Page 52 of Only a Breath Away

CHAPTER 43 - MAGNUS

Isat down on the couch and slid the sword under it, within reach. Then I put my hand on the lid so that it clicked open again.

Lady Mairead exhaled, then leaned forward. I watched her carefully as she investigated the interior of the chest.

She pulled her books from her bag and opened the auld book that originally belonged tae Johnne Cambell. “Do ye see, this smooth black piece in the center? It looks like an obsidian river rock, embedded in the metal. It is labeled in this book: the drochaid—”

Quentin said, “What does that mean?”

I said, “It means a bridge. This is where the chest gets its name.”

She tentatively touched it and everyone said, “No!”

“Why?”

Chef Zach said, “Lady Mairead, respectfully, you can’t just touch it in the middle of the living room in the middle of the lake house in the middle of Maine. Think about the damage the Trailblazer does, there are kids here!”

She huffed. “Fine, if ye are feeling fearful I winna touch it. Besides, it says here in this book that ‘in ùine air fhuasgladh.’”

Hayley whispered tae Fraoch, “What does that mean?”

“Time and unraveled.”

“Oh.”

Lady Mairead continued, turning the page to the next and pointing, “Ye hae tae activate the bridge at the ‘steach far a bheil bruachan na h-aibhne air leth.’” She looked triumphant.

Quentin asked, “Boss, a translation, please.”

I said, “Och, right, m’apologies, Master Quentin. The words mean, ‘the place where the banks of the river are discrete,’ m’guess is it means as opposed tae where the banks of the river are connected, ye ken? I suspect we are supposed tae use this at the place where the timelines become unraveled.”

Lady Mairead said, “Aye, see here, this word?”

I read aloud, “Fhuasgladh.”

Fraoch explained tae Hayley, “Unraveled, like when ye are weavin’.”

I pulled the book around and read, “‘An abhainn dhubh,’ the words are out of order and misspelled, but it means the black river.”

Hayley asked, “So we need to stand on the bank of the black river?”

Quentin pointed at the chest, “No, I think it means this, the stone here, that’s like a black river stone.”

“Could be. If this is the bridge and the stone is the black river, where are the banks? And where are the banks ‘discrete’ and where are they separate?”

We all shook our heads.

Zach said, “Fuckin-A, this is confusing.”

He sipped from his beer. “The thing about this situation is it all fucking started with Sophie, she was the beginning of all the messy timeline stuff.”

We all turned tae him.

He said, “Am I right? I mean, she was out of time, right? Then she was grabbed by Ormr, married off to Domnall, was pregnant, died, long before she was born, married to a friend of her great-grandpa. She was basically a big gigantic time loop.”

Lady Mairead said, “Nae, she was nae a time loop. I am out of time, Magnus is out of time. It daena change the timeline of the world. Tis nae apersonwho is a loop.”

He shrugged. “Sure, fine, she wasn’t the loop, but we do have timelines unraveling all over the place, people stuck in time, kings rewriting history, a loop of everything and everybody... Is it because James tried to rescue her by looping? I mean... he was looping and looping and looping did he set this nightmare in—”

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