FOURTEEN
One of the mandatory new classes was horseback riding. But not just any old trail riding, the way the old class had been—this was endurance riding. It was something like a human marathon—assuming the humans were running, not on streets and roads, but on unimproved land, through any kind of weather, and over marked obstacles known as hazards that were parts of a course as extreme as the terrain allowed. In Montana, even this flatter part of it, that could be very extreme indeed. It even required a special lightweight saddle with a breastplate that kept the saddle from sliding backward when the horse was scrambling up steep inclines. In competition—because to Spirit’s astonishment, this was actually a sport—the races were fifty and one hundred miles long. They weren’t doing that—yet. They were doing shorter distances, the kind of riding called “competitive trail riding,” which sounded so … well, nice. “Oh, let’s get on the horse and ride a trail and see who gets there first!”
Wrong.
These were ten-mile rides. They all started together. Beforehand, they had to kit up the horse as if they were going to end up making camp at the other end, which meant everything for the camp and the horse had to be on the horse. The more stuff you thought you needed, the more the horse had to carry … and so on. And what the horse had to go over, under, and through meant that at any moment you might be trotting, off the horse and walking, or helping the horse to get over something. Or swimming—though this was winter, so the water they’d had to cross was all frozen right now. What the point of this was (aside from, to make you feel as if you had been beaten from head to toe at the end of the ride) Spirit didn’t know.
She, who had never ridden until she got here, had at least discovered that she had what the new riding instructor, Mia Singleton, said was “a natural seat.” That at least meant she could stay on the horse and manage to get in rhythm with it so she didn’t get pounded to death. It didn’t mean that she had any idea of how to handle this huge thing, and she always had the feeling that the horses she got took one look at her and started snickering about how they were going to make her miserable.
At least Addie was in her class, and Loch. Loch was good enough, but Addie had ridden all her life; she’d stick to Spirit like a burr and make sure the horse didn’t run off with her, or stop and not move at all.
“What’s the point of all this?” she asked Addie in despair, as she fumbled with all the gear that was supposed to go on the monster. “Do they really think we’re going to be charging at the Dark Lord on horses, and when we’re done, camp on the battlefield?”
“We might have to run for it, and there aren’t exactly a lot of cars at Oakhurst,” Addie pointed out somberly. “At least this way we’ve got a chance of getting away and surviving to get to a rally point.”
“Oh. Um,” Spirit replied, shivering with both cold and apprehension. Apprehension, because she had the feeling that if it ever did come to that—she’d die.
“Don’t worry, Spirit,” Addie told her. “If it comes to that, I’ll be right with you.”
They didn’t have any chance to say anything more, since Ms. Singleton showed up and started her inspections. When everyone had everything loaded to her satisfaction, she whistled shrilly as the sign to mount up, opened the stable doors, and waited for them to line up at the “start.”
Ms. Singleton didn’t talk much, and generally in as few words as possible. Skinny, tough, hair cut short—if she’d had tattoos, she would have looked like a girl gangbanger. But on the rare occasions she did open her mouth, out came perfect English with a cultured accent. Spirit had never seen her outside of the gym or the barn. She couldn’t help but wonder what it was that Ms. Singleton did for Breakthrough. It was obvious why she was here, though; like the others, she had an Oakhurst ring. Horses would do anything for her—though truth to tell it seemed more a matter of control than because they wanted to. From what Spirit knew at this point, this was one of the things Earth Mages did—Animal Control, rather than Animal Speech. Coercion rather than cooperation. That seemed to fit Ms. Singleton.
When the kids were lined up—eight of them, including Spirit and Addie—Ms. Singleton whistled again, circling her hand above her head three times and pointing down the trail. They all dug heels into their horses’ flanks and started. Most with more success than Spirit, whose horse snorted and stood there, until Addie came alongside, leaned over and gave him a sharp smack on his butt. Then he lunged forward.
This wasn’t a horse she’d had before, and he settled quickly into a very hard trot. Fortunately that “natural seat” thing came in to save her. When he figured out he wasn’t going to bounce her off, he snorted and eased into something a little less bone-jarring. By that time they were at least a mile from the school. The others were all several hundred feet ahead of her. Loch turned to see where she was, and pulled his horse to a complete stop, waiting for them.
“Smack him, Spirit!” Addie called over her shoulder. “Or—wait, this is Pendleton I’m on. I’ll fix your mount for you. Pendleton does hate laggards.”
Addie wheeled around and came in behind Spirit. Her brown horse (they were all brown, Addie called them by different color names—bay, chestnut, whatever—but they were all brown to Spirit) laid his ears back, and Spirit could have sworn he looked gleeful. He rolled his eyes, snaked out his head, and before Spirit could react, all she could see was a set of big yellow teeth heading straight for her horse’s butt.
They connected.
Her horse squealed and lurched forward into a gallop. Pendleton kept pace with him, and whenever he threatened to slow down, those teeth headed for him again. When they caught up to the rest, Addie somehow managed to steer her horse away far enough that he couldn’t bite Spirit’s, but kept him within “threat” distance. Loch joined them, so that he and Addie bracketed Spirit’s horse. Now the only direction he could go was forward. He put his ears back. He was not happy. Well, neither was Spirit; she was already sore, her nose was freezing off, and they weren’t even halfway done yet.
Now they were about two miles from Oakhurst, and outside the “safe” area. Oakhurst was just a dark smear on the horizon. And ahead of them was the first hazard, a big, deep gully with steep, crumbling sides and ice at the bottom. A broad swath of it was marked out with a pair of red flags; that was where they were supposed to cross and they got marked down if they didn’t. Given the competitive spirit at Oakhurst it was a bet that if anyone cheated, three others would tell on him.
But before they reached the gully, a distant whine of motors and plumes of snow to the right warned Spirit—and everyone else—that they weren’t alone out here.
Oh hell, it’s Saturday …
Which meant no school for the kids in Radial.
Sure enough, as the small horde of snowmobiles headed in their direction, it looked like all the drivers were teenagers. The horses were going to hate this.
Whooping and shrieking, the Radial kids buzzed the horses, circling them and forcing them to crowd together, bucking and shying. Spirit’s horse backed into Addie’s, who didn’t snap at him this time. Addie was holding him steady, but his eyes showed whites all around, and he was trampling the snow in tight little steps. Spirit’s horse bounced stiff-legged; she tried to hold him in and soothe him at the same time, and it wasn’t working—
And that was when the sky suddenly darkened. Out of nowhere, huge black clouds just boiled up and covered the entire sky. The kids on the snowmobiles started looking around, startled. The horses all went rigid.
A sound like thunder came out of the gully. Except it wasn’t thunder. It was the hooves of more horses, twenty or thirty, that came boiling up the steep slope out of the gully as easily as if it was level ground. There were riders on those horses, in gray hooded parkas with gray scarves over their faces. They circled the Oakhurst kids and the snowmobiles both, and as soon as the circle was complete, a wall of wailing wind and snow sprang up behind them, cutting them all off from the rest of the world.
And then they turned their powers loose inside that confined space.
Spirit was caught in a maelstrom of screaming horses, screaming kids, wind, ice, fire, and shadow. The earth under them shook and heaved. She saw things—when she could see at all!—that couldn’t possibly be there. Horses bucked, bit, kicked. Snowmobiles careened into the horses. One kid in Oakhurst colors got plucked off his horse before her eyes and thrown about twenty feet into the air; she didn’t see where he landed. She was battered, cut by flying shards of ice as sharp as razor blades, and all she could think of to do was to get as far down on her horse’s neck as she could and cling for dear life while he reared and bucked and screamed. If the others were getting their powers to work, she couldn’t tell. She was crying and screaming with terror herself; she felt blood running down her face from a cut over one eye, and something hit her in the back hard enough to knock all the breath out of her. She started to feel herself falling, hung on tighter. Something smacked her in the head and she saw stars.
This is it, she thought, in a single moment of fear-sharpened clarity. This is where I die—
Then … it stopped.
The wind dropped to nothing. Her horse, exhausted, stopped bucking and stood there trembling. She looked up.
The circle of gray-clad riders was still there, watching them under a cloud-laden sky that looked like a blizzard was about to cut loose any second. Then, as one, they turned away, rode down into the gully again—
And disappeared.
Spirit looked wildly around her. All the snowmobiles were stopped, turned over, one was wrecked with its driver still in it, and from the way he was lying …
Oh my God—he’s dead.…
People were lying all around, bleeding, with arms and legs going in directions that they shouldn’t, screaming, moaning. The kid who Spirit had seen thrown into the air wasn’t moving, either. She spotted Addie, still miraculously ahorse, with a black eye. She looked frantically for Loch, and saw him on the ground, curled in a ball with both his hands over the back of his neck. She jumped down out of the saddle and ran to him.
“Loch? Loch!” As she went down on her knees next to him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. “How are you hurt? Where? How badly!”
He moaned, and rolled over onto his back. His eyes were unfocused, and one of his pupils was bigger than the other. “Head,” he said. “Hurts. Dizzy.”
“I’m going for help!” Addie called, and dug her heels abruptly into her horse’s flanks, sending him in a gallop toward the blur on the horizon that was the school.
“Don’t pass out,” Spirit urged Loch. “I’ll be back.” She began methodically checking on the others.
She might not have magic, but at least she had first aid.
* * *
“My God,” Muirin said, her eyes wide and her face blank with disbelief. “One townie dead, three of us…” For once she had nothing snide, catty, or amusing to say. “I—I’ve got nothing.”
“Stitches, concussions, broken bones…” Burke shook his head. “I should have been there.”
Loch blinked at them all groggily; he’d been concussed and had a cracked collarbone. Spirit had eleven stitches in the cut across her forehead and another fifteen in one across her scalp that she hadn’t even felt till they got back to Oakhurst, and they’d gotten off lucky. Addie was in a sling: a torsion fracture of her left arm. As for the rest, aside from the four dead, there were broken arms and legs, concussions, and lacerations enough to fill the tiny Radial emergency room twice over. But, of course, only the townies had gone there, in a fleet of vans supplied by Mark Rider and the town’s two ambulances. All the Oakhurst kids had come straight to the Oakhurst Infirmary. It wouldn’t do to have the townies see Earth Mages healing people by magic.
Besides their own Mages, Mark also seemed to have his own group of three people that could just do that—plus Madison, who made four.
Now most of the injured were resting and recovering in their own rooms. Spirit’s cuts were half healed already. She had no idea what story Mark had told the townies about what had happened—but she had seen Ms. Singleton going from one stretcher to another, briefly putting her hand on the occupant’s head, muttering something. She had no doubt that Mark’s story had replaced whatever the kids themselves had seen. She had a guess that animals weren’t the only things Ms. Singleton could control.
“If that’s what a mage-battle is like,” Loch said thickly, “we are seriously outclassed. I couldn’t even get myself organized before the horse threw me, and all I could do was try and protect myself.”
“Well, I was about as much use as a beach ball,” Spirit replied, wincing a little as the cut on her head pulled and hurt. It would be fully healed by morning, but with so many injured, the Healing Mages had been forced to ration their power. “How do you fight stuff like that?”
“I should have been there,” Burke muttered again, looking guilty and worried.
Muirin fiddled with her ring and with the snake-bracelet on her wrist. “All right, there’s an elephant in the room, and I’m going to talk about it,” she said. “The Gatekeepers. Mark Rider’s group. Would joining them be so bad? I mean, I know Dylan’s being scouted for it and you guys don’t like him, but if the alternative is what just happened? Come on! At least they know what they’re doing!”
“We can’t choose a side until we know what’s going on,” Burke insisted stubbornly. “Muirin, I know you don’t want to hear it, but so far … well, we don’t know anything about them, except that they’re rich and Oakhurst Alumns. But we do know that the people who attacked Spirit and Loch and Addie were Oakhurst Alumns, too.”
“So the Gatekeepers are also the Shadow Knights?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh come on!”
“The point is not that they are, or that only some of them might be, but that we don’t know!” Burke said earnestly. “Do you see the difference?”
“Yeah. I guess,” Muirin replied.
“I need to go lay down,” Loch said, looking a little green. “They said I was going to feel sick and dizzy for a while and … I’m feeling sick and dizzy.” He got up and wobbled out, Burke going with him to give him an arm.
“Me, too,” Addie replied.
“Too sick for chocolate?” Muirin asked, looking oddly hopeful, then crestfallen when Addie nodded. “Spirit?”
Spirit had the oddest feeling that Muirin was … lonely. Maybe she was all BFF with Madison, but maybe that was just on the surface. “I’d rather just hang out with you,” she said. “’Cause right now, you know, I want to hang with a friend.”
Muirin lit up like a Christmas tree. She immediately tried to cover it, but not that successfully. “Let’s get Addie to her room then.”
The two of them helped Addie get into bed, and Spirit got her a glass of water and some pills she said were for pain. “I’ll be glad when this is healed tomorrow,” she said, as she tried without much result to find a position that didn’t hurt. They turned out her light and left her to try and sleep.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Muirin said as they headed for her room.
“Worth that much? Schadenfreude,” Spirit replied. “The kids from Radial. I know I should feel sorry for them, but they showed up and tried to spook our horses. They kind of got what they deserved. Well, not the one that died,” she amended, “but … you know.”
Muirin blinked at her. “Spirit White, I thought I knew you! You have a dark side!” She opened the door and waited for Spirit to go in.
“Everybody does,” Spirit said, shrugging. “I just don’t show mine that often. It’s still there. You just … I don’t know, you have to know it’s there, and not so much fight it, as … learn from it. About it. I guess. I sound like a moron, don’t I?”
“Nah,” Muirin replied. “Well, a little hippie-dippy with a side of Doc Mac, but that’s not bad.” She flipped on the light and, a moment later, placed a small gold box in Spirit’s hands with a triumphant flourish. Even closed, it smelled of chocolate. I bet this didn’t come from Radial, Spirit thought.
When she looked around the room, it was obvious Madison had been “helping” with the smuggling more than a little. There were new items of clothing in Muirin’s closet that stood out because they weren’t in Oakhurst colors. There was a stack of CDs next to the computer that hadn’t been there before, and Spirit had no doubt that if Muirin hadn’t been so careful about getting rid of the evidence, the little box of chocolate truffles would represent only the tip of the pyramid of junk food she’d been getting in. Briefly, for the millionth time, Spirit wondered how on earth Muirin managed to eat all that and still look good.
She started to pick up some papers off the bed, when she realized she was holding the picture of the runes on the oak … and a lot, a lot of notes.
“Aren’t these the oak-runes?” she exclaimed. “Did you finish the translation?”
“Oh, yeah,” Muirin replied dismissively. “But it doesn’t mean anything. I asked Anastus and Madison, and they said so. Anastus thinks it’s fake, like those Viking runes up in Minnesota.”
Spirit was horrified, but she grabbed her reaction with both hands and held it down so it wouldn’t show on her face. Muirin was finally acting like her old self for the first time in … well, since New Year’s Eve. “Muir—look, I know I sound like I’m beating the same dead horse, but this is the second time we’ve been physically attacked by people wearing Oakhurst class rings. And this time … people died. Me, Loch, and Addie were hurt. We know there’s someone on the opposition team here, and there’s the chance it’s the same at Breakthrough.” Then she decided to use a low blow. “Besides … Anastus? Isn’t it kind of creepy, an old guy like him hanging around you? Eww Lolita creepy? He could be saying that just to throw all of us off. Or even just to get you to concentrate on him, you know what I mean?”
Muirin started to protest, then grimaced a little. “Well … maybe it is kind of creepy…” A brief expression of guilt passed over her face, and she thrust the handful of paper at Spirit. “Here, you might as well have them. Anastus wanted them but … yeah, that’s creepy, why would he want something he said was worthless, unless it’s like some weird souvenir or something.”
Spirit took the papers. And though it required every bit of her willpower, she stayed in Muirin’s room right up until lights out, listening to her talk about fashion and the latest from her stepmother (who seemed to belong to the Boy Toy of the Month Club) as if there weren’t four dead kids in the county morgue, three of them people they knew. And it actually occurred to her, as Muirin nattered on about Vivienne Westwood, that this might be Muirin’s way of dealing with just that. To pretend it hadn’t happened, and hide it behind a wall of trivialities.
When she had to leave, it seemed to her that Muirin had been grateful for the company. Maybe it was harder to cope with all this when there was no one to chatter at.…
But right at the door of her room, a shadow detached itself from the wall. She gasped and started to scream—
—and stopped herself just in time. “Burke!” she whispered harshly. “What are you doing here? You’ll get in trouble!”
“I had to talk to you,” he whispered back. “Spirit, I—I don’t know anything anymore, except that you guys are my family now. I can’t bail on you again. Especially not you. You’re—I should have been there. I should have been with you to protect you. I know you aren’t a fighter—”
“No, I’m not,” she said, and then, felt something strange, like anger, but not like anger, ignite inside her. “I’m not. But I will be.”
He stared at her. Then slowly, a faint smile passed over his face. “I think you will. And I’ll help. Good night, Spirit.”
He faded into the darkness.
She slipped into her room.
As soon as she closed the door and got into bed, she began to go through Muirin’s notes. There were an awful lot of notes for something that was only a few runes long … but Muirin had been as meticulous in her research as she was with her design and sewing, hunting down alternate meanings, considering, then rejecting, things that eventually didn’t seem to match. Finally, near the end, Spirit read the conclusion Muirin had come to. It was written as if she were writing a letter, and Spirit wondered if Muirin had planned to give her the papers all along.
Okay. So this is the only thing it can be. And it’s right out of Lizzie’s goofy story, but nothing else matches. It kind of goes like this: “Interfering stranger (foreigner, you-who-would-meddle kind of thing) Beware! Touch not (do not disturb) the Sacred (or Shunned) Oak sealed (closed, locked up) by the Druid (priest, magician) Merlinus (whatever, dude). Herein is imprisoned (confined, enclosed, banished) the son of the Great Bear (it says Arturus), Medraut (that’s Mordred), Kin-slayer, Parricide, and Most Accursed. Turn your back, and flee.” Which, of course, is insane. Mordred wasn’t the one that was shut up in the oak, or the cave, or whatever—that was MERLIN, duh—and anyway, it’s all myth. Some farmer probably carved this into the oak figuring to make money off that old man, just like we thought.
Spirit stared at the words, because they were suddenly making horrible sense. QUERCUS and Elizabeth said the Shadow Knights were leaderless until Mordred was freed. And when had that happened? When the Oak got struck by lightning? No, that couldn’t be it—could it? If it had been recently, when Doctor Ambrosius started Oakhurst, then what had done it? Who had turned Mordred loose? She pondered those words: “Stranger beware, touch not the shunned oak.” Could someone have freed Mordred after the house was built? Maybe when it was lying empty and abandoned?
Crazy as it sounded, it all seemed to be adding up. Elizabeth’s story was true after all. They really were caught in a war between Mordred and Arthur, and it wouldn’t end until one or the other was truly gone, forever.
But … she couldn’t take this to the others. Not yet. Not until she had more proof.
* * *
Spirit woke up the next day with that odd feeling of determination burning. Maybe it was because she’d been so helpless out there during the attack; maybe it was because Burke had acted like she alone needed protecting when Addie and Loch had been just as helpless.
Whatever the reason, she waded into her martial arts and shooting classes with dogged persistence. If she didn’t have magic, well … there were always things that didn’t need magic.
And she decided to befriend Muirin all over again. All this time, she’d thought Muirin was the way she was because she really didn’t need any of them and was only hanging with them because she thought they were entertaining. Now Spirit was beginning to think it was because Muirin didn’t fit anywhere else. And maybe if Spirit started acting like a real friend …
Well, she’d see.
So at breakfast, before Muirin could start in on her usual snide stuff, Spirit asked her a question. “Hey Murr-cat. You’ve been here the longest of us, right?”
Muirin looked up from her fruit-laden oatmeal. “Huh. Yeah, why?”
“Was there a point when things started getting weird?” she asked.
“Like, weird like now, weird?” Muirin thought, then shook her head. “It’s always been that way.” She took a furtive look around to make sure there was no one within earshot, and leaned over the table a little to whisper. “The thing is, nobody actually noticed the weird stuff—the Tithing—until you and Loch showed up. We all just bought the story that sometimes kids ran.”
Spirit nodded, as the other three leaned in to listen. Muirin flushed a little, enjoying the attention. “Can you think of anything else besides that?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “Well, aside from the fact that it was pretty funky to be going to a school for magicians.” She made a face. “You know, I’ve been to a lot of boarding schools, and I’ll tell you the truth, Oakhurst isn’t the only one that’s this competitive. So that didn’t seem all that strange to me.”
She looked at Loch, who nodded agreement. Addie just shrugged. “I only went to the one, and it had very strict rules about fair play, ethics, all that sort of thing.”
“So—” Spirit frowned. “You’re saying the weird stuff was happening, but you only noticed it because Loch and I did?”
“Sometimes it takes an outsider’s eye, Spirit,” Burke finally said. “We were all … used to it, I guess.…” His voice trailed off uncertainly.
“Nuh-uh!” Muirin shook her head emphatically. “Addie and I were kind of used to the competition. And it just seemed logical to me, and probably to Addie, that some kids would pull a runner from this stalag. But Burke, face it, you’re, like, the most conformist guy I ever met, and you’d believe anything a teacher told you. It’d never occur to you that a teacher would lie.”
Burke flushed, but didn’t deny it.
Muirin screwed up her mouth in concentration. “So okay … you know what? I think the reason all this is happening now is that Spirit and Loch said, like, whoa, what’s going on, and we noticed, and we all started poking around, and maybe that was like hitting the beehive. Which I don’t think is a bad thing because … well I’m beginning to think that once whoever it is figured out that Step would be really happy if I disappeared and wouldn’t go looking too hard for me, I’d have been on the Tithing list.”
Spirit nodded soberly. After a moment, so did Addie, Loch, and Burke.
After breakfast, Spirit followed Muirin out. “Hey, got a sec before class?” she asked before Muirin could get out of earshot.
Muirin stopped and looked at her curiously. “A couple, why?”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. So whatever magic I have might as well not be there. But there has got to be something a non-magic person can do when there’s Combat magic flying around. I mean, not every magician even has anything that’s good in combat. So I need to know how that stuff works, and if you, you know, know anything I could actually do the next time. ’Cause I am not going to stand around like a moron a second time.”
“You’re asking me?” Muirin replied, looking stunned.
“Why not? You’re a really good magician, and you’re smart, and I bet you’ve already thought of some of this.” Spirit waited for her answer.
It came as a slow smile. “You’re right. I have. And I’ll help you out. We’ll hook up after lunch.”
Am I getting through to Muirin at last? I sure hope so.…
* * *
Things had been quiet for three days.
There was actually a funeral—well, a memorial service—for the three kids who’d been killed. No one in Radial knew about that—or about the deaths of Oakhurst kids in the first place. Spirit had used her QUERCUS connection to get the online version of the Radial newspaper, and found out that the one townie that had been killed had been officially reported as a “snowmobile accident while joyriding.” The article basically said the townies had been trying to jump the gully. Well, now Spirit had a pretty good idea of what Ms. Singleton’d been doing to the townies before the emergency crews took them back to Radial.
Muirin was as good as her word. She was teaching Spirit all about Combat magic. And it turned out there were things that could interfere with it.
“A bullet through the head is pretty effective,” Muirin had said dryly. “’Cause, you know, it’s hard to control your powers when your brain’s been blown out.” But then she’d gone on to school Spirit in other options.
Muirin wasn’t the only one Spirit had gone to about this. It had occurred to Spirit that this would be a good way to test Ms. Groves, one of the magic teachers. If what she said matched what Muirin said, then that was a good test at least of whether or not Ms. Groves was giving people misinformation. Plus she might get some angles from Groves that Muirin hadn’t thought of.
Even though Ms. Groves was … scary.
Ms. Groves looked at her with an expression that made Spirit think she was about to get reamed out. “And why would you want to know something like that?”
“Because I don’t want to be known as First Casualty,” Spirit replied.
Ms. Groves had smiled. Actually smiled. It was, as expected, a scary smile.
“Very good, Miss White,” the teacher replied, and rubbed her hands a little. “It pleases me to see you applying yourself at last. When you next get on your computer, you will find you have been given access to a number of new files. Study them. There will be a test in the morning.”
Spirit thanked her, but sighed inwardly. Of course. There’s always a test in the morning.