the map of the town had curved around, following the bend in the river.
The bend in the river, where the current might sweep things and deposit them.
Like architectural elements fallen from the roof ridgelines of important buildings.
The goldensphaera.
“Olive? You have gone all glassy. Have I broken you? Oh dear, I have broken you, have I not?”
“No,” Olive breathed, suddenly full of excitement. “You have given me an idea.”
“An idea about how you should march up to Phineas Oliphant and declare your love for him?” Bonnie asked, sounding a bit nervous.
“I threw my naked body atop his,” Olive quipped drily. “I think he got the message already.”
She pulled away from her friend and reached for her hairbrush, determined to braid her hair up as quickly as possible so she could head to the excavation again. Now that the sun was out, the ground would be steaming, but she could still make some progress.
“Then what are you going to do?”
Olive lifted her chin and stared at her reflection in the mirror, a sense of certainty about her own worth filling her for the first time ever.
“I am going to prove I am as brilliant as he thinks I am.”
