Chapter 34 Magellan
Magellan
Magellan opened her eyes to find herself lying on a bed of grass and staring up at an open sky. She sat up slowly. Rhys was beside her out cold with her satchel slung across his chest. Back at the church, she’d been so upset saying goodbye, she’d forgotten to take it from him.
She looked around her. They were somewhere in a field on top of a sloping hill. An ancient standing stone—a stone well over ten feet—towered behind them like an X marking the spot where they landed.
“Holy crap.” Her heart skipped as adrenaline flooded her body.
She’d done it. She’d actually done it and gone somewhere else.
She turned back to Rhys, and a rush of emotion hit her.
He had grabbed onto her at the last moment.
Right now he looked like a sleeping angel with his face in repose, and the enormity of what she’d done struck her.
He had a family and an estate and responsibilities.
He had a life she’d just forced him from.
His life. Panic seized her. She laid her hands on his arms and shook him.
“Rhys? Rhys! Wake up.”
She kept shaking him until his eyes fluttered open and he looked up at the sky in confusion. Then he sat up, slowly looking around.
Knowing how disoriented he was, she waited for his memories to come flooding back. When they did, he jumped up in alarm and turned a 360.
“What happened? Where are we?”
“I don’t know.” She rose to her feet, trying to stay calm for him.
Where this was and when this was remained a mystery, but she’d been through this once before.
And she was more relieved to be out of 1829 than still there.
After she’d gotten the song from Fanny, things had gone south quickly.
The men at the gate, the storm, the criminals on the street.
Then came the strange moving shadows and terrifying sounds.
She didn’t know what she’d experienced, but a malevolent force had come for her with sounds so painful—a screeching tangle of discordant wails both piercingly high and despairingly low.
Within the wails was an abyss of human torment, a cacophony of pain.
If hell had an orchestra, she had just heard it, an orchestra at war with itself and intent on destruction.
The vortex of shadows and sounds had wanted the song and wanted her.
The song’s resonance had drawn it to her, just like Gwynedd had warned.
Magellan had only come to her senses when they reached the church.
Now she was somewhere else in time’s labyrinth, and according to Gwynedd, whatever was hunting her in 1829 could not follow here—until she played the song again and opened another doorway.
She shuddered, trying not to think about when that time came. Right now, she had to help Rhys come to terms with their new reality, wherever they were, and she had a feeling the Earl of Liron wasn’t going to handle it well.
“Good God! Where are we?” he yelled to the open countryside. He walked a circle around the standing stone and reached out to touch it. “We were at the church. You were playing the organ, and everything began to glow. How in blazes did we get here?”
She shrugged helplessly, unsure how to explain. “Bach and a Ley Line?” she ventured to guess.
“You’re telling me it’s all true?” His voice was pitched high in disbelief.
She made a wild gesture around them with both hands like What do you think?
Rhys did another 360, as if their environment would change if he kept turning in circles enough. “I’m not dreaming this?”
“I don’t think we can have the same dream. I tried to tell you we would end up somewhere else.”
“Yes, I know. But I didn’t think . . . this is madness!” He began to pace. “You’re telling me what Gwynedd wrote in the diary is actually real? That you traveled on a-a-Ley Line from the future to my labyrinth?”
It did sound crazy, but they were standing in the middle of nowhere next to a twelve-foot ancient stone confirming that fact.
Magellan didn’t know how to answer. Rhys looked livid, and her heart fell.
Of course he was upset. She knew he hadn’t believed her, and she’d tried to bring him anyway, because she was selfish and wanted him with her.
Then she’d chickened out at the last minute and tried to leave him behind.
She never should have let him come upstairs to the balcony in the first place.
“Rhys, I’m so sorry. I know you’re mad at me—”
“Mad! Mad?” He whirled on her looking angrier than she’d ever seen him. “You almost came here alone without me!”
It took her a moment to realize what he was mad about. “Wait. You’re not mad that I brought you?”
“If I wasn’t here, you would be here all alone, and I would have”—he had to swallow to get the words out—“been unable to find you.”
She was becoming emotional too. He didn’t understand and was getting it all wrong. “I did want you to come. But I thought it was wrong to trick you when you obviously didn’t believe me.”
“So you knew this whole time you were leaving.” His lips set into an angry line.
“You had no idea where you were going, but you packed a bag.” He sat down on the ground and rifled through it, muttering to himself.
“I wondered what was in this bloody thing.” He held out a scone, and his voice softened momentarily. “Please eat something.”
Magellan sat down and took the scone grudgingly. Rhys always seemed to know when she needed to eat, because she was feeling lightheaded.
He continued to go through the bag. “We’ve landed in the middle of nowhere, but at least we have tooth powder and a butter knife for a weapon.”
Magellan blushed. “There’s food and my ointments and cloth.”
He held up two flasks. “How did you get these?”
“From the carriage when you weren’t looking.” She was pretty sure one held wine and one held water.
“Here, drink something. You must keep your strength to face wherever in the world we are.” He offered them to her, his eyes glittering with emotion as he waited for her to eat and drink.
It wasn’t as if she had wanted to leave him behind.
Without a word she reached for the flask that turned out to hold the wine.
She took two large swallows, needing a stiff drink to deal with this.
He was rubbing the bridge of his nose. “When did you start to realize the diary was real?”
“When Gwynedd started talking about our gift with music and my ring.” A big part of her was relieved Rhys finally knew, because it’d been hard being alone and barely holding on to her sanity.
“And Garesh.” She still hadn’t solved the riddle of Garesh.
Gwynedd believed he was the immortal from an ancient Sumerian legend, which felt even more fantastical to her than landing in another time.
Rhys was staring at her intently, trying to puzzle it all out. “My father knew you would come, and he had the diary.”
“The diary found me in the future too.” Which was still a mystery. “On the morning of my birthday, a man left a message on my cell phone that he had my diary sent by the Liron Institute.”
Rhys stared at her, utterly perplexed. “What is a cell phone?”
She bit back a sigh. “A way to talk and send messages. I’ll explain later. Gwynedd said Ley Lines are mysterious things and objects find their own way to people. Wherever the diary came from, your father’s past or my future, we still need to translate the rest.”
Rhys nodded, looking overwhelmed and trying to take it all in.
“The entire week before I left my time and arrived in yours, an aurora borealis appeared in the sky all over the world.”
His brow furrowed. “Celestial lights?”
She nodded. “Crystal said a magnetic pole shift is happening, and it’s going to be catastrophic.”
“Who is Crystal?”
“My boss.” Poor Crystal. Magellan fleetingly wondered what Crystal thought about her disappearance at the church. Did her parents and Wren think she was dead, or kidnapped? Were they searching for her?
“What is a boss?” Rhys was picking apart every word she was saying. She tried to be patient.
“It’s what we call the person you work for. That day I . . . traveled . . . to you, I was playing the harp at a wedding.”
“Whose wedding?” He was sitting on the ground with his arms crossed, a scowl on his face.
“No one I know personally. I play music at weddings for work. During the ceremony the news broke about the poles shifting. Everyone panicked. I went upstairs to play the pipe organ. The next thing I knew I was in the labyrinth. I thought it was a dream and you were from my imagination.”
She gave a faint smile, remembering that day, and her eyes traveled wistfully over him.
So much had happened since then. It felt like a lifetime ago.
And her old life was beginning to feel like a faraway memory—or worse, a dream.
She tried to focus on Rhys and held out her hand.
“Then I discovered my ring matched the symbols on the standing stone. It was the only thing that kept me from completely doubting my sanity.”
“Yes, I saw the ring when you were sleeping.” Rhys took her hand to study it. His fingers traced the symbols. “And still, I couldn’t believe.”
She could see the profound regret in his eyes.
She told him, “Fanny had the second half of the symphony’s first movement.
” She couldn’t explain to Rhys fully what had happened with Fanny Mendelssohn.
The song was a symphony of epic proportion with so many moving parts and instruments.
What she was playing on a single instrument was the core, and the rest existed in her imagination.
Just the first movement alone, made of hers and Fanny’s parts, boggled her mind.
She was already considering all the instruments she would need and the people to play them.
Not to mention the singing and the voices.
Voices were instruments too. Powerful ones. Like Wren’s.
“You think you’re meant to find a composer somewhere here in this vast wilderness?”