Free Shadow Grail #2: Conspiracies by Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill

sketch the tree without the marks, and then draw the marks on a piece of onionskin that I can hide easily. And I won’t just draw the oak, I’ll draw the Christmas tree, the fireplace, and the Grand Staircase, too.”
    Well, that seemed safe enough. “Thanks, Addie,” she said with relief. “I should know by now you’re too smart to get into trouble.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Addie demurred, but Spirit could tell she was pleased at being called “smart.” “You can all make it up to me by actually playing this game instead of faking it.”
    *   *   *
    For the last three years, Elizabeth Walker had wavered between thinking she had a really vivid imagination, and thinking she was going crazy. But it wasn’t the kind of crazy she could actually talk to anyone about. She wasn’t anorexic, she didn’t want to cut herself … no, the problem was, since the morning of her thirteenth birthday … she’d been remembering.
    It had all started with a bang; she’d woken up from a dream so vivid she’d expected to find herself in a stone-walled room, looking out of a narrow little window that had no glass in it toward a harbor and the sea beyond. But the ships in the harbor—in her dream—bore no resemblance to anything she knew; they were all boats with sails. Not sleek racing yachts, but rough and wooden things like something from a movie about Vikings. The harbor itself was little more than a rocky cove with a single wooden pier.
    Her head was weighed down by the two thick braids that hung as far as her knees. She could feel the stones of the floor through her thin leather slippers. And the dress she’d been wearing had been impossibly heavy, made of thick wool—she somehow knew—and trailing down to the ground.
    She’d felt … older. In her dream, her body felt foreign to her in ways she didn’t have the words to describe, but that were very confusing. She’d ached for things she couldn’t put a name to, which was why she was looking out the window. Waiting for someone. Longing for someone.
    Behind her, there’d been someone moving. She didn’t want to turn to look. Her body—the person she’d been in her dream—didn’t like the person behind her, the person in the bed she’d risen from at the first rays of dawn.
    The person behind her said something. It was as if he spoke a foreign language: Elizabeth recognized only one word. Yseult. Her dream-body turned, knowing this was her name.
    That was when she woke up.
    She’d been almost as confused on waking as she’d been in the dream. Her pink canopy bed, her pink and cream bedroom, the dolls and bears she knew she was outgrowing but couldn’t quite bear to be rid of—these all seemed strange, alien, wrong .
    She’d shaken her head, and then everything settled back into place. The room was hers, of course, and whatever she had dreamed about was, of course, nothing but a dream. She thought about telling someone, because her parents would praise her imagination and her friends would all get a big laugh out of it, but something held her back.
    It was the first dream. The first memory. But it was by no means the last.
    After that, the dreams came more and more frequently. Soon they filled all night, every night—all of her sleeping hours. They were as consistent as if they weren’t dreams, but a biography, and eventually, fearfully, Elizabeth Walker came to realize that this was what they actually were. A biography. The life of someone she had once been.
    Except, of course, that was impossible. There was no way she could’ve been a sorceress named Yseult. She could not possibly have helped to create magic armor and weapons for her uncle, a giant of a man named Morholt. She couldn’t have spent her days learning magic and healing from the Queen. Magic didn’t exist. This was some amazing—terrifying—fantasy created from far too many viewings of Lord of the Rings  … though the castle Yseult—her dream-self—lived in didn’t