Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,81

me they’d send our new scheds after supper.”

“No argument here,” Addie groaned. “I just hope there’s hot water with everyone wanting baths.”

Spirit and Loch just nodded; she was so exhausted she found it hard to concentrate on even the simplest of things. It took her two tries to get at her e-mail, and she must have stared at the screen for fifteen minutes before she figured out which e-mail was the right one.

She was unsurprised to see that music and art classes had been canceled “until further notice.” They’d been replaced with new language courses and new literature courses. Celtic, Norse, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian had joined Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, and German. The new “literature” classes were all folklore, intensive studies in mythology—of course, this was Oakhurst, so “myth” wasn’t so “mythical.” Celtic, French, German, and Italian had already been on the list, now there were Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Roman, Ancient Greek, Ancient Persian … the list was enormous, and the notes said it didn’t matter if you were the only one that wanted to study a particular culture, you would be accommodated.

Everyone was taking marksmanship, which was going to cover every possible weapon you could shoot.

Oh, that’ll make Loch happy. Not.

Everyone was taking something called Systema. Since Ovcharenko was teaching it, it was probably a martial art. Spirit’s morning “conditioning” class remained; her Art class was now a class in Celtic language, her Music class was now her choice of mythologies. She picked one at random, sent the e-mail back, and went to see if there was hot water. She almost fell asleep in the tub, and when she did drop into bed, she was out without a chance to even think about anything.

* * *

It seemed very strange to see Madison Lane-Rider standing where Ms. Holland should have been. Up close she was even more impressive than she’d been on the stage. A long fall of thick red hair so perfectly smooth and shining it looked like it was Photoshopped dropped to just below her shoulders and was parted on the side. Her pale skin looked Photoshopped, too. With that hair and skin, Spirit would have expected green eyes—but no, she had eyes of a very strange gray color.

She wasn’t wearing the Oakhurst uniform, and today she wasn’t even in Oakhurst brown or gold. She wore a slim skirt and bulky sweater in shades of dark emerald, a carved jade pendant, and jade bangles. Spirit got the feeling Madison Lane-Rider was deliberately showing that she wasn’t to be slotted into some preset place on the “team.” And Spirit also got the feeling that between the outfit and the jewelry, what Ms. Lane-Rider was wearing could probably have paid for the White’s old house.

Evidently, Spirit had ticked off “Nordic folklore,” because that was what Ms. Lane-Rider began to lecture on.

“Death,” she said, when everyone had settled. “Death is omnipresent in Nordic lore. There is probably not a single culture that celebrates death or elevates it to such a level of importance as the Norse. Other cultures have the cult of heroic self-sacrifice to save others, to be sure, and the Japanese have, or had, the Kamikaze of sorts, but only the Norse placed so much emphasis on ‘dying well’ regardless of what was won or lost—”

Dylan raised his hand. She acknowledged him with a raised eyebrow.

“What about Klingons?” he asked, eliciting a laugh.

“Very good. Writers have to start with something, and it is quite clear that the Klingon attitude is Nordic, though their catchphrase of ‘It is a good day to die’ is Native American. Now, the question we must answer as magicians, is: ‘What does this mean to us, and how can we use it?’”

Spirit listened, and took copious notes, even though she didn’t agree morally with an awful lot of what Ms. Lane-Rider had to say. Or maybe more to the point, Ms. Lane-Rider lectured from a completely amoral point of view, and Spirit could not have been more opposed. She could tell that Muirin was just drinking all of this in, though, and that worried her. When the class was over, Ms. Lane-Rider even stopped by Muirin’s desk to talk to her about something, which worried Spirit even more. She couldn’t wait, though; her next class was that Systema thing, and she was pretty sure Anastus Ovcharenko was not going to cut anyone any slack.

He didn’t. And Systema proved to be a martial art, but it wasn’t like anything that had been taught at Oakhurst