Rise of the Fey (3 page)

The guard makes me climb onto the wooden stand then proceeds to attach my chain to it.

“Lovely,” I say bitterly, “as if this wasn’t degrading enough.”

The guard smiles wickedly from his position, then gives a final tug on my bindings before stepping away.

Despite the weight of my fetters, I hold myself straighter. If those people think they’ve got me cowering and ready to do their bidding, they’re out of their bloody minds. I stare, unblinking, at the judge and the rest of the jury set in a semi-circle about him.

To the judge’s right are six members of the Board. I see with some relief that Lady Ysolt and her husband are still alive, though Sir Boris’s scarred face and new eye patch tell me he’s barely made it through the battle alive. Next to him is a brooding Father Tristan, followed by a large woman the size of an adult hippo then, dwarfed between her and my once-upon-a-time stepfather Luther, sits Irene.

My gaze instinctively flickers away from her cold face to wander to the other half of the semi-circle, and my heart skips a beat.

“Percy!” I exclaim, more loudly than I expected.

The knight’s head snaps around in my direction and I break into a wide grin. The last time I saw him, he was on the brink of death after fighting off Dean’s evil banshee. I make a mental note to myself to thank Blanchefleur for saving him; if I ever get a chance to get out of these irons that is.

Percy throws me a quick smile before looking away again, as if embarrassed to be overtly friendly with the accused.

The slight hurts, but I can’t blame him. Rather, I blame everyone else around here. Who was the one who warned against the Fey behind all those black-veined murders? Me. Who warned against Carman getting out of jail?
Me
! But instead of thanking me, they’re now blaming me for everything!

“Morgan Pendragon?” the old man asks.

“What?” I yell, fired up with indignation.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Arthur grow tense and remember his warning to be a good girl if I don’t want to ruin my chances of getting free. I take a deep, calming breath.

“Yes?” I ask more demurely.

“You have been accused of practicing illegal elemental manipulation,” the judge says, loud and clear for all to hear, “of hiding important and dangerous Fey artifacts, and of theft. Do you deny any of these charges?”

I refrain from rolling my eyes at him. “Yes, your highness,” I say. “I deny them all.”

I hear muffled laughs behind me and the judge’s wide face turns slightly pink.

“You’ll address me as ‘Your Honor,’ if you please, Miss Pendragon,” the old man says.

“Yes, sir. Your Honor.”

The judge nods then starts reading from a fat ledger.

“Let us begin then with the illegal practice of EM,” he says, looking over his glasses at me. “A little over a week ago, you found yourself on Island Park, did you not?”

I blink. Was it only a week ago that I was on that cursed island? “Yes, Your Honor,” I say.

“And how did you get to that island?”

“Your honor,” Arthur says, standing up. “There have been many reports, my own included, stating that she’d been kidnapped by the Pendragons’ lawyer.”

“After having escaped from our house,” Irene retorts, her back so straight it looks like a plank of wood’s been shoved down her bustier. “Which is highly suspect in and of itself.”

“Where the only guard present was her kidnapper, which is also highly suspect,” Arthur says, and I have the pleasure of seeing both Irene and Luther squirm.

“Noted,” the judge says. “Miss Pendragon, once on Island Park you were, however, seen performing EM illegally. And not for the first time, I believe.”

I blanch. To my surprise, Lance stands up, his perfect features blank of any expression.

“Your Honor,” he says, “Sir Arthur and myself had been fighting Carman and were losing the battle. We would have been killed if Miss Pendragon hadn’t come to our defense. She also healed Sir Arthur who’d sustained severe injuries, and cured the Lady Jennifer from the Fey poison that claimed so many before. If it weren’t for her, none of us would be present here today.”

I repress a grimace, wishing I could forget that last part—saving Jennifer is not one of my proudest achievements.

“Yet she was there when Carman was freed,” the judge says. “Indeed, she was brought there, which can only mean that she was somehow crucial to Carman’s liberation. So tell me, child, how did you perform those feats? Did you perchance obtain some of the school’s more powerful oghams?”

“Your Honor,” Arthur interrupts again, “no ogham was found on Morgan’s person at the time of her arrest, and there are plenty of witnesses that observed her performing these healings without their use.”

“She could have hidden them,” the blond-haired KORT knight sitting next to Percy says lazily. “I don’t believe she was searched until Lady Irene finally apprehended her.”

The judge eyes me carefully and I gulp. “I’m not quite sure about all the supposed EM, Your Honor,” I say, though Nibs’s explanations come back to mind. “I assumed it was because of the Sangraal.”

There’s a collective intake of breath in the stands behind me at the name of the magical cup, but the judge’s face brightens. This is what he’s been waiting for all along.

“How did the Sangraal come to be in your hands?” he asks.

“I first found the cup here at school,” I say, “but then I lost it and didn’t see it again until it was brought to me up on the island. I think”—I bite on my lower lip—“I think I would have died without it.”

The judge frowns. “Who brought it to you then, child?”

I look down at my hands stained with black, the indelible remains of that one, horrifying time I tried to save Owen from the Siege Perilous. I rub them together self-consciously.

“
Who
brought it to you, Miss Pendragon?” the judge asks again.

“Puck, Your Honor,” I reply with a sigh.

The jury pulls back in surprise.

As if he’d been waiting to hear his name, I spot the little hobgoblin making his way into the training arena, hopping and skipping down the sandy floor towards the jury’s dais as fast as his little legs will carry him.

Suddenly, his face whips upward and he skids to a stop to sniff the air. His horny head snaps over in my direction and I see his tiny, fluffy tail beat wildly as he launches off in my direction. But before he can reach me, he trips on his own two hooves and falls rolling to the ground, coming to a resounding stop at the foot of my stand. I instinctively try to kneel to help him up but the restraints tighten around me, keeping me locked in my upright position.

“Who let that creature through?” Irene snaps, motioning for the guard to take Puck away.

The hobgoblin’s head pops up above the platform’s wooden base, dazed, then splits into a beatific smile at my sight. As Puck struggles to pull himself onto my stand, I watch with some apprehension as the guard hurries over. But before the man can reach him, Puck hops into my arms and I hug him protectively.

Irene stands up in anger. “Drop him!”

“No,” I say, squeezing Puck closer to me.

A fat and cold raindrop splatters against my cheek, quickly followed by another, and I look up in surprise as the sky-lake bursts open in a fierce rain. Behind me, the stands erupt in panicked shrieks as the crowd struggles to disperse and find shelter.

“The sky is broken!” someone screams.

“The whole lake is going to fall upon our heads!” someone else shouts.

My gut clenches into a tight knot—did the attack on the school weaken it so much that the barrier keeping us safe from Lake Winnebago’s waters is failing?

I glance over to the makeshift dais where the jury is and, squinting through the sheets of rain, find that none of them have moved. I exhale softly as the stands behind me quickly empty themselves out. People are just being paranoid after the attack, but this isn’t anything more than a passing storm. Except that I’ve never seen one in Lake High before.

Puck snuggles closer to me, using my hair as an umbrella, before looking over his shoulder at a glowing shape moving towards us.

“Peace,” I hear a soft voice whisper, carried over by the whistling wind.

Slowly, the rain clears up to reveal Lady Vivian, the school’s principal, standing between me and the jury members. Her burgundy dress whips about her legs in an agitated fashion, the cloth as dry as the rest of us are drenched.

“You did that on purpose!” Irene accuses her, her mascara dripping in black streaks down her pale face.

Lady Vivian waves her hand dismissively. “I thought I’d clear the air a little,” she says. “Nothing like a good rainfall to wash out the dirt, though it’s not always entirely successful.”

Irene’s scowl deepens. “I knew having that filthy vermin show up here was a bad sign,” she mutters, loud enough for all of us to hear.

The judge clears his throat self-consciously. “Let us get back to the matter at hand, shall we?” he says.

“Yes,” Lady Vivian says, “let us. I came to hear the Gorlois heir’s account of Carman’s escape.”

“We hadn’t reached that part yet,” Luther says with a sneer.

“We were going over the Sangraal affair,” the elderly judge adds.

“Very well,” Lady Vivian says.

She snaps her fingers together and the wind picks up again, shooting straight for her. Her skirts twirl as the breeze gathers behind her, then Lady Vivian sits down and remains perched in the air.

“Please proceed,” Lady Vivian says, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips.

I stare at her, mouth wide open—I’ve never seen her use any kind of Elemental Manipulation before. I always thought she was another layman, like Miss Laplace or Miss Pelletier. Frowning, I scan her now still figure—her ears, neckline, and hands are devoid of any telltale jewelry that would indicate the use of oghams. Nor did she call any elemental name.

I let out a small gasp as understanding dawns on me: Lady Vivian is a Fey!

But having a Fey hold so much power over the school—a school dedicated to eradicating her kind—makes absolutely no sense. She must have some oghams tucked out of sight inside her dress somewhere, and learned to call upon their powers without speaking their names out loud. Except I’ve never heard anyone mention that was possible. Even Arthur can’t manage that feat, and he’s supposedly one of the best knights seen in ages.

Puck suddenly grabs my chin in his tiny hands and forces me to look up. I find the presiding judge is staring at me expectantly and I realize he must have asked me a question.

“Yes, Your Honor?” I ask, feeling myself blush. If Arthur was hoping for me to give a good impression, I’m afraid I’m doing a terrible job at it.

“Carman?” the judge asks, rapping his fingers on the wooden desk.

“Yes, she’s out,” I say.

“Thank you for stating the obvious,” Irene snaps. “We want to know how she did it, and what your role was in it.”

I pause. In my week spent in the cool of my prison cell, I’ve had plenty of time to consider this very question, and only one explanation’s come to me over and over again.

“Reverse engineering, I believe,” I say carefully. “According to the song, there were twelve people who sacrificed themselves to put Carman underground. Four men, four Fey, and four—”

“Nephilim,” says the rotund woman sitting next to Father Tristan. “We know the myth, but that doesn’t explain how she got out of there.”

I scowl at her, then remember Arthur’s words and try to smooth my expression into something more neutral and less likely to get me incarcerated again.

“From what I saw,” I say, “Dean killed twelve people to undo what had been done.” I start counting off on my fingers. “There were those people on the island who disappeared, our knights, Fey…” I shiver as I recall the ground slowly swallowing Dean up before the last of the standing stones rose in his stead. “He also used my blood on the central stone—”

“Gorlois had warned us against that,” Irene hisses, interrupting me. “We should’ve killed her when we first got our hands on her!”

I wince at her tone, though I shouldn’t be surprised by the venom in her voice. She’s never shown me a pinch of affection before, even when she was posing as my mother. But what gets my heart speeding is the mention of my father’s name.

“It seems your account of his words has changed over the years,” Lady Vivian says.

“His words are the same,” Irene says, “it is my interpretation of them that’s wizened.”

My hands clench instinctively around my chains. If Irene saw my father before he died, perhaps he also told her about my mother. Somehow, I need to find a way to question her, and the only way I can do that is if I’m out of these fetters.

“Enough,” the judge says. “I will not have speculations thrown out here, especially not vindictive ones.”

“Miss Pendragon,” Lady Ysolt says, turning to me, “did Dean or even Carman herself say anything to you? Anything that would elucidate his actions or hint at Carman’s plans could be of tremendous help to us in our efforts to rid the world of that abomination.”

“He was her son,” I say, enjoying despite myself the sour looks that cross both Irene’s and Luther’s faces.

Considering how long Dean worked for them, it’s no wonder they both look constipated. I wouldn’t be chirpy either if I was a Board member and found to have harbored one of the most dangerous demons around.

“Impossible!” the fat lady blurts out. “Her sons were defeated shortly after her demise centuries ago!”

I bite back a scathing retort. I need them to believe me, to trust me. Otherwise, they’ll throw me back down in that lightless cell for the rest of my life. And then I’ll never find the truth about my parents.

I think back on my time with Dean. Though I’ve known him all my life, the moments spent with him were few and far between, except during the last few months. I know now that it was only to keep an eye on me so he could get me to Island Park when the time was right. He sure wasn’t happy when I skipped out on him and he had to go looking for me all over the place…

A thought strikes me. “I did catch Dean talking with someone down here during the battle,” I say. “A man. Perhaps he would know something.”