Victories

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Where’s the nearest working phone?” Addie demanded.

  * * *

  It was early evening. The high walls of The Fortress cut off the last of the daylight, but in the center of the courtyard a roaring bonfire gave both heat and light. It was surrounded, whimsically, by chairs and couches looted from the offices and living quarters, and at the opposite side of the courtyard steps, there were several barbeque grills set up, with buffet tables flanking them. They held as lavish a spread as Breakthrough had ever put on back in the days when Mark had been trying to overawe Radial with his wealth and power, but Spirit thought the food tasted a lot better now.

  Over the noise of the fire they could hear the roar of generators outside the walls. The Red Cross and the National Guard would probably be here by morning, but right now, the materials Breakthrough had stockpiled for the end of the world were being used to make sure everyone in Macalister County had heat, light, and a place to sleep. A tent city had been set up so nobody would have to sleep in peasant huts, and Mark had told Spirit that Breakthrough would be giving back to the town—for real, this time.

  “As soon as my lawyers find out if I’ve got any money left,” he’d added, laughing.

  Mark had been one of the first Shadow Knights to recover in the aftermath of Mordred’s death. Spirit’s first guess had been right—with Mordred gone, so were everyone’s Reincarnate selves. The new improved Mark Rider was working as hard as anyone else not only to take care of the sick and injured, but to get rid of all the evidence of Mordred’s plans before the authorities showed up to ask what the hell had happened here in Macalister County. The fire in the computer center had helped, but Mark and everyone who wasn’t lying in a hospital bed had spent most of the afternoon dragging out paper files and documentation to make a bonfire.

  As for the few who’d died during the battle—about a dozen Breakthrough people, including Mark’s wife and brother—the plan was to blame as much of that as they could on Anastus Ovcharenko. The Russian Mafya hitman had fled in the confusion.

  And now it was time to celebrate. To give thanks for not just their victory, but for the fact they were all alive. Almost everyone was here—townspeople, Breakthrough people, and Oakhurst students. There were still a lot of missing kids (who would probably be missing forever, since Mordred had probably sacrificed them to his necromancy), but at least practically everyone Mordred had recruited to the Shadow Knights was still alive.

  “I don’t blame anyone,” Spirit said to Burke. Both of them, like nearly everyone here, was dressed out of Breakthrough’s closets, especially since none of the townspeople had really wanted to go on looking like refugees from the nearest RenFaire, and the Oakhurst kids had been wearing bloody rags. The two of them were sitting together on one of the couches. A few of the braver souls were up close to the fire trying to toast marshmallows, but it was a huge blaze. Nobody was having much luck.

  “Neither do I,” Burke said. “We were lucky. Back when we were all still at Oakhurst you broke Mordred’s spell over us, so we knew what the stakes were. A lot of people weren’t that lucky.”

  Spirit nodded silently. In one way, none of the Shadow Knights, or the Gatekeepers, or even the rank and file of Breakthrough, had gotten a real choice about what they’d done. Mordred had dazzled them with wealth and power—and dazzled them in another way, with magic.

  I guess that’s a thing of the past, too, Spirit thought. She remembered the moment when she’d struck at the Gallows Oak. Perhaps all of them had given their power to that blow. Or perhaps it was a byproduct of Mordred’s death. All she knew was that the magic of the student Mages of Oakhurst seemed to have faded away to only a shadow of its former strength. She didn’t miss her own magic—she’d only had it a short time, and never really understood it—but some of the kids were really upset at losing what they’d had. The Weather Witches could predict the weather now, but not summon storms. The Fire Witches could still light a candle or a pile of tinder—but the days when they could have set the entire Fortress burning with just a single thought were over. Even the Illusion Mages could only summon up faint shadowy ghost-images now.

  The Scrying Mages seemed to be the happiest of all of them about losing their Gifts.

  “I guess we were all victims of Mordred,” Spirit said. “And if some of us were happier than others as the minions of an Evil Overlord, well, nobody remembers much now.”

  “By next year, it will probably all seem like a bad dream,” Burke said.

  “Oh my god, I hope so,” Spirit said feelingly. But Burke’s comment made her wonder—where would she be in a year? She was still an orphan. So was everyone else from Oakhurst. And now, none of them had anywhere to go.

  “Another one for the fire.” Mark Rider walked by them, a cardboard box filled with files in his arms. He flung it high and hard, and it landed on the fire with a shower of sparks.

  “What was in that?” Kelly Langley asked idly.

  “Who cares?” Mark answered. “Whatever it was, it’s better gone.”

  “How much more stuff is there to go?” Burke asked, as Mark turned away from the blaze.

  “Not much,” Mark answered, smiling. “Most of it’s going into the furnace in the basement, then the ashes are being flushed into the new sewer system Breakthrough put in, where I defy any forensic analyst to reassemble them. But I thought you guys deserved a celebratory bonfire.”

  “We deserved,” Spirit said firmly, including Mark in her words. “We all won today.”

  Mark bowed—an oddly courtly gesture from someone who no longer had medieval memories to draw on—and wandered off to speak to someone else.

  I just hope none of the Townies completely flips out when they’ve had a few days to recover, Spirit thought. In the chaotic first hours after the victory, it had been Loch who came up with their cover story: a freak tornado had wiped out the entire town. It had holes in it you could drive a truck through (a really big truck), but it made a lot more sense than the truth did. Say something enough times, and even you’ll start to believe it, she told herself.

  “I finally got through to my lawyers,” Loch said as he arrived to join them. “Between Spears Venture Partners Limited and Prester-Lake BioCo, we’ll have enough clout to cover up everything here.”

  Loch was wearing a button-down shirt a few sizes too big for him under a green sweater. He sat down on the arm of the couch, and Burke put an arm around him in a quick hug.

  “Oh, but there’s nothing to cover up,” Addie said, sitting down beside Spirit. She was holding a platter heaped with burgers in buns, and everybody took one. “It was a freak tornado. I even heard Sheriff Copeland telling Mrs. Weber that.” Addie favored all of them with her best wide-eyed idiot expression.

  “Oh, well, in that case.…” Loch said archly. Addie snickered.

  “So … what do you suppose happens now?” Spirit asked. It was the question she hadn’t wanted to know the answer to, but if she couldn’t ask her friends, who could she ask?

  “Well, first Breakthrough and Prester-Lake rebuild Radial,” Loch said. “I heard Brenda Copeland say we’d all probably be wards of the County for a while—at least until all that Oakhurst stuff gets sorted out. Some of us probably have relatives we could be going to. I don’t.”

  “Me, either,” Addie said. “But I’m pretty sure my trustees will come swooping down and pack me off to some exclusive boarding school.”

  “For the rich and boring,” Loch said, and Addie sighed in agreement.

  “You know,” Addie said hesitantly, “all the craziness, and the magic, and the making all of us fight with each other, that sucked. A lot. But friends like you guys? That really didn’t.”

  “And Muirin,” Spirit said.

  “And Muirin,” Addie agreed softly.

  They sat in silence for a while, watching the fire. Somebody’d found a guitar somewhere, and Spirit could hear singing and playing, but by now it was too dark to see who was doing it. Spirit tilted her head back ag
ainst Burke’s arm. The sky was a deep blue, and the first stars had appeared.

  “It’s hard to believe that after all that, nothing much has really changed for us,” Burke said quietly.

  “Well, yeah,” Loch answered. “Oakhurst may be gone—I think Mark’s planning to sneak over there and pack the sub-basements of the place with dynamite to get rid of all the stuff down there nobody ought to see—but we’re all still teenaged orphans. We’ll have to finish school. Somewhere.”

  “And someone’s going to have to train new young magicians,” Addie said firmly. “Weak magic is still more magic than most people have. And how do we know it won’t get stronger later?”

  “Do you think more people are going to be born with magic?” Spirit asked, alarmed. “Now that Mordred’s dead, and the Reincarnates are all gone.…”

  “Yeah,” Loch said. “But most of the people with magic—on both sides—were just ordinary people.”

  “Ordinary magicians,” Addie corrected.

  “Ordinary magicians with a future,” Burke said.

  “Ah, but for an Oakhurst graduate to be merely ordinary is to fail!” Loch quoted pompously, and Spirit found herself laughing along with her friends.

  * * *

  The next three weeks were a mix of boring, annoying, and ridiculous for everyone. The medieval village was dismantled and carted away, surveyors came and laid out a new town plan, Katrina cottages started appearing along the new streets as families recovered and began to rebuild. Every single government agency in existence seemed to descend on Macalister County in the wake of the “tragic disaster.” That it involved about a hundred now-homeless orphans ensured that every news organization on the entire planet would show up to ask incredibly stupid questions. “How did you feel when your parents died?” was a real favorite, and after the first twenty or thirty times they were asked, a lot of the kids started giving snarky answers—which were taken as the flat truth, at least by Fox News. Fortunately, a PR firm hired by Prester-Lake BioCo showed up to manage things before any of the Oakhurst kids could get an international reputation as future sociopaths. A number of the townsfolk were happy to take in the “Oakhurst orphans”—Burke was living with the Copelands now, and Spirit was living with the Basses, who’d lost their daughter Erika to a Shadow Knight attack earlier that spring.

  It was weird, Spirit thought, to get to eat pretty much what she wanted. Weird to watch television. Weird to listen to whatever music she liked. Weird to wear jeans, and wear colors that weren’t cream, gold, and brown. Weird to sleep in a bedroom that wasn’t pink all over.

  I guess I’ve got a lot of things to get used to all over again, Spirit thought. At least Burke and I aren’t being split up. But she was going to miss her other friends when they left. Now that she was out of the creepy hothouse atmosphere of Oakhurst, living in a regular house with normal people for the first time since her parents had died, it was as if losing Mom and Dad and Fee was new all over again. She liked the Basses—and Erika’s younger brother, Damien—but their presence only seemed to make her loss fresh and real.

  Nearly all of the Breakthrough employees, except Mark Rider, were gone by the end of the first week.

  With The Fortress as one of the two buildings left standing within a hundred miles—the other one being Macalister High School, since Oakhurst had suffered a tragic and mysterious explosion the day after the tornado hit town—The Fortress quickly became the command center for all the rebuilding efforts. Mark Rider announced that he was donating the building as the new Macalister County Seat, something that Radial’s Mayor Gonzales called “a humbling act of generosity.”

  The Oakhurst kids knew better. Mark wanted to ditch everything related to Doctor Vortigern Ambrosius, “progressive European educator and philanthropist,” as much as they wanted to forget being student mages.

  While it would be years before the county recovered from the bizarre and shattering blow it had been dealt, at least there was no shortage of money to rebuild. Loch and Addie hadn’t been the only “trust fund elite” at the school. But for just that reason, the “Oakhurst family” was breaking up. As lawyers and banks and trusts were slowly contacted, the kids with someplace else to go went there. Addie and Loch had stayed, stubbornly insisting they wanted to be here for the rebuilding, but both of them were minors, and it was only a matter of time.

  And finally, one day, it was time.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe I’m leaving this place,” Addie said. “Alive, I mean.”

  “What, you call this living?” Loch wisecracked. “I’ll write, you know. To all of you.”

  “And we’ll write back,” Burke said. “Come on.” He started his horse forward at a gentle walk, and the others followed.

  It was the first of May. Beltane. The day on which the world had been scheduled to end, only it hadn’t, and only a few people—now—remembered it had been supposed to. Later today Loch and Addie would be driven to Billings—in an ordinary car, this time, not an Oakhurst Rolls-Royce. From there, Loch would go to a boarding school in New York State (he’d chosen it himself, and it had an aggressive anti-bullying policy, as well as a school code requiring respect for all races, creeds, and sexual orientations), while Addie was heading to Switzerland.

  Because it was their last day together, Burke had organized this farewell event, and borrowed horses, too. He said they weren’t going far, or going to be away long, but Mrs. Copeland had still packed a lunch that would probably have fed eight kids for two days.

  They rode down Radial’s new main street. It hadn’t been paved yet, but the sidewalks had been poured and there was so much new construction going on that everything smelled of fresh-cut wood and sawdust. By the end of the month, there’d be actual buildings here again.

  “So where are we going?” Loch asked. “Not back to Oakhurst, I hope.”

  “No,” Burke said. “But I thought we could take a look at it for old time’s sake.”

  “Ha,” Addie said comprehensively. “You mean at the future home of the Prester-Lake School.”

  “I cannot believe you’re naming it after yourself,” Loch said.

  Addie flashed him a brilliant grin. “Don’t be silly, Loch. That would be vulgar. I’m naming it after my money.”

  “And money is never vulgar,” Loch said grandly.

  As a gesture of goodwill to the county (and because, Addie said, somebody had better do something with the place), a new school was going up on the grounds of what had once been Oakhurst. When it was finished, all the kids in the county would go there, but it would also have dormitory housing for any of the former Oakhurst kids who needed it. It should be ready by fall.

  And someday, maybe, teenaged magicians would come here to learn to use their powers. But that time was a long way away, if it ever came at all.

  “I wonder what it’s going to be like going back to school,” Spirit said. “To a real school, I mean.”

  “You’ll hardly notice,” Loch said. “You’re going to be spending most of the time applying to colleges.”

  “At least I don’t have to wonder what I’m going to take,” Addie said. “Business administration. Prester-Lake is a pretty big company. Somebody’s got to run it.”

  “Better you than me,” Loch said feelingly. “I’m not sure what I want to do. Maybe become a counselor.”

  “Troubled teens our specialty,” Burke said lightly. “Well, I’m off to medical school when I graduate. If I can find one that will have me.”

  “Grades are going to be a problem,” Spirit said. Everyone’s last year at Oakhurst had been pretty much a wash academically, not to mention the fact that all their school records had been destroyed.

  “If there’s one thing we all know how to do,” Burke said. “It’s study. The difference is, now it’s going to mean something.”

  “Something real,” Addie said.

  They detoured around the place where the school itself had been. When they’d come to tear it down, nobody
had asked why neither of the dormitory wings had windows. Now the whole area was a building site, and they couldn’t just ride across it. Most of the parts of the school that had still been intact after the explosion had already been torn down, and anything that had been left had been bulldozed flat for the new construction, so the stables were gone, and the little sunken garden with the fountain, and most of the landscaping. Only the chapel and the little train station had survived from when Arthur Tyniger had put Oakhurst up in the first place

  “So where are we going?” Loch asked, when they’d ridden past the train station.

  “You’ll see in a minute,” Burke said.

  The landscape ahead of them was unchanged, and unsettlingly familiar. It had been the scene of Endurance Rides too numerous and horrible to count.

  And of one very important battle.

  For a moment Spirit shivered in a winter wind only she could feel, thinking of the night the five of them had faced the Wild Hunt. The stand of trees where Loch had created his spelltrap—and where they’d sent the Wild Hunt’s leader back to Hell—was just up ahead.

  The little pine forest was, as Spirit had suspected, their destination.

  “The boundary marker’s still here,” Loch said in surprise. He dismounted, and ran his hands over it. “The Warding’s gone, though. At least I think so. It’s kind of weird, not being able to tell any more.”

  “I think it’s a good thing,” Addie said. She swung down out of her saddle and took a deep breath. “Spring! I never realized this miserable wasteland could actually be pretty.”

  “A lot prettier when you aren’t fighting for your life,” Burke agreed with a smile. He dismounted, then reached up to haul the packs off his saddle. “I figured, since two of us are leaving and everything’s changing, we should do something to mark the occasion. Not celebrate, exactly. Just mark it.”

  He opened the pack and pulled out, to everyone’s surprise, a small foldable shovel. “We’ll need this,” he said.