Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies

by Mercedes Lackey; Rosemary Edghill

  “Uh—what?” she asked, completely taken aback. It looked as if Doctor MacKenzie also liked to keep people off balance.

  “What’s in this file, and what they told you, was complete bullshit,” he said bluntly, tapping the manila folder. “I don’t know what they’re turning out of college these days, but they all sound like the latest bestseller self-help book. They seemed to think you were supposed to somehow magically get over having your entire world ripped out from under you in less than a year. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Of course you’re still not over any of it. You shouldn’t be. If you were, I’d be looking for some pretty intractable problems with you and flinging around fancy terms like severe attachment disorder. You don’t just get over that sort of loss in a few months, or even a few years.” He snorted. “Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were supposed to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called ‘half mourning’ for another full year, and during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now? A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you’re expected to be all better—or down pills so you can pretend you are.” He just shook his head. “Unfair doesn’t even come close.”

  Spirit was torn between shock and wanting to hug and kiss him. Not only was this the first time anyone had acted halfway normal around her, it was the first time any shrink had more or less given her permission to keep feeling bad. And the relief she felt was impossible to describe.

  The thought fleetingly occurred to her that Doc Mac could be saying all this to try and trick her into trusting him.…

  Well, if so, it was working, and right now, she didn’t care. She wanted to trust him; all of her instincts were reacting as positively to him as they reacted negatively to people like Ms. Smith. She liked him. She had the feeling that if he had been her shrink in the hospital, she wouldn’t be nearly so messed up now.

  And for the first time, she felt like talking about it to someone, because she just knew he wasn’t going to cut her off because “her hour was up.” She was going to be able to vent about how bad she felt, how much she missed everyone, everything, and would give up everything to have them back again. How much she envied Muirin and Loch, because they hadn’t had parents they’d miss, and Burke, because he still had his foster folks. How sometimes she wanted to punch the next person who told her it was time for her to get over it. He was going to listen for as long as it took.

  So she did. She went through a lot of tissues. Doc Mac was just solid, right through it all. He didn’t get all creepy and ooze sympathy and pretend empathy like Ms. Smith did; he was just there, listening, not saying much, but what he did say made her feel, not better exactly, but as if he understood.

  He was a hundred times better than any of the shrinks she’d seen in the hospital.

  When she finally wound down, he gave her the rest of the box of tissues and made a couple of brief notes. He talked to her a little about New Year’s Eve. She told him what she’d really seen and felt. He made some more notes, then looked up. “All right, Spirit, you’re good to go. I think you weathered the New Year’s incident pretty well. If you have trouble concentrating, sleeping, if you’re having nightmares, make an appointment. If it’s urgent, come right to me, and I’ll clear my schedule. We’ll try a little talk therapy, maybe a week or two of meds to take the edge off and get you over the hump. Otherwise, having crying fits and being depressed is part of the grieving process, and don’t let anyone try to tell you differently.”

  She blew her nose as he added, almost to himself: “And I wish I could get Dylan to believe that.”

  She hesitated a moment. Then she made up her mind. “That night … the night of the wreck … I saw something,” she said. “And the crash wasn’t an accident. There was something like—okay, it must have been an explosion of some kind of magic, like a flash of light, except it was dark.”

  “Dark, like absence of light, or dark, as if all the light was being sucked into something?” he asked, his eyes suddenly going sharp and bright.

  She blinked. She’d never thought of it that way. “The light being sucked into something,” she replied slowly. “So that’s some kind of magic?”

  He nodded, and his brows creased. “All the Schools of magic have opposites, like matter and antimatter. You probably haven’t gotten that far yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently evil about the opposite, any more than antimatter is evil. But if the usual forms of our magic are hard to control, the dark forms are even harder, because they’re rooted in chaos.” Doc Mac ran his hand over his balding head. “So you saw a manifestation from a magician who was either extremely powerful or just bug-out crazy. Or both. Go on.”

  “Something—was just there, in the middle of the road.” She shuddered. “I think Dad saw it, too. It was—I’m not sure what it was. It was—I thought it was a man. A big man, but it was like the light was sucking into him, and—I don’t remember exactly, just that it was evil. And I knew, I knew that it was after me.…” She started to cry again, and stifled it. “It was, wasn’t it? It was after me, and it was hunting me. If it hadn’t been after me, they’d still be alive. Wouldn’t they?”

  She couldn’t help it, a sob escaped on the last word, and that set her off again, wailing softly, the guilt filling her chest and throat and choking her. She cried and cried until her eyes were all gritty and her nose was sore. Once again, Doc Mac let her cry herself out. When she got herself back under control, he sighed.

  “I’m not going to blow smoke at you,” he said. “Yes, I think you did see something evil. And it was there to kill you. And yes, the rest of your family died because of it. But Spirit”—he leaned over and fixed her with an intense gaze—“Spirit, that does not mean that you are to blame, any more than you would be to blame if you were the only survivor of a mass murderer. Whoever sent that thing, whoever did this in the first place—that is who is to blame. Not you.” He sat back in his chair. “This is one of those ‘bad things happen to good people’ situations. This magician, or group of magicians—they made the choice to hurt people. You didn’t hunt them down to taunt them, you didn’t do anything to them; in fact, you didn’t even know they existed until you came here. They are the bad guys. They are the ones who hurt people. You are innocent; the only thing you did ‘wrong’ was to be born, and you weren’t exactly the one responsible for that. And I want you to keep repeating that to yourself until you believe it, all right?”

  Spirit nodded, hesitantly. This was crazy. Here she was pouring out her secrets to someone she didn’t even know—and yet Doc Mac was the first person here besides her friends she had ever felt was a real human being, and trustworthy.

  And she wanted to keep right on trusting him.

  He smiled a little at her nod. “Good. Now, you hop along to class. If you need me, you know where I am.”

  * * *

  “… I didn’t tell him about the Hunt or anything,” Spirit concluded, as she and Loch continued to page slowly through the scrapbooks, “but I wanted to. What do you think?”

  “I think he doesn’t sound anything like the shrinks my dad’s girlfriends all saw,” Loch replied. “Which is a plus. I have an appointment with him day after tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I think. Burke’s sold on him. Dylan hates him, says he’s a wuss.”

  Spirit rolled her eyes. “Anybody Dylan hates has to be all right.”

  Loch chuckled. “I kind of agree with you. What did Murr-cat say?”

  “She was kind of pissy, but didn’t actually say anything.”

  Loch laughed again. “Which means not only couldn’t she game him, he probably read her like a book.”

  “Well, she wasn’t rude about him.…” Spirit ventured.

  “Which means he might have either impressed or scared her. Maybe both.” Loc
h peered down at an old clipping. “Once I see him, and Addie does, I think we should all decide together on what we tell him.”

  “If anything,” Spirit reminded him.

  “If anything,” he repeated. “Though if he’s in Doctor Ambrosius’s inner circle, he’ll already know about the Hunt, or at least as much as we told Doctor Ambrosius.”

  “So? If he does, great. He wouldn’t have told me he knows, he’d have been waiting for me to bring it up. That’s how shrinks work.” She frowned at her hands; they were filthy. Looking at the books together in the study carrels at the back of the stacks in the Library was a good idea, marred only by the fact that she was going to have to wait to get to her room to wash her hands.

  “You’re not so bad at gaming the system yourself.” Loch lifted a corner of a yellowing bit of newsprint, carefully. This stuff crumbled easily.

  “Practice. I wonder who made all these books, anyway?”

  “Tyniger, or an assistant,” Loch replied. “Could have been either. Rich guys back then did things like that.” He put a marker in the pages and closed his book. “Okay, that’s it. My eyes are going to cross if I have to do any more of this today.”

  “Mine, too,” Spirit admitted. “Let’s get going.”

  “Why do you want to tell Doc Mac about everything we’ve found out so badly?” Loch asked, as they headed back toward their rooms. It seemed safe enough to use one of the study carrels; no one was ever back there. Most people did all their school research electronically.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It just seems as if we ought to have one adult we can trust.”

  “Besides Doctor A.,” Loch prompted.

  “Uh, yeah.” But she hesitated to say that …

  And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.

  NINE

  Spirit woke feeling bleary and exhausted; she’d been reading in one of the scrapbooks long after she should have been asleep. Technically she had been in bed, and it seemed that if you weren’t on the computer or had every light in your room blazing, no one figured out you were still awake. It was pretty easy to get away with reading in bed after “lights out.” She thought she might have hit something interesting, but by the time she’d gotten an inkling of it, she’d been nodding off and had to put the book away.

  She was tempted to skip reading the usual school e-mail announcements once she was cleaned up and dressed. They rarely had anything interesting in them, just the usual club meetings and sports practices.

  But if I don’t there’ll probably be something vitally important, she decided with resignation. Or at least something that will make me look stupid for not knowing it. She went to the desk and bumped her mouse to wake up her computer. Brushing her hair with one hand, she opened up her e-mail program with the other.

  Field Trip to Billings was the subject of the first unread e-mail.

  She blinked. A field trip? When did the school start having field trips?

  Now, apparently.

  She opened it.

  A field trip to Billings will take place two weeks from today, she read. This will be to visit the Yellowstone Art Museum, and a short shopping visit for select students, a chance to socialize outside the school. Three teachers will accompany the students: Mr. Martin Bowman, Magic and Mathematics; Ms. Lindsay Holland, Art and Magic; and Mr. David Krandal, English Literature and Lore. The names of the students to go on the trip will be announced in a few days.

  If there ever was an announcement of something that was obviously a reward for the perfect Oakhurst student, this was surely it. Pigs will sing opera before my name is on that list, she thought, deleting all the messages. She was a little angry and a little depressed at the same time—and the stupid thing was, she didn’t even know why she’d want to go on the trip. She didn’t have any money to shop with, and she didn’t like art museums. Her parents had tried to get her interested in art all her life, and it hadn’t worked; that had been her kid sister’s thing. Spirit liked science and history museums.

  Maybe it was just the idea of getting away from this place even for a day. Maybe it was the whole Tom Sawyer trick of knowing she wasn’t going to get something that made her want to have it. Just another divide-and-conquer Oakhurst trick. Probably they’d make a point of dividing up kids who were friends, so one got to go and the other didn’t.

  Good old Oakhurst.

  She deleted the e-mail. No point in having it sit there, mocking her.

  Besides, this evening they were all going to get together to see what they’d found in the scrapbooks. That should keep her mind off stupid field trips.

  * * *

  “I guess I’ll start,” Spirit said, as they all pulled up chairs to the Monopoly board. “Most of what was in the books I’ve looked through so far is newspaper stories about Arthur Tyniger.”

  “Bleah,” Muirin said, making a face. “He was probably hanging out with my robber-baron great-grandfather, figuring out how to evict widows and orphans.”

  “This was all stuff from the social columns,” Spirit corrected her. “Lots from New York City and San Francisco newspapers. He was kind of like William Randolph Hearst, not as wealthy, but rich enough to do what he wanted, and he was considered a real catch. Most of the stories are about how he was buying up all kinds of antiquities and art for all of his mansions. English mostly. And what they called ‘curiosities.’ One of them was the oak, and he thought it was so important that he built the whole house around it! And guess what it was sold to him as?”

  “Robin Hood’s oak tree in Sherwood Forest,” said Burke, with a laugh.

  “The oak Bonnie Prince Charlie hid in,” Addie put in.

  Spirit shook her head. “He bought it as the same oak that Merlin was imprisoned in by Nimue,” she told them. “The Merlin. Merlin the Magician. King Arthur’s Merlin. He believed it, too. It was on some farm in Cornwall near Tintagel and was struck and brought down by lightning in a huge storm; that was how he was able to buy it. He had the whole thing transported by steamship to New York, then put on its own flatcar and brought here via rail.”

  They stared at her. “Uh … he was a sucker?” Burke said, finally.

  “Oh I don’t believe it, either,” she assured them. “I mean, King Arthur’s a myth. And ‘The Merlin’ was supposed to just be a title for a major Druid priest, so there would have been hundreds of Merlins. But I do believe there is a lot of magic in that tree, and we’ve seen the evidence of it.”

  The rest nodded. “There’s probably a hundred Merlin’s Oaks, too,” Addie added. “It’s like pieces of the True Cross, you go around collecting those from all the churches in the world and you’ll have enough wood to build the Italian navy.”

  Muirin’s eyes had lit up, and she had a strange, eager expression on her face. “Well, the runes on the trunk really are runes, only not the Norse kind,” she said, her voice getting that lilt that meant she was excited. “They’re Celtic ogham. I haven’t been able to translate them yet, but they match perfectly to the ogham symbols I’ve found. It might not have been the Merlin’s Oak, but it was a Merlin’s Oak, I bet!” Spirit looked at her askance. She sounded as if she’d uncovered a cache of double chocolate chocolate-dunked brownies. “I bet it was used for human sacrifices! The Druids would do that with their sacred oaks, tie a victim to it and—”

  “More likely some farmer found the tree down, didn’t want to go to the work of cutting it up for firewood, knew Tyniger was in the neighborhood, and decided to make a lot of money,” Loch said cynically. “Probably found a picture of an ogham inscription in some book, then burned the runes into the tree himself and got all the villagers to agree to some story that it really was Merlin’s Oak if he bought them all a round at the pub.”

  Burke grinned and Addie chuckled. “That’s a very likely story,” she said. “At the turn of the century people manufactured hundreds of those sorts of things. Petrified giants, baby mermaids…”

  “I don’t know why it couldn’t be a
real Druid oak,” Muirin replied, sullenly. “It’s just as likely a story. And how do you explain the magic in it? We all felt it, the way we can’t look at the oak without working really hard.”

  “Oh, it’s almost certainly a spell carved into it,” Loch replied. “That’s how Druidic spells were cast in the first place. Written language was so sacred you weren’t supposed to use it for anything but magic and prayers. For that matter, spoken language was sacred, too, and bards were also magicians. That’s where the word ‘enchantment’ came from—you chanted at something and that worked magic. Just because some farmer carved something he found in a book into that tree, that doesn’t make the inscription itself phony. If he copied something faithfully enough, it would be real magic all right. For all we know, it really is the sort of spell you’d find carved into a sacrificial oak.”

  Muirin didn’t look mollified, but finally she shrugged. “There’s definitely magic going on there,” she repeated.

  “Definitely,” Loch agreed, and the rest of them nodded.

  “It might have been even more powerful when it was fresh,” Addie pointed out. “Probably protective. Tyniger lived to be awfully old, and his fortune managed to pass through the Great Depression pretty much intact. That’s what’s been in my scrapbooks. He made his fortune in the 1880s, and built mansions with it in San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and New York City. But instead of building a vacation home in the Catskills or the Hamptons like everyone else did, he built Oakhurst out here. He started construction around 1900 and it took ten years to finish. It was a real showplace; for the first couple of years he was bringing people here all the time by his private rail line to show it off. Then, about the time World War I started, he gradually stopped spending any time in any of his other mansions, and stopped bringing people out here. People didn’t notice so much because everyone was wrapped up in the War. But the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1918 pretty much seems to have made him decide he wasn’t going to bring anyone here anymore and he wasn’t going to leave; he sold all the other places and lived here as a recluse. The funny thing is that one of the books has a big section of notes to him from the staff, thanking him for saving them from the Influenza; not one of them got sick. And it looks like that year is when he started making the scrapbooks. I’m no expert, but it looks as if all of the earliest ones were made in the same year, like he finally took stacks of clippings and things and made them into books.”