Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,47

what’s going on. No matter what it is.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Muirin said instantly.

“Ridiculous?” Spirit shot back in disbelief. “Spells are ridiculous?”

“Mind-control spells,” Addie said, frowning. “Telepathy, or . . .”

“Or glamourie?” Spirit asked. All those mind-numbing lessons with Ms. Groves were finally coming in useful. “How is controlling what somebody thinks and feels any different from controlling what they see? Muirin?”

“I don’t know,” Muirin said thoughtfully. “But it isn’t an Air Gift. Or Water or Earth or Fire. We get taught every Gift that every School can have—you know that, Spirit. It’s in case, you know, we show up with a secondary one later. Right?” she said, looking at the others.

Or any Gift at all, Spirit thought. “But everything we know about magic—real magic—we know because Oakhurst has taught it to us, and told us it’s the truth. If they aren’t telling us the truth about how our classmates are disappearing, what else aren’t they telling us?”

“If you’re right,” Loch said slowly, “then I think we may have a real problem.”

“Just the one?” Burke said, rolling his eyes. “That’s a relief. For a minute there, I was worried.”

“First things first,” Addie said. “We need to find out what happened to Nick. Somebody has to talk to him.”

“Loch, you’re up again,” Muirin said. “Time to work those magic ninja powers.”

“Yeah,” Loch said, glancing at his watch. “But now we have to get back to class. I don’t know what they’d do if they noticed us going off to talk like this, but I don’t want to find out, either. So lets just keep this here. No Cadence, no Brendan. Nobody else—and especially none of the proctors. Just us.”

The five of them exchanged glances, their faces serious as they nodded agreement. Spirit had known this was serious when Loch told all of them about Nick, but making this a secret only the five of them shared seemed to underscore that fact.

“Yeah, and I don’t think I have to remind any of you orphan geniuses to keep this off the intraweb, right?” Muirin said.

Nobody said anything. Even Burke didn’t protest.

SEVEN

If Spirit had found it difficult to concentrate that morning just knowing Nick was gone, it was a hundred times harder that afternoon, knowing he’d run into something last night that had fried his brain. And whatever it was, it seemed like the administration didn’t think a Healing spell would do any good. Were Healing spells no use on someone who’d been traumatized so badly that he’d completely flipped out?

Maybe they thought whatever had happened to Nick might be contagious. Was that even possible? Spirit didn’t know.

Or maybe there wasn’t anyone here who could Heal him? That didn’t seem right, either.

It couldn’t just be that they wanted to conceal what had happened from the students, because with so many magicians among the teachers, the odds were that one of them must be a Healer as well. Had to be. How could they not have a Healer? It had to be Doctor Ambrosius, if nobody else.

Or . . . maybe not Ambrosius. Transformation was a Water Gift, and Healing was a Fire Gift. Even if somebody had Gifts from two Schools, it was usually from Schools of compatible Elements, so maybe Doctor Ambrosius was out of the running for School Healer.

True, Loch had three Gifts, but Kenning and Shadewalking were both from the School of Air, and apparently Pathfinding—School of Earth—wasn’t that incompatible.

On the other hand, you were only supposed to be able to Transform yourself, not somebody else; and he’d certainly turned her and Loch into mice. So what School did that make Doctor Ambrosius?

Could you have Gifts from several Schools? Or was there a secret School that let you do things they didn’t talk about in class?

She chewed on the end of her pen. Why hadn’t anybody ever thought about these things before? (Maybe they had, a little voice inside her suggested. Maybe the kids who think about things like this are the ones who vanish.) The more Spirit thought about Oakhurst, the more she realized there were so many things none of them knew, and more things that just didn’t make sense.

She was so distracted that Ms. Groves caught her not paying attention in Magic Class, and as a result she got an extra assignment—write a ten-page paper on how the traditional folklore practices of Wiltshire were adapted when the English emigrated to the New World, due Monday. There went every scrap of free time over the weekend, not that there was much