Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  “Have they told us anything about not cutting things up from here?” Addie asked.

  Muirin shook her head smugly, then dived back into the racks to grab a black-and-silver thing that was even worse than the rainbow poof dress—and not even in her size. She couldn’t imagine anyone her age—anywhere, ever—wearing that horror.

  “I’ll get this stuff deconstructed before they have a chance to tell us not to get creative, then it’ll be too late for them to do anything about it.” Muirin glanced down the row of dresses at Spirit, who was wearing a look of utter horror. “Trust me,” she said, knowingly, waving the silver-and-black dress like a flag of triumph. “I might have to cover up where I take Rainbow Brite’s corsages off. You’ll love it.”

  For one moment Spirit contemplated telling her not to bother, that she’d pick something out by herself. Then she looked at the other choices. And realized there were no other choices. “Um … thanks,” she said, faintly. She only hoped she wasn’t going to end up wearing something held together with safety pins.

  Then, as she followed the other two out, she could have hit herself. What was wrong with her? They were all still in deadly danger—and she was worrying about a dress? She’d started her conversation with Addie and Muirin wanting to talk about Elizabeth, who behaved as if she knew she was in danger. She’d wanted to talk to them about the danger she knew they were all still in. And she’d ended up down here picking out a prom dress as if she didn’t have anything to worry about besides who’d dance with her at the ball!

  This was the last thing that should have been on her mind. Maybe it wasn’t just shock and denial. Something was going on here. Maybe they were all being manipulated into forgetting what had happened at Midwinter, and even she was falling into the trap.

  She started to say something to Addie and Muirin—and then stopped herself just in time. Because telling them—again—wouldn’t help. She couldn’t prove there was some sort of Jedi mind-trick stuff going on, and saying there was would only make her look more paranoid.

  No, somehow she had to get them to see it for themselves.

  Maybe investigating the oak in the Entry Hall would help. She had to start somewhere.

  * * *

  Muirin showed up to dinner a little late—not so much that she got in trouble, but enough so that a couple of the proctors gave her a glare. There were bits of white and black thread on her skirt, so Spirit knew she had made good on her plan to cut the two gowns up, and the cat-in-the-cream look on her face told Spirit that she was happy with the results. They kept the conversation to perfectly ordinary stuff over the food, but once they were free for the evening, they all retired to their favorite nook and Addie brought her Monopoly board from her room.

  “I’ve been thinking about the Hunt,” Loch said, reluctantly. “And, yeah, it doesn’t belong here. And, yeah, somebody had to summon it.”

  Spirit managed to not say “I told you so.” She practically held her breath as she waited for Loch to continue.

  “It’s mostly Celtic in origin, so we’re looking for someone who really knows Celtic tradition, the genuine old stuff, as opposed to—oh, Nordic, or Native American or Chinese. So that’s as good a place as any to start,” he continued.

  But Addie sniffed. “Oakhurst isn’t exactly the Rainbow Coalition,” she pointed out. “Most of the students and all of the teachers are whiter-than-white WASPs. That doesn’t much narrow down who could be the summoner, since practically anyone could have known about the Hunt.”

  Spirit blinked a bit in surprise. Addie was right, and somehow she hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t she noticed? Was this something else they didn’t want you to think about? But why? What difference could it possibly make?

  Loch grimaced. “You’ve got me there, but it’s the only thing I can think of. Maybe if we can find someone doodling in ogham or something…”

  Thanks to all the research they had done, Spirit knew what he was talking about, and—hadn’t those marks on the oak tree looked a bit like ogham? “I noticed something I hadn’t before. Two things, actually. You know the big oak tree the Entry Hall is built around?”

  “You mean the Christmas—” Burke began, then blinked, looking puzzled. “Now why would I think that? Especially when you said ‘oak tree’…”

  “That’s my point exactly!” Spirit said, excitedly. “What I noticed was that there’s something about the oak tree—it’s hard to remember it’s there even though it takes up tons of space!”

  Both Addie and Muirin shook their heads, not as if they were saying “no,” but as if they were trying to shake something loose. “Okay. That is weird,” Muirin admitted grudgingly. “Really, really weird.”

  “And wrong,” Addie said firmly. “Why would anyone here want us to not look at the tree? Why not just wall it up or plaster it over or something in that case?”

  “I don’t know, but I decided that if something or someone didn’t want me looking at the tree closely, then I was going to.” At least now she had their attention. “There wasn’t anyone around, so I went up to it and stared at it for a while. There’s marks on it, and they didn’t look natural to me. But it was hard to make them out, and there was more weirdness, because right after I left the room I couldn’t remember them well enough to try and sketch them.”

  Burke mulled that over for a moment. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go and stare at it,” he said, eying her as if he expected her to object. “I mean, if by some crazy chance you’re right, and there still is someone here after the kids—us—you never know how they could be watching.”

  Spirit tried not to bristle at the if by some crazy chance part. “Well, how can we get a good look at it then?”

  “Actually, I think I can,” Addie piped up unexpectedly. “My Art Class is supposed to be doing sketches around Oakhurst all vacation. I can sketch the tree. I bet no one else is.”

  Spirit felt a chill of alarm at the idea of Addie sitting alone in that room, sketching something that had deliberately been protected in some way. What if someone saw her?

  Addie must have read what Spirit was thinking from her expression. “Relax,” she said, with a little chuckle. “I’ll keep our sketch hidden by using an onionskin overlay. I’ll sketch the tree without the marks, and then draw the marks on a piece of onionskin that I can hide easily. And I won’t just draw the oak, I’ll draw the Christmas tree, the fireplace, and the Grand Staircase, too.”

  Well, that seemed safe enough. “Thanks, Addie,” she said with relief. “I should know by now you’re too smart to get into trouble.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Addie demurred, but Spirit could tell she was pleased at being called “smart.” “You can all make it up to me by actually playing this game instead of faking it.”

  * * *

  For the last three years, Elizabeth Walker had wavered between thinking she had a really vivid imagination, and thinking she was going crazy. But it wasn’t the kind of crazy she could actually talk to anyone about. She wasn’t anorexic, she didn’t want to cut herself … no, the problem was, since the morning of her thirteenth birthday … she’d been remembering.

  It had all started with a bang; she’d woken up from a dream so vivid she’d expected to find herself in a stone-walled room, looking out of a narrow little window that had no glass in it toward a harbor and the sea beyond. But the ships in the harbor—in her dream—bore no resemblance to anything she knew; they were all boats with sails. Not sleek racing yachts, but rough and wooden things like something from a movie about Vikings. The harbor itself was little more than a rocky cove with a single wooden pier.

  Her head was weighed down by the two thick braids that hung as far as her knees. She could feel the stones of the floor through her thin leather slippers. And the dress she’d been wearing had been impossibly heavy, made of thick wool—she somehow knew—and trailing down to the ground.

  She’d felt … older. In her dream, her body felt foreign to her in ways she didn’t have t
he words to describe, but that were very confusing. She’d ached for things she couldn’t put a name to, which was why she was looking out the window. Waiting for someone. Longing for someone.

  Behind her, there’d been someone moving. She didn’t want to turn to look. Her body—the person she’d been in her dream—didn’t like the person behind her, the person in the bed she’d risen from at the first rays of dawn.

  The person behind her said something. It was as if he spoke a foreign language: Elizabeth recognized only one word. Yseult. Her dream-body turned, knowing this was her name.

  That was when she woke up.

  She’d been almost as confused on waking as she’d been in the dream. Her pink canopy bed, her pink and cream bedroom, the dolls and bears she knew she was outgrowing but couldn’t quite bear to be rid of—these all seemed strange, alien, wrong.

  She’d shaken her head, and then everything settled back into place. The room was hers, of course, and whatever she had dreamed about was, of course, nothing but a dream. She thought about telling someone, because her parents would praise her imagination and her friends would all get a big laugh out of it, but something held her back.

  It was the first dream. The first memory. But it was by no means the last.

  After that, the dreams came more and more frequently. Soon they filled all night, every night—all of her sleeping hours. They were as consistent as if they weren’t dreams, but a biography, and eventually, fearfully, Elizabeth Walker came to realize that this was what they actually were. A biography. The life of someone she had once been.

  Except, of course, that was impossible. There was no way she could’ve been a sorceress named Yseult. She could not possibly have helped to create magic armor and weapons for her uncle, a giant of a man named Morholt. She couldn’t have spent her days learning magic and healing from the Queen. Magic didn’t exist. This was some amazing—terrifying—fantasy created from far too many viewings of Lord of the Rings … though the castle Yseult—her dream-self—lived in didn’t look much like the Elven castles of the Rings movies, and only a little like the ones the Riders of Rohan lived in. It was wood and stone and shockingly—to Elizabeth’s eyes—small, though Yseult thought of it with pride and satisfaction, because all the floors were stone instead of being dirt on the ground floor, and because she and her parents had rooms of their own and didn’t have to sleep in the big main room—the hall—with everyone else.

  That she was actually dreaming about a time she knew nothing about—and had lived before, lived then—was impossible, but that magic was real was even more impossible. Or so she’d thought as she lived a double life, growing up as Elizabeth by day, living as Yseult by night. Although Yseult knew and did things that Elizabeth had not even in her wildest waking thoughts imagined—

  —things that involved a man named Tristan, and Elizabeth grew to love him as much as Yseult did. So many mornings she woke up and started to cry, because Tristan wasn’t real any more than Yseult was, but Tristan was everything she could ever want in a boyfriend: he was handsome, and kind, and smart, and he loved …

  Yseult. Tristan loves Yseult, not me. And he isn’t even real!

  The things they did made her blush when she thought of them, even though she knew about them from movies and television she wasn’t supposed to watch. And the last time she’d slept over at Marcie’s house, Marcie’d had an actual DVD with real sex in it, and they’d all watched it, muffling their giggles and squeaks behind their hands. But Elizabeth had thought (privately) that the DVD had been kind of, well, gross. Not at all like what Tristan and Yseult did—when they could get some privacy, because Yseult’s castle didn’t have a lot of that.

  She kept having to remind herself they weren’t real. Sure, sometimes she thought she was going crazy. But it wasn’t as if she was seeing things when she was awake. And it wasn’t as if she believed in all the magic she—Yseult—was doing in those dreams. She had a good imagination, that was all. She began to think about writing her dream-life down as a story, and maybe it would be good enough to get published, like the boy with the dragon books had been.

  And that was the way her life went while she turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. She never told anybody that she didn’t dream about anything but Yseult’s life, but she didn’t think of herself as keeping bad secrets. Who did her dreams hurt, anyway? Nothing in them was really real, any more than magic was really real.

  That was what she’d believed right up until three months ago.

  September, and she was a junior, and head of the Cheer Squad for the Junior Varsity football team. They’d all been at the game when Terry Bishop, who looked a little like Tristan in the right light, jumped for the ball and got clotheslined, and there was an awful snapping sound, and he screamed.

  She got there first, even before the coach, and she still didn’t know how because she didn’t remember moving. Terry’s leg and knee were lying all wrong, and before anyone got there to stop her, Elizabeth put her hands on them, and did what Yseult had been doing in Elizabeth’s dreams for months.

  With a weird snap, the bones went back the way they belonged, and she felt a rush of something pouring out of her and into Terry. So much something poured out of her that she nearly passed out, and she hardly noticed when the coach and everybody else shoved her aside and told her to get back to the sidelines with the rest of Cheer Squad. She stumbled back to the sidelines, and she must have looked really wrecked, because Marcie told her she probably shouldn’t do any of the stunts, and Elizabeth knew better than to try when she felt so awful. She sat through the rest of the game in a daze, then went straight home instead of going to the after-game party, and when she woke up the next morning she discovered she hadn’t even taken her shoes off before collapsing on top of her bedspread and pretty much passing out. Mom had a few careful words to say to her at breakfast about drugs, and how she wasn’t going to preach but she hoped Elizabeth would tell her if she’d decided to experiment because a lot of them were a lot more dangerous than alcohol, and Elizabeth had stumbled through an explanation about the game and seeing Terry get hurt. At least that explained her behavior.

  The game was Friday, and normally she’d have had to wait until Monday to find out anything, but Marcie’s older sister was dating Terry’s best friend, so it only took Elizabeth one phone call to find out that Terry’d wrenched his knee and he’d be out for a couple games but not the season. That certainly didn’t match Elizabeth’s memory of a leg broken in at least three pieces, with the ends of the bone pushing against the skin and threatening to break through. She spent the rest of the day trying to convince herself that Daphne and Marcie were right—just a sprain—and she hadn’t seen—or felt—what she knew she had. And when she tried, it seemed as if she could hear Yseult’s laughter in her mind, affectionately mocking her attempts to blind herself to the truth.

  So if the magic was real … were the dreams?

  She wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet.

  She began to experiment, using ideas taken from books she’d read, fantasies where magic was real.

  Lighting a candle: easy. Seeing through the eyes of a bird: piece of cake. Putting magic into an object …

  There was this girl at school who Elizabeth felt kind of exasperated with and sorry for at the same time. Janine was nice enough, but she’d gotten mixed up with this guy who controlled practically every moment of her life. She stayed with Tommy because he said he loved her—and she said she loved him even after she ended up in the hospital and had to stay for three days. She told everybody she’d “fallen down the stairs”—but everyone who knew Tommy knew what had really happened to put Janine into the hospital.

  So Elizabeth decided she was going to do something about it. The magic that made people change their minds about things was pretty much always the same—according to the books—you just varied what you wanted them to do. Elizabeth swiped Janine’s sunglasses; they were expensive designer ones, but besides that, the girl had to wear
them sometimes to hide her dark circles and even an occasional black eye. She returned them the next day—enchanted. “See him the way we see him,” was the enchantment she’d put on them—appropriate for a pair of glasses!

  It worked better than she had ever dreamed it would. The next day Tommy was in jail on assault charges, and Janine was wondering aloud what she’d ever seen in him.

  But Elizabeth’s triumph was short-lived. Because after that, she started seeing things—while she was awake.

  At first it was just out of the corner of her eye. Something moving impossibly fast, something that wasn’t there when she turned her head to look at it. Eyes in shadows.

  But then she started seeing them clearly, in daylight.

  They never showed up except when she was alone—when she was walking back from school was the first time she saw one by daylight. She had turned a corner, and realized the street was deserted, and too, too quiet. And there he was, standing in a challenging pose in the middle of the sidewalk, as if daring her to pass. A black blot that seemed to absorb all the sunlight, staring at her—he didn’t wear the black-washed armor and helm of her dreams, but she knew him, knew what he was, as he stared at her from beneath the brim of a black hat, black trench coat down to his ankles, open to the breeze, and showing black jeans and a tight black tee.

  She froze like a scared baby bunny.

  Then a little mob of grade school kids came around the corner, laughing and shrieking, and she turned involuntarily. And when she looked back, he was gone.

  He—they—were something she remembered from her dreams, the menacing Knights of the Shadow.

  But he, or more like him, kept popping up, and soon they appeared whether she was alone or not. Staring at her out of a crowd of spectators at a game. Lurking outside the school, right where she would see him when she looked out the window. Cruising by in a black SUV. And nobody else seemed to see him—or them, if there was more than one.