“You’ve sung it ten thousand times already!” Nibs yells over me.
I snap my mouth shut and lean back against the iron door, my post since Arthur’s visit, and the perfect spot to tell if someone’s coming. Not that it matters. By now I’m convinced the whole world’s conveniently forgotten all about me.
“I’m bored,” I say after a while. “Let’s play a game!”
“How about seeing how long it takes Carman to get her ass here and bail us out?”
“That could take ages,” I say. “I’ll be tried and hung before that happens.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Nibs says.
“Why not?” I ask, perking up.
“Because of your Fey blood. Have you noticed a propensity to heal, by any chance?”
I frown to myself, remembering my wounds closing up after drinking from the Sangraal. “I suppose…” I say tentatively.
“So you’re likely to suffer a much more gruesome, painful death instead,” Nibs says with relish. “One that won’t give you a chance to heal back up.”
“That was because of the Sangraal,” I say. “They can’t blame me for that, can they?”
“The Sangraal helps augment one’s powers not temporarily give you one,” Nibs says.
I think back to that dreadful night facing Carman, and how I was able to heal Arthur afterward. “Could it boost your healing too then?” I ask. “Could it restore your ogham?”
Nibs chuckles dryly. “No, but I’d settle for a face lift at this point. Not that it matters in our present circumstances.”
“If I get my hands back on it,” I tell him, “I’ll help restore you to health.”
Before Nibs can answer me with another one of his jabs, the metal of the door vibrates against my back. Someone’s coming down the stairs. I straighten up as the tremors intensify—more than one person is coming, which means this isn’t mealtime….
Someone unlocks the door and pushes it open, projecting a dazzling wedge of light inside the cell. Before I can scurry away to the other end, however, a guard grabs me by the arm and hauls me to my feet.
“Time to get yourself burned at the stake, demon,” the man says before dragging me out into the narrow hallway and closing the door again.
Despite the guard’s painful hold on my arm, the faint heat of the flickering torch releases some of the tension that’s been accumulating between my shoulder blades while in jail. As my vision adjusts to the light, I find myself standing before a familiar figure dressed all in black. The woman’s heavily-lined eyes are watching me with a flat expression, judging as they always have.
“Hello, Irene,” I say, smiling until my lips crack. “Always a pleasure.”
Her nose wrinkles in distaste.
“Laguz,” she intones, flicking her hand towards me.
The guard barely has the time to let go of my arm before a massive jet of water hits me in the chest, cold and unforgiving. When I think I’m about to drown, the deluge stops, leaving me soaking wet and shaking.
“That’ll have to do,” Irene says with a slight smirk.
The guard proceeds to handcuff me before slipping on a heavy iron collar around my neck, a long, heavy chain hanging from it.
“A fitting leash for the little bitch,” he whispers, before dragging me after him.
We emerge next to the church, the sky-lake bright with the light of noonday. The wind picks up, plastering my sodden clothes to my body, and bringing with it the ever-present scent of apple blossoms that can’t quite mask the acrid smell of fires. A chill runs down my arms as I remember the pile of dead Fomori serving as a pyre on my way back from facing Carman. Surely they can’t still be burning the dead?
“Get going, you demon spawn,” the guard says, yanking hard on my chain.
I stumble after him as Irene leads us past the church towards the training grounds. I hear the sounds of commotion long before we reach the arena, and I guess I’m to have a public trial, one the whole school seems most eager to attend.
The crowd’s excited chatter grows to a roar of disapproval the moment I step inside the stadium. Something hits me in the face, splattering all over my hair and my guard’s uniform. I barely taste the juice of a well-ripe tomato before another flurry of vegetables and rotten fruit hits me.
“Death to the traitor!” someone shouts as a solid apple hits the back of my head with a loud thunk before bouncing off to the ground and rolling away in the dirt.
My guard cusses under his breath and forces me to go faster towards a round stand erected a third of the way down the arena floor.
“Rip her ogham out!” another shrill voice screams from the stands.
Applause of approval resounds at the cry when a crackling thunder rends the air. I look up, startled.
“I will have order and discipline at my court!” a voice booms out, coming from the dais raised in the center of the stadium.
The curses and cries die out as quickly as a snuffed flame. The man who spoke is a grizzled geezer, his shoulders pulled back proudly, his face stern. Fluttering angrily on a pole above him is a triangular flag depicting a bearded man with the horns of a ram, a sword in one hand and a wreath of oak leaves in the other—the Board’s sigil.
The guard makes me climb onto the wooden stand then proceeds to attach my chain to it.
“Lovely,” I say bitterly, “as if this wasn’t degrading enough.”
The guard smiles wickedly from his position, then gives a final tug on my bindings before stepping away.
Despite the weight of my fetters, I hold myself straighter. If those people think they’ve got me cowering and ready to do their bidding, they’re out of their bloody minds. I stare, unblinking, at the judge and the rest of the jury set in a semi-circle about him.
To the judge’s right are six members of the Board. I see with some relief that Lady Ysolt and her husband are still alive, though Sir Boris’s scarred face and new eye patch tell me he’s barely made it through the battle alive. Next to him is a brooding Father Tristan, followed by a large woman the size of an adult hippo then, dwarfed between her and my once-upon-a-time stepfather Luther, sits Irene.
My gaze instinctively flickers away from her cold face to wander to the other half of the semi-circle, and my heart skips a beat.
“Percy!” I exclaim, more loudly than I expected.
The knight’s head snaps around in my direction and I break into a wide grin. The last time I saw him, he was on the brink of death after fighting off Dean’s evil banshee. I make a mental note to myself to thank Blanchefleur for saving him; if I ever get a chance to get out of these irons that is.
Percy throws me a quick smile before looking away again, as if embarrassed to be overtly friendly with the accused.
The slight hurts, but I can’t blame him. Rather, I blame everyone else around here. Who was the one who warned against the Fey behind all those black-veined murders? Me. Who warned against Carman getting out of jail? Me! But instead of thanking me, they’re now blaming me for everything!
“Morgan Pendragon?” the old man asks.
“What?” I yell, fired up with indignation.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Arthur grow tense and remember his warning to be a good girl if I don’t want to ruin my chances of getting free. I take a deep, calming breath.
“Yes?” I ask more demurely.
“You have been accused of practicing illegal elemental manipulation,” the judge says, loud and clear for all to hear, “of hiding important and dangerous Fey artifacts, and of theft. Do you deny any of these charges?”
I refrain from rolling my eyes at him. “Yes, your highness,” I say. “I deny them all.”
I hear muffled laughs behind me and the judge’s wide face turns slightly pink.
“You’ll address me as ‘Your Honor,’ if you please, Miss Pendragon,” the old man says.
“Yes, sir. Your Honor.”
The judge nods then starts reading from a fat ledger.
“Let u
s begin then with the illegal practice of EM,” he says, looking over his glasses at me. “A little over a week ago, you found yourself on Island Park, did you not?”
I blink. Was it only a week ago that I was on that cursed island? “Yes, Your Honor,” I say.
“And how did you get to that island?”
“Your honor,” Arthur says, standing up. “There have been many reports, my own included, stating that she’d been kidnapped by the Pendragons’ lawyer.”
“After having escaped from our house,” Irene retorts, her back so straight it looks like a plank of wood’s been shoved down her bustier. “Which is highly suspect in and of itself.”
“Where the only guard present was her kidnapper, which is also highly suspect,” Arthur says, and I have the pleasure of seeing both Irene and Luther squirm.
“Noted,” the judge says. “Miss Pendragon, once on Island Park you were, however, seen performing EM illegally. And not for the first time, I believe.”
I blanch. To my surprise, Lance stands up, his perfect features blank of any expression.
“Your Honor,” he says, “Sir Arthur and myself had been fighting Carman and were losing the battle. We would have been killed if Miss Pendragon hadn’t come to our defense. She also healed Sir Arthur who’d sustained severe injuries, and cured the Lady Jennifer from the Fey poison that claimed so many before. If it weren’t for her, none of us would be present here today.”
I repress a grimace, wishing I could forget that last part—saving Jennifer is not one of my proudest achievements.
“Yet she was there when Carman was freed,” the judge says. “Indeed, she was brought there, which can only mean that she was somehow crucial to Carman’s liberation. So tell me, child, how did you perform those feats? Did you perchance obtain some of the school’s more powerful oghams?”
“Your Honor,” Arthur interrupts again, “no ogham was found on Morgan’s person at the time of her arrest, and there are plenty of witnesses that observed her performing these healings without their use.”
“She could have hidden them,” the blond-haired KORT knight sitting next to Percy says lazily. “I don’t believe she was searched until Lady Irene finally apprehended her.”
The judge eyes me carefully and I gulp. “I’m not quite sure about all the supposed EM, Your Honor,” I say, though Nibs’s explanations come back to mind. “I assumed it was because of the Sangraal.”
There’s a collective intake of breath in the stands behind me at the name of the magical cup, but the judge’s face brightens. This is what he’s been waiting for all along.
“How did the Sangraal come to be in your hands?” he asks.
“I first found the cup here at school,” I say, “but then I lost it and didn’t see it again until it was brought to me up on the island. I think”—I bite on my lower lip—“I think I would have died without it.”
The judge frowns. “Who brought it to you then, child?”
I look down at my hands stained with black, the indelible remains of that one, horrifying time I tried to save Owen from the Siege Perilous. I rub them together self-consciously.
“Who brought it to you, Miss Pendragon?” the judge asks again.
“Puck, Your Honor,” I reply with a sigh.
The jury pulls back in surprise.
As if he’d been waiting to hear his name, I spot the little hobgoblin making his way into the training arena, hopping and skipping down the sandy floor towards the jury’s dais as fast as his little legs will carry him.
Suddenly, his face whips upward and he skids to a stop to sniff the air. His horny head snaps over in my direction and I see his tiny, fluffy tail beat wildly as he launches off in my direction. But before he can reach me, he trips on his own two hooves and falls rolling to the ground, coming to a resounding stop at the foot of my stand. I instinctively try to kneel to help him up but the restraints tighten around me, keeping me locked in my upright position.
“Who let that creature through?” Irene snaps, motioning for the guard to take Puck away.
The hobgoblin’s head pops up above the platform’s wooden base, dazed, then splits into a beatific smile at my sight. As Puck struggles to pull himself onto my stand, I watch with some apprehension as the guard hurries over. But before the man can reach him, Puck hops into my arms and I hug him protectively.
Irene stands up in anger. “Drop him!”
“No,” I say, squeezing Puck closer to me.
A fat and cold raindrop splatters against my cheek, quickly followed by another, and I look up in surprise as the sky-lake bursts open in a fierce rain. Behind me, the stands erupt in panicked shrieks as the crowd struggles to disperse and find shelter.
“The sky is broken!” someone screams.
“The whole lake is going to fall upon our heads!” someone else shouts.
My gut clenches into a tight knot—did the attack on the school weaken it so much that the barrier keeping us safe from Lake Winnebago’s waters is failing?
I glance over to the makeshift dais where the jury is and, squinting through the sheets of rain, find that none of them have moved. I exhale softly as the stands behind me quickly empty themselves out. People are just being paranoid after the attack, but this isn’t anything more than a passing storm. Except that I’ve never seen one in Lake High before.
Puck snuggles closer to me, using my hair as an umbrella, before looking over his shoulder at a glowing shape moving towards us.
“Peace,” I hear a soft voice whisper, carried over by the whistling wind.
Slowly, the rain clears up to reveal Lady Vivian, the school’s principal, standing between me and the jury members. Her burgundy dress whips about her legs in an agitated fashion, the cloth as dry as the rest of us are drenched.
“You did that on purpose!” Irene accuses her, her mascara dripping in black streaks down her pale face.
Lady Vivian waves her hand dismissively. “I thought I’d clear the air a little,” she says. “Nothing like a good rainfall to wash out the dirt, though it’s not always entirely successful.”
Irene’s scowl deepens. “I knew having that filthy vermin show up here was a bad sign,” she mutters, loud enough for all of us to hear.
The judge clears his throat self-consciously. “Let us get back to the matter at hand, shall we?” he says.
“Yes,” Lady Vivian says, “let us. I came to hear the Gorlois heir’s account of Carman’s escape.”
“We hadn’t reached that part yet,” Luther says with a sneer.
“We were going over the Sangraal affair,” the elderly judge adds.
“Very well,” Lady Vivian says.
She snaps her fingers together and the wind picks up again, shooting straight for her. Her skirts twirl as the breeze gathers behind her, then Lady Vivian sits down and remains perched in the air.
“Please proceed,” Lady Vivian says, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips.
I stare at her, mouth wide open—I’ve never seen her use any kind of Elemental Manipulation before. I always thought she was another layman, like Miss Laplace or Miss Pelletier. Frowning, I scan her now still figure—her ears, neckline, and hands are devoid of any telltale jewelry that would indicate the use of oghams. Nor did she call any elemental name.
I let out a small gasp as understanding dawns on me: Lady Vivian is a Fey!
But having a Fey hold so much power over the school—a school dedicated to eradicating her kind—makes absolutely no sense. She must have some oghams tucked out of sight inside her dress somewhere, and learned to call upon their powers without speaking their names out loud. Except I’ve never heard anyone mention that was possible. Even Arthur can’t manage that feat, and he’s supposedly one of the best knights seen in ages.
Puck suddenly grabs my chin in his tiny hands and forces me to look up. I find the presiding judge is staring at me expectantly and I realize he must have asked me a question.
“Yes, Your Honor?” I ask, feeling myself
blush. If Arthur was hoping for me to give a good impression, I’m afraid I’m doing a terrible job at it.
“Carman?” the judge asks, rapping his fingers on the wooden desk.
“Yes, she’s out,” I say.
“Thank you for stating the obvious,” Irene snaps. “We want to know how she did it, and what your role was in it.”
I pause. In my week spent in the cool of my prison cell, I’ve had plenty of time to consider this very question, and only one explanation’s come to me over and over again.
“Reverse engineering, I believe,” I say carefully. “According to the song, there were twelve people who sacrificed themselves to put Carman underground. Four men, four Fey, and four—”
“Nephilim,” says the rotund woman sitting next to Father Tristan. “We know the myth, but that doesn’t explain how she got out of there.”
I scowl at her, then remember Arthur’s words and try to smooth my expression into something more neutral and less likely to get me incarcerated again.
“From what I saw,” I say, “Dean killed twelve people to undo what had been done.” I start counting off on my fingers. “There were those people on the island who disappeared, our knights, Fey…” I shiver as I recall the ground slowly swallowing Dean up before the last of the standing stones rose in his stead. “He also used my blood on the central stone—”
“Gorlois had warned us against that,” Irene hisses, interrupting me. “We should’ve killed her when we first got our hands on her!”
I wince at her tone, though I shouldn’t be surprised by the venom in her voice. She’s never shown me a pinch of affection before, even when she was posing as my mother. But what gets my heart speeding is the mention of my father’s name.
“It seems your account of his words has changed over the years,” Lady Vivian says.
“His words are the same,” Irene says, “it is my interpretation of them that’s wizened.”
My hands clench instinctively around my chains. If Irene saw my father before he died, perhaps he also told her about my mother. Somehow, I need to find a way to question her, and the only way I can do that is if I’m out of these fetters.
Rise of the Fey Page 2