An hour later, there was an entire city of tents where there’d been nothing but broken ground and crumbling tarmac. There were even enough tents so that the four of them could sleep above ground as well. That was a relief—Spirit had never really gotten used to sleeping at the bottom of a hole in the ground. One of the tents had been designated as the medical tent (though the medical attention would be magical in nature), because a lot of the new arrivals were nursing sprains and bruises sustained in the escape.
Spirit knew she should go and tell Merlin what had happened today—though Vivian might have given him a preliminary report, Spirit supposed he’d want details—but Merlin was unlikely to cause a riot if he was ignored, and the refugees probably would. The longer everyone got to think about things, the less willing they were to cooperate.
“The one thing Oakhurst really didn’t teach us was trust and cooperation,” Burke muttered to Spirit, after he’d broken up yet another fight over supplies.
If there hadn’t been a handful of natural leaders in the group, it would have been a lot worse, but Kelly, Dylan, Veronica, and Brenda rode herd on everyone with ruthless good humor, making and keeping order—and reminding them, over and over, that at least they weren’t sealed into their rooms anymore.
When the tents were all up, everyone gathered in the center of the camp. Tents or no tents, it was clear Vivian hadn’t really been expecting to have to deal with three dozen new residents, because she’d disappeared almost at once and was still nowhere to be seen.
“Listen up!” Burke said. “I know you all have a lot of questions, and I promise you, we’ll do our best to answer them, but right now we need to make the area safe. Separate out into your Schools, and I’ll take you around to the Wards and show you how they work.”
Nobody moved.
“Who died and made you God?” a voice called from the back of the crowd. Spirit couldn’t identify the voice. It might have been Brett Weber. For an instant she saw Burke’s face transform with fury. She could almost hear the words he struggled not to speak. Fools! You would deny the orders of your lawful lord?
Yeah, that’d go over really well, Spirit thought wryly. But it was hard to remember to act like ordinary (ordinary for Oakhurst, anyway) teenagers, when they had the memories of being kings and queens. Even Loch—Lancelot—had been king in his own land before coming to Arthur’s court.…
“School of Fire over here!” Kelly said, stepping out of the crowd and brandishing a glow stick. The tension of the moment was broken.
“Water here!” Dylan said, moving to stand beside her. Some of the attributions of Gifts to Schools didn’t make a lot of sense on the surface: Jaunting, Dylan’s Gift, belonged to the School of Water.
“Air!” Vanessa Cartwright said, her Georgia accent plain even in that one word. Van was an Air Mage, Spirit remembered now, with the root form of that School’s Gift. She could call up a wind from nowhere, or suck all the air from a room with nothing more than a gesture.
“And Earth!” Loch said. Like a number of the students, Loch had minor Gifts from two schools, but Pathfinding was School of Earth.
With only a little grumbling, everyone sorted themselves into Schools. They followed Burke as he led them off to show them where the Wards were. In a few moments, the only ones there were Spirit—whose magic belonged to the Fifth School—and the four Radial kids, who weren’t members of any School. Spirit knew from her own experience how off-balance and left out they must be feeling right now. Not just from all the high weirdness that had gone on today, but from being the only ones here without magic powers. She’d been in their place herself, and it really sucked.
“Come on, guys,” Spirit said. “You’re going to need to see this, too.”
“Why?” Veronica Davenport said plaintively. “None of us has any magic. We’re just people.”
“Normal people,” Brett muttered darkly.
“Sure,” Spirit said brightly, ignoring Brett’s tone of voice. “And being the only ones without magic isn’t any fun—I know, I was at Oakhurst for six months as the only one there without it—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to know where the Wards are. Mordred can track us with magic, but inside the Wards, he can’t see us.”
“You mean they’re kind of like a force field?” Brenda asked.
Spirit smiled. “Kind of. The important thing is to stay inside them.” She gestured, and they came with her reluctantly.
“But how are we going to know where they are?” Veronica asked.
“There’s nothing magical about that part,” Spirit said. “We marked them with chalk. It’s a lot easier to just find a chalk mark than to hope you’re in the right place, and not everybody has major magic.”
That got her a wordless snort from Brett, but the four of them followed her willingly enough. The groups of Oakhurst students had each gathered at the Ward related to their School, and were deep in discussion. Spirit pretty much ignored them as she pointed out the boundaries of their campsite to the Radial teens. She already knew where the Wards and the boundaries were, and it was more important to keep the Townies from feeling that all magicians were their enemies. Oakhurst had set its students against each other as a matter of policy, and Mordred had nearly succeeded in claiming victory because of it.
“Do you think—I don’t know—that other people have magic too?” Veronica asked wistfully.
I think it’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, Spirit thought instantly, but she knew what Veronica was really asking.
“You’re just hoping—” Juliette began.
“I don’t know,” Spirit said, cutting Juliette Weber off before she could say whatever cutting thing she was thinking of. “All I really know about magic is what they taught us up at Oakhurst. And I think there were plenty of lies mixed in to that.”
It wasn’t really an answer, but at least it stopped any further bickering. And for all Spirit knew, Veronica did have magic. Maybe Mordred hadn’t cared about any magicians born in Radial. Maybe he hadn’t bothered to check the kids there for magic powers. Maybe Veronica’s magic was too faint for him to have seen. Spirit had no idea. And now wasn’t the time to investigate.
That could wait until they found out whether the end of the world was going to actually happen.
After they all (Townies and magicians) had circled the camp and learned the boundaries, Vivian organized some of the Oakhurst students to help her bring up food from the pantry in the bunker. There were a couple of folding tables among the things in the truck, and when all the food was all set out, the campsite took on a weird picnic-y look. The Fire Witches were doing a good job of keeping the area warm, and the Oakhurst students began to split up into smaller groups. Spirit noticed that Veronica had joined one of them. She wondered if Veronica’s question had been more urgent than she wanted Spirit to suspect. She’d managed to shake off Mordred’s bespelling, after all. Maybe she really was another late-blooming magician.
“All we need to do now is build a campfire and we can sit around and sing songs,” Addie murmured, walking up behind Spirit.
Spirit just shook her head. “If I’m supposed to be running this rebellion, I’ve got to say Princess Leia really never was my favorite.”
“And so you think you suck at it,” Addie said, with dismaying insight. “Well, nobody else would do any better, Spirit. And a lot of people would do worse.”
Spirit just sighed. Even if I could wave my hand and just make Mordred and Breakthrough vanish in a puff of smoke, we’d still have problems, she thought in irritation. There’s all of us here, and we all have magic, and what if there are more magicians out there? What can we do about them? Anything?
She wanted peace and quiet and a few minutes of not having to answer the same questions over and over again. She left Addie and retraced her steps until she was back at the invisible boundary. Only it wasn’t that invisible now, since somebody’d gotten their hands on a can of bright orange spray-paint and not only marked each cardina
l point but drawn a ragged circle on the tarmac to connect each one.
“It isn’t easy, is it?” Burke asked, coming up quietly behind her.
“None of this is,” Spirit answered bitterly. “Oh husband, would I had known my vow would bind all of us to eternal rebirth!” Spirit played back her own words in her head and hiccupped a little. “Um, that didn’t exactly come out right,” she muttered, blushing.
She could almost feel Burke smile in the darkness. “I got the gist of it. You—she—Guinevere—did the best she could at the time. And if we all weren’t being reborn, then Mordred would have gotten out and nobody would have known what they were up against.”
“But he wouldn’t have had a candidate-pool to recruit his Shadow Knights from,” Spirit answered inarguably. “That geasa of my invoking fell upon all of us, all the people of Britain, no matter who they’d fought for. I—she—shouldn’t have done it.”
“I disagree,” Burke said. “But I’ll be happy to argue it with you for years. After we win.”
That made Spirit sputter out a strangled laugh. “You sound so certain we will!”
“It’s one of those leadership skill things.” She could tell Burke was choosing his words carefully, almost translating them from Old High Forsoothly-speak into modern-day English. “You act confident. You keep your doubts to yourself—or you only share them with people who won’t spread them around.”
“And do you have doubts?” Spirit asked daringly. This was in some ways a more intimate conversation than any she’d had with Burke ever before.
“I’d like to say I don’t,” Burke said. “But in fact, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen now. I think we have a better chance of winning than it might look like, though.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Spirit said doubtfully.
“No.” Burke shook his head. “Mordred’s a.… A control freak,” he said, and the words sounded strange, as if he really were translating them into Modern English (which he probably was). “He won’t take anybody’s advice. And we already know he isn’t even trying to fit in to the modern world. He’s trying to change it into what he knows. I figure that’s going to set him up to make mistakes. Maybe critical ones. But that isn’t why I came looking for you,” he added apologetically.
“Oh?” Spirit asked. While his view of Mordred was encouraging, she wasn’t sure how useful it was. What did it matter if Mordred made mistakes if he had the power to squash them like a bug?
“It’s time for a council of war,” Burke said.
* * *
Vivian was waiting for them in the Medical Tent. With her were Elizabeth, Loch and Addie, and a few of the others from Oakhurst: Dylan, Kelly, Troy, Vanessa, and Emily Davis.
Emily was about Spirit’s own age, but Spirit didn’t know her well. It wasn’t just that Oakhurst didn’t encourage friendships: Emily’s Gift was Scrying, and the students who had it tended to keep to themselves even more than the usual run of student magicians.
“I’ve been talking to the people you rescued,” Vivian said when they came in. “Trying to get an idea of what Mordred’s doing, and how he’s doing it. I know none of you think you saw or heard anything—” this was addressed to the Oakhurst students “—but you saw more than you know. And with Emily’s help, I’ve gotten a good look at what’s going on.”
“So if you can see the future, are we going to win?” Loch said.
“Not the future,” Vivian said. “The past and the present.”
“Clairvoyance, not precognition,” Vanessa said, after a moment’s thought.
Vivian smiled slightly. “You’d be surprised how often getting a good look at the past is useful. But, moving on, the first thing you need to know is that not all the people who vanished—from Oakhurst and from Radial—did it because they were joining forces with the Black Snake. Mordred’s started in on some heavy-duty necromancy in preparation for his conquest.”
“Blood magic,” Loch said in disgust.
“He’s sacrificing them?” Dylan asked, his face twisted in revulsion.
“Yes,” Vivian said. “Eventually, he would probably have killed everyone left at Oakhurst.”
“But … why?” Spirit asked. Even her Reincarnate memories didn’t contain much information on necromancy.
“The younger the victim, the more powerful the sacrifice,” Vivian answered. “And he doesn’t need any of them—you—now. He’s got thirty years of Oakhurst graduates—all Shadow Knights—to draw on, and he knows who his main enemies are.”
“He’s gathered all the magicians at The Fortress,” Elizabeth said, taking up the tale. “But he’s not counting on just them to keep order. Ovcharenko was put in charge of hiring their foot soldiers, so right now there’s a magical army of mercenaries in Radial.”
“Those giants we fought today,” Burke said slowly.
“I wonder if they’re getting paid in T-shirts?” Loch asked irreverently.
“So,” Vivian said. “That’s what you have to deal with at The Fortress: Shadow Knights, monsters, and mercenaries.”
“Do they all know what Mordred’s going to do?” Spirit asked.
“The Shadow Knights and the monsters don’t care—or at least, the Shadow Knights won’t cross him, no matter what they might be thinking about his plans,” Vivian said. “And the monsters can just go home again if they get tired of our world. I suspect Mordred thinks the Shadow Knights will either fall into line completely—those who have their doubts—or if they don’t, they’ll provide more sacrifices for his blood magic.”
“Lovely,” Addie said with a sigh.
Kelly gave her an odd look. “I don’t mean to be a wet blanket here, but you don’t sound nearly upset enough for that news. I don’t see how we can make him stop—and you’ve already said telling the authorities won’t do any good.”
“It won’t,” Spirit said firmly. “But we don’t need to fight our way through an army. All we need to do is get to the oak tree in the Main Hall of Oakhurst. If we can destroy it, Mordred will be vulnerable. He may lose his magic completely. And without Mordred looking over his shoulder, Mark won’t start the war.”
Loch glanced at her, his face still. Spirit could read the unspoken words in his eyes. We hope Mark won’t start the war with Mordred gone.
“Then haven’t we won already?” Kelly asked. “I didn’t exactly start a small fire today. Oakhurst and everything in it is toast. Game over.”
“You started the fire on the top floor,” Spirit pointed out. “Which, okay, I would have done the same thing. But it means their Water Witches probably managed to put it out before it reached the Main Hall. They know they need to protect the Tree from damage, even if they don’t know why. That’s why they were guarding it today when we went in.”
“Then we just need to go back,” Kelly said. “If we get a few of the other Fire Witches together, we should be able to turn Oakhurst into ashes pretty darned quick. As long as somebody evacuates it first.”
“You don’t even need to evacuate it,” Troy said. “I’m not the only one here with Transmutation. School of Air is the most common school for guys.”
Kelly nodded. “Fire and Water for girls, Earth and Air for guys, although anybody can have anything, really,” she said, as if reciting a well-known lesson. “How many other Air Mages with Transmutation are here?”
“Not me,” Vanessa said with a sigh. “Wish I did, but … no.”
“I know Josh has it,” Troy said. “And I think Noah or Colin. Maybe both. But if we go in and start turning everything from the roof on down into water, that will flood anyone out who’s still there. That should take care of your evacuation.”
“Leaving my team with the remains of a soaking wet mansion to set on fire,” Kelly said. “Thanks a lot, dude.”
“But you can do it?” Spirit asked.
“Sure can,” Kelly said. “Give us an hour and we’ll give you a smoking hole in the ground.” She grinned at Troy and high-fived him.
&nbs
p; Burke and Loch looked at Spirit.
“Okay,” she said. “I think it’s a good plan. Tomorrow we’ll go through everyone and see what Gifts everybody has. Then we can ask for volunteers. And go back to Oakhurst … better prepared.” Because an Illusion Mage—another common Air Gift—could help them drive right up to Oakhurst almost unnoticed.
She tried not to think about Muirin, and failed.
“And as soon as Mordred is out of the picture,” Addie said. “Then we call in the authorities.”
* * *
It was late that night before Spirit could actually do something as mundane as sleep, and she still hadn’t had time to go and talk to Merlin. She and the other three had been too busy keeping a lid on things.
It was Loch who’d pointed out that they had almost forty people here, and the longer the Oakhurst contingent got to think about things, the more they were likely to figure they had just as good an idea of what to do next as anyone else did—or to just decide that getting as far from Radial as they could before the missiles flew would be a really good idea. It was Burke who’d suggested they have everyone stand watches. It would give everyone something to do, and it would play into the core values (for definitions of values meaning just the opposite) that Oakhurst had instilled in them, because anybody on watch would probably rat out anybody who tried to sneak away. It was Addie who said they’d need to include the Radial kids in anything they did, because they were already “us-versus-them-ing” things enough without adding in wizards versus Muggles. And Spirit had laughed bitterly and drawn up a watch list. Six people for each watch, and two hour watches (they really only needed two for a watch, but she suspected a lot of the people who signed up would bail, so it was good to have extras). That would mean only about half of them would have to stand a watch each night, so they could start with volunteers.
It went easier than she’d thought it would, but going around and getting everybody signed up meant yet another round of questions. Spirit knew why everyone kept asking the same questions over and over. It was because the answers were so unbelievable—and so bad—they kept hoping this time they’d be different. The idea that kindly old Dr. Ambrosius had murdered their families, that he’d been living a masquerade for decades while being some kind of movie villain mastermind, that he meant to destroy the world … those were all things it was hard to take seriously. Who’d want to believe in those truths, when they meant everyone at Oakhurst had lost their families not by some horrible accident, but by a murder that would never be prosecuted?
Victories Page 12
