Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,93

didn’t even know I had magic! Now I do, and I know it wasn’t just dumb luck and parkour, but parkour and magic that did it.”

“So we have three sets of supposed Legacy parents who could not possibly be dead if they really were magicians,” said Addie, and Spirit realized Addie—calm, quiet, gentle Addie—was more furious than Spirit had ever imagined she could be. “And there’s no mirror-Oakhurst for ordinary people to go to. Which means—”

“We were lied to. We aren’t Legacies at all.” Spirit bit her lip. “So … how did we end up here?”

“We’re here because Oakhurst is looking for kids with magic, and is somehow diddling with records to get themselves named our wards,” Loch said immediately. “In a lot of states that wouldn’t even be a problem. They’re an institution with no black marks against them, orphans are a drain on the state. Most states would be happy to turn us over, no questions asked.”

“Even those of us with money,” Addie said, her eyes flashing dangerously. “Because our Trusts have to put us somewhere. Why not here?”

“Please don’t call me a ‘conspiracy theory nut’ again,” Spirit begged. “But … is it possible that because we have magic, that’s why our families … died? Like … whatever sent the Hunt is trying to kill us off, and got our families, but not us?” That horrifying figure on the road loomed up again in her memory.

“Or maybe it’s our magic that saves us. I know it was in my case,” Loch said thoughtfully. “Given what we know now … that’s not all that crazy, Spirit.”

“My turn to sound like a nut bar,” Addie said, slowly. “We know there’s someone here trying to kill off the students. What if that same person is the one that found us in the first place, tried to kill us then, and got our families instead? Because our families didn’t have magic to protect them?”

Vindication should have been sweet. Spirit realized vindication meant having to tell her only friends their families had been murdered because of what they were. Vindication wasn’t sweet. It hurt.

“That’s not nutty, Addie,” Spirit replied, wrapping a twist of her hair around and around her finger nervously. “Take that a step further. What if that person already knew, because they’ve done it so many times already, that they couldn’t kill us at a distance, so they killed our families, knowing we’d be brought here, where it would be easy to get us?”

“Argh,” Addie replied, knuckling her temples. “I wish that didn’t sound so logical! It fits what we know too well!”

“And why didn’t Doctor Ambrosius tell us the truth about our families in the first place?” Loch frowned. “Because he had to know it. And I don’t think he’s the type to spare our feelings, either. Hell, if anything, he’d use the guilt. You know: ‘Your families died because Dark Powers were trying to get to you, now you have to train to become the Great and Powerful Oz and avenge them!’”

Both Addie and Spirit nodded. “That does sound more like his speed,” Addie agreed.

Then they all looked at each other. “He might not know…,” Spirit said, slowly.

It was Loch who addressed the elephant in the room. “Or he might be the one behind it.”

If that was true, Spirit thought they’d better be praying Doctor Ambrosius really had gone senile.

FOURTEEN

One of the mandatory new classes was horseback riding. But not just any old trail riding, the way the old class had been—this was endurance riding. It was something like a human marathon—assuming the humans were running, not on streets and roads, but on unimproved land, through any kind of weather, and over marked obstacles known as hazards that were parts of a course as extreme as the terrain allowed. In Montana, even this flatter part of it, that could be very extreme indeed. It even required a special lightweight saddle with a breastplate that kept the saddle from sliding backward when the horse was scrambling up steep inclines. In competition—because to Spirit’s astonishment, this was actually a sport—the races were fifty and one hundred miles long. They weren’t doing that—yet. They were doing shorter distances, the kind of riding called “competitive trail riding,” which sounded so … well, nice. “Oh, let’s get on the horse and ride a trail and see who gets there first!”

Wrong.

These were ten-mile rides. They all started together. Beforehand, they had to kit up the horse as if they were going to end up making