The Bone Quill by Carole E. Barrowman, John Barrowman Page A

that.
    I would.
    Em stared at her brother.
You don’t really mean that.
    Matt shrugged off her dismay. At long last he had a clue to his mum’s disappearance, and he was not letting it go.
    Simon loudly cleared his throat. The twins noticed the room had quietened.
    ‘What were you two squabbling about in your heads?’ asked Renard.
    Matt stole a glance at Em. ‘We think we can control our animation so that we don’t time-travel,’ he said.
    Zach could feel Em’s anxiety tightening the muscles in his neck.
    Are you okay?
    Em nodded at Zach, but she wasn’t okay at all. She hated it when Matt lied, and she hated it that she was glad that he had.
    ‘Fine,’ said Renard reluctantly. ‘But Simon goes with you and you animate into the painting directly. Retrieve whatever clue Sandie has left and then animate back ... immediately. Understood?’
    Simon stood between the twins with his fingers hooked on the waistbands of their jeans, leaving their hands free to animate. Renard had moved the still-life from the wall to an easel in the centre of the library, around which they were all gathered.
    In unison, the twins locked the image of the painting in their imaginations and closed their eyes. Matt leaned in front of Simon and began drawing the desk first. While he captured that, Em tackled the specific objects sitting on the desk, starting with the skull. She loved drawing skulls.
    Wait!
    Em’s eyes popped open a beat before she heard Zach’s whistle. Matt lifted his hand from the page, the paper already shimmering with lines of light. Zach grabbed the key they’d almost forgotten and slipped it quickly into his dad’s pocket.
    The twins resumed their drawing, fingers flying, becoming more translucent with every stroke. Soon the three of them were made up of light and colour. With a whoosh, they shot into the centre of the still-life, sending tiny haloes of light into the air above it.
    ‘As long as we can see the particles of light,’ Renard murmured, ‘they’re all okay.’

THIRTY-THREE
     
    The Middle Ages
    The Monastery of Era Mina
     
    S olon sat up with a bump the size of an egg on the back of his head. He sensed the peryton’s presence before he felt its touch. The wind had shifted direction and become a warm breeze. The force of the receding tide drained the water from the pool where Solon was submerged, flipping him on to his stomach.
    Coughing and gagging, drenched and shivering, Solon expelled a bucket’s worth of slimy, salt water. At the sharp insistent prod of the peryton’s gleaming antler, he sat up. His head ached. Leaning back on his elbows, he looked around the darkening cove for the stranger and his painting. Where had he gone?
    Satisfied that Solon was okay, the peryton leaped on to the rocks in front of the cove and took flight, disappearing like a spray of stars in the darkening sky. Solon watched it go with groggy eyes.
    After Vespers in the Abbey, Solon headed for the refectory with the other brothers for his evening meal. Overhead, heavy clouds scudded across the sky. Brother Thomas, the monastery’s master baker and passable cook, lamented as he served Solon his meal that a bad storm was coming in from the lands to the north.
    ‘Ach, I can feel it in here,’ he said, rubbing beneath the knee of his weakened left leg.
    Brother Thomas’s leg injury was the consequence of once wrestling a boar on to a spit for a royal feast. The weakness in his leg had done little to impair his movements. With or without the aid of a crutch, he was fast on his feet.
    Brother Thomas had a number of body parts that talked to him on occasions of astrological and agrarian significance. His nose smelled a full moon rising, his ears heard the turnips growing. Solon’s favourite was generally Brother Thomas’s eye.
    Brother Thomas had lost an eye at the point of a Viking sword when he was a boy. A leather eye patch created by the Abbey’s tanner covered the socket. On the evening of the winter solstice,