Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,78

Shadow Knights! You know what they’re called!” she exclaimed, her eyes darkening.

Spirit blinked, startled. “Uh, what? Burke just made up that name.…”

“But it’s the right name for them! The Shadow Knights—they’re the ancient enemies of the Knights of the Grail!” Elizabeth clutched Spirit’s arm; her hands were freezing. “It all goes back to Arthur!”

“Arthur?” It took Spirit a moment for her brain to come up with the right association. “You mean King Arthur? Camelot? Excalibur? Merlin?”

“Yes!” Elizabeth had her arm in a death grip. “Listen, it’s all deeper, all larger than you think. It’s not just Oakhurst, and it’s not just now, this is a war that’s been going on for centuries, and now it’s getting near the end—”

And then, the words just poured out of her, as if they had been kept behind a dam all this time. More words than Spirit had heard Elizabeth speak in the entire time she’d been here. As Spirit listened, caught in a kind of bemused numbness, Elizabeth spun a story so wild that it belonged in a book, not real life. Spirit’s friends had been calling her paranoid for weeks, but even though she was dead certain they were all in danger and smack in the middle of some horrible conspiracy, even she hadn’t come up with anything this crazy. And Elizabeth wasn’t exactly making it easy to follow her story.

Finally, when Elizabeth ran out of air, Spirit tried to get it all sorted out so it was more or less coherent. “So … all this is about King Arthur and the rest of those mythical people. First, there are these Shadow Knights. And they’re serving Mordred. Mordred has been reincarnated, or else he never died, you’re not sure which. But some of the Shadow Knights are people who served him, or were his allies before, and they are all reincarnated over and over. And Mordred wants the usual Evil Overlord stuff, and the Shadow Knights are going to help him get it. Right?”

Elizabeth nodded and opened her mouth to start again. Spirit held up her hand. “Whoa. Wait. I’m still trying to get this straight.”

Elizabeth nodded, and watched her expectantly.

“But the Shadow Knights have never been able to defeat the Grail Knights, who were the ones that served Arthur and Merlin. And the Grail Knights haven’t been able to defeat the Shadow Knights, either. Which is why they all keep getting reborn.”

The girl nodded. “And Arthur, too. Arthur is reborn.” She faltered. “Merlin and Mordred, I am not sure. I am not part of their story, so I do not know these things, I only know what I have been a part of myself—”

Wow, now she’s even starting to talk … odd. Like someone who’s not really from around here … as in a zillion years ago not from around here.

“Wait! I’m still—Okay, so now we talk about Oakhurst. Some of the Oakhurst people are Shadow Knights. Some are Grail Knights.” She paused, trying not to think about how absurd this all sounded. “Some aren’t anything, except magicians. And you can’t tell which is which.”

“It is all part of the curse that fell upon Britain when Mordred betrayed Arthur and sold himself to the Dark,” Elizabeth said earnestly. “Everyone involved in any way with Arthur’s kingdom is doomed to be reborn over and over until either the Shadow or the Grail triumphs. One must destroy the other. But I do not recognize any of the people here at Oakhurst, because I did not know them in the past.”

“So why doesn’t anyone remember all this?” she wanted to know.

“The Shadow Knights do, but only once they turn to the Dark. Their master, Mordred, wakes their memories. I do not know about the Grail Knights.” She looked as if she knew that part of the story sounded pretty weak. “Possibly Merlin wakes theirs as well. But when they are reborn, they have no memories of their past lives.”

“But—I don’t get it, if they’re reborn over and over and fight the war over and over, why hasn’t anyone noticed until now?” Spirit shook her arm a little, and Elizabeth finally noticed she was holding on to it and let go.

“Because until the spirit in the Tree was freed, they had no leader and no direction,” the girl said simply. “Their conflicts were random, skirmishes rather than battles, and since none of them recalled their pasts, they did not even know why they fought with each other. That Tree is the one here in the