“That’s not very sensible,” Chloe pointed out faintly. “It’s too malleable. Pure gold is too soft, too easily damaged. That’s why so many of the ancient torcs had cores of iron beneath the gold. Well, that and to help deflect a potential sword. What Compact, anyway?”

“Precisely their purpose,” Silvan murmured, lightly tracing the edge of the gold sheet. “’Twas said they did it to symbolize how fragile The Compact was. To underscore that it must be handled gently.”

“What Compact?” Chloe asked again, stepping gingerly between a pile of leather-bound tomes and a heartbreakingly rusted shield, peering deeper into the shadowy corners of the chamber. She wondered if they’d let her live down here for a while. Another glance at Dageus made her recant that thought. Unless he lived down there with her.

“The Compact betwixt the Tuatha Dé Danaan and man.”

Chloe sat down heavily on her bottom.

“Not on the tomes!” Silvan gasped.

Chloe, startled, toppled sideways and sprawled on the dusty stone floor, appalled that she’d just planted her rump on a pile of priceless texts. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m just a little over-excited. How old is it supposed to be? What language is it in? Can you translate it? What does it say?”

Silvan busied himself sorting through an urn of scrolls.

Dageus shrugged. “No idea what language it’s in.”

“You can’t read it?”

“Nay,” Dageus muttered.

Silvan harrumphed.

Chloe’s eyes narrowed but she decided to leave it alone for the moment. She was feeling light-headed again and didn’t want to push it. She needed to slowly absorb her new perspective of history, one that included both Druids with the power to manipulate time itself, and the existence of an ancient civilization that had possessed knowledge and technology advanced far beyond anything man had ever achieved.

Grandda had been right—the Tuatha Dé Danaan had once lived, and not just in myth!

Breathe, Zanders, she told herself, dropping to her knees on the floor and reaching for the nearest tome.

Many hours later, Chloe rested her head back against the cool stone wall and closed her eyes, listening to Silvan and Dageus talk. Languages she couldn’t translate, scribed in long-unused alphabets, danced on the insides of her eyelids.

There was dust in her hair, on her face and in her nose, she was wearing a dust-covered medieval gown in a castle that had no showers or indoor plumbing, and she couldn’t have been happier. Well, unless she’d been sent back in time to the Alexandrian Library right after Anthony had given Cleopatra the Pergamum Library, bringing the estimated total of volumes housed therein to nearly a million, if anything historians claimed was to be trusted.