Lies and Prophecy

by Marie Brennan

  “Go home, Kim,” Grayson said softly. “Quickly. I was the nearest Ring member when this happened, but the others will arrive soon, and you don’t want to be here when they come.”

  Chapter Ten

  Robert raised one eyebrow at Julian, amusement lurking around the corners of his mouth. “Is there, by chance, anything you have neglected to tell me?”

  “Such as?” Julian paged irritably through the book he was holding. The index was worse than useless, and he couldn’t find the information he was looking for.

  “Oh, some trivial matter which might cause Kim to glow faintly at dinner—and not in a magical sense, I might add—while blushing from time to time, at no visible cause.”

  Julian put the book down and gave his roommate a level look. Blushing? He hadn’t noticed that.

  Robert needed no verbal confirmation. He crowed with laughter, sprawling back in his chair so the long bones of his arms and legs radiated outward, starfish-like. “At rather long last! I thought I saw her gathering the nerve necessary to say something to you. And you needn’t pretend I have it wrong; I know she was the one to speak first.” He quieted and looked across at Julian, face still merry. “And now I shall have the delightful entertainment of watching you figure out what to do with her.”

  Before Julian could find something approaching a sane response to that, they heard an unsteady knock on the door.

  Head-blind as he was, Robert simply got up to answer it. Julian reached outward with his mind, and shot to his feet just as his roommate opened the door.

  “Ye gods,” Robert said, seeing Kim outside. Blood streaked her face, and she had the wide-eyed stare look of someone staying on her feet only by force of will. Robert drew her into the room and closed the door while Julian guided her into a seat.

  “What happened?” he asked. He kept himself locked down as he said it; she didn’t need to be hit by his reaction, not in her state.

  “Unseelie,” Kim said faintly, not looking at either of them. “Talman. In the stacks.”

  His hand floated a hair’s-breadth from the slash along her cheekbone, then fell to the bloodstains on her shoulder. “One of them did this to you?”

  “Books first. Then he started throwing computers.” She buried her face in her hands and began to shake uncontrollably.

  Julian wrapped his arms around her, trying to halt his own shaking. Fury nearly overwhelmed everything. The Unseelie had attacked Kim. But he shoved that down; anger wasn’t what she needed from him. He channeled warmth and support to her, and from the other side, even Robert did what he could, one long-fingered hand touching her head. The comfort broke the last of Kim’s fragile control. Tears began to roll down her face, though she made no sound.

  Above her head, Julian exchanged a glance with his roommate, and found Robert’s face reflecting his own thoughts.

  But they stayed silent while Kim cried. Only when she shifted, raising one hand to wipe her face dry, did they sit back. “Grayson came,” she said, her voice still thick with tears. “She felt it, I guess. Said the rest of the Ring would be there soon. She’s going to cover it up. Don’t know how.”

  “The Unseelie escaped?” Robert asked.

  She nodded, the motion jerky. “Yeah. Don’t know where he went. I was too busy playing tennis with shards of glass to pay attention. Then when they stopped flying at me, my first instinct wasn’t to go after him.”

  “Of course not,” Julian said. His anger almost slipped its leash as he said it. Attacks on him, he could accept; he was fair game. Kim was a different story.

  She felt it, and glanced up at him, but he instinctively avoided her eyes. Robert, deliberately or not, deflected them both. “Why was he trying to kill you?” he muttered.

  “He wasn’t,” Kim said. “I don’t think so, anyway. At first it was just scare tactics, trying to make me freak out. Then….” She shuddered, and Julian laid a cautious hand on her shoulder, focusing himself once more. “I guess he lost his temper. Or something.”

  The words were coming slowly, her voice dead with fatigue. She was in no state to keep talking about the matter, and Julian glared Robert into silence when he tried to ask another question. It could wait.

  Julian laid his head on top of Kim’s again, and held her until she was asleep.

  ~

  The light was coming from the wrong direction, I realized sleepily. It shouldn’t be falling on the left side of my face. Was it that late? But no, that didn’t work either; my room didn’t have a west-facing window.

  Puzzled, I opened my eyes. It took a moment for the shapes I was seeing to resolve into a coherent picture, and then a moment more for it to register. I wasn’t in my room. I was in Kinfield still.

  The spartan austerity of the room told me whose it was. I pushed back Julian’s worn blue comforter and sat up. And looked at the window. And remembered that his room, unlike mine, faced west. It was that late.

  “Shit,” I groaned, and flopped back onto the pillow.

  A step outside the door brought me up again, but even as my mind reached out, Julian appeared in the doorway. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just realized I slept through all my classes.”

  He shrugged and came into the room, folding into a cross-legged position on the tile floor. “With good reason.”

  “But I can hardly tell my professors that, can I?” I shoved my hair out of my face and wished for something to tie it with. Unfortunately, Robert cut his ponytail off freshman year, and no longer had hair-bands around. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Don’t you have classes, too?” I doubted he’d gone outside in those scruffy clothes.

  He shrugged carelessly.

  “Julian! You’ve already missed two weeks; you can’t afford to miss more!”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you alone.”

  That was both touching and irritating. Last night I’d been grateful beyond words to know that I didn’t have to worry about defending myself for a little while, that any Unseelie who tried to walk in the door would be dead before he got two steps. Still…. “You’re as much of a target as I am, you know.”

  “Except I wasn’t sleeping off a backlash-headache.”

  Irritatingly, he was right. I opened my mouth once or twice but couldn’t find a useful comeback. Had anyone come for me while I was out, I would have been an easy target. “Don’t worry,” Julian said. “I’ll be fine.”

  That was always his answer. “I guess so,” I muttered rebelliously.

  “How are you feeling now?” he asked, blatantly changing the subject.

  “Better than I was yesterday.” Thanks to my long sleep, I had only traces of a headache. Memory said I’d fallen asleep on their futon; there was no way I’d been in a state to go back to Wolfstone. I hadn’t even noticed them shifting me to the bed. Where had Julian slept? On the futon, probably, if he’d slept at all. He didn’t look like he’d been up all night, but I wouldn’t put it past him. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what explanation Grayson cooked up for the damage in Talman?”

  “Not yet. I told Robert to call if he heard any rumors.”

  “What about Liesel? Has anybody called her—does she know where I am?”

  “She knows. She was scared, at first, but you might be glad to know the next words out of her mouth were ‘I hope Kim got the bastard good.’”

  I sighed wearily and leaned my back against the wall. “As if I could. I got one bolt off before he expected it, but he blocked everything else. It’s a pity they don’t teach undergrads combat magic.” Julian’s face didn’t flicker, but I still found myself wondering what he knew. If he’d learned summonings before coming to Welton, what else had they taught him? “Shit,” I said, as something else occurred to me. “I left all the books I’d found in Talman.”

  “On the sidhe?”

  “The I Ching. And other things.” I chose my words carefully, so as prevent the conversation from going down any of the various
tracks I wanted to avoid. He didn’t know about my mother’s dream, and it wasn’t like he needed more warnings to protect me. “This is a turning point, so it’s damn near impossible to get anything concrete from divination. Still, I wanted to try other methods—but I don’t know the I Ching well enough to use it without a reference.” And try though I might, I could not convince myself to go back to Talman.

  “I have a book on it,” Julian said. He helped me to my feet, and I did need the help. My knees felt like limp noodles. But we made it to the common room without mishap, where Julian fetched the appropriate book from its shelf.

  “Thanks,” I said, looking it over. The title was one I’d pulled in Talman last night. Now it was lost, somewhere in the disaster that was the third floor. Gods, I hoped the checkout boy was all right. Maybe he’d just gone to the bathroom when the Unseelie slipped in.

  I stretched my back, feeling it pop in four different places. “Well. I should go back to my room and give this a try. Maybe even some class work; I can’t afford to miss tomorrow, too. Not if I’m supposed to be acting normal.”

  Julian nodded and picked up his coat. I frowned. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Going with you.”

  I almost objected. I didn’t want to be coddled, like some kid who couldn’t cross the street on her own; I’d had enough of that after my brother died. Then it occurred to me that, while Julian might want to protect me, that wasn’t necessarily his only reason. And I didn’t exactly object to spending more time with him. “Let’s get food, though. I’m not hungry, but I know I should be.”

  After a quick meal in Kinfield’s dining hall, we went out into the snow. For once, I didn’t care about the cold. Julian walked at my side in companionable silence, not touching but closer than usual, and for a brief moment I could pretend everything was normal.

  But not forever. With people coming out of afternoon classes, I should have felt safe. Instead, every nerve was standing on end, hypersensitive for danger. My eyes darted from side to side, and it was only by force of good manners that I didn’t psychically scan everybody who walked past. My muscles were tensed to run.

  “Try to relax,” Julian said quietly.

  I tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed. “I know. They’re not likely to try anything here.”

  “They might,” he said. “But you can react faster if you aren’t tense.”

  That unexpected response rocked me. Were we really in that much danger? No, hopefully not—but this was how Julian lived, or at least how he’d been trained. Assume danger, but don’t let it paralyze you. Gods. And I needed to learn to think like that, too.

  It was impossible to be aware of everything at once, but my paranoia tried. Could I trust my senses, though? This might all be an illusion. All the people I saw around me, they might not really be there. I might not be where I thought I was. If it was a glamour, the level of detail was insanely high, but who was to say the sidhe weren’t capable of it? I could be walking the wrong way, into the Arboretum where they could attack me, or off campus and onto a road. They could kill me with simple misdirection.

  Could they deceive my body like that? I’d walked this path a thousand times. Surely my feet would follow the right course without thought, would notice if my surroundings went askew.

  But I couldn’t be sure.

  By the time I reached Wolfstone, my nerves were frayed. I reached out reflexively and scanned the building, feeling the comfortable familiarity of the place, the gentle pulse of the various shields on people’s rooms. My own room. I didn’t think the sidhe could fake that.

  We paused inside the doorway, gear-shifting again from potential Unseelie targets to a pair of young people in the awkward early stages of a relationship. An involuntary grin crept over my face at the ridiculousness of it. Julian showed amusement as well, but before we could decide what constituted an appropriate goodbye between a standoffish wilder and his girlfriend of two days, a voice came from the stairs. “Hey, Kim. Hey, Julian.”

  We twitched apart, as if we’d been caught doing something scandalous. Michele crossed the entrance hall, studying the two us with obvious curiosity. Then her eyes widened. “Lord and Lady, Kim—what happened to you?”

  I’d forgotten about the cuts on my face. “A botched PK exercise,” I improvised. “The glass exploded, and I, being stupid, got hit.”

  “Ouch. Weren’t you wearing any protection?”

  “Obviously not enough.” Michele made a sympathetic noise, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “What are you doing here?”

  “Liesel asked me to come by. She and I meditated together, and then did a couple of protective spells.” She nodded at Julian. “For you as well as for the rest of the Circle.”

  Julian only said, “Thank you,” but I rather thought he was surprised. “And thank you for the healing work—I sent everyone a message, but I also wanted to say it in person.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. I mean, I’d thanked them, but somehow it never occurred to me that Julian would think of it, with everything else on his mind. I hadn’t considered what it would mean to him, that people he wasn’t good friends with would do that for him, a wilder.

  “You’re welcome,” Michele said. “Hey, not to be rude, but I’ve got something to tell Kim—do you mind?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got to head off anyway. Kim, I’ll see you later.”

  “Bye,” I said, and inwardly cursed Michele for not having come downstairs thirty seconds later.

  When he was gone, the Circle leader said, “I guess I could have said this in front of him, but—well, I had a weird dream last night, about you.”

  First my mother, now Michele. At this rate we weren’t going to keep things secret much longer. “What happened?”

  “The whole Circle was there, but you were standing apart, looking at us in a strange way. And there was this band of mist between you and the rest of us, and I was afraid to touch it or walk through it.”

  My precognition twinged ominously. “Any idea what it means?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  I shrugged with my best imitation of carelessness. “Me neither. Thanks for telling me, though.” Everyone was warning me lately. Grayson’s reinforcements could not arrive fast enough.

  “You’re welcome.” Michele looked uncomfortable. “I have to go. Just—be careful, all right?”

  I nodded. “I will be.”

  Alone once more, I climbed slowly up the stairs. Whatever Grayson was busy doing, I couldn’t sit on my hands—not where my own safety was concerned. I would try to get information tonight.

  ~

  This time the four of us ate in Liesel’s and my room in Wolfstone. Back in the days when we had nothing to hide, we’d rarely taken our meals out of the dining halls. Now it was becoming routine. We couldn’t talk about the sidhe in public, and our conversations were about little else.

  Even when the topic wasn’t the sidhe, it was still indirectly about them. “So, did you hear about the idiot who set an imp loose in Talman?” Robert asked dryly as we ate.

  I blinked, momentarily confused. Then I made the connection. “What the hell did Grayson do?”

  “Covered your tracks—yours and the Unseelie’s.” Robert shook his head in admiration. “The woman works fast, I’ll give her that. She conjured up an imp and persuaded it to run all over the mess, covering the magical traces with its own, and then subdued it before anyone else arrived. Not that she’d find that last a difficult task. I’ve yet to see the imp that could look Grayson in the eye.”

  I glanced at my textbook from Lesser Banishing Rituals and shuddered. Imps were, at the moment, beyond my skill. They were pissants in the grand scheme of things, being nothing more than the embodiment of humanity’s baser urges, but they were bloody nuisances, and sending them back to the weird quasi-plane they inhabited could be a frustrating task. The only thing that made them useful was that they were marginally more intelligent than constructs, and
could be drafted for more complex tasks. “Why the hell would anyone let an imp loose in the library, though?”

  “To do his research,” Robert said blandly. “Except that the creature had ideas of its own.”

  Gods. I could just see some of the idiots on campus doing that. “Who’d she blame the summoning on, though? And how’d she handle the issue of permits?”

  “According to rumor, it had been loose for too long, so she could not tell who called it. It was gone before the other Ring anchors got there, so they could not check her story. And presumably the fellow responsible is taking a summoning course. The University may try to investigate who among those currently studying summoning would have an interest in divination books, but since they cannot be certain that was the section the imp was directed to, they will likely give it up as a waste of time.”

  Smooth. Grayson had covered amazingly well, and with little time to plan. Guardians were used to doing that, after all. “What about the checkout boy, though?”

  “He was discovered locked in the broom closet.”

  “And….”

  “He corroborated Grayson’s tale of the imp, insofar as he was able. The imp, he says, locked him in the aforementioned closet. The rest, he obviously was not there to see.”

  I blinked. “He mistook the Unseelie for an imp? And that bastard, who threw screens at my head, only locked him up?”

  Robert shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Either you are correct, or Grayson got to him first and implanted a ‘suggestion’ of the proper story. Only she can say.”

  That latter sounded more plausible to me. If it was the case, though, Grayson had, in the space of ten minutes at most, summoned an imp, directed it to run amok while she doctored the checkout boy’s memories, and then banished it once more.

  Were all Guardians that good?

  We finished our meals and stacked the dishes by the door, then began setting out candles. Liesel had asked Julian and Robert over to help reinforce the shields on our room. What we currently had blocked us from sensing our dorm-mates’ nightmares or other nocturnal adventures, but she wanted something more substantial. I wondered how much good it would do us against the Unseelie. Our idea of a shield might be laughable to them.