Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies Read Free

his only son to be raised by a series of exclusive private schools. Oakhurst wasn’t much of a change for Loch. Aside from the magic, of course.
    At least Loch has his magic. I’m the only person at a whole school for magicians who can’t cast a single spell.
    It was true. The first thing that happened to you once you reached Oakhurst was getting tested to find out which School you had an “affinity” for. There were four of them: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The School you belonged to determined what kind of magic you had: Addie was School of Water, a Water Witch, while Muirin’s ability to cast perfect illusions meant her powers belonged to the School of Air, and Burke’s Combat Magery put him in the School of Earth.
    Even Loch had passed his tests with flying colors. He had what they called minor Gifts from two Schools: Shadewalking, and Kenning, from the School of Air, and Pathfinding from the School of Earth.
    Spirit hadn’t had an affinity for any School at all.
    “So … before the concert we’ve got that religious service, right?” Spirit said, just to change the subject.
    “Not really religious, but yeah,” Burke replied. “That’s ten to eleven-thirty, then the concert’s from twelve to two, then dinner at two-thirty. Fifty different spoons, the whole formal thing.”
    “It’ll be fun,” Muirin said, looking up from drowning her waffles in syrup to make a disgusted face.
    Spirit nodded glumly. When it all came down to it, in the last year she’d lost her family, Loch had lost his father, Muirin had lost her friend Seth, and all of them had known most of the victims of the Wild Hunt.
    There really didn’t seem much to celebrate.
    *   *   *
    The “religious service” made Spirit uncomfortable—and not just in the butt-numbing, having to sit on hard wooden pews for two hours way, but in a kind of soul-numbing way. She’d never been raised to be more than vaguely “spiritual,” but services at Oakhurst always seemed wrong in a way she couldn’t define, as if the entire thing was a smirky, mocking, yet somehow mind-deadening parody of a real religious service. Yet at the same time there wasn’t a single thing that someone—whether they were devout or not—could have pointed to as being overtly insulting. She knew Burke was the only one of the five of them who was really religious, and even he couldn’t say there was anything wrong with the Oakhurst services. They were all so very bland and inoffensive.
    The concert that followed was pretty much identical to the one at Thanksgiving. Different music, but it sounded the same—like elevator music. It’s just like the Christmas service, Spirit thought, with an odd air of discovery. It’s all stuff that might have started out being good or interesting but now it’s had all the life sucked out of it.…
    By the time they were let out of the concert, Spirit was feeling like a marathon runner entering the final stretch of the race. Only two more things to get through. The Formal Dinner would have been okay if merely eating hadn’t been an ordeal—and if Spirit had had any appetite for it. Like at Thanksgiving, there were place cards and assigned seating and extra-formal place settings, but even Dylan wasn’t his usual vicious self. I guess everyone thinks about their family at Christmas. She took servings of everything she was offered—you weren’t allowed to refuse anything, on the grounds that you were “broadening your gustatory horizons”—and just pushed it around on her plate with her fork until the potatoes and the vegetables were a beige mush. Then she covered them with the pieces of roast goose. At Thanksgiving, the meal had ended with pumpkin and mince pie. For Christmas, there’d be something called a Viennese Table set up in the dining room after the gifts were handed out. Spirit didn’t think she’d have any appetite for that, either.
    Now there was just one more thing to endure before she could go back to her room