Page 130 of Under Arthur’s Protection

Get out, Gwen. Go now.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted to read it all. But lingering over it was foolish. I had a chance to escape and had to go.

But when I lifted the sword’s case, I froze. Under a sheet of glass embedded in the desk was a calligraphed charter with wax seals. It was written in Latin, and I couldn’t translate all of it on the fly, though I did recognize some phrases. Custos secreti. Keeper of the secret. Novae Avallonis. Part of the inscription I’d been chasing. Rex quondam rexque futurus. The once and future king. And a name. Custodes Aureliani.

The Aurelian Custodians.

Dated to 1284 by Edward I.

Holy fucking hell! Edward I?

Did the panel come out of the desk? Could I take it? Toss it into the sword’s case and go? Maybe it would prove something. Maybe it would be a lead, or maybe it⁠—

Voices again.

Shit.

I put the case down and closed the folder. The voices were getting closer. Two men. I couldn’t make out the words yet, but one voice was lower, clipped.

Oh god. It was Rick Younge.

I was too far from the door to hide behind it, so I crawled under the desk. I pressed my back against the inside panel and pulled my knees to my chest.

They pushed the door open.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

You should have run when you had the chance.

“—can’t keep her here indefinitely,” Rick was saying. “She’s a liability. Every hour she’s breathing is another hour closer to our secrets getting out.”

“Which is precisely why she needs to stay alive,” came the second man’s voice. Older, gentle. Dr. Theo Hopkins. But not the Dr. Hopkins from St. Catherine’s Church, the man who’d smiled at me and admired the sword. No, this voice sounded more tired. Stressed. “If she dies and that email publishes, we’ve lost everything. Centuries of work. Everything the Custodians have protected.”

“She’s bluffing.” Rick stopped near the desk, and I could feel how close he was to me. “What could it possibly have in it, other than the inscription you were able to explain? Maybe she’s got some photos from the church. Nothing we can’t manage.”

“Can you guarantee that? Can you guarantee the email doesn’t have detailed notes on whatever theories led her into the Passage?”

The Passage. That must have been Merlin’s Cave.

“No,” Rick said. “I can’t.”

“Then we don’t touch her. Not until we can verify what’s in that email, or find a way to stop it.”

“And how exactly do we do that? Her phone’s at the bottom of the sea. She can’t reset it herself, which means we can’t make her do it.”

“I’m aware of the constraints.”

“Are you? Because from where I’m standing, this whole operation has been a disaster since she turned up at St. Catherine’s.” Rick’s voice had an edge to it. “Your little stunt in Champagne didn’t work, and now we’ve got Arthur Penn’s girlfriend locked upstairs, and he’s going to come for her.”

“Penn doesn’t know where we are.”

“You don’t know what Penn knows. The man’s father runs one of the world’s largest private security firms. If he starts pulling on threads⁠—”

“We deal with it when it happens.” Dr. Hopkins sounded more like a department chair at the end of a long faculty meeting than a man discussing whether to kill me. “Right now, the priority is the email. She said it was going out in forty-eight hours?”

“Minus travel time, so I don’t know how many we have left.”

“We need to put a computer in front of her, where she can log into her email, and we negotiate.”