Sacrifices
Authors: Mercedes Lackey,Rosemary Edghill
Tags: #Mystery, #Fantasy, #Young Adult
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CONTENTS
Tor Teen Books by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill
PROLOGUE
The year Spirit White turned fifteen, she’d gone to the fair.
Well, to be accurate, her
family
had gone to the fair: Spirit and Mom and Dad and her baby sister Phoenix, who was just about to turn twelve. And it wasn’t a fair like a State Fair, with rides and a midway: it was a Crafts Fair—a
juried
Crafts Fair, Dad had said happily—and Mom had said a jury meant the accused would get a fair trial at least and Fee said Dad was just bringing her and Spirit to have slave labor and he’d laughed and twirled an imaginary moustache.
And they’d stayed at a friend’s house, because the show was two days and too far away for them to drive home overnight, and he’d won second prize in the “Decorative Arts” category, and Mom had bought food before they left and they stopped at a rest stop on the way back to have a picnic. It was nice, because it was June.
She couldn’t remember the rest of that day. She’d tried and tried until her head hurt and all she wanted to do was lie down and cry, but she couldn’t. The doctors had said it was normal. All she could remember was the end of it, almost midnight, when they were almost home and Dad was just making that hairpin turn over the ravine with Keller Creek at the bottom of it.
And then there’d been a flash of dark, all around the car.
That had been the first memory that came back to her after the operations, when she started probing the end of her world as if it were a sore tooth. Darkness darker than midnight. A thing squatting in the middle of the road. (Impossible thing. Monster.)
And it looked at them and Mom shouted and Dad yanked the wheel sideways.…
It was somewhere between Operation Number Two and Operation Number Three—when they’d stopped having to remind her that her parents and her little sister were dead in the crash—that a sheriffs’ deputy came to her hospital room and told her that there’d been another accident, that her parents’ empty house had caught fire and burned to the ground.
(She wondered, later, why Oakhurst had bothered to burn it down, but she’d never figured that one out.)
That was when the lawyer showed up, the lawyer from Oakhurst, the one who’d told her all the lies: that her parents had set up a “trust” for her; that the trust was administered by this “Oakhurst Foundation”; that when she was fully recovered Oakhurst would be sending for her, because she’d be living at “The Oakhurst Complex” until she was twenty-one. (Oakhurst
did
send for her, but it was still a lie, though it took her a long time—six months—to realize that.)
But she came to Oakhurst by limousine and private plane and private railway car (wondering all the time:
why do they need to try to impress me?
though later she knew), and there she met Doctor Ambrosius for the very first time. His hair was pure silvery white, combed straight back, and long enough to brush his shoulders. His beard was the same color, and his eyes were a pale blue, and he spoke with a faint English accent that Loch said, back in the beginning, was probably put on for the tourist trade.
That was in September, and by the beginning of October Spirit realized that Oakhurst was fanatical about competition: they pitted the kids against each other in the classroom and on the field. Heck, they
turned
them against each other; it had been weeks before Spirit realized how strange it was for her to have friends—Loch and Addie and Muirin and Burke—at Oakhurst.
The five of them were as different from one another as they could possibly be. Addie was wealthy and refined, the sole heir to Prester-Lake BioCo, a major pharmaceutical company worth, literally, billions. Burke was quiet and quietly devout; he’d been orphaned as an infant and grew up in foster care. Loch was the son of a businessman. Muirin’s father had owned a construction company—his second wife had sent her to Oakhurst. Cultured, quiet, clever, drop-dead trendy—and
her
—they were the unlikeliest of friends. But their strengths complemented each other.
That was about the time Spirit’s life and “normal” parted ways forever. It wasn’t bad enough knowing magic was real—or that all your friends had it—or that you were
supposed
to have it and didn’t—but then the five of them had to figure out how to battle a bunch of ghosts and elves and demons that someone inside Oakhurst was helping pass through the “protective wards” around the campus. And they’d won, and they’d even survived, and that was the point at which the credits were supposed to roll and the movie was over.
But the Wild Hunt hadn’t been the real problem—or not the
only
problem. For the last six months, she and her friends had uncovered enemy after enemy, conspiracy inside conspiracy. They’d destroyed the Wild Hunt that had been preying on the Oakhurst students for decades, only to realize that someone—or some
thing
—had Called it in the first place. And when the Shadow Knights descended on Oakhurst, they’d fought back. They’d
all
fought back.
* * *
Before the Shadow Knights could move, Dylan grabbed a piece of burning wood, and charged the nearest Knights with a bellow of fury. The Knights might have been ready to fight, but their horses weren’t ready to face a screeching maniac flailing at them with fire. They bolted. At that, almost the entire student body broke out into shouts of defiance and anger. Those who had combat magic used it. Those who didn’t picked up anything they could use as a weapon, and charged.
It was like being in the middle of that attack on the endurance riders, except the proverbial shoe was very much on the other foot. Fueled by energy frantic for any sort of outlet, the combat magicians of Oakhurst filled the air with spells. Spears of ice, gouts of fire, deadly little tornados and fierce blasts of derecho wind pummeled the Shadow Knights who’d been expecting to confront a huddle of terrified youngsters. Illusory copies of Dylan led the ones charging at the lines; kids who were throwing whatever came to hand found themselves with piles of perfectly round ice balls beside them. There were a couple of people who had Animal Telepathy and Animal Control because the mounted Knights found their horses practically turning themselves inside out to be rid of their riders.
The Knights managed to deflect the fireballs, but they did so at the expense of not deflecting ice shards and the objects being hurled like missiles. Spirit had the satisfaction of seeing one of her own ice balls make a direct hit inside the hood of the Knight nearest her, and seeing him go down. Silence from the Shadow Knights turned to cries of fury and pain.
* * *
That night they’d danced and partied until dawn, sure they’d won. They’d awakened the next day to find themselves in an armed camp. The attack of the Shadow Knights had been just the excuse that Mark Rider and Breakthrough had needed to
really
take over. Soon after the Shadow Knights had attacked Oakhurst for the first time, Mark Rider, his wife, Madison, and his brother, Teddy, had arrived. Officially, he was here because Mark Rider was moving Breakthrough’s HQ to Radial. Unofficially, he was here to protect Oakhurst from the Shadow Knights.
Only he wasn’t, because he
is
a Shadow Knight. They all are. Everyone at Breakthrough.
Almost overnight, Breakthrough had taken over Oakhurst. Classes had gotten harder, the teachers more ruthless. Guards patrolled the campus openly, night and day. But if the regimen had been hard before the February Dance—and the student rebellion—it was brutal now. Academic classes had been slashed. But it didn’t matter how many classes had been axed—almost every waking moment was still filled with classes. Magic, folklore, military strategy, wilderness survival, and every kind of combat you could imagine.
We’re being brainwashed into becoming good little foot soldiers. Paranoid foot soldiers.
It started almost as soon as you got up, with a “motivational email” you had to read while you were getting dressed—and if you didn’t, they’d know, because the Breakthrough staff quizzed everybody on the contents. Every meal now included a “Motivational Lecture” about how they were in a war now—and you’d better show up for meals on the dot, because they closed and locked the doors, and if you weren’t there, you didn’t eat. Even Muirin didn’t dare sleep late any more.
Last year, before she got to Oakhurst, Spirit turned sixteen. The lawyer who came to her at the hospital said she’d be living at “The Oakhurst Complex” until she was twenty-one. That was a lie.
Because Spirit wasn’t sure she was going to live to be seventeen.
ONE
Guinevere, High Queen, sat like a statue on the bare back of one of the famous white horses that had been her dowry on the day she had wed Arthur. Only the knights of the Table had ever been permitted to ride them, for they were bred to carry kings.
But there were no more than a handful of Arthur’s knights left now.
When Arthur fell at Camlann—and it seemed to all as if the day were lost—it had been Guinevere who had taken command of his army—and they had been eager to have someone, anyone, lead them. That, Mordred had not expected—that she, of all people, would appear on the battlefield in borrowed armor at the head of a vast army. From the moment Arthur had sent her into exile, she had been preparing for this day. But she had come too late to save her husband and lord. Camelot had fallen.
She had given her dying husband into the care of the Lady of the Lake. She had taken his sword from his death-cold fingers.
And she had followed the fleeing Mordred and his army with all her host.
Mordred had broken Arthur’s army at Camlann, and the years of fighting that had preceded it had stripped Britain of knights and fighting men. But Guinevere’s army did not ride clad in mail and wearing steel. It was made up of Druids and monks, nuns and sorceresses—the Old Ways and the New Faith coming together to oppose an enemy who would destroy all that was. And beside Guinevere rode The Merlin.
Nimue had been the first of Mordred’s allies to desert him, and with the breaking of the spell she had put upon him, The Merlin was freed. When he had learned of Arthur’s death, his wrath had been terrible to see.
Across all of Britain the two armies rode, one pursuing, one fleeing. And slowly, one by one, Mordred’s allies and vassals deserted him. Arthur had died in the springtide. It was autumn when Mordred was brought to bay.
This was the end.
The trees were leafless, now, and the wind was cold. Behind Guinevere stood her husband’s army and her own, each man and woman waiting with a deadly implacable patience to witness the end of the man who had destroyed everything they had worked so long to build. Before her stood the ancient oak tree that Mordred had once meant to be The Merlin’s eternal tomb.