Ironhand by Charlie Fletcher

Author:Charlie Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Three Challenges and a Betrayal

Edie had got her legs back under control, but she was still sitting on the pub floor, absorbing what had happened to her. Finding herself in the midst of World War II at the height of the Blitz had been quite different from the sharp pain of merely seeing slices of the past when she glinted.

Being in the past rather than just seeing it wasn’t painful as such. It just left an overwhelming feeling of nausea and a kind of empty horror inside her. Maybe it was being there and coming back so suddenly that did it, she thought, concentrating on this idea rather than the twisted overcoat and hand she’d seen sticking out from under the tipped omnibus. Perhaps this was like jet lag only worse—time lag, in fact.

The Friar watched her from the bar, which he was leaning against, still getting his breath back. He pushed George’s coat to one side and heaved his great bulk up on the bar, bare legs and sandals dangling out of the bottom of his cassock, somehow startling in their powerful nakedness. He looked as if he were sitting on the side of a river, about to paddle. He lacked only a fishing rod to complete the illusion. Instead he looked at Edie and flicked a question over her head like a fly.

“And the second question.” The Friar spoke in a voice so honeyed and solicitous that, despite the shock flushing through her body, Edie felt her hackles begin to rise.

“Second question?”

“Apart from the mirrors and how they work. You said you had a second question.”

Though it had been only minutes ago, it felt as if she’d asked that question in a different life. She shook her head to clear it.

“Yeah. Right. The Hard Way. You said if George didn’t make his sacrifice by putting the broken head on the Stone, then he would have to do things the Hard Way.”

“Indeed,” he purred, and sat there with the kind of smugness that, in Edie’s book, would have been asking— in fact begging—for a slap. Somehow in her present state, she didn’t have anything approaching a proper slap in her—real or verbal. She took a deep breath.

“What exactly is the Hard Way? Is it why he just vanished off the face of the earth?”

The Friar twirled George’s coat around on the bar top. Then hung it neatly on one of the beer handles.

“Maybe.”

Somehow, having been dragged back from what very possibly was, and certainly had felt like, the end of the world hadn’t put Edie in a mood for maybe’s.

“I need you to tell me a little bit more. Please.”

The please stuck in her throat, but she got it out with a good attempt at a smile as sugarcoating. And to her surprise he told her. He told her that George must stand and fight the three duels, and that they all had to be fought above or below ground, in the air or in or on water.

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