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

look much like the Elven castles of the Rings movies, and only a little like the ones the Riders of Rohan lived in. It was wood and stone and shockingly—to Elizabeth’s eyes—small, though Yseult thought of it with pride and satisfaction, because all the floors were stone instead of being dirt on the ground floor, and because she and her parents had rooms of their own and didn’t have to sleep in the big main room—the hall—with everyone else.
    That she was actually dreaming about a time she knew nothing about—and had lived before, lived then —was impossible, but that magic was real was even more impossible. Or so she’d thought as she lived a double life, growing up as Elizabeth by day, living as Yseult by night. Although Yseult knew and did things that Elizabeth had not even in her wildest waking thoughts imagined—
    —things that involved a man named Tristan, and Elizabeth grew to love him as much as Yseult did. So many mornings she woke up and started to cry, because Tristan wasn’t real any more than Yseult was, but Tristan was everything she could ever want in a boyfriend: he was handsome, and kind, and smart, and he loved …
    Yseult. Tristan loves Yseult, not me. And he isn’t even real!
    The things they did made her blush when she thought of them, even though she knew about them from movies and television she wasn’t supposed to watch. And the last time she’d slept over at Marcie’s house, Marcie’d had an actual DVD with real sex in it, and they’d all watched it, muffling their giggles and squeaks behind their hands. But Elizabeth had thought (privately) that the DVD had been kind of, well, gross . Not at all like what Tristan and Yseult did—when they could get some privacy, because Yseult’s castle didn’t have a lot of that.
    She kept having to remind herself they weren’t real. Sure, sometimes she thought she was going crazy. But it wasn’t as if she was seeing things when she was awake. And it wasn’t as if she believed in all the magic she—Yseult—was doing in those dreams. She had a good imagination, that was all. She began to think about writing her dream-life down as a story, and maybe it would be good enough to get published, like the boy with the dragon books had been.
    And that was the way her life went while she turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. She never told anybody that she didn’t dream about anything but Yseult’s life, but she didn’t think of herself as keeping bad secrets. Who did her dreams hurt, anyway? Nothing in them was really real, any more than magic was really real.
    That was what she’d believed right up until three months ago.
    September, and she was a junior, and head of the Cheer Squad for the Junior Varsity football team. They’d all been at the game when Terry Bishop, who looked a little like Tristan in the right light, jumped for the ball and got clotheslined, and there was an awful snapping sound, and he screamed.
    She got there first, even before the coach, and she still didn’t know how because she didn’t remember moving. Terry’s leg and knee were lying all wrong, and before anyone got there to stop her, Elizabeth put her hands on them, and did what Yseult had been doing in Elizabeth’s dreams for months.
    With a weird snap, the bones went back the way they belonged, and she felt a rush of something pouring out of her and into Terry. So much something poured out of her that she nearly passed out, and she hardly noticed when the coach and everybody else shoved her aside and told her to get back to the sidelines with the rest of Cheer Squad. She stumbled back to the sidelines, and she must have looked really wrecked, because Marcie told her she probably shouldn’t do any of the stunts, and Elizabeth knew better than to try when she felt so awful. She sat through the rest of the game in a daze, then went straight home instead of going to the after-game party, and when she woke up the next morning she discovered she hadn’t