Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (11 page)

One thought from me, and the sword was engulfed in flames. I burst into song to strengthen the flame for what I needed to do. The knights hesitated.

“Take them! I can always heal you after,” shouted Morgan. Knights advanced, somewhat more cautiously.

“What good is one sword, even a flaming one, against a dozen knights?” Stan whispered to me. I’m sure that is what Morgan thought as well.

I spread the flames out into a circle around us at shield level, then gradually expanded the circle in both directions until I had a flame wall surrounding us completely. The knights, confused, stopped again and looked in Morgan’s direction.

Just as the
pwca
had not expected an improvised laser, Morgan had not expected what amounted to a force field. As she stared, I extended the flames over our heads, and the field was complete. Even a flying adversary, if Morgan had one up her sleeve, could not touch us without burning, and the flames burned so intensely now I could not imagine any knight jumping through them fast enough.

Unfortunately, the sword had not been forged with this kind of use in mind. I could feel the hilt starting to overheat in my hand, feel the sword start to draw magic faster than I could feed it. I could only keep this kind of barrier up a few minutes.

“Everyone, harmonize with him.” Everyone, even Stan, looked at Dan in surprise. They might have expected some defensive plan from him, but they could hardly have expected musical direction.

Stan joined in first. I don’t think he had much of a future as a cantor, but at least he reinforced my rhythm. I was singing in Welsh, but as there are no language barriers in faerie realms, someone like Stan could sing in English, yet somehow the lyrics meshed.

Then a high, clear voice joined the harmony. Eva, even on autopilot, as she was likely to be now after all she had been through, could still sing well, having been the star of more than one musical. I could feel the strength of my magic grow, feel the flames burn even hotter.

Jackson joined then; though he was the drummer in my band, he was not a bad baritone. Dan himself joined next, contributing more volume than anything else, and then the others.

You would have thought that such a random combination of unrehearsed voices would have produced cacophony rather than music. Indeed, it might have, probably should have, but it didn’t. You see, when a bard uses music as a source of magic power, he uses more than just the sound; he uses the feeling behind it. All of us wanted to survive, and that intense feeling harmonized even if the literal sounds did not. Nor did the connection depend only on the survival instinct. The brotherhood Stan and I shared, the connection we had made with Dan, Eva and Dan’s love for each other, the long hours Jackson and I had spent in rehearsal, and other connections helped to bond us and to bond our sound. A recorded version probably still would have sounded horrible, despite all that, but to a listener standing right there, sharing our bond as well as hearing our sound, what we produced together would have had a rough but undeniable beauty.

By now the flames were an inferno, their very touch death, and the knights backed up to avoid being burned right where they stood.

Then the rain started.

I had been so focused on getting my own magic working fast enough to do us any good that I had lost track of what Morgan was doing. She may not have understood the idea behind a force field, but she certainly would have known that water puts out fire.

We had pushed the flames to such intensity that at first the rain became steam and hissed away, but Morgan was more than capable of intensifying her attack. The rain became a downpour, a deluge, a flood from the sky. The hilt began to burn my hand, and my throat became more and more scratchy. I could feel the others struggling to keep up the music as more and more of the rain knifed through our fiery shield and hit us in great, chilling drops. White Hilt itself sputtered as the rain starting hitting it directly.

Then the flaming ceiling above us collapsed, and the full force of Morgan’s unnatural storm nearly drove us to our knees. The wall between us and the knights looked more like desperate smoke than fire. In seconds even that tenuous defense would be gone. The group had given me what strength it could, and given us all a chance, but even together we were no match for Morgan. Unless, unless…

During Stan’s brief, ill-fated martial arts career, he had told me the old proverb about using an enemy’s strength against him. Morgan had created an incredibly powerful storm, one that threatened to beat us into the mud. However, as far as I could tell, she had seldom if ever left Annwn in the last few hundred years, while I had been living in the “real” world and learning its lessons. I thought of the weather in scientific terms as well as magic ones, and I believed I knew enough about meteorology to be able to visualize a way to use that storm against her, if my friends and my magic held out long enough.

I stopped trying to sustain the firewall. The knights, battered by the rain themselves, did not react very fast. With what power I had left, I caught the steam clouds, accelerating their condensation into even more rain. The condensation released heat into the surrounding clouds, and I again accelerated a natural process, encouraging the heat to build, creating a low pressure area that in turn caused the wind to begin to spiral inward. Much faster than in nature, but using the same basic processes, I took the conditions Morgan had created and brewed myself up a hurricane, with my friends safe in the eye. The knights and Morgan were not so lucky.

Shield and armor made the knights maybe sixty pounds heavier than they would otherwise have been, but keep in mind that hurricanes of enough magnitude can easily suck up cars. Two of the knights fell back fast enough; the other ten screamed as they spiraled upward, on their way to Oz…or death. I tried not to think about the second part. Morgan herself had managed to push the hurricane back from her as she tried with all her might to still the roaring storm. She would succeed eventually, but her first attempts failed because she did not understand what she was dealing with.

A combination of the storm’s fury and her frenzied efforts to stop it shattered the illusion she had been maintaining. First the unnatural brightness faded; then the rows and rows of apple trees dissolved as if the rain were melting them. In their place stood a few dead trees with barren branches and rotting bark, the sole distinguishing features in the gray and dreary realm that was Morgan’s true home. I heard a thud and noticed an empty suit of armor, rusted and useless, hit the hard ground. Even Morgan’s knights had been more illusion than real.

The Voice started speaking through Dan so abruptly I nearly jumped. “Morgan has tried so hard to make this place Avalon that she has poisoned it irrevocably. The illusion drained all the substance away, until only the husk you see remained, corrupted beyond redemption.” Morgan screamed then, screamed into the wind, her voice echoing and re-echoing eerily all around us, her face twisted in frustration, her eyes gleaming murderously.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked urgently. I could feel the hurricane begin to lessen as Morgan contended against it. She might be ruler of a wasteland rather than a paradise, but that did not render her any less capable of killing us all.

“Observe,” said the Voice, having Dan’s body step aside to reveal a glowing doorway. “The way home.”

Without a moment’s hesitation I yelled at everyone else to get through the portal. Numb both physically and mentally, they all complied without question. When they were through, Dan more or less shoved me through and then followed, just as the hurricane was dying down.

The world around us seemed to shudder momentarily, and then we landed with a jarring thud on the dais in the city council chambers; I somehow knew we had only been gone for a minute or two at most. The lights were still out, and everyone around us was shrieking. At first I thought we had stumbled back into some kind of massacre. Then I realized the ceiling sprinklers had gone off, drenching everyone in the room. Obviously there had been no fire, so there was only one possible explanation.

Someone who knew we were going to come back soaking wet was covering our entrance. Even as stunned and exhausted as I was, I couldn’t help but wonder how to fix my other immediate problem.

Stan, of course, already knew who I was, and Dan never remembered what happened while the Voice was using him as an instrument, but six other people had seen Morgan Le Fay treat me as if she had known me for centuries—which she had; worse, they had seen me work magic, and pretty spectacular magic at that. I was in close physical proximity to them when we first popped back into our world, but we were surrounded by dozens of other people, even before the lights came on, and the parents rushed upon us as fast as they could. There was no way I could even enforce a command not to talk about what they had seen. All I could do was hope for the best—which, given the way my life had been going, didn’t seem like a winning strategy.

“Tal!” my mom half-yelled as she hustled up on stage, closely followed by my dad, both pretty soggy, just like everyone else in the room. “When the lights went out, I…I was worried about you.” Logically, she would have had no reason to worry, but perhaps her maternal instincts had correctly identified a possible threat she could not consciously be aware of.

“I’m fine, Mom. It’s just water.” Stan’s mom, as if she too had sensed something, was hugging him hard enough to crush him, and I wondered if maybe I had her figured wrong. Perhaps part of her control freakery really did come from love after all.

None of us students said much to each other as our parents collected us, but I couldn’t help noticing the stare that Carlos gave me, or the uneasy way that Aabharana wouldn’t make eye contact, or even the completely unreadable expression on Eva’s face as she passed by me.

“Taliesin!” said someone right behind me. I turned around, and there was Carrie Winn, soggy but somehow able to carry it off better than most people.

“Ah, and you must be Mr. and Mrs. Weaver,” she continued, sweeping toward my parents in a friendly, but nonetheless forceful, way. “How proud of your son you must be.”

“Yes, we are!” said my dad, actually meaning it, at least I thought so, as he reached out to shake Ms. Winn’s outstretched hand. My mom, by contrast, was a little shaken to be suddenly confronted by the city’s founder and uncrowned queen.

“Oh, Ms. Winn, I’m such a mess!”

“We all are, dear,” replied Ms. Winn, shaking my mom’s hand vigorously.

“You’re beautiful, Mom,” I surprised myself by saying. She blushed, just a bit, and Ms. Winn raised an eyebrow.

“A scholar and a gentleman! I wonder…I know you want to get home and get dried out, but could I borrow Taliesin, just for a second? I have an internship opportunity I’d like to discuss with him.”

If pride were fire, my parents would have burned up right on the spot. “Of course! Tal, we’ll meet you out in the parking lot.”

Ms. Winn thanked them and then hustled me off to one side, away from the friends I so desperately needed to do something about, but even as a high school student, I knew that Ms. Winn was not a person you said no to.

When we were a safe distance away from everyone else, our conversation in any case largely covered by the mob of people shuffling around in the room, Ms. Winn turned to me and said in a low voice, “Taliesin, that was quite a victory over Morgan. Impressive, to say the least.”

I must have looked incredibly stupid with my mouth hanging so far open. “You…you know about that?”

“Why are you so surprised?” she said gently with a small smile. “After all, you have been getting my help and advice for some time.”

Ms. Winn was the Voice!

“You have never identified yourself before.”

Ms. Winn nodded solemnly. “The situation is much more…difficult than I at first thought. I have to work with you more directly from now on. The internship I mentioned to your parents will be a good cover if I need to contact you directly.”

“Is this because of Morgan?” Ms. Winn chuckled a little at that.

“My dear, Morgan has been a prisoner in that little corner of Annwn for centuries. Oh, she can still do some mischief if someone stumbles into her prison, but she has long been insane and in any case cannot leave—or call anyone else to her.”

“But she grabbed me and the other students…”

“No!” Ms. Winn cut me off decisively. “Morgan did not pull you into Annwn. Someone else threw you in.” I must have looked puzzled, and Ms. Winn’s tone became more impatient. “There is an opposing force working in Santa Brígida. I have known for some time, but I did not expect such a bold move, such a direct attack. In one way, though, what happened tonight was very fortunate. I think I know who our enemy is.”

“Who—” I started to ask.

“No time for that now. Your parents will be wondering what’s going on as it is, and I’m not one hundred percent sure yet anyway. I will let you know as soon as I can verify my hunch.” Ms. Winn looked around cautiously. “It’s time for you to go.” She shook my hand. “Just be as alert as you were tonight, and I’ll be in touch.”

Since we had almost gotten taken prisoner by Morgan Le Fay tonight, merely maintaining the same level of alertness didn’t seem like enough, but this was not the time to argue. I said goodnight to Ms. Winn and walked out, somewhat shakily, to join my parents. The fog had cleared, and the sky actually sparkled, but the night’s beauty did little to allay my uneasiness.

I finally knew who the Voice was, but that revelation raised as many questions as it answered. I had beaten one enemy only to discover another, potentially far more powerful one. Some of my fellow students now had questions I couldn’t begin to answer.

Typical! Just typical!

CHAPTER 10: TRIANGLES

Despite the ominous events on Founders’ Day, life for a few days seemed normal, or at least what passed for normal in my universe. There were no attacks, no urgent messages from Ms. Winn, no intrusions by the Voice (which I somehow hadn’t gotten around to just calling “Ms. Winn,” or something similar). My dad, though he might have been happier if I had plastered the walls of my bedroom with Taylor Swift posters, had pretty much decided I wasn’t gay, and, since from his point of view everything was falling into place for me, didn’t even complain about my harp playing. My mom fretted less than at any other time in the last four years. I was doing well academically, keeping myself in combat-ready physical shape, even finding time for some band practice. I almost gave in to the temptation to believe my life really was as good as it seemed to be.