Page 113 of Under Arthur’s Protection

“No radios in the safe room?”

“Sadly, no. We should be flying with a full set of backups in future.”

I added spare surveillance kit to my mental shopping list for when we were done with this job. Even if my luggage and radio had made it out of Troyes, Gwen still wouldn’t have had anything. Having spares on the jet would have been smart.

One more thing you didn’t plan⁠—

Shut up, Penn.

Low tide was now sixty minutes away, and the drive would take us forty. Time to look forward instead of backward. “Let’s roll.”

Chapter 34

Gwen

“It’s not a circle.” I halted on the steep path, one hand on the wooden railing, the wind pulling at my hair. Below us, the cove’s beach stretched out in a wide crescent, wet from the retreating tide and the fog. Above, the footbridge connected the mainland cliff to the island, where Lance was positioned with his binoculars.

“What?” Arthur stopped, two steps ahead of me, somehow aware I wasn’t moving. He carried the sword case, ready if we found somewhere to use it.

“The symbol.” I pulled out my phone and scrolled to one of the photographs of the sword’s ring, with the symbol that started everything—the cross and circle, with the wavy line beneath them. I held the screen up against the landscape, despite the fog clinging to the headland and hiding much of the ruins above. “You need to see this.”

He joined me, looking over my shoulder.

“The circle isn’t abstract. It’s the headland.” I pointed at the massive rock formation rising from the sea, where the castle had once stood. “The wavy line is the water around it. And the break in the wave is the cave. Arthur, it fills at high tide, so it breaks the waterline at low tide.”

“And the cross?”

“Marks the spot.” I turned my head, and his face was right there, next to me. “The whole symbol is a map of this place.”

Arthur’s gaze cut to me. “You think?”

“I do.”

“You’re brilliant. Has anyone ever told you that?”

I wanted to kiss him, to close the few inches between us and brush my lips against his. It would be nothing more than a celebratory kiss. But Lance’s binoculars or the drone’s camera might have been on us. Plus he had his earpiece in, so the guys might have heard us. We were probably suspiciously close already.

On the drive from the ferry that morning, he’d warned me he’d be back in bodyguard mode once we got to Cornwall. I’d tested him when we arrived, but the second Lance appeared, the smiles and kisses were gone. But they’d be back tonight, if not sooner.

He said, “You should add the symbol-as-map connection to your email before we go in.”

“Good idea.” I recorded what I’d just figured out in the email and reset the forty-eight-hour auto-send timer. Once I was done, I pocketed the phone. “It’s one more data point connecting the sword and church to the castle. The question is⁠—”

“Find it first.” He started down the path again. “Ask why second.”

He was right. Getting ahead of myself wouldn’t help anything. All the same, before I continued after him, I pulled my digital camera from the giant jacket pocket I’d stashed it in, and snapped a few photos.

We continued down, the wind no match for the yellow rain jacket Arthur had pillaged from his mother’s closet. Considering the size of their cottage, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the full sets of clothes they kept on hand. It was still weird, though.

“How long is the cave or passage or whatever you want to call it?” I asked.

“About three hundred feet.” He adjusted the sword case to his other hand. “Light reaches in through both openings, but there are plenty of deep shadows inside.”

“Thus the flashlights?”

He nodded from five steps ahead. “Thus the flashlights.”

The sandy beach was busier than I’d expected on a chilly, foggy October afternoon. Maybe two dozen people spread across the beach, walking dogs and picking through tidal pools. If I hadn’t been on a mission, I would have been taking photographs of what was visible of the ruins through the mist, or the legendary cave, the waterfall, or the bridge. There was so much to see, and I felt the weight of all those legends.