Lies and Prophecy (7 page)

“Yeah, well, I knew a lot of it from before,” I said—and then cursed my slip.

Robert's eyebrows shot up. “I thought you hadn't taken a CM class before.”

“Not at Welton,” I said uncomfortably. “Earlier.”

I could sense Liesel about to steer us away from the rocks, but Robert spoke before she could. “You were not on your high school's team, of that I'm sure … oh, my lady, tell me you weren't subjected to that Yan nonsense.”

Even Liesel couldn't save me from this now. Making the best of the situation, I said, “It isn't nonsense. The Yan Path gives you a head start. Hell, I just said it's the reason I'm keeping up in Grayson's class.”

“Yes—but you also waste your time going through the motions of exercises that can have no possible result, because you have no gifts to power them!”

“Sometimes that's a good thing.” It took all of us a moment to realize the words came from Julian; we'd pretty much forgotten he was there. He swiped one hand across his eyes and set the latest bottle down empty. “It's how wilders are trained. We learn the theory and practice the form before we attempt it with power.”

I nodded. “Yan got his idea from that, I think. I don't really know the details, but he figured that if early training was good for wilders, why not for ordinary bloods?”

“Because it teaches you
failure,
” Robert said. “Go through the motions of calling up energy or what have you, but of course nothing happens, and so by the time your gifts come you
expect
nothing to happen. It might work for wilders, where non-response of the gift is hardly a problem, but for the rest of us?” He shook his head in disgust.

Startled, I looked to Liesel. Her expression might have been drawn by a cartoon artist: an appalled wince, the kind someone has right after a clumsy oaf knocks down their house of cards.

Was Robert right? Was my problem that I'd trained myself to fail?

Liesel had recovered by the time anyone else looked at her, and diverted Robert into an argument over the specialty schools in Germany. It gave me time to think. He couldn't be right, not all the time. Plenty of people took Yan lessons and went on to perfectly successful careers in ceremonial magic. The system worked.

But nothing was perfect. Maybe I was one of the duds—not
me,
not something innate to my gifts, but the way the training had affected me. All those exercises, all those empty motions, building up a pattern in my head.

And Liesel knew it. I could translate her wince; no doubt she'd figured this out a while ago, and had been trying to lead me gently down the path to overcoming that block. If she'd said to my face, “Your problem is that you expect to fail”—as Robert had just more or less done—it would have put me precisely where I was now: even more tangled up in my own head. Any doubts I had now would feed on themselves in a vicious circle.

My roommate's tactics were good. Since they'd just been blown out of the water by one enthusiastic Irishman, though, I had to fall back on the one thing I
knew
I was good at: sheer damned stubbornness. This was something I could fix, and I
would.

Fortified by that thought, I glanced over at Julian—and he looked me in the eye.

The effect was appalling. He rarely met anyone's gaze, because he knew what it did to them. The strangeness of him, the inhuman presence that set him apart from me and everyone else, grew stronger by a hundredfold. Every hair on my body rose at once. His shields were fully up, and his grey eyes held no expression whatsoever. And I could not look away.

A hand landed on my shoulder. I jumped. “Kim, tell Robert he's being unreasonable,” Liesel said. When had she moved behind me? The faint squeeze of her fingers said she'd noticed me caught, and had come to rescue me. In gratitude—and because it was a safe bet—I parroted her words obediently.

By the time I glanced back, Julian had begun to gather up the empty bottles, gaze carefully averted again.

He'd known. At least, I thought so. All my determination not to let him see, but Julian was hardly an idiot; maybe he'd even spotted the Yan book in my hand at the library. Why hadn't he said anything, though? Not as bluntly as Robert, necessarily, but
something
?

Maybe out of respect for my privacy. Maybe just to spare my pride a bruising.

Well, I'd take bruised pride over continued failure any day. Especially when it meant that maybe—if I re-trained my brain—I could do CM after all.

And maybe become a Guardian.

My delight at the thought was tempered by a single, small chill.
I have to be prepared.
Ever since that reading, my gift had been whispering those words in my ear, reminding me that something was coming. I hadn't forgotten the Moon, and I doubted it had forgotten me.

~

Robert started half out of his chair when the door crashed into the wall. He didn't relax at the sight of me in the entrance to his dorm room, and I couldn't blame him.

He eyed me warily from his half-crouched stance as though debating whether to bolt for cover. “Are you angry at me, my absent roommate, or some poor ill-starred third party?”

My only response was to show him the tarot deck in my hand. He nodded, lowering himself back into his chair as I shuffled three times, cut, and threw down the top card.

It skidded across his desk and landed at a skewed angle. Lurid flames leapt forth from cracks in the walls of a crumbling spire. Pieces of masonry fell to earth like burning comets. People fell alongside them, hands outstretched as though that would save them. “The Tower,” Robert said. Sorcerer he might be, but he could recognize the Major Arcana.

I rammed it back into the middle of the deck, shuffled, cut, and dealt.

The Tower.

Shuffle, cut, and deal.

The Tower.

And again.

Robert leaned back in his chair and quirked one eyebrow at me. He seemed more amused than anything else. “Las Vegas would have great use for you.”

“It's not me.”

The harsh words froze his easy grin. Slowly, cautiously, he shifted forward again, not looking away. “I believe you.” He paused. “Do it again.”

“I was doing class work for Historical Tarot,” I said as I shuffled and cut. The motions were soothingly familiar and kept my hands from shaking. “Trying to, anyway. But every single time, no matter what the question is, the first card up is the Tower.” And once more it held true.

Robert spun his chair and plunged one hand into a chaotic drawer. He fished around blindly for a moment before coming up with a nearly-new deck. Dropping the cards into his hand, he shuffled more times than he needed to, cut, and dealt.

Six of cups, reversed.

He repeated his test. The nine of wands landed on his desk.

Grabbing a scrap of paper, Robert began to write furiously in his illegible scrawl. “How many times?”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember. “Five here. One other time with this deck, making six. Four times with an eighteenth-century deck, once with an original Rider-Waite, once with a Manifestation-era Urban Tarot, twice with my Piacenza. And every time it was the Tower.”

Still writing, Robert extended his free hand. “Do you mind?” I handed him the deck without hesitation; the cards were a library loan anyway. Twice he shuffled, cut, and dealt. The first try turned up the two of swords. The other produced Temperance.

Robert handed the deck back and shrugged. “It seems to be you.”

Repeating the test with his cards, I got the Tower again. I sighed and sank into his roommate's empty chair. “I kind of hoped Julian would be here—no offense.”

“None taken. He seems the natural audience for such strangeness.”

I hadn't seen Julian since he came by my room; he'd missed lunch on Monday and Wednesday. I'd never told him about my own reading, and the Moon. There hadn't seemed much point: a vague warning in response to a personal question, and nothing indicating Julian except maybe the Knight of Swords. But now this.

Robert leaned back and looked pensive. “The Tower. A card of destruction, as I recall, or sudden and severe change. Have you tried other tools? What do they turn up?”

His mind was a gem. “Do you have runes?”

“Somewhere.” He gave the drawer a vague look. Then his hand dove in again and came out holding a bag. “They're wretchedly cheap.”

“I don't care.” I stuck my hand in and grabbed the first piece my fingers encountered.

“Well?” Robert asked impatiently. “What is it?”

I laid the square of plastic down on his desk. He glanced at the figure painted on it—an H-shaped character, with the cross-bar tilted at an angle—and shrugged. “I confess ignorance. Three years I've owned these, and never used them.”

“Hagalaz,” I said slowly. “Sudden change, again, and destruction. It can also mean a bridge between worlds, but its primary significance is like the Tower's.” I tossed it back in, shook the bag up, and drew. Neither of us was surprised to see Hagalaz again.

Robert glanced around the room. “I have no other divination tools, and I'm damned if I'll touch Julian's things to find any. You might want to experiment further, to see if this continues. Your class meets tomorrow, yes?” I nodded. “Ask then, I suppose. Perhaps others have encountered this phenomenon.”

“What do you make of it?”

“You are the diviner, not I.”

“I know what I think. I want to know what
you
think.”

Robert's brow furrowed. “Well. It must be serious, to produce results this consistent even when you try to ask different questions. If others have experienced the same, be assured the university will set people to investigate at once. More likely, though, the change augured is specific to you.”

He'd arrived at that conclusion without even knowing about my prior reading. It cemented my growing fear. But then Robert surprised me by adding, “If the change is not personal, and you are the only one to see it, then it's also possible you are unusually sensitive—or being specifically targeted with a warning.”

Somehow, that was even less comforting than the thought of the Tower in my life. “Not likely. I'm not going to pick up something everyone else would miss. And no one has a reason to target me.”

“I should hope not.” Robert dropped the tarot cards and runes back into his drawer. “Ask tomorrow, I would say. And then go from there.” I nodded agreement. Then he frowned in sudden thought. “Not to cast a pall over what should be a happy occasion—but could this be related to your birthday?”

His question froze me where I stood. I'd been so caught up in homework, and then distracted by this anomaly; I had honestly forgotten what day it was.

My skin felt as if somebody had thrown a bucket of cold water over me, but I forced my mind to work. “No,” I said slowly, eyes unfocused. “I—I don't think so. I could be wrong, of course … but that's the kind of connection my gift would make if it were there. Even if I didn't get anything else. Until you said that, though, I didn't even remember that today's my birthday.”

“Given your strength of gift, for you not to even think of that aspect does argue against correlation, yes.” Robert snorted then, and gave me an amused, chiding look. “Why were you doing work anyway, silly child? You ought never work on your birthday.”

“Don't go there, Robert.” I stood up and stretched, trying to release some of the tension that had taken up permanent residence in my body. “I don't need another lecture on my course load.”

“Because it is your birthday, I will concede the point. For now.” He rose to make a mocking bow. The antique clock on his desk chose that moment to begin chiming softly, and our heads both whipped around. “Blast! We're overdue in the Arboretum.”

I stared at him blankly. Then memory returned. The equinox: the Palladian Circle was holding a Sabbat ritual. “Crap. I have to get my things.” I grabbed the tarot deck and headed for the doorway, then paused. “Thanks, Robert. I still don't know what it means, but I feel better anyway.”

He nodded. “Any assistance I can offer is yours, my lady.”

~

Later that night, when the ritual was over, and the celebratory dinner, and the singing of “Happy Birthday” deliberately rendered in thirteen keys at once—a real achievement, when only seven people were singing it—I went into the Arboretum, feeling my way carefully in the new-moon darkness, stripped off my clothes, and jumped into the Copper Creek.

It was tradition, dating back to my childhood in Georgia. There, I would spend an hour floating in our pool, thinking over the previous year. Minnesota in late September was not so congenial to that, at least not by my standards. But I kept the practice up in modified form, meditating upon the bank, then jumping into the water at the end. Why should a little hypothermia get in my way?

My meditation this year was a disaster, though. Happy thoughts about possible Guardianship kept being interrupted by logistics—what requirements would I need to complete before applying to graduate programs?—and personal hurdles—what would my mother say? Once I swept those concerns out of the way, I hit the underlying foundation of tension, the Moon and the Tower, and my gift's refusal to tell me anything more about them. Finally I gave it up as a bad job and dove in. There was a second tradition to follow, this one dating from my freshman days at Welton, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Two years ago I'd been hurrying home from my dip, cursing my own idiocy and cataloguing better ways to continue the practice, possibly involving indoor pools or even bathtubs. I hadn't been looking where I was going, beyond a serious desire to get home before I died. My path cut through the center of campus and the massive monument there: a huge circle of dark green marble, edged with the seals of all the countries that abided by the sidhe-blood laws laid down in the Cairo Accords, and ringed with three grey marble arches symbolizing telekinetic disciplines, telepathic disciplines, and ceremonial magic. I'd been halfway across it and thinking only of home.