Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [63]
“And with that oak right in the middle of it, I can see why he’d want it,” Muirin said, getting back her enthusiasm. “And maybe the reason there isn’t a lot of magic in the oak now is because Doctor Ambrosius drained it all to build the protections around the school!”
“Oh yeah, I bet you’re right, Murr-cat!” Burke exclaimed. “That makes perfect sense!”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Spirit objected. “How can you drain magic out of a spell?”
“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Addie replied dismissively. “Any Energy Mage can do it. It’s an advanced thing, but they can all do it.”
Spirit stared down at the Monopoly board, reminded forcibly again that she didn’t have any magic.…
Except Doc Mac said she did. It was just sleeping.
Well I wish someone would set off the alarm clock, she thought angrily. Then she bit her lip and fought the anger down. This was just one more way that Oakhurst was trying to separate her from her new friends. And she wasn’t going to let it.
* * *
They talked until a proctor came to shoo them out of the lounge for lights out. Two things seemed really obvious when they got done going over everything any of them had found in those scrapbooks.
First, the runes. They had to be pretty important. If they were protective—and they probably were—according to Loch and Addie, they would have been what Doctor Ambrosius used to “anchor” his own protections.
“The thing is,” Addie said, frowning a little, “you’ll have to take my word for it, but runes can actually change a little if they’re used that way—if they’re incorporated into something other than their original purpose. Physically change, I mean; the runes themselves will kind of get slightly rewritten to reflect the altered purpose.”
Spirit didn’t ask, “They can do that?” even though she wanted to, because Addie would never have said it if it wasn’t true. So she asked, “How?” instead.
“Magic is a living force,” Loch pointed out. “It changes. How we use it changes. So the tools we use to manipulate it have to be able to change, too. Things like runes. You can’t rewrite them drastically, but you could take a protective spell that read, say, ‘all that shelter under my boughs,’ and by doing what we think Doctor Ambrosius did, the runes would change to read ‘all that shelter within my bounds.’ If he got specific about what he was protecting against—which would be smart—the runes would change to name those things.”
“So if we translate them, we can figure out who or what Ambrosius is defending us against, and if we know that, we can figure out how we can help—” That felt better. That felt proactive. Spirit realized in that moment that she was getting very tired of always waiting for something to happen before she could act.
Burke had been very quiet all this time. When they all finally stopped talking, he spoke into the momentary silence.
“We’ve gotten distracted by all this,” he said slowly, and waved his hand vaguely. “The runes, the history … even New Year’s … it’s distracted us from what’s really urgent.” Before any of them could ask him what he meant, he continued. “We still haven’t figured out who the inside man is. Who the one trying to kill us from inside the school is.” His jaw firmed. “The more I think about it, the more certain I am. There is someone in here, and it won’t matter squat how much we figure out and how we help Doctor A. guard against what’s outside, when we have someone right inside with us—”
He might have said more, but just