Elliot Channing took a deep breath and tried not to panic. It wasn’t easy, especially when certain very specific, and very pertinent, facts were taken into account. They’d only travelled three hundred yards through the wood, and he’d already found four separate tree roots to fall over. The rope around his wrists was starting to chafe. His Roman sandals were giving him blisters. And his captors were all painted blue.

 

Being gagged, tied up, and led through the forest by a dozen men was bad enough, but it was the blue streaks and swirls that covered the other men’s skin that were really starting to freak him out. And even the woad wasn’t the worse of it.

 

Elliot wasn’t going to think about the worst fact surrounding his current predicament. The ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away theory hadn’t done him a damn bit of good so far, but he hadn’t quite given up hope that it might yield fantastic results any second.

 

The guy holding the other end of the length of rope knotted around his wrists tugged at it. Elliot sped up and promptly stumbled over yet another bloody tree root—didn’t any of the damn things grow underground in Wales?

 

One of the other students who made up the party of Celtic warriors looked across at him and laughed. Ha, bloody, ha ha! Elliot was pretty sure the guy with the screwed up sense of humour was the same man who’d rugby tackled him right into a muddy ditch in the first place. He was never going to get the stains out of his toga.

 

Something moved in the forest to Elliot’s right. None of the Celts appeared to notice. Elliot tried to be subtle as he stole another glance at the patch of trees. Somebody had been standing there a moment before, Elliot would bet his life on it, but there was no sign of him now.

 

That was good, Elliot decided. Whoever was there was being covert. He was pretty sure that’s what people were supposed to do when they were rescuing prisoners from enemy soldiers. Someone was coming to save him, and if they hurried up, they might actually have time to do that before everything got very, very complicated. There were some things Elliot really wasn’t ready to explain to his captors.

 

The warriors led him out from between the closely spaced trees and into a less crowded area of woodland. It seemed to be a clearing of some sort, where several different well-trodden paths merged together before splitting from each other once again.

 

A man stood in the middle of the crossroads. He was wearing a pair of loose brown trousers and some sort of open shirt. Inside his head, Elliot ran through every swear word he knew. There was no doubt that the man standing before them was the same man Elliot had seen tracking them through the trees. Unfortunately his face, and those bits of his body that were displayed by the open edges of his shirt, were splattered with the same woad as the other warriors.

 

Another bloody Celt. Elliot was starting to wonder if there were any other English students attending the university this year. He wasn’t sure if the toga he’d been given was meant to imply that he was a Roman invader or if the costume girl had strange ideas about what Saxons wore, but he hadn’t seen anyone else running around in the forest wearing a cut up white sheet and bugger all else. As a solo suicidal fashion statement, it was really starting to get on his nerves.