Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] Read Online Free Page B

really unusual in this time. The color of the older man’s eyes seemed to shift and change as he fixed her with a gaze so powerful, it shook her right down to her ankles. She tried to calm her breathing.
Okay.
Sparkles and changing eye color. Magic
was
possible here.
    The boy tore his own light eyes from the machine to ask his father, “Is it magic then?”
    “Mayhaps,” his father muttered, studying the machine. “Or it may be the work of men.”
    “Not any men we know,” the boy snorted, his eyes still wide with wonder.
    Diana understood it, at least pieces of it. And they weren’t speaking Latin. Assuming she had actually come back to Dark Age Britain, it must be . . . Brythonic Proto-Celtic. How could she understand even a word? She blinked at them, her mind frozen.
    “Is she a goddess, or a witch?” the boy asked. “Her clothes are not like ours.”
    She swallowed and said slowly, “I am neither,” picking the words from her memory. Her breath came fast and shallowly. This was the language she’d spoken after they found her wandering in Chicago, before she’d learned English. Her eyes filled. What did this mean?
    “She speaks our language, Father!” the lad said in the same tongue. He was brave in the face of what must look like sorcery to him.
    Her brain clicked into gear as she stood there blinking. No surprise the social workers in Chicago hadn’t recognized Proto-Celtic. How had she not known? But it wasn’t a language you just happened on, like the Old English of
Beowulf.
She’d never seen anything written in it, never heard anyone speak it. While it sounded vaguely Welsh or Gaelic or something, it . . . it wasn’t.
    She spoke
Proto-Celtic
?
    “Who are you?” the father asked her. She hadn’t known what he would say. The boy, either, come to think of it.
    “I am Diana Dearborn,” she said carefully. The words came easier now, as if the language had been lurking inside her, waiting to flow. “I come from the future time.”
    “And these metal wheels brought you here?” the man said, putting out a reverent hand to touch the nearest gear. He set the sparkling ball of light free and it floated near his shoulder.
    “It looks like a mill, Father, only more finely wrought, in metal.”
    “I, of anyone, should know that time is not linear. Space, either,” the man murmured, caressing the jewels. She didn’t catch all of that. He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “I have seen you in my scrying pool. Not in the full flower of womanhood, but as an untried girl.”
    “You . . . you know me?”
    He smiled, and it was as though the clouds that foretold rain raced across his eyes, making them a swirling gray. “I do not. I only know you are important.”
    Her? Important? The man was mad.
    “Is . . . is this Camelot?”
    “Oh, aye. Or was.” Those two words held all the sorrow in the world. He shook himself. “But we must face thefuture without it now.” He turned toward the woods and waited.
    A crashing sounded in the underbrush and a man stumbled into the clearing between the standing stones. He had a fierce face, with a jutting nose and sharp angles. He was dressed for battle, with linked chain mail over a leather jerkin and greaves of hardened leather on shins and forearms. He carried a sword almost as tall as he was, and he’d been using it, to judge by the blood on it and on him. Some of it was his, leaking from a slash on his upper arm just below the short sleeve of his chain mail. His dark hair was plastered to his head with sweat.
    “I’ve been waiting for you,” the man with the strange-colored eyes said.
    “You know why I’m here,” the newcomer panted, his palms braced on his thighs. Diana was shocked to find she couldn’t predict what he would say, either. Had her curse entirely disappeared in this time? “With your support I can hold against the Saxon hordes. . . .” He trailed off as he seemed to notice the great machine for the first time. He was too