Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (29 page)

“Thanks,” I said faintly.

“We could simply w
ait it out. And then let you in, and be forty-nine again. I
nstead of going through the gestation period with only forty-eight of us.”

“So…no baby?”

“
It wouldn’
t be necessary
,
if they accept you.
”

Amber was going to love this idea. Not.

“It occurs to me,” I said—trying to sound casual—“that I might have something to offer.”

Rune quirked an eyebrow. “In what way?”

“
In the way of—“ I took a deep breath, then blurted it out. “N
ew blood.
I mean, wouldn’t that be valuable?
To the race as a whole?
”

He looked intrigued. “It would,” he said. “If we could figure out your parentage.”

“Well, what about that?”
Hope flared within me
. “Are there any theories
floating around
?”

“None that make sense.”

“Tell me. Maybe I can help narrow it down.”

“Okay.”
Rune
almost
grinned
. He
held up his index finger
. “The first possibility is, your parents were sticks and you are the result of some kind of rogue throwback gene.
A
lthough we know of no other occurrence of this kind, a child with your gifts might have sprung from perfectly normal, boring parents
.
After hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of separation between the races. You could just be a
fluke.
”

“Hmm,” I said.

He heard the skepticism in my tone and nodded. “The odds are slim, to say the least.”
He held up two
finger
s
. “Theory number two. Your parents are among us, even though each of us has denied all knowledge of you. There are a couple of problems with this theory: one is that
spellspinners
cannot conceal their thoughts from one another—certainly not from the Council—sufficiently to pull off a lie of this magnitude. The other is that your birth does not coincide with a period of time when
spellspinners
were fertile. Had you been born the same day as Lance—“ He shrugged. “But you weren’t.”

“Ah,” I said. “What else you got?”

Rune held up three fingers. “A freak accident at a sperm bank.”

I actually laughed. It had been days since I’d laughed. “This I’ve got to hear.”

He smiled. “Don’t get your hopes up. This theory has the same problems as the
last
one. But if a male
spellspinner
—on a dare, or because he lost a bet, or for whatever nutty reason—donated his sperm to a sperm bank, his sperm would be sterile. So he'd
feel safe doing that. But if it
just so happened that someone took it out of the deep freeze
during our mating season, who knows?”

“Except that none of you recall donating to a sperm bank.”

“Right.
Under this theory,
the sperm
was
donated by a
spellspinner
who is
no longer living.
Unfortunately,
you weren’t born after a fertile period.” He shrugged. “So there
ya
go.”

“
What’s t
heory number four
?” I asked.

Rune shook his head. “I
don’t have o
ne.”

But I had.
My heart started to pound so hard that I felt dizzy.
Did I dare tell him? Every instinct screamed
no.
But what choice did I have? Rune was the only person w
ho might have an answer for me.

I clasped my hands together so hard they hurt, in an effort to hide their trembling. And I leaned forward, the better to watch his face.

“What if…” I bit my lip, struggling to find words that wouldn’t give everything away. I blocked, blocked,
blocked
the image of my baby blanket, which—naturally—was all I could think about. Rune’s expression turned puzzled, then wary, as he picked up the fact that I was hiding something from him.
“Sorry,” I gasped. “I’m having a hard time with—I can’t—“

“Just tell me.”

I tried an indirect approach. “Have there ever been—and I don’t mean now, I mean
ever—
spellspinners
born with only one
spellspinner
parent? The other parent being, you know, a stick?” When he didn’t answer right away, I plunged ahead. “What would happen in that circumstance? Would the kid be a
spellspinner
or—or not?”

He frowned. “You think you’re only half
spellspinner
?”

“Maybe.”

His frown turned thoughtful. “
Theoretically, a one-time
infusion of
fresh, unrelated genes
into a
spellspinner
bloodline might,
er
, freshen the batch, so to speak. Which could result in
unusually powerful offspring. But it could go the other way as well. The child might have no powers at all
. And over time, of course,
if
spellspinners
and sticks intermarried,
the
spellspinner
line would become so diluted that our race would die out—which is why, Zara,
even if we could—which nobody knows anymore—
we
don’t
reproduce with sticks.”

“What, never?” I shook my head in disbelief. “That’s not possible, is it? At some point, somebody, somewhere, must have fallen in love with the wrong person. We’re only human.”

He shook his head regretfully. “Sorry to burst your bubble.
The Council keeps a very tight rein on these things. And we let them, because we all know how important it is. There have been a couple of instances of
spellspinners
falling in love with ungifted humans, and at least one marriage, but that doesn’t mean they produced offspring. The penalty is death.” He leaned forward, fixing me with his gaze. “For the child. Try explaining that to your spouse.”

I collapsed back against the tree, unnerved. “So even if it were true, this is not an explanation that helps me.”

Rune nodded. “If you are the product of one of us mating with a stick, you’re toast. That’s been the law since the first Council formed.”

Since the first Council formed. Which was at the end of the Great War—a war the sticks never even knew about, since it took place only among
spellspinners
. “And when was that, again?” I asked. “When the first Council formed?”

He looked surprised. To him, it must have looked lik
e I was changing the subject. “You know w
e don’t keep written records. But it must have been around the end of the 17
th
century or very early in the 18
th
. Possibly 1690 to 1705. In there somewhere. Why?”

Maybe I could be grandfathered in.
My hands were trembling again. Rune apparently picked up part of my thought, judging by his puzzled expression. I looked awa
y quickly, afraid to let him glimpse
the half-crazy ideas boiling in my brain.

“I was just wondering
,” I said—trying to sound nonchalant
, and failing miserably—“what the rule would be if a child had been conceived before that law went into effect.”

I wasn’t looking at him anymore; I had picked up a leaf and was watching my hands twirl it idly from side to side. But I sensed his amazement, of course. “Wow,” he said. “Talk about clutching at straws. Where are you going with this?”

We’d been so absorbed in our conversation, we hadn’t noticed
Nedra
standing up and folding her camp stool. Now she stumped over toward us and we both looked
up. Behind her came more
spellspinners
—five of them. All were expressionless, and their minds were completely closed to me. I caught a flash of what Rune was feeling; guilt and alarm. He scrambled to his feet as if ashamed to be caught talking to me. Then his mind closed against me as well.

Fear
scampered
along my nerves. I tried to keep my face as smooth and blank as theirs, my mind as tightly shuttered, but I don’t know if I succeeded.
The seven
spellspinners
stood before me in a roughly-formed semicircle, their eyes fixed on my face. There was something formal about their stance. I didn’t like sitting on the ground while everyone else was standing up, so I stood too, brushing ineffectively at my beat-up silk skirt.
I knew I was filthy,
and my once-neatly-braided hair had fallen out into what I feared was a straggly mess. I
felt that
my disheveled appearance
put me at an even worse disadvantage—as if being a prisoner wasn’t bad enough.

The sun was low, slanting obliquely through the trees that stood all around us like pillars. Dust motes danced in the mellow gold
en
light. The effect was cathedral-like, solemn and beautiful. The air around us was so still, I could hear the distant surf and
the
cry of sea birds.
And then …

Zara
Norland
.
My name sounded all around us, deep and sonorous as the voice of God. No one’s mouth had moved. We were hearing it in our heads.
Zara
Norland
,
the voice repeated.
And a third time:
Zara
Norland
. Come into the court.

There was something ancient in
the measured words and cadence.
I caught a whiff of centuries of ritual. The weight of tradition. Perhaps if I had understood it, if I had been a part of this community all my life, the summons would not have frightened me so. But as the alien in their midst—the skunk at the garden party—hearing that voice calling my name like a tolling bell filled me with horror.

Come into the court!
Where the deck would be stacked against me.
Come into the court
where my enemies lay in wait.
Come into the court
to be tried on charges I did not understand
, accused by people I did not know,
and found guilty of crimes my parents committed before I was born.

My mouth went dry. My eyes darted frantically from face to face and found no hint of empa
thy in the gazes that met mine.

A mindless terror
seized
me then
.
I panicked
,
and tried to bolt. My body slammed into the invisible barrier immediately and I
screamed—
whether with fear or pain I cannot say.
But I was beyond reason now, hurling myself again and again against the walls of my tiny prison, beating my hands against the smooth, unforgiving surface and scrabbling idiotically for chinks or breaks or weak points. There were none, of course. The surface did not even exist—not in any real sense, not in any way t
hat my nails could grab.

I was almost grateful when
the world
disappeared
in a rush
of
black
ness
and I
lost consciousness.

The faint must have been spell-induced, because when I came out of it I came out completely
—and, incredibly, standing on my feet. There was n
o wooziness. No confusion. I
knew exactly where I was, even though they had moved me while I was ‘out’ and I was somewhere I’d never been before.

I’d glimpsed it last summer, in Lance’s memory.

I was before the court.

It was full dark, so I had been unconscious for
a while
. I was standing in
a forest clearing,
before
a
large
fire built inside a ring of stones
. A
campfire,
with a rough semi-circle
of log benches curved around the other side of it
.
I had been placed slightly to one side, facing the benches, close enough that the firelight beat against my face, illuminating me.

On the benches sat forty-one
spellspinners
.
A
transparent
curtain of heat and smoke rose from the fire, causing their faces to seemingly waver, going in and out of focus as the
fire
light waxed and waned.
I
stood motionless,
trying to keep my mind clear and blank. Giving them nothing
—
nothing—
besides my fear.