Lies and Prophecy (13 page)

“What then?” Julian asked intently.

“You called me,” Ariana said. “I'd been hearing from half the Fiain already. You were the only one attacked, as far as we can tell, but everyone seems to have known something was in the wind.”

Julian's expression was distant as he fought to reclaim the memory. “I told you it felt … directed. But strong enough that others would pick up on it.” He focused on Ariana once more. “What did you tell me to do?”

Ariana winced. “I told you to go somewhere safely apart from everyone else, lay down a circle with every binding known to man, and summon something for answers.”

Silence, except for the faint ticking of Robert's antique clock. “Anything else?” Julian asked, in a dead voice that made me flinch.

“No,” Ariana said. “I promised to spread the word. Then you hung up.”

More silence. “That's it, then,” Julian said at last. “I summoned something—but instead of answers, I got my memory wiped, all the way back to before the attack.” He sighed and lowered his head. “Looks like I ran into the enemy again.”

“I don't think so,” I said, surprising even myself. My subconscious was one step ahead of the rest of me. “The thing that attacked you, and snared me when I went looking—it tried to munch us. We both agreed on that. If you summoned it, why would it stop with erasing your memory? You think it was sorry for what it tried to do?”

“Maybe the circle protected him,” Ariana said.

“No, I agree with Kim,” Robert said, shaking his head. “The whole tenor is off. And we've yet to explain the missing days. Julian left that night; even if he waited until the next day to cast the circle, why did he not show up again until the early morning of the tenth? What was he doing in that time?”

Julian answered him grimly. “That's what we have to find out.”

~

Michele knelt and touched the ground with her fingertips. Robert, Julian, and I waited in a silent ring around her, me trying not to shiver in the biting air.

“Something … big….” Michele's accented voice was distant and halting, the speech of someone in a trance. “People … more than one.” Another long pause, and then she surfaced with a sigh. “A healing prayer, I think. Hard to read it clearly, but it wasn't a summoning.”

Julian didn't swear, but he turned and slammed his palm with bruising force into a tree trunk. I put one hand out to stop him.

“Where else?” Robert asked.

“I don't know.” The very deadness of Julian's voice was worse than anger. Michele backed up a step. “Any of the other glades would have been too public. Even this one was a long shot. I wouldn't have wanted to be interrupted.”

“Are you sure you would've used a glade?” I asked.

“I—” Julian said, but that was as far as he got. He stared at me, inspiration dawning. “No. Privacy would have been important, but more than that—
gods.
I'm an idiot.”

We ran to the river. Progress along its bank was slow, but I wasn't certain where exactly we'd been Samhain night, so we didn't dare back off to more open ground. I paused several times, eyeing a likely spot, trying to remember, moving on.

“There,” I said suddenly. “The broken branch.”

The limb in question sagged down to touch the riverbank; I remembered clinging to it. And all of us could feel the heavy residue of power in the air. I kicked myself for not thinking of this before; the laws of sympathetic magic made it the perfect place to try.

Michele was on the ground and tranced in moments. “Summoning,” she said distinctly.

“Can you tell what?” Julian waited, tight as a harp-string.

Her brow furrowed as she sorted her way through the traces. “No. Wards … interfere.”

Of course. The same protections designed to keep Julian safe from whatever he summoned would also block Michele from sensing the target's nature. Then again, the wards hadn't been enough. Shouldn't she be able to feel
something?

“Anything malevolent?” Julian asked.

Michele looked up. Her eyes had rolled back in her head until only the whites showed. She scanned the clearing, even though she could not possibly see like that.

“No,” she said slowly, the word dragged out of her. “I … don't think so.”

No malevolence. And yet he'd disappeared for days, and reappeared with his memory wiped clean.

“Let's go back,” Julian said. He sounded calm, but the very evenness of his tone made me doubt it. Or maybe it was just that I knew him too well. Biting my lip, I followed him out of the Arboretum.

~

“What other choice have you?” Robert demanded of Julian, frustration tingeing his voice. “You were alone. We have no other way to learn what happened.”

Julian didn't answer. He'd come to dinner from a meeting with the Dean, and judging by the stiffness of his shoulders, it hadn't gone well. She'd never liked having a wilder on campus, and this recent strangeness had only amplified that. I pitied him, having to explain his actions to her when he didn't remember half of them and didn't dare admit to the rest.

“Reason with him,” Robert appealed to me. His anger had vanished as if it had never been; I was an ally once more. “He will listen to you. The memories have to be there somewhere, and Liesel can find them.”

Liesel was opening her mouth, probably to disagree, when Julian interrupted.

“They're
not
there,” he said flatly. I wouldn't have wanted the look he was sending Robert directed at me. “I'd know if they were. It's not a matter of me or someone else having blocked them out; I could find that, and work through it. They're
gone.
And no amount of prying into my head will find them.”

He had to be telling the truth. If it were merely his fierce antipathy to letting others into his mind, he would say so. “I believe him, Robert,” I said. “Let it be.” Robert shot me a frustrated glance, which I ignored. There was no point antagonizing Julian. He'd been through too much already.

Conversation around the table died. We sat in uncomfortable silence, surrounded by noise, no one meeting anyone else's eyes. Liesel picked at her food, but ate hardly anything. Stress always killed her appetite.

My mind continued to gnaw at our problems. If Julian didn't have information, who did? The obvious answer was,
no one.
But I refused to accept that. Someone, somewhere, had to know something. We just had to figure out who to ask.

Questions. Answers. This was a familiar path we were treading. And with that, an idea began to form in my mind.

~

“This has got to be the craziest idea we've ever had,” Liesel said as we picked our way through the shadows along the bank of the river.

Robert stubbed his toe and swore. “The idea is not bad. Our common sense in trying it on our own—now
that
is questionable.”

“Who else would take our places?” I asked, hitching my backpack higher on my shoulder.

“Somebody
trained
?” Liesel suggested.

“What, like Bradley? Madison? Fitzgerald? They all tried, and failed.”

“That was divination. This is different. Gods, Grayson would be perfect.”

“I should be doing it alone.” Julian's voice sounded unearthly, coming out of the darkness ahead. “You shouldn't be here.”

“When pigs fly,” I said.

Robert's answer came on the heels of mine. “You tried it alone before, and look how well you fared.”

“He's right,” Liesel agreed. “You were even more crazy to try this alone.”

“We're here,” I said, forestalling further argument.

The river ran black, with no moon to light its surface. This spot was starting to become familiar, in a way I wasn't sure I liked. I set down my burden and stretched to relieve a stiff back. Gods, I hoped this worked. All of it, but my own part in particular. One successful shield did not a sorceress make. Could I hold up even my small end of the burden?

Don't think about it. Just do it. You owe it to Julian.

Flashlights and an electric lantern drove back the shadows enough for us to function. From the backpacks came candles, two books, a compass, matches, incense, four thin bundles of silk, rope, several fist-sized semi-precious stones, measuring tape, torches, and more. Everything a good and well-balanced ritual might need.

Julian and Robert outlined concentric circles on the ground, sketching them into the dirt with sticks. When the largest was in place, Liesel and I planted the standing torches at the cardinal points along its rim. The candles we set at the inner circle. Then, while the guys began the painstaking process of marking the circles with symbols, she and I inspected everyone's shielding. We would boost it during the ritual, but before that, the everyday shields should be in shape.

They were still checking their work when we finished our part. Robert was going over the outer ring, a circle of containment that would keep our energies from bleeding into the outside world, and outside influences from coming in. The inner circle, the active one, he left to Julian, the only one of us who actually knew how to work a summoning.

I looked at Julian, on his hands and knees as he scrutinized the symbols. We'd brought the books for him, but he hadn't touched them. I hoped he knew what he was doing.

Something seemed off-kilter, though.

I glanced around the area, taking in the circles, our bags, the electric lantern—

“Julian,” I said suddenly, “where's your stuff?”

Everyone stopped. They looked at each other, and at me. “What do you mean?” Liesel asked.

I gestured at the things strewing the area, the ritual circles carved into the earth. “All this. All the signs that a ritual happened here, everything necessary for it. Michele read the magical residue—but what happened to the physical evidence?”

Julian, sitting back on his heels, gazed at me steadily. “Someone cleaned it up.”

“Who?” Liesel breathed.

“Had it been university personnel, you'd have heard,” Robert pointed out.

“Maybe whoever you summoned,” I said, still looking at Julian.

“Lord and Lady,” Liesel whispered. “If it—kidnapped you,
and
destroyed the evidence—”

Julian rose smoothly and walked past me to the pile of tools. Bending, he picked up one of the silk-wrapped items and stripped its cover away, revealing a slender, black-hilted knife.

There was a pause. Then Robert snorted. “Kind of them, to put your athame back in your room.”

I stared at the blade. “If that was back where it belonged … you must have put it there.”

“And unless it took over your body like a puppet—”

Julian finished Robert's thought for him. “I must have gone freely.”

None of us had a response to that. Julian finally moved, crossing to stand in the west, between the outer protective circle and the inner one.

“Are you—”

“It's ready,” Julian said.

Liesel blinked, cut off halfway through her question. “You're sure?”

“It's ready,” he repeated.

A flaw in either of the circles, but most particularly the one for summoning, would put us all in a great deal of danger. And Julian had still been checking when I interrupted him. Liesel looked none too convinced. But I shrugged and took up my post in the east, opposite Julian. Robert stood in the south. Liesel glanced back and forth between the two of us, then sighed and stationed herself in the north. “All right. But if you're wrong….” She left the sentence unfinished. If Julian was wrong, she'd have bigger things to do than yell at him.

We cast the protective outer circle with attention to detail. I'd done this dozens of times last term, in class and in the Palladian Circle, but never very well. Earth, Water, Air, Fire: we summoned them from most solid to least. I drew power easily enough, but fumbled the pass to Liesel. She caught it, and then Robert came in and steadied us both. When Julian took up the power and cast the circle, I could see the steady glow of the shield without any effort. For ordinary rituals, it was a negligible thing. Then again, for ordinary rituals, its only purpose was protect the demarcated ground of the circle from any outside contamination. This shield was to that sort what a bomb shelter was to a raincoat.

With the outer circle finished, Julian took the lead. We followed his direction, raising another shield on the inner circle, this one to keep whatever we summoned away from us. I did better this time, but thanked the gods my only job from here on out was to provide power. That, I was pretty sure I could do.

I wondered about Julian, though. He'd taken a class on summoning—sophomore year, long before most CM majors were allowed to—but no newly-taught student would be this effortless at something so complex. So clearly he'd known how to do it before he even came to the university.

Which explained why they let him into the class. But Julian had told me on Samhain night there were things he could learn better here, at Welton. If summoning wasn't it, then what? Shielding? But why?

No time to consider it further. I was grounded and centered as firmly as I'd ever been, as were the others, and now both the summoning circle and its containment shield were tied in. Anything trying to get out would have to go through all four of us.

That wasn't a reassuring thought.

The symbols on the summoning circle began to radiate their own light. I didn't have a prayer of identifying the technique Julian was using, of course, and I couldn't understand his chant, either; it was in Irish, his chosen ritual language. I could only trust him.

On Julian's cue, the rest of us fed power to him. His chanting grew louder, and despite the cold, a sheen of sweat appeared on his face. I prayed to whomever might be listening that this wouldn't be beyond him.

“
Cuirim toghairm ort,
” Julian said in a clear voice.