Page 91 of Under Arthur’s Protection

“The article.” She ripped off pieces of tape for the gauze. “So if he arranged for us to stay here…”

She didn’t have to finish the question—the ask was obvious. She wanted to know what kind of place Merlin had sent us to. Why it was so bare, but I was confident we were safe here.

“It’s somewhere people can disappear for a while,” I said.

“Or they get disappeared to?”

“No.” There weren’t any dark splotches on the floor or walls to indicate it had been used that way, although bleach did wonders for concrete. “Merlin wouldn’t send us to a black site.”

She glanced up at the institutional light overhead. “Kinda seems like it.”

“It’s low maintenance.”

She hummed, not really agreeing, and taped the edges of the gauze. “I was thinking… on the drive…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She held the tape down like she’d done at the rental. “I thought reviewing everything might give me a hint of what to focus on.”

“Did it help?”

“I don’t think so.” Gwen took my right hand in hers to examine the swollen knuckles. She frowned at the damage and started cleaning them with a fresh wipe. “But I think I’ve figured it out.”

“About Dr. Hopkins?”

“About where this leads.” She dabbed at the damaged skin across my middle knuckle. “He sent us to three places. Glastonbury told us Novae Avallonis was a real term. Malta confirmed the church inscription dates to the fourteenth century or earlier. Champagne gave us a forged document that claimed the sword’s inscription was an eighteenth-century collector’s whimsy.”

“Which means?”

“If I’d believed the forged document, we would have left Champagne thinking there’s nothing special about Novae Avallonis, and that the sword is nothing more than a collector’s item. But when I rejected it, they sent three men after the sword, and then Rick came after us. He said flat out he needed the sword and my research. They wouldn’t do all of that unless Novae Avallonis is very important, and the sword is more than a trinket. It’s the key, precisely like the inscription says.”

She picked up another wipe and continued cleaning my hands. Her voice had changed. Still quiet, but far steadier. The hedging was gone. The qualifiers were gone.

“By trying to make it seem unimportant,” she said, “they proved the opposite. The sword and the church are linked, and that means… I don’t know what it means.”

The thinking time might not have improved her mood, but it was certainly productive.

“But add in what I found about Dr. Hopkins. It dawned on me right before I fell asleep. The rebuttals weren’t about all of the West Country. They were all about Tintagel. He’s been steering people away from a specific place, and I was simply the most recent one.”

Tintagel was the legendary site of King Arthur’s conception, and it was a stone’s throw from my father’s cottage. Because, of course, it was. We’d visited the ruins of the castle several times, despite my father’s insistence he wasn’t obsessed with the stories.

“Porta Novae Avallonis on the church. Clavis Novae Avallonis on the sword.” She paused in cleaning my knuckles and met my eyes. “And an expert working so hard to prove there’s no link between them because I was already too close to the town he chases every researcher away from.”

This was not the woman who’d folded in Hopkins’s office when he’d dismissed her reading of the inscription. Not the woman who’d left Fergus’s shop because his sister had made a crack about her neckline. This was the woman I’d promised myself I’d fight for, and sworn I’d get her a win so big no one would ever question her.

“Whatever Theo Hopkins, Rick Younge, and whoever they work for are trying to hide, it’s at Tintagel. That’s where we need to go.”

“It’s too dangerous,” I blurted. So much for giving her the win.

“I understand, but⁠—”

“I don’t think you do. We’ve been attacked twice. You heard what Merlin said—Rick is connected to an operation with money behind it. If what they’re protecting is at Tintagel, we’d be walking into their hands.”

“We can’t run forever.” She took my left hand, more forcefully than necessary, and checked the knuckles. “Rick knows you, he worked with you, and he knows what I look like. They’ll find us eventually. At least in Tintagel, we’d be going for a reason.”

“Tintagel would be the one place they’ll be most prepared for us.”

“Or it’s the one place where we find out what this whole thing is about.” She dabbed another wipe across the skin, and I flinched. “Arthur, I didn’t fly to England to hide in a bunker. I wanted to go to Cornwall to do my job, but I found out there was more to the item I was authenticating. This is the sort of discovery to⁠—”