Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,23

knew she was outgrowing but couldn’t quite bear to be rid of—these all seemed strange, alien, wrong.

She’d shaken her head, and then everything settled back into place. The room was hers, of course, and whatever she had dreamed about was, of course, nothing but a dream. She thought about telling someone, because her parents would praise her imagination and her friends would all get a big laugh out of it, but something held her back.

It was the first dream. The first memory. But it was by no means the last.

After that, the dreams came more and more frequently. Soon they filled all night, every night—all of her sleeping hours. They were as consistent as if they weren’t dreams, but a biography, and eventually, fearfully, Elizabeth Walker came to realize that this was what they actually were. A biography. The life of someone she had once been.

Except, of course, that was impossible. There was no way she could’ve been a sorceress named Yseult. She could not possibly have helped to create magic armor and weapons for her uncle, a giant of a man named Morholt. She couldn’t have spent her days learning magic and healing from the Queen. Magic didn’t exist. This was some amazing—terrifying—fantasy created from far too many viewings of Lord of the Rings … though the castle Yseult—her dream-self—lived in didn’t look much like the Elven castles of the Rings movies, and only a little like the ones the Riders of Rohan lived in. It was wood and stone and shockingly—to Elizabeth’s eyes—small, though Yseult thought of it with pride and satisfaction, because all the floors were stone instead of being dirt on the ground floor, and because she and her parents had rooms of their own and didn’t have to sleep in the big main room—the hall—with everyone else.

That she was actually dreaming about a time she knew nothing about—and had lived before, lived then—was impossible, but that magic was real was even more impossible. Or so she’d thought as she lived a double life, growing up as Elizabeth by day, living as Yseult by night. Although Yseult knew and did things that Elizabeth had not even in her wildest waking thoughts imagined—

—things that involved a man named Tristan, and Elizabeth grew to love him as much as Yseult did. So many mornings she woke up and started to cry, because Tristan wasn’t real any more than Yseult was, but Tristan was everything she could ever want in a boyfriend: he was handsome, and kind, and smart, and he loved …

Yseult. Tristan loves Yseult, not me. And he isn’t even real!

The things they did made her blush when she thought of them, even though she knew about them from movies and television she wasn’t supposed to watch. And the last time she’d slept over at Marcie’s house, Marcie’d had an actual DVD with real sex in it, and they’d all watched it, muffling their giggles and squeaks behind their hands. But Elizabeth had thought (privately) that the DVD had been kind of, well, gross. Not at all like what Tristan and Yseult did—when they could get some privacy, because Yseult’s castle didn’t have a lot of that.

She kept having to remind herself they weren’t real. Sure, sometimes she thought she was going crazy. But it wasn’t as if she was seeing things when she was awake. And it wasn’t as if she believed in all the magic she—Yseult—was doing in those dreams. She had a good imagination, that was all. She began to think about writing her dream-life down as a story, and maybe it would be good enough to get published, like the boy with the dragon books had been.

And that was the way her life went while she turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. She never told anybody that she didn’t dream about anything but Yseult’s life, but she didn’t think of herself as keeping bad secrets. Who did her dreams hurt, anyway? Nothing in them was really real, any more than magic was really real.

That was what she’d believed right up until three months ago.

September, and she was a junior, and head of the Cheer Squad for the Junior Varsity football team. They’d all been at the game when Terry Bishop, who looked a little like Tristan in the right light, jumped for the ball and got clotheslined, and there was an awful snapping sound, and he screamed.

She got there first, even before the coach, and she still didn’t know how because she didn’t