Ellen hesitated. “I don’t usually stay in any one place for very long.”
Hastings had been staring down the Ghyll, the expression on his face unreadable. Now he put his hand on Ellen’s shoulder, and she flinched under his touch. “Why don’t you finish the tour with the Chaucerian Society?” he suggested. “I can spend a little time debriefing you. We’ll determine just how high risk you are. Then we can make a plan.”
As always, there was no resisting Hastings. And so it was agreed.
Chapter Eighteen
Trinity
More and more, there were no revelations, but simply the uncovering of truths long known but dimly remembered. Everything had been written long ago. There was nothing truly new in the world, but only the slow, circular march of time that revealed the old things once again.
“Way to skunk Jen DeBrock. She didn’t even know you were there until you blew past her with the ball.” Will grinned happily and signaled for the waitress. “But if it’s anything like last season, you’ll be seeing Garfield again in the playoffs. You only get one free one.”
Jack counted some money out onto the table. “Too bad Slansky can’t clone you, Ellen,” he said. “That way he wouldn’t have to choose. You could play goalie and forward at the same time.”
Nothing got through Ellen when she was in front of the goal. Trinity girls’ fall soccer season had been a long series of shutouts for the opposing teams. It was the talk of the conference.
Soccer was a good outlet for Ellen’s natural aggression. Which was a good thing, since she had little use for the social intrigues of a small-town high school.
Ellen grinned savagely. “I’d rather play forward. You know I like the attack, Jack.” She held his eye for a long moment, then stood, slinging her team bag over her shoulder. “I’m heading back, Will. I told your mom I’d do the front yard. There’s already a ton of leaves out there again.”
“I said I’d do it!” he protested weakly. They both watched as she slammed through the front door of Corcoran’s. Will was finding there were definite advantages to having Ellen as a houseguest.
Linda Downey had set it up. During the last part of the tour with the Chaucerian Society, she had told Will’s parents some story that no one could remember about Ellen’s parents moving away and Ellen wanting to finish high school in Trinity. Since Will’s older sister had left for college they had an extra room, and they immediately offered it to Ellen. Maybe there was sorcery involved, but Will was happy with the arrangement and Hastings felt that Ellen posed little danger to anyone who didn’t draw a blade on her.
She seemed eager to earn her keep. She was constantly chopping firewood or raking leaves or shoveling compost. She explained to her hosts that she came from a military family and was used to a very disciplined lifestyle. Besides, she liked to stay in shape.
Ellen had also joined the drama club, since she said she was used to playing various roles, and she signed up for girls’ basketball. She had not yet made any close friends outside of their small group, but it was more for lack of common ground than anything else. She’d had a nontraditional childhood, to say the least—nightmarish, in fact. Jack worried about her, but she resolutely resisted any attempts to be drawn out.
The events of the spring and summer had left their mark. Jack’s dreams were filled with bloodthirsty wizards, spells, ambushes, and deception. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, and when he did, he woke up screaming. He managed to persuade Becka that therapy wasn’t likely to help in his case.
By fall, Trinity had had an entire summer to forget about the events at the end of the school year, since most of the players had spent the summer abroad. Some speculation resurfaced upon their return, but the town gradually fell into its usual autumn cadence, with the startup of classes at both the university and the high school, and with the departure of the summer residents. Some people noticed that Jack and Ellen seemed different after their trip to England, but then travel abroad can change a person.
“You want to hit some balls before it gets dark?” Will seemed inclined to allow Ellen to handle the leaves after all.
Jack shook his head. “Mr. Hastings is back in town. Mom asked him to dinner.”
At first, they had seen a lot of Hastings. He spent long hours with Ellen, questioning her about her training and the tactics of the Red Rose. It could have been awkward, given the history between them, but Ellen seemed to find it therapeutic.
After about a month, his appearances became more sporadic, sometimes coinciding with Linda’s. She had been in and out of town more often than usual. To Becka’s surprise, she had stayed the last part of the summer in Oxford with them, and had visited several times since their return to Trinity. It was as if she were unusually hungry for their company.
Linda and Hastings seemed to have overcome their differences about Jack’s participation in the tournament, given the way things had turned out. Jack wasn’t sure where their relationship was, otherwise. They spent considerable time together, discussing politics. But his aunt seemed determined to keep their relationship on a professional plane, which couldn’t have been easy.
Trinity High School had a new assistant principal, though everyone agreed that Hastings would be missed. Discipline had never been a problem during his tenure, despite the fact that he’d rarely issued a detention. There was just something about him that made discipline unnecessary.
Becka often invited Hastings to dinner when she learned he was in town. She always said she wanted to thank him for what he had done that day at the high school, and for his hospitality while they were in England. But sometimes Jack caught her studying Hastings’s face, as if eager to remember something lost. The wizard was a charming guest, but Jack had the sense that he was always under tight control, keeping her at arm’s length.
Keeping a promise to Jack.
His feelings about the wizard were complex. Hastings had pledged his life to keep Jack out of Jessamine Longbranch’s hands. The possibility still sent shudders through him. Considering the likely outcome had he chosen not to fight, the decision to play seemed like a good one in retrospect. But he knew that matters could have turned out very differently. Under the wizard’s influence, he’d come close to doing murder.
On one of his visits, Hastings gave Jack three books on wizardry from his collection. Jack remembered them from the library in Cumbria. “If you keep up with your studies, you might find these useful.” Then Hastings handed Jack a tiny, leather-bound book of attack charms. Jack examined it, surprised. He’d never seen it before. “I don’t keep this one on the shelf,” Hastings added with a faint smile. Jack stared at him, wondering how much the wizard knew, and how long he’d known it.
The Wizard Council had not yet responded to the events of Midsummer’s Day. It was hard to imagine they would quietly accept the dismantling of the system they’d maintained for centuries. Perhaps even now they were plotting a countermove. Jack tried to put it out of his mind. There was nothing he could do about it, after all.
Nick Snowbeard slipped easily back into his role as caretaker when he returned to Trinity. He finished wallpapering the second floor of the house, and completed the renovation of the bathroom. Jack suspected there was more than a little sorcery involved. He still devoted time each day to tutoring Jack. Sometimes they focused on wizardry, sometimes other topics. There was less intensity to these sessions now, more like the old days.
Jack had never thought of Nick as anything but relaxed, but now it seemed that some kind of burden had slipped from the old wizard’s shoulders. Perhaps it was the presence of the sanctuary. Nick often frequented the coffee houses and taverns down by the university, spending hours in philosophical dialogues with his friends. He also enjoyed walking along the lakeshore, often long after night had fallen, gazing out at the stars and the tumbling gray water. Sometimes Jack walked with him, old wizard and young warrior, as the cold northwest wind drove the scent of burning leaves inland.
“So I suppose you don’
t have to keep an eye on me anymore,” Jack remarked. He hesitated to bring the subject up, but he wondered if the old man might have business elsewhere, and a sense of duty was keeping him in Trinity.
Snowbeard smiled at him, and put an arm about his shoulders. “Jack, this war has been going on for centuries. I’ve found it is wise to enjoy any time of truce, while recognizing it for what it is. A truce.”
That wasn’t exactly reassuring. Still, Jack couldn’t help but feel optimistic. Freed from the effects of the Weirsbane, he’d been reborn to the race of the Weirlind. Despite their fractious interactions, he saw promise in his relationship with Ellen. And he felt safer than he had at any time since the day he took his sword out of the ground in Coal Grove.
And sometimes Jack or Ellen developed a restlessness, a need that couldn’t be denied. Ellen might call Jack, or the other way around, and they would agree to meet at the meadow. Jack would throw up his wizard’s barrier, and they would have at each other with their foils; or call up Brooks or some other old friends from the warrior army for a bout. Brooks taught Ellen a few moves, as promised, and she taught him not to underestimate women warriors.
They fought because they loved the dance, and the weight of a sword in their hands. The clash and spark of metal and hiss of flame was like music written just for them. They fought for glory, but not for blood. They were Weirlind, heirs of the warrior’s stone. And they always slept better with blades beneath their beds.
For Rod, who changed everything.
Prologue
Their target was a run-down three-story building in an area of the City of London that had not yet been gentrified. The surrounding streets had been emptied of people and traffic, and the filthy pavement perspired in the thick air. Magical barriers overlaid the soot-blackened brick, beautiful as spun glass. It might have been an ice sculpture, or a fairy castle that hid the menace within.
For once the Dragon had stayed online long enough for them to pinpoint his location. Perhaps he’d thought it safe to emerge in the small hours of the morning.
Six wizards came through the front door like wraiths, shields fixed in place, knowing the Dragon would attack when cornered. It took them less than a minute to discover there was no one in the apartment to kill.
D’Orsay followed them in. The flat was shabby and small. The furnishings looked to be castoffs accumulated over several decades. Layers of grime ground into the carpet made it impossible to guess at its original color. He passed through a front room, a kitchen, into the bedroom in the back. The keyboard and monitor were still there, a harness linked into a tangle of cables, but only a faint outline in the dust of the desk surface revealed where the laptop had been.
An inside staircase at the back of the flat led to the roof. The apartment would have been chosen for that reason, and not for the decorating. They stormed up the steps to find the roof occupied only by cats. D’Orsay scanned the grid of streets surrounding the building. There was no movement anywhere.
Something had spooked him. Perhaps the use of magic had given them away. Somehow he’d sensed they were backtracking through the Net to find him, crawling past all the online blind alleys and mail drops he’d set up to mislead them.
Or someone had tipped him off. The Dragon’s spy network was legendary, his operatives astonishingly loyal. For months, D’Orsay had been searching for the flaw in it, the loose end that when pulled would unravel the web.
A loose end. Someone he could carry to the dungeon in Raven’s Ghyll and torture into spilling the Dragon’s secrets.
But nothing. Even worse, it was possible D’Orsay’s own organization had been compromised.
The newly minted Wizard Council was struggling to overcome the centuries-old blood feud between the Wizard Houses of the Red and the White Rose so it could deal with the recent rebellion of the servant guilds. Ending the feud would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but it was nearly impossible with the Dragon fanning the flames of old rivalries, spreading rumors, and posting confidential correspondence to the Internet.
It was particularly galling to someone like D’Orsay, who had so much to hide.
Wizards were murdering each other in the backstreets of London, in castles in Scotland, and in the glittering nightspots of Hong Kong. Magical artifacts were disappearing from vaults and safe-deposit boxes and wine cellars. Traditionally submissive, sorcerers, seers, and enchanters were fleeing their wizard masters. And the Dragon’s hand was in all of it.
This was the third near miss since the tournament at Raven’s Ghyll. Six weeks ago, they were sure they had the Dragon cornered in a ghetto in São Paulo. Then they’d blundered into a magical quagmire, a network of diabolical traps that had decimated D’Orsay’s team of assassins and left the Council empty-handed. Three wizards dead, and they were no closer to finding him than before.
D’Orsay recognized his handiwork, the elegant simplicity of the charms and devices. The wizard might as well have scrawled his signature all over it.
Most recently, the Dragon had freed a dozen sorcerers from a stronghold in Wales. That had been triply infuriating because it had been D’Orsay’s own project. D’Orsay had hoped that, given enough pressure, the sorcerers might rediscover some of the secrets of the magical weapons of the past.
They found no photographs in the flat, no personal items that might have provided a clue to who the tenant had been.
D’Orsay was disappointed, though not surprised. He was confident he knew the Dragon’s identity. In any case, he wasn’t fussy about being right. But this was no rat to be caught in an ordinary trap. D’Orsay was uncomfortable with this kind of operation anyway. He was a strategist, not an assassin. He was present only because of the power of their adversary and the need for discretion. It was what you might call an unauthorized operation, outside of the purview of the council.
Why would a wizard involve himself in a rebellion of the lesser magical guilds? What could he possibly have to gain?
Twenty minutes later, Whitehead returned to the kitchen carrying a manila folder. “I found this between the filing cabinet and the wall.” She handed it to D’Orsay. “He probably didn’t realize it was back there.”
D’Orsay paged through the contents of the folder— letters and copies of e-mails to and from a law firm in London, relating to the guardianship of a minor. There was also correspondence with a private school in Scotland regarding housing, tuition, and financial arrangements for the same. All of it was at least two years old.
The student’s name was Joseph McCauley. D’Orsay frowned. The name didn’t bring to mind any of the Dragon’s known or suspected associates. He couldn’t relate it to any of the Weir families, either, though it would be more reliable to check the databases. Through the centuries, genealogy had enabled the Wizard Houses to find warriors when they needed them, to hunt those who carried the gift and didn’t know it. Computers only made the process more efficient.
What could be the connection between this boy and the Dragon? Possibly none, but D’Orsay’s instincts told him different. What else would explain the presence of material so personal in the midst of the enemy camp? And why was a law firm handling this kind of routine correspondence? Unless the intent was to hide a relationship that might prove to be a vulnerability. D’Orsay smiled. That would be too good to be true.
This was worth spending a little time on. By now, the others were returning to the kitchen. He finished his cider and handed the folder to Whitehead.
“Find this boy for me, Nora. Contact the school mentioned in the letters and find out if he’s still there. See if you can get any information from the law firm about who engaged them.” He thought a moment, stroking his chin. “Check with the General Register Office also. Look for a birth registry, baptismal papers, anything at all. If you don’t find any British records, try overseas. See if he’s in any of the Weir databases. But be discreet.”
They left the building a half hour after they had arrived, leaving a few traps behind in the
unlikely event the Dragon returned. At least they may have driven the Dragon underground for a time. Any delay was to their benefit. By the time he got back into business, it might be too late for him.
Perhaps by then, they would have another card to play.
Chapter One
Toronto
The August heat had persisted deep into the night. Thunder growled out over Lake Ontario, threatening a downpour. When Seph walked into the warehouse a little after 2 a.m., it felt like he had blundered into an urban rain forest. He sucked in the stink and heat of hundreds of bodies in motion and squinted his eyes against the smoke that layered the room.
It was his habit to arrive late for parties.
Seph smiled and nodded to the bouncer at the door. The man was there to intercept the underaged, but he just smiled back at Seph and waved him on. Access was never a problem.
Music throbbed from high-tech speakers wired to the struts of the warehouse ceiling. Sweat dripped onto the scarred wooden planks as the crowd thrashed across the dance floor. The black lights painted the faces of the dancers while leaving the perimeter of the room unviolated. An illegal bar was doing a brisk business in one corner, and the usual customers were already trashed.
He was stopped six times on his way across the room by people wanting to make plans for later.
Seph and his friends always held court to the right of the stage. Carson and Maia, Drew and Harper and Cecile were already there; Seph could tell that they’d been there all evening. They surrounded Seph, fizzing with excitement and the kind of euphoria that comes with hours of sensory overload. His friends were older than him, but the party never really started until he arrived.
They all started talking at once—something about a girl.
“Whoa,” he said, raising his hands and grinning. “Say again?”