Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,35

the dojo area of the gym (because the kendoka and the karate students were both going to be competing at the end of November, not just exhibiting), she was down at the stables. Only Sundays were free.

But only in a way.

Mr. Wallis called for a five-minute break before they changed partners. Spirit gratefully lowered her sword, stepped back, and bowed to Kylee before going over to the mat to rest. Karate was done on mats, kendo on the bare wood floor. She pulled off her mask and ran her hands through her hair, scraping it back into her ponytail again, and thought about Sunday.

Every Sunday at Oakhurst began the same way, with a pancake breakfast that was just as good as Muirin had said it was. And after breakfast, they all had half an hour to go back to their rooms and get their coats for the walk across the campus to the Chapel.

The Chapel was a freestanding stone building that looked as old as the main house. It even had a bell tower with an actual bell, not a recording of a bell, that Mr. Gail rang for Sunday service. It was one of those “neutral” kinds of places that didn’t really look as if it belonged to any denomination—or any religion—at all. There were pews, and a pipe organ, and a pulpit, but the stained glass windows all showed odd pictures of knights in armor.

Spirit thought it was kind of odd for somebody to build themselves their own church; Loch said he didn’t think that Arthur Tyniger had built it when he built Oakhurst, but that Doctor Ambrosius built it later when he turned the place into a school, maybe even putting it together out of bits and pieces of other buildings that were as old as the main house, because it certainly looked as if it matched.

Just as Muirin had said, Sunday service wasn’t exactly church, although there were songbooks and a choir—that Addie sang in—and all the students sang along with the choir. But in the last six weeks, Doctor Ambrosius had read to them out of the Diamond Sutra, the Yasna, the Rig Veda, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tanakh as well as out of what he said were several different translations of the Bible. Spirit couldn’t make up her mind whether Doctor Ambrosius was trying to convince them that all religions shared an underlying spiritual truth—or that they were all equally false. But at least after the service, the rest of Sunday was free.

Only last Sunday when the service was over, Spirit had been stopped on her way out the door by Ms. Smith, who told her she’d be having afternoon tea with Doctor Ambrosius. When she’d caught up to Muirin and the others and asked about it, Burke said that Doctor Ambrosius took afternoon tea every Sunday with four boys and four girls chosen at random from the student body. Once you’d been to an Afternoon Tea, you couldn’t be picked again until everyone else at the school had been picked. (“Kind of like jury duty,” Muirin said.) Spirit knew that one of the things Oakhurst was supposed to be teaching them was what that section of the Oakhurst intraweb that talked about their curriculum called “genteel deportment” and Camilla called “fancy manners,” and Spirit guessed that the Afternoon Tea thing meant that Doctor Ambrosius got to spend Quality Time with all of the students at least once a year.

When he wasn’t turning them into mice, that was.

At least she didn’t have to worry about what to wear.

The Afternoon Tea was held in the Senior Teachers’ Parlor, a place Spirit hadn’t been until now. It was one of the rooms on the second floor of the original house, and Spirit couldn’t imagine what it had been originally. Bedroom? Library? Roller-skating rink? Whatever it had been, it was an enormous room. The walls were paneled in golden oak, except for the outside wall, which was all windows (with window seats, or at least padded benches, although nobody sat on them). There were a bunch of oil paintings on the walls: some of them landscapes, but one of them—a huge one—was a portrait of an annoyed-looking man in old-fashioned clothes, who Spirit guessed must be Arthur Tyniger.

The other kids looked just as nervous about being here as she felt, and it didn’t make Spirit feel any better about this Tea that there were half a dozen teachers here, including Ms. Smith and Dr.