Lies and Prophecy

by Marie Brennan

  But now I was paying attention, not just to my own difficulties, but to Julian’s. Any thought I had of asking him for remedial CM help was well and truly dead—he really didn’t need the added work—but I could and would make sure he didn’t collapse.

  Assuming I didn’t collapse first. After all, I still had that PK test to get through.

  ~

  Every heartbeat made my whole body shake. I took a deep breath and tried to relax, tried to find energy somewhere deep inside. This was PK, not a ritual; I couldn’t draw power up from somewhere else and use it for this exercise. Besides, even that would use some of my own strength, and right now I had very little left.

  I exhaled. One more try.

  The flame burned steadily in front of me. I focused on it, trying not to blink, and concentrated. The flame wavered, bent, and slowly flattened out into a disc. My jaw creaked from my gritted teeth.

  A ruler floated over the flame and hovered briefly, just long enough for Townson to measure the diameter. I tried to hold on, but an instant later I lost control of the flame and it shot upright once more.

  My professor gave me a searching look, then scribbled something in his notebook. He was in the telekinetics department, but I hoped he had enough empathic skill to sense how tired I was. Then again, he probably didn’t need empathy to figure that out. I just prayed he’d be lenient. My first two tries had failed even worse than this last one.

  I didn’t watch as Townson moved on to Ana and Geoff, and they, thank the gods and sidhe, didn’t say anything about my test. When class ended, I parted company with them and went back to Wolfstone, where I threw my book bag onto the couch with a snarl. My eyes took in the state of the room, and my mood worsened. My stuff was everywhere. Between CM and PK, I’d done little more lately than read, practice, and sleep. Not enough sleep. And we were less than a month into the quarter.

  What the hell had I gotten myself into?

  My favorite tarot deck lived in a small box on my desk. I excavated it from beneath a stack of books, shoved everything else onto the floor, and began to shuffle the cards.

  Most of the time, if I had a question that hit close to home, I got Akila or somebody else in Div Club to read for me. It was too easy to misinterpret things otherwise; my preconceptions got in the way of my gift. All my attempts to figure out where I was going wrong with CM, for example, turned up nothing but confusion. But this wasn’t a question I wanted anybody else answering.

  Where was this little crusade leading me?

  For path questions of this sort, I generally used a modified Celtic cross layout, with a branched final position. After setting my significator, the Knight of Cups, on the surface of the desk, I began to shuffle the cards, letting the familiar motion soothe and center my mind. Grayson’s class. Tackling the problem of CM head-on. What did I stand to lose if I gave it up, and what did I stand to gain by sticking with it?

  Those answers would come at the end. The first card up, symbolizing my environment, was Strength. More or less what I expected; Grayson’s class definitely qualified as a challenging situation. The woman wrestling the lion even looked a bit like her—not physically, as the figure on the card was white—but they shared a certain cool determination. I crossed that with the obstacles card, and frowned at the five of cups thus revealed. Its interpretation varied between decks, but none of them were good. An excess of emotion, maybe? It got in the way of working magic. I’d learned way back in high school to center myself, though, so that couldn’t be the problem. The cloaked figure brooded over five goblets, some of them knocked over. Sorrow? Obsession? Regret? I nudged my gift, hoping it would cough up something of use, but no luck. This came too close to the question I could never answer: why I failed.

  I moved on. For tools, I had the Lovers. Friends could help me? I thought of revealing my difficulties to Julian, and grimaced. I knew better than to argue with the cards, though. And it was reassuring to hear I didn’t have to do this on my own.

  The fourth card was more puzzling. Generally that position signified hopes or ideals. In this case, it held the Knight of Swords. An active person, highly skilled, brave in the face of danger; the obvious interpretation was a Guardian. After all, that was why I was doing this: to see if that dream was attainable.

  But the obvious interpretation felt wrong—no, incomplete. Court cards usually indicated people, but who? By the traditional physical associations, swords should represent someone like me, with dark hair and blue eyes. But then again, I used cups for myself, which wasn’t traditional at all.

  Julian? The Knight of Swords certainly fit him—the Guardian type, even if he hadn’t gone that route professionally. Did this mean I wanted his approval? Or to be like him? Not a wilder, but someone that strong? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t ferret out the proper reading.

  The next card, by contrast, took no interpretation at all. My past: the Queen of Pentacles. “Hello, Mother,” I muttered. She’d come up that way too many times in my readings for there to be any doubt. Sighing, I flicked the next-to-last card out with my thumb.

  The Chariot, reversed. I didn’t know what I’d been hoping for. Something signifying happy relaxation, the avoidance of stress? But no: this was the future that awaited me if I abandoned my current course, and the cards were calling me chickenshit. If the Chariot upright signified triumph, this was defeat. More, it meant quitting wasn’t going to make me any happier. Maybe the opposite. I didn’t like the idea of giving up on anything.

  So what would I get by sticking with it? That was the second half of the branch. I turned last card over, hoping for an improvement.

  Death.

  After a moment of staring, I laughed. This was the problem with divining for yourself. You got invested in certain expectations, and the upsetting of those expectations could be … well, upsetting.

  I wasn’t some head-blind freshman, though. I knew Death, in its divinatory sense, wasn’t inherently bad. Still, its presence in the spread surprised me. Profound change, even to the point of beginning a new life. Was that what lay behind door number two? I stuck with Grayson’s class, and came out the other end a different person?

  It seemed excessively dramatic. This was just a class, after all. But maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was a stepping-stone to something bigger. Like Guardianship. Which should have been pleasing. My gift, however, working through its impressions, wasn’t sure that the change foretold was even one I was going to choose for myself. That worried me. My mother seemed a likely candidate for the one pushing change on me, and I knew where she wanted me to go.

  Lies, damned lies, and prophecy. On the other hand, forewarned was forearmed; the reading didn’t mean my mother would win out, and it might help me prepare to resist her.

  If I was right about it being her at all. I wasn’t sure of that, either.

  Frowning, I swept the cards together, preparing to stow them once more in their box. As I moved to tap them straight, though, something caught my eye.

  The Moon.

  I pulled it free, staring. The Moon hadn’t been anywhere in that spread, had it? Sometimes cards stuck together, though—fate’s way of telling you something was more complicated than it looked. Only, which card had the Moon been stuck to?

  An involuntary shudder ran through my shoulders as I looked at it. Deception. Danger. Hidden enemies. Was it an obstacle, or something linked with my past? The reversed Chariot took on a more ominous cast in my mind. Not just a quitter, but unprepared.

  That word echoed up from the instinctual depths of my gift. Unprepared. For what? I had no idea. But whatever was coming … I might need to become a different person, if I wanted to be ready for it. Somebody like a Guardian.

  Or at least somebody who could cast a circle properly.

  I shook my head and shoved the Moon into the middle of the deck, where I wouldn’t have to look at it. That interpretation was a house of cards, both literally and figuratively; I wasn’t at all sure I had it right. And there were lots of
things still unexplained. It had carved itself into my memory, though. This was going to be one of those readings that kept prodding me at odd moments, I could tell.

  It had given me this much, at least: no way in hell was I quitting Grayson’s class. Whatever the rest of it meant, I didn’t want to accept defeat.

  And I definitely wanted to be prepared.

  ~

  Common courtesy meant most students placed shields over their dorm rooms, to keep everyone from sharing in the drama and adventures of their neighbors. The minute Liesel walked in, though, she caught the brunt of my frustration and annoyance. “Problems?”

  She’d been out doing a volunteer shift for Open Door, one of the campus peer-counseling groups; I hated to unload my problems on her, too. But after two years of rooming together, I knew Liesel wouldn’t ask if she weren’t willing to listen. “Parents. Of the maternal variety.” I sighed and yanked my hair into a fresh ponytail. “She called a little bit ago. I told her about Grayson’s class, and made her day. But then I brought up Julian.”

  Liesel didn’t need me to explain why that was a mistake. She sighed, setting her bag gently on the floor. “Why does she hate him so much?”

  “She doesn’t hate him,” I said, knowing it sounded defensive. “I mean, she’d never call him a—a changeling or anything. She just doesn’t approve of me associating with him. It’s a social issue.” One plenty of people shared. Robert had once let slip that he wasn’t the first person the University asked to room with Julian, though he refused to say how far down the list he’d been. It could have been a terrible pairing, with Robert all impulsiveness and extroversion, and prone to planting his foot in his mouth. But it had worked out well in the end, dragging Julian into enough of a social life to keep him from self-destructing out of sheer isolation.

  By way of Liesel, as it happened. “Your mother takes it further, though,” she said, fetching her hairbrush from the bathroom. “I mean, I understand the basic problem. Robert invited me to dinner that first night because of my empathy; he trusted I’d at least be nice to Julian. But you were the one who turned it into friendship. Without you, I might not have gotten that far. He’s very … off-putting.”

  “That’s a polite way to put it.” I dropped my shoulders firmly, trying to relax them, and scrubbed at my eyes. “He makes people’s skin crawl. His Krauss rating’s got to be through the roof.”

  “And everything about them is so secret,” Liesel said. “At least in Germany. All I really knew, growing up, was that wilders are dangerous, and that’s why the government handles them.”

  “They aren’t dangerous, not once they’re trained.” I could hear the frustration in my own voice, and tried to moderate my tone. Venting at Liesel was not going to make the world get over its stupidity. “That’s the whole point of them being wards of the state: the government can keep the wilders from torching themselves and everybody else while they’re learning control. But once that’s done, they’re fine.”

  Liesel nodded, then stopped so she could twist her hair into a bun. “I understand that, intellectually, but on a gut level it makes no difference. Julian still feels like he could take the roof off Wolfstone if he wanted to.”

  I wondered briefly if he could. He could survive both Combat Shielding and Power Reservoirs at once, while still taking three other courses. And passing them all. “Anyway, my mother just doesn’t like me being friends with him. It’s a mild social taint among her peers. I frankly don’t give an iron damn.”

  “What does your father think?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows. He’s wrapped up in his work. He does less of the high society thing than my mother does.”

  Talking about her wasn’t making my mood any better. I brooded at a small stain in the rug while Liesel plugged in her port and woke her screen to check for messages. Then she said, out of nowhere, “Grayson was going to assign the first big practical yesterday, right? Have you tried that yet?”

  Either her tact had just failed in spectacular fashion, or her empathy told her I needed to talk about this whether I wanted to or not. My head fell against the back of the couch with a thump. “Yes. And it was … weird.”

  Liesel perched on the armchair and listened to my description of the previous night, and the guys’ verdict on my athame that morning. I kept it as clinical as I could, not to hide anything from her—a lost cause—but to help myself think through it. When I was done, she mused, “So they said you did it right. The athame, that is.”

  “Yeah.” My failure with the circle had dominated my thoughts, but that was something to be proud of, I supposed.

  Liesel had on what I thought of as therapist face, attentive and kind, which meant her mind was whirling behind those big hazel eyes. “This was a modified Yan-style circle?”

  I nodded. “The principle of it was sound enough. The problem wasn’t in the method. And according to the guys, it wasn’t in my athame, either. Which means it must be in me.”

  “What does that mean, though?” Liesel asked. “What kind of problem?”

  “I’m just never going to be good at CM.” The words came out with difficulty. I didn’t want them to be true, because of what they meant.

  “But didn’t you say you were able to channel the power?”

  “Draw it,” I corrected her, but frowned as I said it. “Which … I don’t know. Usually people with small talents can’t pull much power to begin with, like I can’t light much more than a candle. But I guess there’s other ways to be untalented.”

  Sounding for all the world like a Socratic philosopher, Liesel said, “What’s talent, though?”

  I rolled my eyes. “What you’re born with. Or what you manifest with, in this case. As opposed to what’s learned.”

  “Do you think the difficulty with your circle is one you could learn your way out of?”

  I started to answer reflexively, then stopped myself. I’d drawn power—more than I ever did when I was a teenager. That had to count for something, right? The problem wasn’t what I’d thought it was a month ago. And in that case…. “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t at all sure, but it was worth believing in, at least for now.

  And then I remembered the cards. “But I think I might need help.”

  “Help?” Liesel echoed. “How so?”

  I got up and fetched my deck, mostly to feel the reassuring weight of it in my hand. “You don’t have to remind me what I’ve got taped to my screen. But I did a reading for myself, and it suggested I look to other people for assistance.”

  Liesel tilted her head in thought. “I don’t think you mean Grayson’s office hours.” She laughed at my vehement gesture of refusal. “But I bet Julian would help, if you asked.”

  “No.” That bothered me almost as much as the prospect of Grayson. “I’m not going to him with this. He’s a wilder; it would be like asking a fish for swimming lessons.”

  Amusement curled the corners of her mouth, but she didn’t push it. Then one of her hands rose to hover in mid-air, as if about to close around an idea. “Would you like to join the Palladian?”

  “Your circle?” I pulled back in surprise. “I’m not really Wiccan, though.”

  “Neither are half our members—Rafael’s practically an atheist. Those of us who care about the religious aspect take center stage on the holidays; the rest of the time it’s a social thing, and some low-grade ceremonial magic. Good practice for you, in a context where people are used to helping each other out.”

  I busied myself putting the cards away in their box, buying time to think. The Palladian … they were Liesel’s friends, much more than mine. I knew them all, well enough to sit with them in class or eat the occasional meal together, but we weren’t close. And I knew their leader well enough to foresee one potential problem. “Michele wouldn’t like having me there. Agnostic and unreliable with ritual magic? She runs a tighter circle than that.”

  “But would you like to? If you do, then I can talk to Michele, and see what she thinks. The other
s would be fine with it, I’m sure.”

  Would I like to? No. It would mean admitting my weakness in front of others, after years of pretending I just had no interest in CM. But maybe this was what I needed.

  “Sure,” I said, and crossed my fingers as Liesel went to call Michele.

  ~

  Robert cast the circle with an easy competence I envied. It was no big deal; tonight’s ritual wasn’t anything requiring authorization from the University Ring. We weren’t summoning imps or ghosts, or messing with the weather. We were just doing a quiet little initiation.

  We. The seven members of the Palladian Circle, and myself, about to become the eighth.

  The members of the group were a motley bunch—from all three psychic sciences departments, with several international students—but they’d had been going strong for nearly two years now. Most freshman circles bit the dust much sooner.

  The difference was probably Michele. The circle’s French leader was exactly the kind of person every organization needed, the one who made sure things got done. How Liesel had convinced her to let me in, I didn’t know. Michele and I had shared a few classes and swam together at the gym every week last spring, but we’d never quite warmed to one another, even though she and Liesel had dated sporadically since freshman year. With the baggage I was bringing along, I would have expected her to say the Palladian wasn’t the place for me.

  Her opening invocation showed no hint of reserve, though. It was all about friendship and the strength we gave each other. Next came a bit of call-and-response, with Robert, Liesel, Geoff, and Ana presenting symbols of the four elements, and then the focal point of the ritual: the binding itself, the connection that linked us to one another, transforming the seven-plus-me to a stable ring of eight. I wouldn’t have trusted myself to handle that personally, but I didn’t have to. Michele, who despite being a postcog clearly knew her way around ritual magic, had it well in hand. All I had to do was say, “By this I seal our bond,” and prick my finger with the tip of my athame.