Victories

by Mercedes Lackey

  “But why didn’t they just kill us?” Spirit asked.

  “Best guess?” Loch answered. “They didn’t have detailed orders. And I don’t think Mordred’s the kind of guy you want to get creative on. So they did everything they could that was covered by their orders, and ran for reinforcements.”

  “Who should be here pretty soon,” Spirit said wearily, “so if you’ve got any good ideas, now’s the time.”

  She looked around the gym. Over near the bleachers, she could see that Burke was talking to everyone, organizing work parties and getting everyone to make lists of what they needed to settle in here. There’d been forty of them at the missile base. Now there were only thirty-two. Vivian was among the missing, and that hurt out of proportion to the loss. It seemed unfair for Vivian to have worked so hard and hidden so long and so successfully only to have fallen into Mordred’s hands now. But at least Elizabeth was still among the survivors.

  No, Guinevere whispered in Spirit’s mind. Iseult. And Gareth Beaumains, that noble knight. And more.…

  Spirit looked around the gym. Maybe her power had gotten stronger since she’d Awakened Dylan, or maybe now she just knew what she was looking for, because despite what Iseult had told her back when she was first telling Spirit about the Reincarnates, Spirit could not only tell which of them were Reincarnates—but who the Reincarnates were. And what she saw—scattered among the Oakhurst refugees—were Guinevere’s friends, vassals, comrades. She saw her friends—but she also saw Arthur, Lancelot, Vivianne.…

  Here were Gareth and Iseult, who were also Dylan Williams and Elizabeth Walker. There was Brangane, the sorceress who’d aided Iseult—in this life Maddie Harris—and Bertilak, the Green Knight’s warrior bride—Kylee Williamson. Cei and Bedivere, Dagonet and Morholt, Olwen, Peredur, Laudine, Loholt … and Gaheris, Gareth’s brother.

  And Agravaine’s brother, too. Dylan-slash-Gareth had come down on their side. Would Chris Terry make the same choice if she awakened his Reincarnate self? Or would he side with his other “brother”—and the Shadow Knights?

  No, Spirit thought. I have to believe Chris—Gaheris—is a Grail Knight, not a Shadow Knight. That’s why they locked him up.…

  In a way, Mordred had done the selection of Spirit’s allies for her. And with a dozen Reincarnates, and a dozen magicians, surely they could do … something?

  “First things first,” Burke said, coming over to them. “Let’s make sure the Black Snake can’t find us.”

  * * *

  Burke’s plan was elegant. (And, Spirit thought, it had a chance of actually working.) Thanks to Veronica, they knew that there was a bomb shelter in the basement—the school dated from the 1950s—which had been converted to an emergency shelter. It was full of cots, blankets, and cases of MREs.

  “Continuing our Cold War motif,” Loch said grandly, as he opened the door. “We present—an actual Atomic Bomb Shelter!”

  “It’s for bad weather, mainly,” Brenda Copeland said, walking past him to flip the light switch. Nothing happened, and she made a face. “We lose power a lot around here in the winter, and when that happens, folks need a place to go so they don’t freeze. The school’s got an emergency generator, too, but I don’t guess we’ll be firing it up any day soon.”

  “Yeah,” Loch said. “How about not?”

  Spirit suddenly realized that while people had been shivering down here during the winter blizzards, Oakhurst had probably had not only its own power plant (both mundane and magical) but enough space that it could take in everyone in Radial without anyone being cramped. (If it hadn’t been a fortress being run by an insane necromancer, of course.) She wondered if this shelter had been needed in the years since Oakhurst had opened—and if so, how often. And at the same time, another part of her was thinking that Mordred was no true lord and knight, to refuse the shelter of his castle to townsfolk in need.

  She wondered if this kind of “double vision” was as confusing to the other Awakened Reincarnates as it was to her.

  “We’ll hide the van under the bleachers in the gym,” Burke said, “and Angela can show the rest of the Air Mages how to sweep away every trace that shows we’re here. Then we hunker down here in the basement, and Ward the heck out of it.”

  “So the atomic bomb shelter becomes a magical bomb shelter,” Loch said.

  Burke nodded. “They can stomp around the school until the cows come home. But they won’t find us down here. And I’m going to bet that if they search it once, they won’t bother to search it twice.”

  “Great,” Spirit said, trying to force enthusiasm into her voice that she didn’t feel.

  She didn’t ask what they’d do next.

  She knew the answer.

  * * *

  Nervous energy carried everyone through all their preparations. The shelter was large enough for all of them—Veronica said it was rated for fifty—though when all the cots were set up it would be a little hard to move around.

  Spirit realized that it hardly mattered whether Merlin was still out there on the Internet or not—the school had a few computers for student use, and one of them even connected to the Internet (Veronica said)—but without electricity, they might as well just be so many big chunks of plastic. Whether Merlin was out there or not, they were on their own now.

  Angela and Kylee did the sweep of the school—everywhere inside it any of them had been, and around the outside, too—with Allan going along to help hide them while they did it. As far as Spirit could understand, it was kind of like casting a set of inside-out Wards: you weren’t building an impenetrable wall that nothing could get through. You were sweeping away everything that a Warding might hide.

  Once they were all inside the shelter, Burke went around chalking marks on the walls and the floor. Then he lifted Loch up to do the same on the ceiling.

  “Is that it?” Brenda asked, when he was done. She sounded puzzled and a little disappointed. Burke smiled at her.

  “Just the start. Benchmarks, you might say. Now we turn them into protection,” Loch answered.

  Spirit knew, from the few things Addie and Muirin had said (and oh, god, would there ever be a time when she could think of Muirin without tears?) that setting Wards was advanced magic that wasn’t taught until the very end of your time at Oakhurst—undoubtedly set up that way so the Oakhurst students couldn’t hide things from their teachers (assuming, of course, she thought, anyone ever really did graduate from Hellmouth Academy). All anyone was usually taught before then was how to recognize Wards and make them stronger. Creating them was a different thing. Of everyone here, only Addie had the knowledge to do that. The Lady of the Lake was a powerful sorceress in her own right, even without the power of the Hallows.

  So six times Addie—Vivianne—created the fragile scaffold of the Warding, and six times the young magicians filled them with power—the power not of four Schools, but five. Spirit—Guinevere—felt herself at the center of a vortex of raw power, once again at one with the land, as she had been when she had held the power of Britain in her Gift. As she had three times before in this lifetime, she let herself serve as a conduit of the great force of Life and Light, channeling it into the friends and comrades around her, molding their power into something vast and good.

  A sword against the Darkness.

  It seemed to Spirit she could hear a high bell-like chime when the sixth Ward snapped into place with the other five. Just let them try to see through that! she thought in fierce triumph.

  “Whoa,” Blake Watson said, gazing down at his hands as if he expected to see his palms smoking. “That was intense.”

  Spirit hid a smile as she looked at the Radial kids. Brenda was looking puzzled, as if she’d gone to a concert and there’d been only silence. Veronica was looking hopeful, as if she might be able to hear the music if she only tried hard enough.

  “Did you really do anything?” Veronica blurted out, and then blushed furiously.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Brenda said doubtfu
lly. “You just all stood around staring at each other for a couple of minutes.”

  “Indeed,” Dylan said. “We did a parlous thing. And now we can rest easy—chill out—here in our nice warm bunker.”

  Spirit recognized the signs of Dylan editing his speech to cut out the worst of Gareth’s forsoothlyness and tried not to grimace. It was hard enough to be a teen wizard. It was a lot worse when you also had the memories of somebody years older than you were who’d lived centuries ago. And who, in a sense, was you.

  “We’re safe, for now,” Burke said. “So I guess it’s time to make plans.”

  There was really only one possible plan. The question was: how? The Oakhurst students simply assumed they were going to fight—it was what they’d been trained for, after all. And whether they wanted to just run away or not, Oakhurst had carefully taught them—month after month, year after year—that escape was impossible.

  If they couldn’t run, they had to fight. And their deadline—May First—was getting closer every hour.

  Burke organized their forces. Everyone knew him, and everyone liked him—he’d been at Oakhurst longer than anyone else in their rebel band. On the morning after their arrival, Burke sent out scouting parties—Shadewalkers and Illusion Mages, who could move about the area without being seen. His aim wasn’t to have them enter the enemy camp—one magician could sense another if they were using their Gift—but to see if the Shadow Knights were hunting them, or coming toward the school, and to gather any other information they could.

  Of the thirty magicians in their group, five had the requisite Gifts. There were two Shadewalkers, Loch and another boy named Russell Frazier, and three Illusion Mages: Renee Trueblood, Mike Sherwood, and Allan Tate. Spirit knew that Loch could protect himself, but of the others, only Allan was a Reincarnate (but an unAwakened one, for what that was worth), and Renee was only thirteen. She was the youngest. Of all the kids here, Angelina Swanson, eighteen, was the oldest.

  Most of us aren’t even old enough to vote, and we’ve got to save the world.

  “I don’t get it,” Brenda said, puzzled.

  The two Radial teens were, Spirit knew, valuable allies, and she’d made sure to tell them so, and include them in both the planning and in things as minor as being there when they opened the door of the gym to let their scouting party out. Neither one had magic, so neither one could be influenced by a lot of the subtle spells Mordred might cast to make them reveal themselves. And to a magical search, they would be invisible.

  Brenda glanced at Spirit. “You’re all kids, like us. And they’re just going to … walk out there? Without even, I don’t know, a Kevlar vest or anything?”

  “Kevlar’s hot, and mail is hot, noisy, and heavy,” Loch said, absently. He was bundled up in several sweaters against the cold, because the heavy canvas parka Vivian had given him would rustle when he moved. He was checking himself over carefully: making sure he was wearing nothing that would reflect light, or catch on something, or make noise when he moved. He glanced up at Brenda and smiled. “Yeah, we are. And it’s not just because we don’t have a real choice. It’s because we’ve trained to do this. Say what you will about Oakhurst—and I could say quite a lot—it trained us to fight. And now we’re going to.”

  He opened the door just far enough to slip out. Spirit watched after him, then blinked, realizing she couldn’t see him any longer.

  “Was that magic?” Veronica asked. “Can you still see him?”

  “Yes, it was,” Spirit said. “And no, I can’t. It’s complicated.”

  “I can,” Russ Frazier said, grinning. He was another Shadewalker, after all. “My turn.”

  He slipped out the door, and one by one, the three Illusion Mages followed. Then all there was left to do was wait. Some people stayed down in the basement. Some came up to the first floor to look around. Others went picking through the athletic equipment stored here, looking for things that could be made into weapons. The Cauldron could transform anything placed into it into what you needed it to be, but the closer it was to what you wanted it to be to begin with, the easier the transformation was. And if your Gift allowed you to turn wood to stone—or to iron—even a hockey stick could become a deadly weapon.

  * * *

  Everybody was on edge until the five scouts returned from their first reconnaissance. They were able to report that there was no sign of activity east of The Fortress—that was the side Macalister High was on. Twenty miles west stood the old Tyniger Manor: Oakhurst Academy.

  “No Wards,” Allan Tate said. “And no search parties, either. Or any kind of guards.”

  “What could they possibly need to guard?” Loch sniped. “They’ve brainwashed an entire town into thinking they’re medieval peasants, and everyone in The Fortress has gone over to the Dark Side.”

  Russ Frazier and Mike Sherwood reported much the same thing—if anybody was out looking for them, they weren’t doing it from horseback or in cars. “Not that there’s anything like a road left once you get far enough away from the high school,” Mike said, with a shrug.

  “So they aren’t going to keep looking for you?” Brenda asked. “After all they did—following you to Nebraska, attacking you, killing people—they’re just going to forget about you?” She sounded both baffled and indignant.

  “They probably think we’re still running,” Loch said.

  “We aren’t their priority,” Burke said (and oh, it was Arthur that Spirit heard in his voice, Arthur who had grown to manhood waging war while dreaming always of peace). “And they don’t think we’re a major threat. At least Mordred doesn’t think so. And he’s the one calling the shots—woe betide any wight who exceeds his authority. Er, as it were. I think they’ll keep looking for us, but they’ll be looking in Nebraska, and that’s a bit of a hike from their home base. We’ll have a few days’ grace, I think, before they really start looking closer to home.”

  They had the Cauldron’s magic to thank for that, Spirit/Guinevere knew. There would be no trail for Mordred’s hunters to follow back here to find them.

  “I saw something out there,” Renee said, shivering. “At least I think I did.”

  “Ah, but did it see you?” Addie’s voice held all of Vivianne’s authority and her assumption of rule. “It can’t have, or we’d all be dead now.” She smiled encouragingly at Renee.

  Way to make everybody feel better, Spirit thought, and felt her other self smile in rueful agreement.

  “So we aren’t dead and what was it?” Dylan demanded. He, too, was having trouble sorting his Reincarnate self out from his present life; he spoke as if he were used to commanding instant obedience.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Renee said. Her jaw firmed. It was far too old an expression for her face. “If I thought it’d seen me, I wouldn’t have come back here,” she said flatly. “But—School of Air, Illusion, you know the drill—I can see right through them. And there was a stand of trees, right at the edge of where the road is turned to grass.”

  “County’s been talking about cutting those down since forever,” Brenda said quietly.

  “So it was bespelled,” Renee said. “Only, under the illusion, it was still trees, okay? Only.… I think they were alive.”

  “Alive like…?” Spirit prompted carefully.

  “Like in that movie!” Renee burst out. “Where the trees were people, and they walked around.”

  “Ent, misbehaving,” Loch said, and the sheer magnitude of that horrible pun was enough to make Addie groan and Spirit roll her eyes.

  “Maybe that’s what Mordred’s using for sentries,” Burke said after a moment’s thought. “It’d make sense.”

  “I’m going to guess that from now on, saying the hills are alive isn’t going to be funny,” Allan Tate said.

  “Not even a little bit,” Loch answered.

  * * *

  They were going to make a last stand against The Forces of Darkness™, and the idea was so insane that even Guinevere, who had faced down Mordred
’s dark army the first time, found it implausible. But they had no choice. Eventually the Shadow Knights would search Macalister High and find them. Or they’d just tear it down, and find them that way. Or Mordred would launch the missiles. Before any of those things happened—instead of any of those things happening—they had to defeat the Shadow Knights. Which meant defeating Mordred first. Which meant burning the Oak to ash.

  That had to be their first priority. Nothing else would have much point if they couldn’t destroy the source of Mordred’s power.

  And for that reason, Spirit’s target wasn’t The Fortress. There was no way they could storm that with just them, no matter how powerful their magic might be. But Loch had confirmed that Oakhurst was still standing (though the upper stories were burnt out and the roof had fallen in), and so she meant to strike at the Gallows Oak. It might not be the source of Mordred’s power, but it was clearly his weak spot. Leave it intact, and he might be able to jump to a new body. Destroy the Oak, and they might have a chance against the Shadow Knights.

  “I don’t think Mark really wants to rule over a post-atomic wasteland,” Spirit said to Burke. “But I’m not sure how we can use that.”

  “Any indecision on the part of the foe is a weakness his attacker can exploit,” Burke said. She saw him grimace as he heard his own words—they were Arthur’s, not Burke’s.

  It was evening, and they’d snatched a moment of privacy by offering to do the last sweep through the gym. Everyone else was already down in the shelter.

  How often had she and Arthur snatched just such moments of privacy at the edge of his war camp?

  Spirit shook her head, trying to remember … what? She didn’t know. Spirit White, of Flat Rock, Indiana? Her parents? Her sister? That life seemed unreal now. She was Guinevere of Britain, Bán Steud, daughter of the White Mare.

  “I never liked those movies anyway,” Burke said, idly. “And I’m willing to bet Mark didn’t either. Teddy probably did, though.…” He took a deep breath. “I know this is a fell unchancy thing, my lady, that neither you nor I did ever hope to see.” He took a deep breath. “And this is just as weird for me as it is for you. Honest.”