Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,100

unwrapping the larger of the two boxes. “It’s the Gift du Jour.”

The “Gift du Jour” was brown, with the Oakhurst crest engraved on the back, and his name: Lachlan Galen Spears. Loch made a face and Spirit winced back in sympathy. It was awful to have a dorky name.

“They come in gold and cream, too, of course,” Addie said kindly. “If you don’t have one when you get here, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get one for your first Christmas.”

“Huh,” Loch said, sounding surprised. “It’s charged. And preloaded.”

There was no real point in trying to push through the mob of students heading for the Refectory, and one thing Spirit could say for Oakhurst was that when it decided to let them fall off the healthy diet bandwagon, it didn’t stint on the junk food. There was no need to hurry, there’d be more sugar and chocolate than all of them could eat in a week.

Bread and circuses. For a moment she could hear her Mom’s voice in her head. Mom had—used to have—a saying for every occasion. In Ancient Rome, the emperors used to keep the people from making trouble by giving them free food and free entertainment. Bread and circuses.

That’s what we get, Spirit thought. Every few weeks there’s another school dance, and a lot of candy, and most of the kids don’t look past that, to all the things that are wrong with this place. . . .

“What color is yours?” Loch asked. With a feeling of resignation, Spirit unwrapped the larger of the two boxes. Her iPod was cream-colored. Same crest cut into the back, and her name: Spirit Victory White. She didn’t bother to complain, even mentally, that now everyone at Oakhurst would know her middle name. She woke her iPod and looked at the preloaded playlist.

“Ah, I recognize this,” she said mockingly, scanning the start of the list of titles. “This is next semester’s Music History stuff.”

“Heaven forbid we should actually use these for recreation,” Addie said, her voice dripping with irony. “That would be frivolous. How ever could we expect to excel?”

“Ah, but you forget. We’re all already winners here at Oakhurst,” Loch replied, deadpan.

“Come on,” Burke said. “It’s cleared out a little, and we should go find the Murr-cat and stop her from eating herself into sugar shock.”

“Fat chance of that,” Addie answered.

The Refectory was full, but not crowded. Most of the crowd was around the dessert buffet, and Spirit had to admit it looked pretty. There were cakes on stands, plates of brownies, pyramids of perfectly round scoops of ice cream frozen so hard that it would take them at least half an hour to melt, and—because this was a school full of teenagers—stacked cases of soda.

The four of them, by mutual consent, took one of the empty tables at the opposite end of the room from the buffet table. Muirin saw them, waved, and came over carrying two plates heaped high with desserts—obviously one for herself, and one for all of them.

“I don’t see how you can eat all that,” Addie said as Muirin plopped down at the table opposite her.

“Practice,” Muirin answered. She pushed the second plate toward them. It was stacked with brownies of various kinds.

Spirit picked up the top one and bit into it. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but hey: chocolate. Bread and circuses, her mother’s voice whispered in her mind.

“So, come on, open your other one!” Muirin urged around a mouthful of fudge and ice cream.

Spirit had almost forgotten about the second box. Why had she and Loch both gotten two when no one else had? She tore the paper off quickly. Inside it was a pasteboard box, and inside that was a tiny wooden jewelry box—a ring box—with the Oakhurst crest (what a shock) laser-cut into the top.

She opened it.

Inside, on a bed of black velvet, was what looked like . . . a class ring. She lifted it out of its box and inspected it curiously. It was gold—when she looked inside the band, she saw it was stamped 24K—and felt heavy, very heavy. On the sides of the band were the broken sword and the inverted cup from the Oakhurst coat of arms. The bezel of the ring said: absolutum dominium.

“Absolute dominion,” Loch translated. He’d opened his own box and was looking at his ring curiously.

With everything else about the ring being so lavish, Spirit would have expected the stone to be something she recognized. But to her surprise, it looked