Lies and Prophecy (6 page)

“What does that mean, though?” Liesel asked. “What kind of problem?”

“I'm just never going to be good at CM.” The words came out with difficulty. I didn't
want
them to be true, because of what they meant.

“But didn't you say you were able to channel the power?”

“Draw it,” I corrected her, but frowned as I said it. “Which … I don't know. Usually people with small talents can't pull much power to begin with, like I can't light much more than a candle. But I guess there's other ways to be untalented.”

Sounding for all the world like a Socratic philosopher, Liesel said, “What's talent, though?”

I rolled my eyes. “What you're born with. Or what you manifest with, in this case. As opposed to what's learned.”

“Do you think the difficulty with your circle is one you could learn your way out of?”

I started to answer reflexively, then stopped myself. I'd drawn power—more than I ever did when I was a teenager. That had to count for something, right? The problem wasn't what I'd thought it was a month ago. And in that case…. “Maybe,” I said. I wasn't at all sure, but it was worth believing in, at least for now.

And then I remembered the cards. “But I think I might need help.”

“Help?” Liesel echoed. “How so?”

I got up and fetched my deck, mostly to feel the reassuring weight of it in my hand. “You don't have to remind me what I've got taped to my screen. But I did a reading for myself, and it suggested I look to other people for assistance.”

Liesel tilted her head in thought. “I don't think you mean Grayson's office hours.” She laughed at my vehement gesture of refusal. “But I bet Julian would help, if you asked.”

“No.” That bothered me almost as much as the prospect of Grayson. “I'm not going to him with this. He's a wilder; it would be like asking a fish for swimming lessons.”

Amusement curled the corners of her mouth, but she didn't push it. Then one of her hands rose to hover in mid-air, as if about to close around an idea. “Would you like to join the Palladian?”

“Your circle?” I pulled back in surprise. “I'm not really Wiccan, though.”

“Neither are half our members—Rafael's practically an atheist. Those of us who care about the religious aspect take center stage on the holidays; the rest of the time it's a social thing, and some low-grade ceremonial magic. Good practice for you, in a context where people are used to helping each other out.”

I busied myself putting the cards away in their box, buying time to think. The Palladian … they were Liesel's friends, much more than mine. I knew them all, well enough to sit with them in class or eat the occasional meal together, but we weren't close. And I knew their leader well enough to foresee one potential problem. “Michele wouldn't like having me there. Agnostic
and
unreliable with ritual magic? She runs a tighter circle than that.”

“But would you
like
to? If you do, then I can talk to Michele, and see what she thinks. The others would be fine with it, I'm sure.”

Would I like to? No. It would mean admitting my weakness in front of others, after years of pretending I just had no interest in CM. But maybe this was what I needed.

“Sure,” I said, and crossed my fingers as Liesel went to call Michele.

~

Robert cast the circle with an easy competence I envied. It was no big deal; tonight's ritual wasn't anything requiring authorization from the University Ring. We weren't summoning imps or ghosts, or messing with the weather. We were just doing a quiet little initiation.

We.
The seven members of the Palladian Circle, and myself, about to become the eighth.

The members of the group were a motley bunch—from all three psychic sciences departments, with several international students—but they'd had been going strong for nearly two years now. Most freshman circles bit the dust much sooner.

The difference was probably Michele. The circle's French leader was exactly the kind of person every organization needed, the one who made sure things
got done.
How Liesel had convinced her to let me in, I didn't know. Michele and I had shared a few classes and swam together at the gym every week last spring, but we'd never quite warmed to one another, even though she and Liesel had dated sporadically since freshman year. With the baggage I was bringing along, I would have expected her to say the Palladian wasn't the place for me.

Her opening invocation showed no hint of reserve, though. It was all about friendship and the strength we gave each other. Next came a bit of call-and-response, with Robert, Liesel, Geoff, and Ana presenting symbols of the four elements, and then the focal point of the ritual: the binding itself, the connection that linked us to one another, transforming the seven-plus-me to a stable ring of eight. I wouldn't have trusted myself to handle that personally, but I didn't have to. Michele, who despite being a postcog clearly knew her way around ritual magic, had it well in hand. All I had to do was say, “By this I seal our bond,” and prick my finger with the tip of my athame.

A crimson drop welled up immediately. Health Services had certified all eight of us clean, and so Michele pricked her finger in return and touched it to mine. An electric jolt ran down my arm to my heart. Only a touch of blood, and only the lightest of bindings through it. But the element that made all this possible was there, invisible: the sidhe blood in our veins. A tiny genetic legacy, yet one which shaped all of our lives.

It took a few more stabs with the athame to get enough blood for the six remaining members. I was fleetingly glad the circle wasn't even bigger. Drop by drop, I felt the connection grow, until a fragile web hummed between us all, a channel through which we could share power more easily.

Or I so I imagined. If it was there, and I thought I felt it, was that any different from feeling it in truth? Yes, because what I expected to feel might not be accurate. Study could fix that, though. I should have asked Liesel—or better yet, Robert—to break down the specifics of the binding for me. I liked knowledge. It made a good shield against uncertainty.

Knowledge, and friends. Liesel touched me with reassurance, and I smiled back at her. It would be rude to whisper telepathically to her in the middle of the ritual, but afterwards, I'd be sure to thank her. Whether this turned out to be the magic wand for my problems or not, I was glad she had suggested it.

~

When I got to Hurst the next day for lunch neither of the guys was there. I stood for a moment, puzzled. Julian was often a bit late, but Robert was usually early. Shrugging, I dropped my bag at our window table to reserve it and got food.

By the time Julian came, even later than usual, Robert still wasn't there. “Where's your roommate?” I asked as he put his things on an empty chair.

“Having lunch with Dr. Lo. He won't be here.”

“Ah, he's sucking up.” I grinned at Julian, but he returned it only briefly before getting his own tray.

When he came back, I tried to examine him without being obvious about it. He looked a little more worn, a little more drained. In a way, it was a relief: Julian was human after all, whatever his Krauss rating might be. Still, I worried about him. People like Grayson could handle that kind of load; strength and endurance grew over time, and with practice. Most college students would have been flattened in the first week, though.

Robert's absence gave me a good opportunity to pry. “Grayson's beating shielding into us now,” I said by way of an opening. My soup bowl I shoved aside; the watery excuse for bisque they were giving us today was just inedible. “She explained some of how it works, and it's fascinating.” Much more so than when my Yan teacher went over it. Even if I was having the usual trouble with the execution.

Julian just nodded.
Come on,
I thought,
give me more than that.
Shielding was one of Julian's favorite subjects; he'd returned to it again and again since coming to Welton. Come to think of it, the shielding course he was taking this quarter was one of Grayson's, too. I asked, “So how does the combat version work, anyway? I know they're different, but not how.”

He gave up on the bisque, too, but answered me. “Daily shields are just a precaution against ill-mannered people, and ritual shields prevent contamination by outside energy. Neither are built on the idea that someone's deliberately and repeatedly trying to penetrate them.”

I could have figured that much out for myself. I had him talking, though, and that was a start. “So you need a mechanism for doing something with the energy thrown at them. If you just let it hit, the disruption in the energy flow makes weak spots, and pretty soon the shield comes apart.” There had to be some way to steer this around to him, instead of magical theory. Peeling an orange as if I might find a clue inside, I asked, “So what sorts of tricks do combat shields use?”

“Various things.” Julian said. “If you're good enough, you can absorb the energy into your own shield. But it's tricky—if you take the power in directly, the negative energy eats away at the shield instead. So you have to transform it as you absorb it.”

“While in the middle of a fight.” The mind boggled. “What else?”

Julian gave me a slantwise look I couldn't interpret. “You can spin your shields, to lessen the force of the attack and deflect it to one side. Or sink it into something that can take the hit, like the earth. Or make your shield reflective, and bounce the attack off. Though that's not one you want to try when innocents are around.”

I shuddered. “I would think not.”

“Or even plants, for that matter. Most of them just die, but Grayson showed us one that was mutated by a reflected attack. It looks like a Venus flytrap gone wrong. It tries to bite her when she waters it.”

It sounded like the kind of story Robert would make up, but Julian was serious. “Why am I not surprised she keeps souvenirs like that?”

“She's got an unseelie streak in her,” he admitted.

“So what do you think—is Combat Shielding worth taking?”

His expression shut down again. Did he think I was considering it for myself? I couldn't even cast a proper circle yet, not that I'd admitted it to Julian. “Yes and no,” he said, his tone carefully flat. “It's a good class, and Grayson's brilliant, but there's no way it's worth the drain if you don't have a compelling reason.”

Now I let him see me evaluating him, judging his condition. “I kind of gathered that from the way you look.”

Julian grimaced. “I wouldn't give it up for anything, but no, it's not easy. She drills us on the basic principles until we have them down cold, but it isn't just a theory class. Once we've practiced a method, Grayson tests us by flinging levinbolts at our shields.”

My appetite went away with a bang. “So if you haven't built it well enough, you get hurt? That's barbaric!”

“It's not
that
bad. She puts her own shields on us, under the ones we've built. But she deliberately leaves them weak, so we know when we've let something slip through. In real life, failure will have consequences, and we need to understand that.”

He sounded entirely undisturbed. Was this how wilders got trained? “I'm surprised the university lets her get away with it.”

“Think, Kim.” The hard edge in his voice startled me. “Everyone in the class is planning to be a Guardian or a bodyguard or something else dangerous. Grayson can't let us go unprepared. Coddling us could have fatal consequences.”

“But you're a
student,
” I said. “You're not about to become a Guardian, or you wouldn't be at college. So what's your ‘compelling reason' for putting yourself through this?”

I couldn't even tell why I was so upset. Maybe just simple fear, the consequence of imagining myself in his place. But my hands were clenched into fists atop the table, and all thought of food was gone. Julian, for his own part, was staring out the window, as if trying to decide how to phrase “it's none of your business.”

When he finally spoke, though, his answer was gentler than I expected. Only his shoulders communicated the tension he kept from his words. “It's something I need to do, Kim. I may become a Guardian, once I'm done here; I don't know yet. But in the meantime, this is what I have to do—and I'll be all right.”

And what the hell did
that
mean? I didn't know, but I knew I'd pushed more than enough for one day. “Just be careful,” I said, defeated. “I don't want you burning out.”

Julian seemed amused, but he nodded. “I promise.”

~

The odds of him keeping that promise seemed higher the following Sunday, when he and Robert showed up at Wolfstone with the news that Julian had finally built up a reservoir of power large enough and stable enough for him to draw on it for shielding.

“It's about time,” was Julian's only comment before he sank into the deep armchair and closed his eyes.

Liesel gave him a bottle of juice. From my perch on the edge of my desk, I surveyed his condition both with sight and psychic senses. He was bone-weary. A few of his shields were down for once, and from what I saw, I could only be glad the reservoir finally worked. Even he could only take so much strain.

“So now, my ladies,” Robert continued—he'd been the one to announce the news— “it is up to us three to make sure this fool gets some rest.”

They stayed there for a while, chatting—or rather Robert chatted, and Julian drank down bottle after bottle of fruit juice. Before long he pulled himself together and sat up, but I couldn't tell if he was really feeling better or if he'd just resumed his pretense of energy.

I didn't have much chance to judge, because Robert decided to grill me on how Grayson's class was going. I hadn't failed any of the practicals yet—though I'd come close, on our recent shielding test—but I didn't want to admit I was scraping through only by sheer logic and determination. Instead I focused on the theoretical side, where I had much more success. “Impressive,” Robert acknowledged with a nod of his head. “She force-feeds it so quickly, most students find themselves choking within a month.”