“Alright, alright, settle down. You’re third-year archaeology students, not high schoolers, I shouldn’t ever be starting a class with those words.”

Judi didn’t look at any of her students as she delivered that speech, instead focusing on the desk at the head of the class as she worked toward it. She was, admittedly, a few minutes late to walk in, but well within the usual time, so that was no excuse.

This was just always what it was like after her students had got some field experience. Baby’s First Dig.

She parked her briefcase on the desk and turned back to look at the assembled company. “Good news, by the way. My colleague Professor Bingham is happy with the work you all did and with the professionalism of the way you did it.” Now, adjusting her rectangular spectacles, she raised her eyes to the class, her gaze sweeping across them, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “This is not something I usually get to hear, so well done - but also, thank you. We depend on the local digs for future classes, and that means we depend on his goodwill.”

There were a few positive reactions from some of the students, while others were still more interested in either what lay on the trestle tables by their benches or showed on computer monitors from the photos and video taken while they were there.

“Now, we do have some findings here, as I can tell you’ve already seen,” Judi said. “Today we’re going to be looking at those and you are going to be showing me how well you can evaluate archaeological evidence,” she used that phrase after the field experience every time, purely because she knew most of her students wouldn’t be able to and it satisfied her to know that they understood it too.

“I’ll drop by each of you and ask what you’re thinking. I won’t say go mad here but don’t forget to think outside the box. Sometimes a new perspective does clear up a mystery, and if it’s silly, I just won’t pass it on to Bingham’s team when they collect the samples.”

She gave them each a small smile. Everything she’d said was true, but she also knew - and hoped that they all understood - that the odds of anyone in the class discovering anything truly mindblowing were minuscule. Undergraduate students could have insight, but it came much more often from people with life experience in other lanes. A knitting enthusiast had solved the question of mysterious bone constructs once; they perfectly mirrored a much more recent tool for fabric.

What would these kids draw on, aside from their undergrad lessons? Video games, memes, and horror stories?

Judi was already expecting much of what she’d hear in the lesson to be useless. What she was looking forward to screening for was how many of them could provide a good, clear, workmanlike job of analysing what was in front of them, showcasing what they’d learned and proving to her that they properly understood it. Anything else would be a surprising benefit.

“Professor!” It was Felix who raised his hands and called out first. Not surprising. He was keen - most of them were by this point - and he was pretty good at retaining information. What he wasn’t good at was anything that involved using his own initiative, and that could often be a problem.

He had a shallow tray in front of him, and he was gently separating items out from a collection within the tray and taking notes. His identifications were by and large accurate, but she had to work in conversation with him to draw out his own inferences; he treated any question she asked as a leading one, a hint for a good boy toward the right answer.

Some kindly teacher in his youth was probably responsible for the habit, she thought; had always coaxed him to the right answer when he couldn’t get it himself and he had become reliant.

Reanne was the next to raise her hand. There were few locals in the class, but her rural Welsh accent stood out amid the variety of Highlands and Lowlands Scots accents and even the smattering of English voices mixed in.

Judi was fond of Reanne; she was one of those girls who would always succeed, full of confidence and hard work and properly organised. Over the past three years the blonde hair had gone black and one arm had been filled with a sleeve of interlocking tattoos, the black linework of the designs always running ahead of the colour, but neither of these were the career barrier they had been except in a few unusual contexts.

The first thing Reanne said as Judi reached her was “I don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary here,” she said. “But I think I know whose burial place these were taken from. What they did, I mean.”

She tapped a series of items in quick succession. “Spearhead. No wood remaining, but I think we can assume a spear from that. These tiny little metal strips, they were found on the body, pretty tight together but regularly spaced. I think they were studded onto leather armour, the way the Romans did with the lorica segmenta. There’s something on the hooks on the back of the strips; I’m guessing analysis might tell us if it was leather and what it was made from. So this was the resting place of someone who’d been a soldier, or a bodyguard. And this little gold decorative brooch here, maybe a clasp for a cloak? But it’s an expensive decoration. No other finery, so I think the body was part of the guard for someone important, but wasn’t a noble in their own right.”

Judi was nodding all along. “I think that’s a good first assessment,” she said, “and I think there’s a very good chance you’re just right.” But that on its own didn’t account for the bubbling excitement she could see in Reanne. “What else is on your mind?”

“Well, I was one of the people who extracted these,” she said, and she lowered her voice, as if what she had to say would be either a shock or a secret. “The bone structure on the body - they were a woman!”

It was one thing, Judi supposed, to know intellectually that women had always been fighters, that keeping them at home was a comparatively modern decision, but it was another thing to have seen evidence of it for yourself. She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “That does happen.”

“Who do you think she was guarding?”

“Well,” Judi sighed. The Archaeology Department of the University of Scotland was unique in not sharing a campus with any of the others. It had been sited in the remote Highlands purely because of the ruins a mile or so from the campus that now formed the basis of the dig.

The ruins had been discovered during the 1950s, when a particularly bad winter had led a whole section of one hillside to slide away, revealing ancient stone buildings beneath. Subsequent discoveries had made it clear that there were multiple levels of structure on the site, all of them old enough to have been covered over by time before anyone made detailed maps of the area. It wasn’t the first time this had happened in Scotland, but even though this was the remote Highlands, it was the most accessible, the others being an overnight ferry or more away.

There were some records of the people who had lived there, preserved on vellum in stone chests or daubed or carved onto walls, but there would never be a full picture of the history of this bastion of early civilisation. Judi, and her colleague Bingham, both believed that certain old folk tales had likely taken place here, or at least the events that inspired them; coincidences of landscape, structure, and time made it likely. Such tales might be the best they could do to extract a narrative of the place itself, not just the people within.

“I think that will take a lot more time to piece together,” was the way she chose to put it. “We’ve only recently started excavations in this section. It’s an era we have little information on, and this is only part of the puzzle. But as you continue your career, even if you go elsewhere, I’d keep an eye on the news from here.”

Reanne gave her a smile in return, and Judi knew she’d pitched it right. She moved on.

Stuart White raised his hand as soon as she stepped away from Reanne, and had obviously been waiting. He was grinning, something he rarely did in class, and in hindsight she thought that was why she went to speak to him before she spoke to anyone else.

Stuart was a good student. He goofed off occasionally, but he got the work done. Judi had a soft spot for him in a very different way to how she sympathised with Reanne; Reanne was definitely going somewhere, but Stuart would need to hunker down and put in the work if he wanted to do the same. Privately, Judi wasn’t sure whether he would or not, but that wasn’t her job; her job was to make sure that if he wanted to he had the opportunity.

Stuart had taken up position in front of one of the computers, and when she walked over he was tapping a mechanical pencil rapidly against the side of the keyboard, obviously hyped up and excited. Judi braced herself.

“What do you have for me, Stuart?”

“A, what do you call it,” he said. “A, a, a personal rune maybe? Would it be a rune? Some kind of glyph.”

Her eyebrows rose. If true, this would be interesting, and would technically be new simply by virtue of Stuart noticing it first. With no more information, though, it was just as possible that he’d spotted cracks in stonework and assumed them to be carvings. Or even cracks in old vellum; it had happened before, and people had got very excited and even produced translations before realising.

In fact it turned out to be paint daubed on stone. It had faded, of course, over the centuries, but the lines were still visible.

They were straight, angular lines despite being sketched out entirely within the outline of a person, an outline Judi immediately read as a man wearing a cloak.

This outline had been picked out in a white or near-white chalk; the jagged symbol was in a deeper brownish red. If it wasn’t for the fact blood would long since have faded completely away she’d have assumed it to have been picked out in human blood.

“It’s not any form of futhark I recognise,” she said thoughtfully. “Not Ogham either, or any futhorc-based cipher runes I’ve seen before. But rune seems like the right word, I would say. I think you might be right.” She frowned at the display. “I wonder how easily we could create a cleaner, clearer version of this.”

“That should be easy,” She heard the click as he readied the mechanical pencil for action, only to realise that a largely digital classroom didn’t have notebooks to hand; Judi was about to say, gently, that she’d see if there was a pad in the store cupboard but Stuart had impulsively tried something else.

Dragging the pencil over the back of his other hand, he was tracing out the marks, the tip of the pencil pressed in firmly enough to scrape against his skin. Where he had first pressed the point into himself, a swell of his own blood had been drawn; crimson marks followed the outline.

“Stuart,” she said, “there’s no need to do anything like that.”

And of course there wasn’t. But she found her mouth suddenly dry. Her gaze flickered from the crimson on his hand to his face, and her breath caught in her throat.

The way Stuart looked hadn’t changed, but at the same time, he looked completely different. He had a presence to him; he was awesome, in the old sense of the word. Looking at him filled her with awe.

For a few moments she wondered how to apologise to him for her own presumption. Then he laughed.

“I guess not,” he said, and his eyes were on his own hand, on the mark. “I, uh, I don’t know why I did that. It was like something took hold of me.”

She nodded, in acceptance of his word and also in agreement as she also felt like something had taken hold of her. He was, she thought privately, glorious. How could she teach such a man? And yet she was his teacher, and so it was her duty. That way she could be confident, in future, that he would rule wisely and benev…

…what? She cleared her throat. “Good. Good… find,” she said, and had to strangle her own voice to stop her tongue from traitorously adding my lord to the end of the sentence.

She stood and hurried on to the next student, her head reeling. She didn’t understand the feelings - the instincts - that her mind seemed to have suddenly embraced. There was no reason for them. He’d neither done nor said anything out of the ordinary, in fact he’d been (a brief mental conflict here as she insisted to herself upon the word) foolish in not simply waiting for a piece of paper.

Throughout her conversation with Jimmy Stevens, her mind kept returning to Stuart. At first it was almost like daydreaming, but as she kept forcibly shutting those wandering thoughts out, it seemed to her that her mind was trying to trick her.

She would start thinking instead of how to communicate Stuart’s find to Professor Bingham, and of course from there it was easy to think about herself at his side, standing by and watching, strangely but proudly passive.

Or she would be thinking about the incident book, and how she was going to write up his injury. It probably had to be recorded; someone would notice, especially as it was on the back of his hand. She hadn’t been able to stop him in time, and she didn’t think that would receive any pushback from her colleagues, as he had been so impulsive; on the other hand, it would embarrass him to be thought foolish.

It was not good for a ruler to be thought foolish. It opened up a greater risk of - but, with an effort, Judi brought herself back to focus on reality. Stuart was not a ruler.

He was a student. She had no idea what his family was or did, but as she’d never heard the surname Bingham outside Austen before, she was quietly confident this was no aristocrat. There was something about him.

But Judi knew that if she’d been asked to describe him before that lesson, she’d have had little to say, and none of it would have involved his raw charisma or inherent leadership abilities. It certainly wouldn’t have touched on how naturally she felt she’d fit in at his right hand.

Intrusive thoughts, Judi knew, happened to us all, Sometimes an idea appeared in someone’s head with no real indication of how it had got there. But this was far more detailed than most; it was an idea with texture, as if she’d been daydreaming over and over for some time, refining her ideas until they had that intricate shape. And she knew that she hadn’t.

She avoided his presence for the rest of the lesson, but only by maintaining constant vigilance against her own actions.

As the class filed out of the room, her eyes were drawn back to him. He stood out from the others, not just because of his charisma; most of the class stayed a few paces away from him, giving him personal space, a respectful area. Reanne followed him, two paces behind rather than the three paces on either side that the others maintained at a minimum. Judi’s eyes narrowed.

*

Alright, so it wasn’t really done to shadow your own student in his path across campus, and certainly she’d be later to her next seminar than she’d intended. All the same, Judi was by now sure that there was more happening than met the eye; she just didn’t know what it was, why it was happening, or what to do about it.

That was why she was following Stuart and Reanne across the small campus. It certainly wasn’t jealousy.

The two had never been romantically linked to her knowledge, even in the somewhat looser definition of ‘romantic’ that held sway during students’ academic careers; she didn’t exactly track the mating habits of undergraduates but it had been hard to miss the aftermath of Reanne’s big relationship collapsing messily last year, and if she’d been asked to guess, she’d have assumed Stuart was dating someone quiet and mousy.

Hard not to look at the way the two of them were standing and not read Reanne as attracted to him; her body language was attentive, deferential. Her gaze frequently swept their surroundings (Judi wouldn’t be willing to bet she hadn’t been seen as she followed them, though she was sure Stuart wouldn’t have noticed.

She told herself that they weren’t standing like lovers, though. At the car park they stopped, standing by Stuart’s car, and they had a conversation in low tones; Judi had sufficient self-possession to not try and creep close enough to hear them. Whatever they were talking about, they clearly came to a decision. Stuart walked over to Reanne’s car, she held the passenger door open for him, and they drove away.

Judi would concede that Stuart’s car was cheaper than Reanne’s, and probably less comfortable. Perhaps that was all that had made the decision. At the same time, some part of herself had thought approvingly that Reanne being Stuart’s driver made more sense, and yet Judi wasn’t sure she trusted those thoughts, that instinct.

*

Her car, but his place; Stuart had presented it like a compromise, and Reanne supposed that technically it was; she had refused to leave him to his own devices, and he had been suspicious of that.

The car had been quiet aside from her radio for most of the drive, aside from the occasional two-word instruction of navigation. She was beginning to think he didn’t trust her, was cagey around her.

Ridiculous, of course. She would do anything for him. But as she drove she had more time to think.

He had no reason to trust her yet, she realised. Not that he had any reason to distrust her, either - far from it. They’d never really interacted.

And now here she was, leaving a class with him, refusing to leave his side afterwards. Accompanying him even off campus and refusing to take no for an answer. She conceded, to herself at least, that she understood why it might have surprised him.

Nonetheless it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to her.

She reached out and rested one hand on his thigh for a few moments, gently squeezed it, then returned her hand to the wheel. She should say something, she thought, to accompany the gesture, but she wasn’t sure what; vague sentiment dried up on her tongue.

It wasn’t her place to speak to him first, she thought, and promptly felt angry with herself because that idea didn’t fit her at all; she had worked hard to be treated seriously in any classroom she joined, it had been part of her efforts to grow into herself, along with the gym visits, the hair dye, the tattoo sleeve…

But somehow giving Stuart deference felt different, like it was natural to do.

“I don’t know what you think this is,” Stuart said abruptly, breaking the quiet and shattering her train of thought. “And I’ve just realised I’m going to need a lift back onto campus to get my car.”

Reanne wanted to reassure him, but she didn’t know what she thought this was any more than he did. On the second point he raised, however, she felt she could reassure him. “Just ask me,” she said. “Or call me,” she continued, adding in that suggestion only with a reluctant effort. “I’ll be here.”

“Why?”

Reanne let that go unanswered for a while, if only because her lips had almost shaped the first word of You are my liege-lord before she realised what she was about to say and stopped herself.

He wasn’t her liege-lord, of course. That wasn’t a thing anymore. And when it had been, it had been a duty, a weighing down with obligations, not a pleasure.

Perhaps that pleasure itself was the reason. “Because I want to,” she said.

“Why?”

Asking those questions, showing uncertainty like that, was unbecoming, unattractive; He should be taking charge. “What about you? What do you want?” she asked instead.

Stuart lapsed back into quiet for a while Out of nowhere, he drew in a deep breath, then sighed loudly. “Today,” he said, “has been fucking weird.”

Reanne laughed, glanced sidelong at him, returned her eyes to the road. “You’re not wrong,” she said. “Did you find anything?”

“Oh, yeah.” The tone of his voice was immediately more enthusiastic. “I think I found part of their writing system.” They were far from full-fledged archaeologists, but they knew enough not to automatically consider a single symbol to map to a letter or even a word until they were sure. As Professor Slater had drilled into them in her first class on the subject, archaeologists of the future might well look at the radiation trefoil and take it, at first glance, for part of a primitive alphabet.

“Really?”

Stuart was only too happy to tell her more.

*

In the end Judi didn’t email Stuart’s discovery over to Bingham, not yet; she told herself she didn’t want to do half the job, that it would do her good to check through the discoveries and the photos of the new excavation looking for anything else that might be another rune in that style. She was almost sure that she’d seen one, somewhere, and hadn’t known what it was.

Perhaps it had passed under her eyes when she’d done a cursory review before the class, or perhaps one of the first couple of students she’d called on had shown her something marked with it. Before seeing Stuart’s sample she might have thought it just an interesting design.

When she found it, it wasn’t carved into stone, or painted into an illustration. It had been worked into a brooch, the clasp of a cloak worn by the lord’s bodyguard, the one Reanne had found.

Putting them side by side, the two runes had too much in common not to be connected. Smiling, she collected images of both and got ready to send Bingham her findings. Then she stopped.

Judi sat and thought for some time.

The runes were part of the same series. One seemed ascribed to the lord who had overseen the dig site in the time they were looking at, before being laid to rest in the barrow. One was attached to his guard.

Or was it perhaps attached to all of his servants?

And if so, was there a connection between the two?

Judi didn’t believe in magic, but she believed in coincidence less. Blood was often drawn by people who claimed to practice magics of this kind, or other substitutes were found. Stuart had cut himself in etching a rune of leadership on his skin.

And she and Reanne had responded to it, each in their own way. She had seen the edging. Reanne had touched the brooch. Sympathetic magic worked by connections. The rest of the class had responded by giving him space; the person closest to the casting and the person who had felt a kinship with someone wearing his guard’s mark had clearly felt things more deeply.

She sighed heavily. It was all very implausible, of course. And even if not, when the cut healed up - and it had been fairly shallow - any magic it might hold would presumably dissipate. Any spell she might imagine was there should be broken.

So why was it, Professor Judi Slater wondered, that she didn’t want the spell to be broken?