Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,14
the nice healthy subzero air,” Addie said cheerfully, as Loch gave her a look of blank astonishment. “The rest of us will keep the fire going for you.”
Burke hadn’t missed the byplay, either, Spirit noticed—the color was back in his cheeks. If she’d met him back in Indiana (while she’d still been going to public school, before Dad decided the School Board wasn’t fit to raise hyenas, let alone set curricula), she’d never have given him a second glance. Sure, he was really good-looking—in a football-player way—but he was also quiet, bashful, self-effacing, and devout. So not what she’d been looking for in a boyfriend!
But that had been when she was fourteen, not almost seventeen. When she’d still had a family, when magic was something you only found in books, before she’d come to Oakhurst and found out she’d been drafted into a wizard war and there were people out to kill her. She hadn’t made up her mind about whether she wanted any boyfriend at all—let alone Burke Hallows—but now she didn’t automatically dismiss him as too boring to be likable.
Burke walked her down to the Entry Hall, where the two of them separated to get their coats—and in Spirit’s case, to get every other warm thing she could think of to bundle up in, because nothing in her life had prepared her for the cold of a Montana winter—and then met up again just inside the front door. Most of the Winter Carnival was on what would be the “front lawn” of any other place, but in the case of Oakhurst, it was the “front acreage.” It was almost as if the school was trying to shout to any (rare) visitor, “Look! See our Happy Students! See them Frolic at the Winter Carnival! And see how they are so much better at this than your kids are!”
No wonder everyone from Radial hates us, she thought sourly. A few visits to Oakhurst and they’d have to be thinking we’re a bunch of stuck-up rich kids. She supposed they were lucky that Radial was twenty miles away as the crow flew—an odd expression she’d never understood—and thirty-five by road—when the road was even passable, which it really wasn’t for a lot of the winter. There was a reason everybody at Oakhurst used the private railroad set up by Arthur Tyniger, the nineteenth-century railway tycoon who’d built the place.
She stepped out the front door, blinking at the bright glare of sun on snow. When she’d gotten here four months ago, the front lawn—the Oakhurst literature referred to it as the “Grand Lawn,” big whoop—had been as green and flawless as AstroTurf. When it started to snow, it had been just the same (only white)—a smooth sloping expanse leading down to the front gate.
Now? Now it had been turned into a showpiece, a set piece, and once again Spirit wondered just who the Oakhurst Staff and Faculty were trying to impress, because really, there wasn’t anybody here but them. Even the Alumni didn’t visit until summer. Despite that, it was almost obscene, how professional—how posed—the scene before her looked.
First of all, the whole Carnival had been carefully laid out beforehand by the teachers, with each piece of the Carnival to be placed exactly so. None of the ice sculptures were allowed to be an inch off the centers of their allotted spaces, and they all had to face the carefully sculpted and groomed avenue that threaded through them. Spirit supposed (grudgingly) the avenue was a good idea, since it was carpeted with pale blue AstroTurf so no one slipped and broke something. The thing was, Spirit had seen pictures of professional competitions in Sapporo and Montreal that hadn’t looked any better than this, and she wished she could stop wondering what invisible watchers Oakhurst was trying to impress, but she couldn’t. Maybe they’re just trying to suck all the fun out of it, she thought. Loch liked to quote something he called “The Litany Against Fun” (it was from a parody of a science fiction novel he liked): “I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer. I will forget fun. I will take a pass on it. When fun is gone only I will remain—I, and my will to win…”
She wondered if Oakhurst had read the same books, because not only was the Carnival laid out with all the spontaneity of a chessboard, all the kids who had to do the Carnival (three-person teams, whose Gifts were mostly from the School