Chapter 24
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Twenty-Four
Ancient trees soared over ground thick with ferns, flowers, and twisting vines as Neil hiked through a legend.
This was the Dandakaranya, the demon-haunted forest of Lord Rama’s exile. It felt like a place that had fallen out of time, where at any moment Neil might stumble across someone from a hundred years in the future—or two thousand years in the past.
More than he usually did, anyway.
It hadn’t yet rained, but it would. The sky was heavy and gray where it was visible through the canopy. Sweat ran down the line of Neil’s back under his shirt and waistcoat, even with a pair of buttons loosened at his collar.
There were twelve men in their party besides Subhas, Neil, and Constance.
They ranged in age from the silver-haired Jignesh to a pair of teenagers.
All of them were armed. Several carried bows and arrows.
A few hung wicked-looking axes from their belts.
Most held Enfield muskets like the ones used to threaten Neil on his approach to the village.
The guns were antiques, probably dating back to the time of the mutiny, but they were all in working order.
The men carried the weapons in a way that signaled they knew perfectly well how to use them.
Subhas was clearly the leader, despite being younger than many of the others. Even Jignesh, the oldest, deferred to his orders, though the two men often talked things through before coming to a decision.
Constance walked ahead of Neil, easily keeping up with Subhas’s merciless pace. She had cheerfully slipped out of her jacket as soon as they’d crossed the river, stashing it in the small pack she carried on her shoulders as she took in everything around her with a wide-eyed air of wonder.
Neil caught himself staring at the way her thighs flexed against the well-tailored fabric as she hauled herself up another step.
He pushed to catch up to her so that he would stop staring at her derrière.
“Water?” he offered, slipping the canteen off his shoulder and holding it out to her.
Liquid spilled over the column of her throat as she downed a hearty gulp. She wiped a hand across her mouth before handing the canteen back.
It took Neil a moment to remember to accept it.
“How’s it work, then?” Constance demanded.
“The canteen?” Neil echoed, his mind still fuzzy from the way the damp glistened on her neck.
“Not the canteen, Stuffy. Your magical past-seeing powers!”
Neil choked on his own sip of water.
He thought of the look on Ellie’s face when he had blurted out his secret. It had read of shock and disbelief—and then a flash of betrayal.
Which was understandable. It hadn’t been fair for him to hide the truth from everyone for so long. He owed his sister an explanation for why he had kept it to himself… which shouldn’t be hard to provide, as Neil knew exactly why he’d done it.
He was ashamed.
Respected academics weren’t supposed to have supernatural powers.
Magically seeing into the past was the most unscientific thing Neil could imagine, right up there with talking about faeries and hunting for ghosts.
If any of his old Cambridge colleagues had found out about it, they would have laughed him out of the room—or stopped talking to him altogether.
Neil’s strange ability was a danger to everything he had built over the course of his education and career… though admittedly less so now that he’d blown his professional reputation to bits by sabotaging his own excavation back in Egypt.
Constance waited for him to answer.
Neil slung the canteen over his shoulder alongside the scabbard for his equally impossible sword. He started walking. “I don’t know. It just… happens.”
“But what’s it like?” Constance pressed, hurrying alongside him.
Neil fought an unfair sense of irritation. “It’s different every time.”
Constance studied him cannily as he used a skinny tree to haul himself up a steeper section of the path. “Have you ever done it when I was there?”
Neil stilled halfway up the slope. “Yes.”
“When?”
He forced himself to look back at her. “Tell al-Amarna.”
Constance’s eyes widened with recognition. “You called it beautiful, only we were standing in a dusty field with a bit of rubble. Not that I’d put it past you to find a field full of rubble lovely,” she added dryly. “But that’s not what you were seeing, was it?”
Neil braced his feet on the rocks, swallowing thickly. “I was looking at Akhetaten, Akhenaten’s capital. Not… as rubble.”
He closed his eyes, and he was there again—the palaces and temples rising up from the sand. Curtains billowed from windows, fruit trees shaded secluded gardens, and women laughed over the lilt of music.
“Engadu!” one of the Adrija men complained, waving for them to stop blocking the path.
Neil ripped himself from the memory and scrambled up the rest of the incline.
Constance gripped the tree below him. She frowned at where to go next, her reach not being quite as long as Neil’s.
He extended his hand. Constance clasped it, and Neil hauled her up, instinctively catching her as she reached the top.
She fell against him, soft curves palpable through her blouse and trousers.
Fiancée, Neil thought numbly.
Fake fiancée.
He let her go and quickly hurried after the rest of the men.
“How did you do it then?” Constance pressed impatiently.
“How did I do what?”
“Akhetaten!”
Neil’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t do anything. It just happened.”
“How long has it been ‘just happening?’”
“A few years?” Neil mumbled back.
“Two? Five?”
Neil turned on her. “I don’t know exactly! I told you. It doesn’t always happen the same way. Maybe I’ve been doing it forever, and I just…”
He bit back the rest, pushing angrily through an innocent stand of waist-high grass.
Constance clamped a hand around his arm and hauled him out of the path.
The men behind them chuckled as they passed, sharing knowing looks.
“Stuffy, I am not going to think any differently of you just because you can do a bit of magic,” Constance huffed.
Neil stilled with surprise at her words.
He hadn’t even known the fear existed until Constance voiced it—but there it was. And why wouldn’t it be? How couldn’t his impossible, unscientific ability change the way people thought about him?
They would assume he was crazy. Or worse, they would expect him to be some kind of magician—which he wasn’t.
“You won’t?” he pushed back tentatively.
Constance let out an exasperated huff. “You’re my friend! I just want to know what this means to you.”
Neil was touched.
Constance spilled out the rest. “I’m also desperately curious, and it’s entirely unfair of you to leave me in suspense.”
Neil suppressed a helpless groan, acknowledging that Constance wouldn’t leave him alone until she had the whole story.
“What it means is that I’m now questioning whether I can actually consider myself a scholar when everything I thought I’d accomplished as a historian and academic might just be some mad parlor trick,” Neil confessed miserably.
He had been tormented by that doubt ever since Sayyid had mercilessly forced the epiphany about his power onto him back in Egypt.
What did it mean that Neil could magically see the past?
Was everything he’d accomplished during his career now a lie?
And what about the future? Using a supernatural power in one’s scholarly endeavors without actually realizing it was one thing, but what were the ethics of going forward with his studies now that he knew what he was doing?
Neil loved his work. He wanted to do more of it—to painstakingly unearth the relics of history and puzzle through their subtle details, teasing out the secrets of lives hundreds or thousands of years in the past. But how could he keep at it now that he knew the real source of his ‘leaps of intuition?’
“Don’t be silly,” Constance retorted.
Her blunt answer threw him. “Silly?”
“You are one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met!” Constance hooked a hand through his arm and dragged him back onto the path. “You read journals in German and letters in Ancient Egyptian…”
“It’s not ‘Ancient Egyptian,’” Neil grumped. “There’s Classical Egyptian and Late Egyptian, and they each have distinct and important variants—“
“My point exactly,” Constance cut in. “There is simply no way you would be able to rattle on about the Roman invasion of Britain, Norse trade routes, and the historicity of Troy the way you do if it were all just magical powers.”
She was right. Not everything Neil had ever learned was in doubt. There were piles of knowledge in his brain that had come from books—because he remembered reading them, spending late nights at Cambridge poring over excavation reports.
They continued to climb the steep, thickly wooded slope. The trees thinned out further up the rise, where more of the gold-gray light of afternoon filtered through the rich green leaves.
“It’s very kind of you to say that, but it’s hard to imagine how I can possibly be both of these things,” Neil replied. “A scholar and…”
“Magical?” Constance looked thoughtful. “I suppose I’m having trouble figuring out how to be British and Indian, but I am both of those things—more so now than I was even a week ago.
And I wouldn’t wish myself to be anything other than what I am—if wishing could make any sort of difference.
So I suppose I’ll have to figure it out. ”
Neil stopped. “You’re right.”
Constance was clearly pleased. “Am I?”
“I am… both,” he admitted, even as part of him twisted queasily at the words. “There’s no point in wishing it were any different. But I haven’t the foggiest idea how to go about it!”