Victories (13 page)

“It takes a little getting used to,” Spirit said.
If I needed any more proof that being a Reincarnate doesn’t mean you have to be the same person you were, this would be it.
Gareth Beaumains was remembered in Arthurian Myth as The Kitchen Knight. He was the youngest son of Lot and Morgause, and Gawain, Agravaine, and Gaheris were three of his brothers.

Mordred was the fourth.

“Wow,” Addie said, staring at Spirit. “You— You’re—”

“You really do have magic.
” Spirit didn’t need magic to guess what Addie was thinking. Vivianne—The Lady of the Lake—had kept a court nearly as grand as Arthur’s, and tendered her aid to Arthur and Guinevere out of courtesy, not fealty.

Spirit tried to force the double vision out of her thoughts. Mordred was the one doing his best to live in the past, and Spirit had no intention of joining him there. But apparently they had one thing in common. They both had the School of Spirit magic that would allow them to awaken the Reincarnates.

Only Mordred had centuries more experience at it. The magic her Guinevere-self remembered was nothing like what Spirit had seen at Oakhurst.

While she was struggling with her thoughts—and with her new awareness of what she could do—Loch and Burke filled Dylan in on what they’d learned in the fortnight since their escape.

“We need to rally the good guys,” Dylan said when they were done. “And the first step to doing that is to take back the Intraweb. That will take out their electronic security, too. I can do that. You guys need to find someone who can zap the Tree.”

“Yes,” Addie drawled. “We managed to figure that out for ourselves.”

Dylan just laughed. It was a free and joyful sound, unlike anything Spirit had ever heard from him before. “I’d Jaunt it for you, but it’s too big for me to move. But this fight is mine, for should you fall into their hands, my friends, our cause is— I mean, we’ll be toast. I can get to the computer lab without being seen, I think. I can get the system up from there.”

There was a moment of silence, and Spirit realized that all of them—even Burke—were waiting for her to say whether or not they’d follow Dylan’s plan.

She nodded in reluctant agreement. It might not be a great plan, but she didn’t have a better one. “Take—” she began, but before she could say Dylan should take Loch with him, Dylan was out the door and running.

“Now what?” she asked, not caring whether it was a Queenly thing to say or not.

“Well, anyone who’s locked up in here is probably going to be on our side,” Burke said.

“And I have the key to every lock,” Addie said. “Come on!”

The others followed her as she ran out into the hall. Addie unlocked the doors one by one, moving along as soon as each door was open. Loch, Burke, and Spirit followed her, opening the doors and giving quick explanations.

“Surprise!” Spirit heard Loch say. “You aren’t being rescued, run for your life.” He sounded unreasonably cheerful about it, too.

In moments the hallway was full of scared—and angry—kids.

Burke and Loch called out the Gifts of everybody they freed. It would take Fire or Transmutation to affect Mordred’s Oak, and none of the boys had it. Both Troy Lang—Transmutation—and Andrew Tate—Fire Witchery—were among the missing. The most powerful Gift someone who was still here possessed was Chris Terry’s, and he was a Weather Witch. Most of the boys on the dorm floor had Air Gifts—Animal Communication, Weather Control, Illusion, or Pathfinding.

“Go on, get out of here. Head for the trees in the woods behind The Fortress,” Spirit said over and over. “We have a place to go where we’ll all be safe.”

Some of them might be Reincarnates like Dylan, but Spirit didn’t want to know one way or the other right now. It was too complicated to be dealt with in the middle of a jailbreak. And what if their Reincarnate selves wanted to side with Mordred?

They couldn’t keep the boys with them once they’d liberated them, and they didn’t even try. Everyone just scattered—Spirit could only hope the boys would remember the rendezvous point they’d been given. She and her friends had somewhere else to be.

As soon as everyone was freed from their bedrooms-turned-prisons, Spirit and her friends headed for the Young Ladies’ Wing. But to get there, they needed to cross the Great Hall—and the Great Hall had become a madhouse, because that was the direction most of the boys had gone. While the Breakthrough Security people were doing their best to contain the student riot, they weren’t really a match for a bunch of scared young magicians who’d spent months learning unarmed combat. The windows were shattered, the floor had buckled, and there were people everywhere.

Spirit skidded to a halt, staring at the Tree. Of all the things here in the Great Hall, it was the only one that was unchanged.

“Come on!” Burke said, grabbing her.

Spirit heard a ripping noise, and saw water come spraying up through the cracks in the floor—Addie, or one of the other Water Witches, was adding to the chaos. And it didn’t take magic powers to sense an oncoming storm. By now there was so much noise it was impossible to talk and hard to think. But the one thing Spirit knew for sure was that she still had to find someone whose Gift could destroy the Tree. And the Girls’ Dorm was the only place left to look. There might be a Fire Witch among the students still in lockdown.

They have to know where we’re going,
Spirit thought. But they had no choice.

Ahead of her she saw a security guard grab for Loch. Loch barely slowed down, but the guard went reeling back, clutching his throat. By the time the four of them reached the other wing, the door to the second floor had already been smashed open. The ground floor corridor was sealed and featureless like the one on the boys’ side, but Spirit could hear shouting from the floor above. She doubted anybody had been able to force the bedroom doors, but she knew someone who could.

“Addie—
go!”
Spirit shouted. Addie nodded, and ran up the stairs.

The floor beneath Spirit’s feet shook. She turned back the way she’d come, and just … stared.

The Breakthrough minions who’d been summoned to make sure nobody else escaped weren’t human. There were three of them, each twelve feet tall, and muscled like the Incredible Hulk. They were wearing kilts and—Spirit stifled a hysterical giggle—red T-shirts with the Breakthrough logo on them.

Where did they ever find T-shirts in the right size?

Then the first one lunged forward, only to be knocked back as Burke activated the Shield and thrust it forward. The giant roared in fury—it sounded like a lion, only louder, not human at all—and attacked again.

But now Loch had evoked the Spear. He wasn’t using it as a weapon—at least, not as a stabbing weapon. It spun in his hands like a quarterstaff, and every time it struck one of his enemies, Spirit could hear a sound like an ax hitting wood.

“Go!”
Burke shouted to her. Spirit ran up the stairs.

The hall was filled with the girls from the Young Ladies’ Wing. Every door that Addie hadn’t unlocked had been smashed open. Spirit grabbed Emily Davis as she headed for the stairs.

“No!” Spirit shouted. “That way’s blocked!”

But Emily wouldn’t listen. She was too scared. She tore loose from Spirit and ran down the stairs.

“Listen everyone!” Spirit cried at the top of her lungs. “We have to find another way out of here!”

A girl named Vanessa Cartwright stared at her with fearful wide green eyes. She was a year older than Spirit. Spirit couldn’t remember what her Gift was. Fire? Water? Suddenly it seemed urgent to remember.

All of a sudden there was an ear-splitting squeal. Spirit hadn’t thought Oakhurst had a PA system, but of course it must. There had to have been a way to talk to everyone before there’d been e-mail.

“—If he’d handled things quietly, Spirit White and Lachlan Spears would be dead now.”
It was Mordred’s voice.

Dylan’s got the recording we made! He’s playing it back!

“These things take time, my lord. I assure you—”

“You’re too used to living a masquerade for the mortal cattle I will soon rule. Do you really think it needs to look like an accident?”

Everyone had stopped for a moment, transfixed by the recording.

“They have us blocked in!” Spirit shouted again, and this time they heard her. “We need to find another way out!”

“Fire escape!” It was Kelly Langley. “This way!” the Proctor (probably a former Proctor now) said. “Come on, everyone!”

Kelly wasn’t the only Proctor who’d been in lockdown. Angelina Swanson—
well, I sure didn’t see that coming,
Spirit thought.
Of all people to end up in Mordred’s bad books
—joined Kelly and began bullying everyone into some semblance of order. The fire door was at the far end of the hall—or it had been. The wall had been sealed shut, the same way the doors downstairs had been. And nobody here had Transmutation, or they would already have opened it.

“Let me!” Spirit shouted, pushing through the milling crowd. She wanted to go back downstairs, to help Burke and Loch—if they were still alive—but she couldn’t leave everyone here trapped. “I need some room!” she said, and Kelly and some of the others pushed the rest of the kids back.

It’s different when it’s real,
Spirit thought. She clutched the pen in her hand, and suddenly it wasn’t a pen any longer. It was a sword.
The
Sword.
“The Sword confers victory on the wielder.”
Vivian’s voice echoed in her thoughts.

She struck at the wall as hard as she could. It took her several tries to hack a hole, but the Transmuted door wasn’t as thick as the rest of the wall. As soon as there was a hole, everyone surged in to help. The fire stairs were steep and narrow, but they led directly to the outside. Students started hurrying down them.

“You overstep yourself, Mark of Cornwall.”

“Truth serves you better than empty flattery, my prince.”

Dylan’s bootleg recording reached its end and started over from the beginning. Spirit grabbed Kelly and dragged her back to the stairwell.

“We need to burn the Tree!” she shouted in Kelly’s ear.

“We’ll never make it!” Kelly shouted back. But she followed Spirit.

Addie was already at the door of the staircase leading down to the First Floor. The moment she saw Spirit running toward her, Addie turned and dashed down the stairs.

One of the giants was down, and Loch and Burke were double-teaming a second one. The hallway was too narrow for the enormous creature to close with them, but there was a third giant who was doing its best to force Loch and Burke out of the narrow space into the larger one beyond.

“Kelly!”
Addie shouted.

The walls began to buckle and splinter as Addie called the water up out of the pipes. It burst out of the wall in a stinging spray—and then Kelly used her Fire Gift to turn it into steam. The jet of steam caught the second giant full in the face. It screamed—the most human sound Spirit had heard any of them make—and crashed to the ground. At the same time, Loch and Burke took out the last one.

The steam stopped.

“Come on!” Spirit said. “We have to get to the Tree! I’ve got Kelly!”

Burke grabbed her before she could dash out into the hall. “You can’t! It’s too well guarded! They’re making their last stand to defend it. We have to get out of here!”

For a long agonized moment Spirit pulled back against Burke’s grip. They were
so close.…
Finally she nodded.

“Let’s go,” Loch said.

Later, when it was all over, Spirit would barely remember the next few minutes. It was what her other self would have called ‘a fighting retreat’ as the five of them—Spirit, Addie, Loch, Burke, and Kelly—fought their way back the way they’d come. If not for the Shield Burke wielded, they would have been shot dead half-a-dozen times. But Burke used the Shield to cover their retreat, and most of the Breakthrough people took one look at the sword Spirit was carrying and ran. She was just as glad. Guinevere’s memories or not, Spirit wasn’t sure she could bring herself to kill somebody.

The five of them burst out of the building at a run.

“The stables!” Addie gasped. “We need horses!”

Spirit looked toward the stables. By Dylan’s count, there were about thirty kids—forty at most—who hadn’t gone over to the Dark Side. The last time Spirit had counted them, there’d been about three dozen horses in the stables. Everybody who’d escaped from the school was down at the paddock saddling horses. Finally all those horrible Endurance Ride lessons were coming in useful. And today the Oakhurst students weren’t fighting each other. In fact, most of the horses were carrying double.

“Come on—come on!” Dylan rode toward them. “Hurry! They’ll be after us in a minute!”

“Addie! Go with Dylan! Show everyone where to go!” Spirit cried.

Addie nodded briefly. Dylan reached down to her, and Addie swung herself up behind him. Dylan galloped off after the riders who’d already fled. The other four ran on toward the stables.

“They’ll just run us down,” Loch said as he ran. “Breakthrough. They’ve still got cars and trucks.”

“No,” Burke said. “They’d have to take the trucks right through Radial. They won’t risk them being seen.”

Spirit only hoped Burke was right.

“Maybe I can give them something else to think about,” Kelly said determinedly. “All our guys are out of there, right?”

“I hope so,” Spirit said fervently. Most of the other kids—and the horses—were already gone, but Gareth and Noah were in the paddock with four horses—saddled but without riders. They were obviously waiting for them.

“Okay then,” Kelly said. She stopped, and turned back to face the building. “I never liked this place anyway,” she said.

For a long moment nothing happened. Then there was the sound of shattering glass, the roar of an inferno, and smoke began to belch out of the third floor windows.

Spirit hoped the Tree was going to go up in the flames, but she was afraid that was too much to hope for. She followed the others toward the paddock.