Lies and Prophecy (10 page)

But he needed sleep. I couldn't argue against that.

“Good luck tomorrow,” Julian said as he headed for the door.

“You too,” I returned automatically. Then he was gone, and I sat back down and put my head in my hands. He was okay. More or less.

It was enough.

~

Robert could rant at length with little or no encouragement, and at the restaurant the next night I was happy to let him. He described in vivid detail the incomprehensibility of the questions on his shamanism exam, quoting from memory to illustrate the impenetrability of his Israeli-born professor's grammar, while I picked at my food and tried to find an appetite.

My tarot exam didn't go badly, I thought, even though I'd woken up with a headache—probably a side effect of touching Julian's own. Or maybe it was a product of my dream.

I could hardly even call it a dream. Nothing had
happened,
unless I'd forgotten it so thoroughly I didn't even remember the forgetting. Just a single image, that I still saw whenever I closed my eyes.

A gauntlet, lying before me on the ground.

An honest-to-god piece of armor, such as the medieval student group might make, formed of overlapping pieces of metal and articulated through the fingers. A gauntlet, lying on featureless dirt.

The image awoke in me such a tangle of feelings that I'd barely been able to put them aside for the exam. Apprehension was the strongest; I didn't know whether people in the Middle Ages had really thrown down gauntlets to announce a challenge, but that was sure as hell the impression I got from this one. But there had been nothing to indicate what the challenge was, or who had issued it.

Maybe no one had issued it. Maybe it was just the hurdles I'd set myself to clear.

So there was curiosity as well as apprehension. I didn't know what the gauntlet signified, and I wanted to: that made sense. How could I explain, though, the sensation I could only describe as joy? Why had the challenge pleased me so much? I had no rationale for it, but every time I thought of the dream, I felt that same fierce gladness. Side-by-side with gut-twisting fear, and that made no sense at all. The fear wasn't that I'd fail the challenge—or not only that. More like I was afraid I wouldn't even try.

Yes. That was it. I was afraid I wouldn't pick up the gauntlet.

But wasn't that what I'd been doing this whole term?

I became aware of eyes on me, and looked up. Both Liesel and Robert were staring at me. Julian was passed out in Kinfield; we'd decided it was better to leave him that way. “Sorry. My mind's elsewhere. Which doesn't bode well, seeing as how I've still got three exams left. Two tomorrow, and one Saturday.”

Robert winced. “My sympathies. Such a schedule should be illegal.”

I shrugged. Right now my exams were the least of my worries. At least, I hoped they were. CM was tomorrow, and although Grayson hadn't killed Julian, that didn't mean she wouldn't kill me.

I wondered if Robert knew his roommate had visited me last night.

“But you will be free Sunday night, and that is a mercy,” Robert pointed out. “You may enjoy the festivities with a clear mind.”

“Assuming I still have one left,” I said, then paused in confusion. “Festivities?”

He smiled wryly. “The Samhain ritual, and Geoff's party.”

I stared at him. I'd completely forgotten that the end of the month was so close. “I don't have a costume.”

“Borrow something from Ceridwen,” Liesel suggested. “She's always up for dressing you like Christine Rendal's latest role.”

I doubted I had the energy for our downstairs neighbor's enthusiasm. My resemblance to the actress made her far too happy. “Maybe I'll just come as a dead college student, killed by stress.” Robert sat up straighter, and I made myself smile, to allay his concern. “Don't worry about me. You're the one who has exams
after
the party.”

“My own suffering does not eliminate yours,” he pointed out.

“But allow my misery to enjoy company.” The dream felt far too significant to be about something as minor as exams. No, this was the Chariot, reversed in my reading—the defeat I would suffer if I wasn't prepared. This was the Strength card, the environment of my question, only it wasn't just Grayson's class, or learning CM, or even my hopes for the future. It was something more. I
knew
it.

I just didn't know what
it
was.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Liesel asked quietly.

I met her eyes and smiled again, locking down my worries where even her empathic senses couldn't read them. “Right now? No. But once I get through exams, I'll be fine.”

~

The grassy slope of the riverbank seemed to float in the light of the waxing moon, as though it were drifting away from the concrete world of dorms and classroom buildings. On the edges of the clearing, the oak trees loomed dark, marking the boundary of Geoff's party. Whether Halloween or Samhain, this night was special to many people on campus—even when it fell in the middle of exam period.

I stood in the shadow of a tree, watching people go by. One last, unexpected warm snap had lured students outside, many of them dressed for the night, though not so fantastically as they would be for my department's masquerade next term. Even if they weren't saving their best for then, not everybody had the time or energy to spare for costuming, not with tests still hanging over their heads.

I had no such worries. Laziness had kept me from going to Ceridwen for something to wear, but I was basking in the deliciously light feeling of a burden lifted. My exams were done. I'd floated through the Palladian Circle's Samhain ritual earlier that evening, celebrating the harvest and commemorating the long-forgotten departure of the Otherworld, and with that taken care of, I had not a care in the world until next Monday.

“Enjoying your freedom?”

I turned around and found myself backing up a step. Julian's body was unremarkable in the standard college uniform of t-shirts and jeans, but in the clothes he'd chosen for tonight, his eyes were suddenly not the only unsettling part of him. I was very glad he didn't choose that moment to meet my gaze. Julian looked as though he lived partly in the Otherworld.

As though he knew how alarming he looked, Julian smiled and smoothed his black velvet doublet with one long-fingered hand. I blinked; the spell was broken. “Nice costume.” Close-fitting black pants, high black leather boots—had he raided the theatre department? His black velvet cloak had a vivid dark green lining.

He bowed at the compliment. “I could say the same to you.”

I suppressed the urge to tug at my bodice. “Thank you.” After the Samhain ritual I'd changed out of harvest colors into a dark blue skirt, a snowy white shirt, and a black bodice that might be just a wee bit too snug. As long as I didn't have to run anywhere, I wouldn't pop the seams—I hoped. “This is just thrown together out of my closet and Liesel's.”

Julian extended one black-gloved hand. “Care to accompany me? I'm in search of drinks.”

The leather shielded me from his skin, so that I might have been touching anybody. I wondered if Julian was deliberately experimenting with the gloves, so he could lay aside his usual avoidance of touch, or whether the courtly gesture just went with the costume. Maybe his roommate's mannerisms were rubbing off on him. Speaking of whom….

“Where's Robert, anyway?” I asked as we set off across the dead grass. “He vanished after the ritual.”

“Coming. He's putting the finishing touches on his costume. The madman is coming as a leprechaun.”

I laughed. “A six-foot-four leprechaun?”

“Why not?” Julian released my hand to collect two plastic goblets of punch.

After making our greetings to Geoff, the party's host, who was dressed as Friar Tuck's Thai brother, Julian and I circulated through the party. Robert arrived, costumed as advertised, and we listened to him sing beneath a huge tree, his body wrapped around his guitar. To my surprise, he sang Irish songs—some new, some very old—about the conflict in his homeland, the three-way strife between Catholics, Protestants, and the Wiccan bloods who flocked there after First Manifestation. For all that Robert spoke loudly and at length about wanting to get out of Ireland and away from its issues, those troubles meant more to him than he would admit.

We moved on at last. I had Julian's cloak around my shoulders—my shirt, while pretty, was not remotely warm enough—and curling my fingers into its green lining, I wondered how much I could read into the gesture. He'd come to me after his Combat Shielding exam; he'd unbent enough to ask me for help. One tiny step closer. Could I manage another?

Might as well try. “Mind if we talk?” I asked, and it came out pleasingly even.

Julian glanced sideways at me, but merely said, “Sure.” Without us discussing it, we widened our latest loop, so that it carried us along the bank of the Copper Creek, away from the party.

I wasn't surprised. He never stayed long at those things. And I was just as happy to have this conversation without witnesses. Whether it was his costume or something else, tonight, for the first time in ages, I found myself seriously uneasy in Julian's presence. Worse even than when he startled me at the beginning of the year. His clothing suited him all too well, with the gloves and the cloak and his hair silver-white.

Julian paused on the creek's edge and pulled off his right glove so he could fish an empty beer can out of the water. Holding the dripping can, he frowned in annoyance. “I don't have any pockets.”

“It might fit in my pouch,” I said. He crumpled the can, the tendons in his hand standing out, until it was small enough for me to slip in with my port and key. I watched as he stripped off his other glove and tucked it into his belt with the first, and by the time he was done I had gathered my resolve to speak.

“I know you don't like people worrying about you,” I said, “because you think it means we doubt your strength. But it's not that.” He'd stopped, and his posture spoke of startlement even if he let nothing slip empathically. “Julian—you're the strongest person I know. And I don't mean your Krauss rating, either. I think you can survive anything. But it has a cost, and that's what worries me.”

His lips compressed into a thin line. Then he said, “Combat Shielding.”

“And everything else on top of it. But yes, that specifically.” I tugged the cloak straight, to give my hands something to do. “I don't like what it cost you. And I'm not the only one.”

He walked onward, and again I could tell it was to hide his expression from me. “So what—you think I should back off? Kim, I can't.”

“I believe you,” I said quietly. I let him stay a step ahead, enough to feel as if he had a measure of privacy. “But I'd like to know why. What are you preparing for, that makes you half-kill yourself like this?”

We were well away from the party now, the trees overhanging us and beginning to crowd the bank. I was almost certain Julian wasn't going to answer when abruptly he said, “You're thinking about Guardianship, aren't you.”

It was one possible reason for his choices, but—
oh.
“I won't even ask how you figured that out. Yes, I am. If I can get past my trouble with CM. You're changing the subject.”

“No, I'm not. If you're thinking of it, you've looked up the training. You know what it's like.”

“But if you're preparing to be a Guardian, why are you even in school? I need this. You don't.”

Julian bent his head briefly, perhaps to watch his footing. “There are things I can learn better here. But Kim—” A muscle flickered in his jaw, as if he had clenched his teeth before going on. “Education is only part of it.”

“And the rest is….”

Robert was right; Julian only opened up if something pushed him. Normally I waited for circumstances to do it for me, but tonight I'd taken matters into my own hands, and for once it was producing results. “For ordinary Guardians—people like you—it's different. A job, like any other. You go where you're sent, and you fix problems because you can, because you're the sort of person who wants to.”

It was more or less what I'd said to Grayson. “So why do
you
do it?”

“Because we have to,” Julian said, almost too quietly to hear. “The problems find us. Or we find them. And we can't walk away, can't tell ourselves somebody else will take care of it for us, because we have these gifts and we have to use them where we can, to help people. They encourage that in our training, but the truth is they don't have to; it's just there. Part of us. Maybe just because if we don't put an end to the problem, it might put an end to us.” He paused, halting the flood of words, the startling honesty. His next words chilled me to the bone. “My kind rarely lives to be old.”

My kind.
As if the wilders were a race apart—not just humans with strong gifts, but something else entirely. Something more like the sidhe.

I bit my lip. What was the life expectancy of a wilder? I'd never asked. And no point asking if he wanted that life. From the sound of it, that would be like asking if he wanted to breathe air.

He stopped, and I walked on another few steps before realizing he wasn't at my side. Turning, I saw him standing perfectly still, a black-and-silver statue in the middle of the path.

He wasn't looking at me.

I took a hesitant step toward him, and then another. “Julian?”

No answer. I'd never touched Julian without permission, not once in more than two years of knowing him—but I reached out now to put my hand on his tense shoulder.

He threw me off with enough force to send me stumbling into a tree. Even as I hit the trunk, something went
wrong.
Julian twisted, crying out, his whole body contorting. The air around us turned black. Storm clouds appeared out of nowhere, blotting out the stars and moon, and let loose a torrent of cold rain. Julian stumbled, fell to one knee, lurched to his feet. He clawed frantically at his body, as if trying to tear something off his back; his nails caught the velvet of his doublet, splitting the seams, ripping it off. The rain plastered his white shirt to his back before it joined the remains of his doublet on the muddy ground.