Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,18

here. Maybe it’s always here, and they just make it invisible for the rest of the year. Maybe old Mr. Tyniger built the place around it.

As if anyone would want to build a room around a tree.…

Then she blinked and shook her head. What the—? Because, of course, this room was built around a tree. And for one moment, staring at the Christmas tree, she had utterly and completely forgotten that, even though the tree Oakhurst was built around was there, right in front of her—that huge oak trunk in the middle of the Entry Hall.

It should have been the focus of the entire room, actually. And it … wasn’t.

She tried to stare at it—really tried—and after a very little time she found her eyes sort of shifting away from it. For some reason, after glancing at it, she kind of found herself dismissing it. As if it was nothing more imposing than a lamp. Instead of being a tree trunk at least twelve feet in diameter and two stories high.

She would never have thought about that twice—she certainly didn’t when she first got here—except for the whole Hunt business. The Wild Hunt was another thing people should have noticed immediately and didn’t … Little alarms went off in her head. If something was making her “forget” about an oak tree that an entire building was built around, she wanted to know why.

Slowly, she walked across the inlaid stone floor toward it; warily, with a creepy feeling as if she was halfway expecting a door in the trunk to open and some horror-movie monster to pop out. When she got up close to it, she studied it, only to see that there were marks all over its smooth time-polished surface. They were faint—but they were there.

And they’d been made by someone. Or something. She would have dismissed them as natural—and a part of her really wanted to do that, because didn’t worms and beetles crawl under tree bark and leave marks on the wood?—but there was something about the marks that kept her from doing that. She couldn’t swear to it—not exactly—but she had the vague feeling the marks on the wood looked familiar.

That was even creepier.

Well, one thing was certain. She didn’t want anyone to catch her looking so closely at that tree or those marks. She was pretty darn certain that if they had something to do with Oakhurst tradition that the kids were supposed to know, Doctor Ambrosius or the teachers would have been all over the story at every given opportunity.

So— They weren’t. And maybe she needed to find a way to look at those marks without being seen.

She moved along, as if she’d been on her way back to her room all along, and resolved to tell the others. With any luck, one of them would have an idea about the best way to get a really good look at the Oakhurst Oak—and its marks—without anyone noticing. With a little more luck, she might be able to get them to wake up to the fact that there was still a lot going on here at Good Old Oakhurst that was just not right.

THREE

At lunch, Elizabeth stood out by not standing out; she picked the table farthest from the desirable spots—which put her at the window, where it was freezing cold—she ate quickly and without really talking to anyone. Even by Oakhurst standards this was odd, and Spirit wondered if she was going to find herself sharing the back of the class with Elizabeth. At Oakhurst, there was competition, and fierce competition at that, for the seats at the front of the room. Everyone wanted to be noticed.

Because, hey, we are all winners, right?

She watched Elizabeth leaving the dining room and wondered where she was going. Her room? Probably. When your family had just been killed, it wasn’t as if you were really in the mood for a Winter Carnival.

She was still thinking about Elizabeth when she got back to her room and found Addie and Muirin waiting for her.

“What do you think of the new kid?” she asked, putting her books beside the computer in the order she was going to do the homework assignments (and why call it “homework” when they never left the campus?).

“Uh, Eleanor? Elsie?” Muirin said, without any interest. “Why?”

“Elizabeth,” Spirit corrected. “She’s in most of my classes. So what do you think of her?”

“I think she’s a wimp,” said Muirin dismissively. “Limper than a shoelace. She’s going to get run