Victories (21 page)

And yet Prince Mordred had not seen enough to know those five children plotted against him. Even Morgaine, who he’d been so certain was already theirs, had defied him. And Agravaine had slain her. But the other four had escaped. Worse, they’d returned bearing the Hallows of Britain, to free the rest of the young mages held prisoner at Oakhurst—children for whom Mordred had plans that did not involve their survival.

Mark had ordered the rebels found and recaptured, of course. He’d thought it would be safe, for he’d ordered that none of them be harmed, only captured. But Mordred had been furious that he’d given any order at all, and forced him to call his knights back—nor had Mark dared to refuse.

But he knew it was a mistake.

If they have the Hallows, they know who they are now. When next they meet, Mordred will not face frightened children, but Knights of the Grail. Why does he not see his peril?

Perhaps,
Mark thought,
what Mordred sees is a chance to flaunt his final victory before his greatest enemies. But that is madness.

Perhaps—

Suddenly a gleam of light caught his eye. There, to the west, there was movement. Horses, coming from the direction of Oakhurst.

Suddenly, in the distance, he heard the mellow call of horns. He turned to the nearest sentry. “There is nothing to see here,” he said meaningfully. “I am going to my chambers.”

*   *   *

Loch carried the banner. It wasn’t much of a banner, but then, they weren’t much of an army. They’d scavenged what they needed from the theater and the music room: a blue sheet with a hastily-painted-on white horse, stapled to a yardstick that was nailed to a pole. Renee and Peredur rode behind him. They’d been in the orchestra, and their French Horns had still been in the music room. When they reached the place where the edge of the town had been, they stopped and sounded the call to battle. The notes were loud in the stillness.

Then they rode on.

*   *   *

“What’s going on?” Brenda demanded nervously from the back of the black van.

“Did I know, be certain I would say,” Addie answered irritably.

Something had gone wrong. She knew it.

She’d waited with Veronica and Brenda (trying not to think of them as “the mortalfolk,” trying to remember she was Adelaide Lake, not Vivianne of Avalon) while the others rode out. Her Hallow was perhaps the most powerful of the Four—the Cauldron of Plenty, which could provide anything its possessor asked of it. The Cauldron had made Avalon a center of healing and peace …

… and those memories, of a lifetime spent coolly ruling over the lives and fortunes of all who came to her for help, were not what Addie wanted for herself. She wanted to
matter.
She wanted to make a difference.

She wasn’t sure, any more, where Addie Lake ended and Vivianne began.

All I know is, powerful or not, it’s a very awkward Hallow to wield, if what you want to do is follow your friends into trouble.

“We’re not just going to sit here, are we?” Veronica said.

The black van—the Cauldron of Plenty—was parked behind a stand of trees directly opposite the gates of The Fortress. Addie couldn’t remember what had been here when Radial had still existed. Maybe nothing.

“There’s nothing else we can do,” she said. “The fog is gone. If I move, we’ll be spotted. We have to wait for the others to get back.”

“Well, I’m not waiting!” Veronica said. Before Addie could stop her, she shoved open the side door of the van and jumped out.

“Veronica!”
Addie cried.

“There’s got to be something!” Veronica called back over her shoulder. She started running toward the village.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Brenda said, opening the passenger door. “I’m sorry—we have to!” She followed Veronica.

Addie pounded on the steering wheel in frustration.

Then she heard the sound of the horns.

I can’t just sit here either,
she thought, and turned the key in the ignition.

The van rolled forward.

*   *   *

Mordred’s knights had made a wide trampled path leading from The Fortress around the southern edge of the village. They followed it. Every few minutes, Peredur and Renee blew their horns.

“Shouldn’t they have come out by now?” Burke asked in a low voice.

“They should,” Spirit agreed uneasily. “We’re giving Mordred exactly what he wants. We’re riding to battle as if we’re living in medieval Britain.”

“So where are the legions of hell?” Burke asked.

Spirit had no answer, then: “Look,” she said, pointing.

The walls of The Fortress were filled with people watching them advance. Hundreds of them, all in the red-and-black of Breakthrough.

And of Mordred.

*   *   *

There was no way Mark could keep it a secret that the missing Oakhurst students had turned up and apparently gone mad. They couldn’t possibly be riding to The Fortress to surrender—not if they rode beneath the White Horse banner. But he’d learned his lesson well: Mordred did not summon him, and so Mark did not summon his Shadow Knights to ride into battle.

By now, nearly everyone—everyone human, that was—from The Fortress was on its walls. The top of the wall was twenty feet wide. There was room for everyone. Shadow Knights, Gatekeepers—everyone who served Mordred was here. Waiting.

“We aren’t just going to watch, are we?” Tristan asked. “I could—”

Mark grabbed his arm before Tristan could prepare a spell. “You could join the others our liege lord has sacrificed to feed his great spell, if you defy him,” he snapped. “Let them come.”

“Surely Prince Mordred has power enough to destroy them without our help,” Morgause said silkily. Her bright hair whipped around her face in the morning as she leaned out over the parapet. “We must allow him the glory of that victory.”

“Yes,” Mark said meaningfully. “We must indeed.”

*   *   *

The black van was waiting for them at the gates of The Fortress. The building’s gates stood open. There was as much space between them as a four-lane highway. This time, when Peredur and Renee sounded the call to battle, the sound echoed back off the stone walls, as if the horns had been blown inside a giant parking garage.

The column of riders walked their horses forward. The van gunned its engine and rolled along beside them.

This was the first time Spirit had actually seen inside the walls of The Fortress. She didn’t think anybody outside of Breakthrough actually had. It might have been a little hard to explain. There was an open courtyard the size of a football field. It was grass, not stone, just as the inner courtyard of a castle would have been centuries ago. At the far end was Mordred’s keep. There was really no other word for it. Like the walls, the building itself was grey granite. Steps the width of the entire building went up to the main entrance. The stairs gave onto a deep portico. The entrance itself was set back. It was high enough above the ground that there was probably a full floor below it, but if there was, it had no windows. The floors above overhung it, so its doors—and whatever decoration they had—were lost in shadow. But above the entrance the Breakthrough logo was displayed, a shield in carved relief, three stories tall.

No. It’s not the Breakthrough logo. It never was. It’s Mordred’s symbol.

At the foot of the granite steps stood the thirty-foot-high trunk of the Gallows Oak. For a moment, Spirit wondered why it was out here, instead of locked up in a vault somewhere. Then she saw that the ground around it was muddy and dark, and she understood.

Blood sacrifices. Mordred’s a necromancer. He’s been making sacrifices to renew his body and let it out of the Tree. But the people he’s killed haven’t given him enough power to do that. He needs to sacrifice magicians.

He needs to sacrifice
us.

The top of the walls around the courtyard were deserted now.

“Yoo-hoo?” Loch called. “Anybody home?” His voice rang off the stone walls. Silence greeted his words. “Okay, we do it your way,” she heard him mutter. He cleared his throat. “I, Lancelot du Lac, King in my own land and vassal of Arthur of Britain—”

Suddenly the temperature in the courtyard seemed to drop. In the shadows of the portico, Spirit saw movement.

It was Mordred.

He wasn’t pretending to be Oakhurst’s eccentric headmaster any longer. He wore a long black robe of some fabric that ate light. Symbols embroidered in dull silver thread covered the arms and the chest, gleaming sullenly as the sunlight struck them. On his head he wore a diadem of blackened silver set with rubies the size of hen’s eggs.

And behind him the shadows filled as his army came to join him. None of them were Shadow Knights. None of them were even human. There were giants in ragged wolfskins, their bodies grey with dust. Tall gaunt pale creatures with glowing red eyes who stood cloaked in their own leathery wings. Creatures that looked like gigantic rats—they walked upright, and beneath their patchy fur, their skin was yellowed and sickly. Trolls with wide flat faces, their mouths gigantic and filled with gleaming shark-teeth. Things that looked like dead trees—if trees could walk, and had eyes. Among them slunk creatures that looked half like wolves, and half like weasels, with black beady eyes and long narrow snouts.

They were all the nightmares anyone had ever had, all the creatures half-glimpsed in the paintings at Oakhurst’s last dance. They belonged in some Halloween night, not in the sunlight of an April morning.

At Burke’s side, Cafall barked once, and was silent.

“So, Arthur, we meet again,” Mordred said. He walked slowly down the steps. “Have you come to beg for your life? Perhaps I will spare your people if you do. Did you imagine, even when you lay dying, that we would meet again? Only this time, it is to celebrate my victory. Gaze upon your pitiful army and despair! You cannot hope to defeat me, for at last, after centuries, my triumph—”

“No.”

Spirit urged Passelande forward, past Burke, past Loch.

“You aren’t fighting him,” she said. “You’re fighting me.”

Gripping Excalibur in one hand and Passelande’s mane in the other, she slipped from the horse’s back and walked forward.

“Your fight has always been with me.”

For one moment, there was absolute silence. Mordred stared at her as if he had not understood the words that had come from her mouth. As if she had spoken a foreign tongue. Then, in an instant, the blank expression turned to apoplectic and absolute fury.

“You puling nonentity!” Mordred shrieked. His face was scarlet, nearly purple, with disbelief and rage. “How dare you! You nothing—you wife—you
girl!”

Girls rule, boys drool,
Muirin’s voice seemed to sing-song mockingly in Spirit’s mind. Spirit was too smart to say that aloud.

And anyway, before she could have, Mordred attacked.

NINE

Black fire boiled out of Mordred’s hand. Automatically Spirit swung Excalibur up to parry. The fire turned red, then orange, as it sprayed off the blade.
Didn’t know you’d be training your enemies when you made us take all that swordfighting, did you?
she thought.

Behind Mordred, his army of nightmare horrors raced down the steps to join the fight. She heard scattered screams from behind her as the others caught sight of what they were facing.
You were right, Arthur. If I had not wakened the Grail Knights, this would have been over before it began.
But with the Grail Knights among them, eager for battle, the magicians of Oakhurst not only stood their ground—they fought back.

She saw one of the tree-things go up in a rush of flame. It howled as it burned, a low sound like timbers creaking. One of the bat things rose into the sky, only to be smashed to the ground by a blast of wind. Gareth—the Kitchen Knight, they’d once called him—had brought a backpack filled with all the cutlery he could find in the cafeteria—he flung knives, forks, spoons into the air, and Jaunted them with lethal accuracy at his targets.

But she had little attention to spare from her own battle. Mordred was screaming in fury, lashing out at her with attacks she could see, and attacks she could only sense. Each time she deflected a spell with her blade she felt it ring, as if Excalibur, too, was challenging their great enemy.

Burke fought at her right side, and Loch at her left. Burke’s fists—the Shield—glowed with a radiance matched only by Loch’s Spear. She saw Burke pound one of the attacking giants, and then fling it aside using a move she recognized from
Systema
. On the left, she saw Cafall spring up to savage one of the wolf-weasels, leaping away again as Loch finished it with the Spear. Each time one of the Hallows struck its target there was a blinding flash, and the monstrous creature vanished.

If her army had not been outmatched a hundred to one, it would have been an easy victory. Her allies had spread into a ragged line. Some of her warriors were still mounted, but anyone who didn’t have one of the Air Gifts fought afoot, for their horses would not approach the enemy.

On the walls above them, the Shadow Knights gathered once more.

On the ground below, the Grail Knights and their allies fought.

Mordred had conjured a sword out of nothingness. It was black from point to hilt, and its surface rippled and shimmered as if it were on fire. Each time Spirit’s blade clashed with his, there was a screeching sound loud enough to be heard over the roar of combat.

And slowly, step by step, she gained ground.

Mordred was not her true target.

Excalibur breaks all magic,
Guinevere whispered in her mind.

It was the thing that might save them—and the world. All the Reincarnates, all the Mages,
had
magic. But Mordred
was
magic. He held his stolen body only by virtue of his sorcery. Destroy that—and he was nothing. He knew—he
had
to—that she’d tried twice to destroy the Gallows Oak. In his frenzy to defeat her, he thought she’d changed her target.

But she hadn’t.