the hope that you've forgotten


Methos walked away from Cassandra again, and he kept going. He traveled north, as the earth turned and the stars wheeled and the days and nights went on. He reached Egypt, the antique lands of pyramids and the Nile. In years past, he'd met travelers there, and he'd walked around the sphinx counterclockwise three times by the light of a full moon. The ritual was said to bring wisdom. He hadn't found that to be true.

"Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away," he murmured. Both Mr and Mrs Shelley had had a way with words.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Methos didn't want to see the crumbling edges of the pyramids again. He stopped at a village far south of Cairo and found a room.

On market day, he met a pre-immortal, a girl of seven or eight named Shariade. She wore her dark hair in tight braids and watched everyone and everything with solemn eyes, while her grandmother sold figs. Methos saw her every few days after that, walking about town with her friends or going back and forth to school. She had a merry laugh, but she wasn't a giggler. Methos made friends with the grandmother, helping her to fix her fence, and she decided he needed to be fed. Eventually he got Shariade to smile a time or two, and he helped her do her sums for school.

As she stared at the numbers and chewed on the end of her stylus, he wondered how and when she would die. How many people might she kill before one of them killed her? "Is that correct?" the girl asked, looking up.

Methos checked her answer. "Yes. You did well."

Shariade nodded in satisfaction then turned back to her work, intent and focused.

How long until she was destroyed by the Game?

He left that night for the spaceport. It was time to disappear.

Amanda had other plans. "Darling!" she exclaimed, in the echoing space where people bought tickets and then waited to go somewhere else. She kissed both his cheeks and then his mouth, and she held onto his hands. She was a honey blonde this year, and her hair hung in long, loose curls. Her cling-tite clothes (the very latest in fashion) shifted slowly from shades of blue to strategic see-through, and she wore a gold nose ring. "What a wonderful surprise! I didn't know you were on Earth."

"Just visiting."

Her smile trembled and fled. "Visiting Cassandra. About Connor."

"Yes." Methos had borne a similar message of death to Amanda not so very long ago.

"You're very thoughtful," she said quietly and kissed his cheek.

Thinking made life easier.

Amanda turned practical again. "Did Cassandra send you to meet me?"

"No." Methos lifted Amanda's hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips. "This was all my idea."

She caught her breath then murmured, "Excellent idea." Methos helped Amanda carry her bags to a hotel.


The next morning during breakfast, Amanda asked, "Are Karla and Chelle at the school yet?"

"Not that I saw. But I haven't been there lately." No point in lying, Amanda would find out soon enough.

"We should leave soon. The Equinox is almost here."

The time when the world lay balanced between light and dark, and these four women were gathering, no doubt each with her talisman of power. Amanda had asked for Cassandra's help in gathering the crystal shards of the Methuselah Stone, and they'd finished the job a hundred years ago. Karla Morgan (a.k.a. Morgaine, the Lady of the Lake, the She-Wolf of the Battlefield, or Sister Mary Carlotta) owned a sword said to have been used by King Arthur. Chelle (first known as Michelle Webster, one of Duncan's protégés who'd surprisingly managed to survive the last six hundred years) had inherited Ceirdwyn's cauldron with its secrets of rebirth and wisdom. Cassandra had been gathering items of power for years: a truth-stone, a necklace, a sickle, and probably more.

So whatever these women were up to, Methos was willing to bet it involved more than painting their toenails. He might as well ask. "Witch work?" Methos asked, sipping his coffee.

Amanda wrinkled her nose at him. "I'm not a witch, any more than Rebecca was. Neither are Chelle or Karla."

Cassandra was. And she was also (almost certainly) going to blab about the Game. Since he couldn't keep her quiet, he could at least add his own spin. He helped Amanda carry her bags all the way back to the Phinyx school.

"Sorry, I have to dash!" she said, glancing up at the half circle of the moon, and she ran up the stairs of Cassandra's tower.

He could see three other women on the roof, dark against the evening sky. He wasn't sure, but it seemed they weren't wearing any clothes.


Southward Equinox, 556 PE

Sunearth School


"It's windy up here," Amanda observed when she finally appeared on the roof.

"It usually is," Cassandra agreed.

Amanda began to braid her long hair with nimble fingers. Cassandra had done that before she came outside.

Chelle, who was still shaving her head in mourning for Connor and Duncan, tapped her foot, either in nervousness or impatience; Cassandra wasn't sure which. Karla stood still and silent, feet apart and both hands on the hilt of the ancient blade that hung straight down, its tip not quite touching the floor. The evening breeze ruffled her short hair and her nipples were crinkled, but she did not shiver.

"You brought Methos?" Chelle sounded disapproving.

Cassandra had expected him to return. Down in the courtyard, Methos was lounging against a wall and looking up at them.

"He brought me," Amanda said as she peeled off her clothes. Literally, for cling-tite was described as a second skin.

"Are those comfortable?" Cassandra asked, considering the dramatic and strategic possibilities in programmable clothing that conformed to every contour.

"Very," came the crisp reply. Then Amanda stood, tossed her braid back, and struck a pose that would have done Astarte proud. Her smile was as brilliant as the crystal orb she held in her hand. "Shall we begin?"

"I'd like to go over it one more time," Chelle said. "I've never been a Keeper in a circle before, and I don't want to fuck it up."

"You hold the bowl in both your hands, and you look in the water while the rest of us do things," Amanda explained, a little too sweetly. "Then you let us look in the water. Then we're done."

"What do I do with the water then?"

"Drink it," Karla said.

Chelle looked down at the deep bowl she held in her hands. It was of clay, a melding of earth and fire and air, molded to hold water. Collected from the rain of a recent storm, the water shimmered dark as a blade-stone, for the inside of the bowl was glazed deep black. The outside bore intertwining swirls in red and white, colors of blood and bone.

"In other rituals, you will do more," Cassandra promised Chelle. "Tonight you are the seer. Karla is the guardian, Amanda is the gatherer, and I am the singer."

"It is time," Karla said, looking to the sun on the horizon.

Laid in tile on the floor was a small, eight-pointed compass star, and the four women took up their positions: Cassandra in the east, with Amanda on her right and Karla on her left, and Chelle facing her across the star. They stood close enough to touch.

When the sun disappeared, Cassandra started the song, a low wordless tune that wove among them and bound them together, and the other women joined in, each finding their own tune. When Cassandra closed her eyes, she could sense the others: their quickenings glimmered with color. Amanda was red, Karla steel blue, and Chelle a dark violet. Her own quickening, Connor had told her, looked green. Connor had been shades of blue and gray, like the ocean, or the sky or the waters of the loch where he had been born, or the mist of the Highlands and its hills, or his eyes…

Cassandra focused on the task at hand, extending her quickening into the world, feeling the moontides in her blood, sensing the path of the earth around the sun. The tune came more easily, drawn by the wake of the heavens in their ancient dance, and Karla lifted her sword, swaying in time.

She moved about them, turning and bowing, the tip of the sword tracing out intricate patterns and leaving ice-blue swirls of quickening in the air. The lines of energy crossed and recrossed, weaving a net about them, a protective shell that arced above and below. Their own quickenings were drawn to it and into it, and the blue net became a gossamer plaid.

When Karla returned to her place, Cassandra went from singing to humming, and Amanda lifted the crystal orb. It pulsated with all the colors of the quickenings, the crystals inside it resonating in different shades. She held it high and more colors appeared, carried in by tiny sparks, like fireflies streaming in from all over the sky. A rainbow shimmered within the orb, every color of the spectrum, growing brighter and brighter, becoming white.

When she touched the orb to the tip of the sword, it flared, too bright to look at. Cassandra closed her eyes, and followed the brightness from behind closed eyelids. Amanda moved in a dance of her own, and orb etched white fire, weaving another web. When it was complete, she stood in the center of the star and let the orb roll from her palms into the water of Chelle's bowl with nary a splash.

Then Cassandra lifted her own talisman, a flute crafted from a man's thigh bone and bored with holes on the darkest night of the year. She set it to her lips and began to play, holding each note long and low. The black water in the bowl rippled, revealing currents of the future and the past, and Chelle stared into the scrying bowl in her hands.

Finally she lifted her head and held out the bowl, and Amanda and Karla leaned in to see. When they were done Cassandra played one last note, looking into the bowl, and then she let the music fade and watched the water as the ripples died away.

The image in the scrying bowl did not change.

Then Chelle drank the water, Karla cut the threads of energy around them, and the circle was done. Cassandra pulled her robe on, grateful for the warmth, and sank to the floor. She was shaking with a mixture of cold and fatigue, and she desperately needed food. And tea.

Amanda retrieved her orb from the bowl then shook it, flicking off water drops. "Well," she announced, "that's not what I expected to see."


Methos had been standing in the courtyard when Doral, a teacher he had befriended on his earlier visit, had greeted him warmly then asked, "What are you looking at up there?"

"The lights at the top."

Doral had peered at the tower. "What lights?"

Lights that apparently only immortals could see. "The stars," he had told her then immediately suggested dinner, and they had enjoyed a meal in the dining hall.

When he came back outside, the light show was over and the rooftop looked deserted, so he climbed the tower stairs. The women knew he was coming; immortal doorbells rang loud and clear. He winced and paused at a landing to let their four quickenings align with his.

He paused again in the doorway, this time to nod cheerfully at everyone, while he hastily evaluated the situation. Everyone had their clothes on, a tea party was in progress, and there were no furious glares. Methos found it easier to summon a smile. Cassandra hadn't told them about the Game.

Yet.

Karla gave him a friendly nod. Her long legs were stretched out in front of her, booted feet crossed at the ankles, and she was balancing a plum on the flat of a dagger blade. Chelle looked at him with serious eyes in a forever-youthful face. She wore a plain brown jumpsuit and she'd shaved her dark hair down to stubble. Perhaps she had joined the military again.

Amanda patted the place beside her in invitation to him, but it wasn't her house, so Methos stayed at the doorway until Cassandra said, "Methos, please do come in."

He took the seat next to Amanda, Chelle poured him tea, and Cassandra passed him the plate of ginger biscuits. All nice and cozy, but not why he had returned to this school. "So," he said, taking a bite of the biscuit, "your coven boil any newts tonight?"

"Ew." Amanda shuddered.

"Toads get boiled," Karla said. "Newts just lose their eyes. According to Shakespeare, that is."

"Ew again," Amanda said.

"I've never cared for that scene with the three witches," Cassandra commented. "All those ingredients make everything seem so complicated. Tongue of dog, blood of baboon…"

"Worse than that French cookbook my grandmother used," Chelle said.

The women were being chatty, but not informative. Methos finished his biscuit and bided his time while Amanda told a story of hiding stolen jewels inside a roasted boar and pearls inside a puff pastry.

Then Chelle poured everyone more tea, the task that always seemed to belong to the junior member of every group. Not that she was young. She was two hundred years older than Duncan had been when he had first knocked on Methos's door. Six hundred years since Methos had invited Duncan in and tossed him a beer, telling him, "Mi casa es su casa."

Eventually, that had come true. They'd even bought a few houses together, and they'd celebrated Duncan's thousandth birthday with a home-cooked meal.

No more meals. No more birthdays.

No more Duncan.

Methos became aware of a silence and looked up to find all four women watching him. His tea cup had gone cool in his hand.

"We saw something of interest on the roof tonight," Karla told him, then flicked her dagger upward, tossing a plum in the air. She caught it on the flat of the blade.

Methos wasn't in the mood for guessing games, but this was why he had returned. So he asked, "And what was that?"

For answer Karla took a bite of plum, lush and juicy, and chewed, all the while regarding him with thoughtful eyes. She swallowed then set the fruit and the dagger on the table. "You."

Methos managed not to snort tea from his nose. "Oh."

"Your face was in the water of the scrying bowl," Chelle told him. "I saw it, too."

"So did I," Amanda said.

He wondered if he had drawn four of a kind. "Cassandra?"

"I see you in flames."

She'd told him once she saw death in flames.

"And in the water tonight," she added.

Methos did not like this. "I had no idea I was so popular," he said lightly.

"I asked the orb to show us what was changing," Amanda said. "What we needed to be aware of. And all four of us saw you."

"Why is that, Methos?" Karla leaned forward, her elbows on the table and her dagger once again in her hand. "What do we need to know?"

He could not have asked for a more perfect introduction. Assuming, that is, that he wanted to talk about the Game. Which he didn't.

But Cassandra did. And would.

She was watching him now, waiting. They all were. And what if he did tell them? They wouldn't try to kill him for it. That wasn't their style. Unlike the idealistic Cassandra, the other three women were utterly pragmatic, in their own ways. Soldiers and thieves needed to be. Perhaps they might be able to convince Cassandra to give up her mad scheme of trying to stop the Game.

Methos took another biscuit, took a deep breath, and then told them all of the beginning of the Game. Amanda left the table, going to stare at a closed window, her back to him. He finished the tale quickly: his attempts to stop the Game (but not Vibia's), how people didn't believe, how it had mutated out of control.

"You," Chelle said when he finished. "You four." She looked white, if a bit green about the gills. Then she started cursing him, low and monotonous.

Methos had heard all the words before, if not in that exact order.

Eventually, Karla laid a hand on the younger woman's forearm. "Chelle," she said softly, and Chelle went mutinously silent. Karla ignored Methos and turned to Cassandra. "You knew?"

"Since late Summer."

Chelle muttered another obscenity, but Karla responded with an upward flash of the eyebrows and a quick glance at him, and Cassandra gave a tiny uplift of her chin. Then they both gave minute shrugs. Methos translated that as Karla saying, "Understood, and you gave him the chance to come clean, but you would have told us if he didn't" and Cassandra replying "Yes" and then the two of them moving on.

"You're not surprised," Methos observed.

Karla's lips tightened but she put away her dagger. "Not entirely. I've watched other myths be born."

Methos pushed back from the table and went to the window. "Amanda…"

She whirled around and slapped him. "How could you?" Her voice was trembling, and she slapped him again. Then she burst into tears and fell into his arms.

"I'm sorry," he told her, holding her close. Her body was trembling, too. "I'm so sorry."

At the end of it, she kissed him, and then they sat back down.

Methos's tea had gone cold. Chelle didn't offer to pour him more.

"There's the change," Cassandra told them all.

Chelle nodded. "We need to stop the Game."

Karla, master tactician, shook her head slowly. "I'm not so sure."

Methos always had liked her.

"Duncan would have wanted us to," Cassandra said once more.

"Yes, he would," Chelle agreed. "So would Connor."

"Duncan and Connor are dead," Amanda replied flatly. "They don't want anything." She got up and left the room, trying to hide the glimmer of tears.


She left the school, too. When Methos went to see her in the morning, her bed was made and all her clothes were gone. But she hadn't taken the orb. It sat on her pillow, like an egg in a nest.

Karla was already in the room, and she looked from Methos to the orb and then back again. "Have you have ever used that?" she asked.

"No." He'd wanted to, centuries ago, to revive a dying love. Alexa. Yes, that had been her name.

Karla leaned over and picked it up, even tossed it from hand to hand. "Want to?"

Of course he did. But curiousness was best paired with cautiousness. "For what?"

"We're going to be searching for pre-immortals, and it's easier to do the work with four. You could help."

Learning more about the coven—and its members—might be useful someday. And learning about the orb was a rare opportunity. "Sure."

Karla handed the orb to him. Methos was surprised by its warmth.

Cassandra looked surprised to see him carrying it when he and Karla showed up in her room. And none too pleased. "No."

Karla ignored that. "Amanda left it for him to use, or she would have put it back in the vault."

"We can manage with three."

Karla leaned her shoulder against the wall and just looked at Cassandra, before finally saying, "You know why."

"That's not certain," Cassandra replied.

"I'm certain."

Methos was certain he enjoyed watching Cassandra lose a squabble, even if he didn't know what it was about.

Cassandra paused then found something else to complain about. "He's untrained."

"He can learn."

Cassandra finally looked at him and met his eyes. "Not from me."

Methos could see that it wasn't hate or spite holding her back; it was fear. Nor was he eager to be her student. "Wise choice." He turned to Karla. "What do I have to do?"


The lessons were both subtle and straightforward. Karla took him to the rooftop, where the sunshine was bright and warm. They sat with their backs against the parapet. "Amanda says that the orb responds to the energy of the quickening," Karla said. "You can focus farther, and on different things."

"So it's both an amplifier and a modulator?"

"I suppose."

"But with no user manual." He already knew the Chronicles had nothing useful, and Amanda was still learning what it could do. When Methos picked it up and stared at it, he couldn't get it to do anything.

"Try blood," Karla suggested. "Bond to it."

He cut his palm and held the orb while flickers of blue flame danced on his skin. A blurred crimson flower spread into the melded shards. Then a jolt rushed through him, and the orb flared blue. His ears tingled. "Ah," he breathed, sensing the shape of the wind and tasting salt on the air.

The quickening, he knew, could be a connection between living things. Immortals used it to identify each other, and many could sense pre-immortals. About half (including Cassandra and Silas) were able to bond with animals. Methos had never had much luck with that, but with the orb, he could share the hunger of the spider in the corner. He could see motes dancing in the air. In the garden below, he could see a flower unfurl. He could taste the water from the roots, and he could feel the delicate feet of a bee on his skin.

"That's enough," Karla said, and she took the orb away.

Methos blinked, disoriented and dizzy in the bright sun. He was on the roof, not in the garden. No bee probed him for nectar. No sun warmed his leaves. He was not a flower. He was a man.

"You back?" she asked.

He surreptitiously wiggled each finger and toe. "Yeah."

"It's easy to go too deep, especially at first," Karla warned. "You went fast, too."

Yet the sun had moved in the sky. "How long was I in that?"

"Forty minutes."

Damn. And another immortal only a few feet away. His neck itched.

"This school is on—" Karla stopped there.

"—on holy ground?" he finished wryly.

She nodded slowly. "Which means nothing anymore."

"It never did."

"No holy ground," she said thoughtfully. "No prize. But still the Game." She looked at the mountains in the distance. "Always the Game."

"Do you see any way to stop it?"

Karla half-closed her eyes in thought. "We could tell everyone then imprison or kill those who won't stop playing. When we find them. If we find them," she amended.

"But that won't stop the fighting." Karla rolled the orb between her hands. "We immortals don't need a prize in order to take heads; a quickening is enough of a reason. It's all some of us live for. So the young ones will still need to be trained. And if we do tell people there is no Game, we lose the sanctuary of holy ground." She shook her head. "I think our loss would be greater than our gain."

Methos was glad to have an ally. "So how do we convince Cassandra? She can be stubborn."

"I've noticed." Karla offered him the orb. "Look for the answer in here."

He didn't touch it. "Certain of that?"

A wisp of a smile chased across her lips. "Yes."

Methos took the orb from her hand.


With Karla's help and occasional supervision, Methos spent the next nine-day studying the orb. He took it apart and put it together in a hundred different ways. The crystals came out a different shape each time. Even their number changed. He suspected that could change its capabilities, but he didn't know how. Normal crystals could be used for data storage, clocks, amplifiers, oscillators, and a host of other things. He had a feeling that the orb could do much more. He just had to figure out how.

When it was whole, he used it to locate (but not connect with) animals and plants and to see microbes in the soil and craters on the moon. "It's a microscope and a telescope," he told Karla. "And a sound analyzer, too."

"A sense enhancer," she suggested.

He tried scent next. That gave him a headache.

"You're sniffing flowers?" Chelle said in disbelief (and some disdain) at dinner. It was the first time she'd spoken to him since he'd told them about the starting of the Game. "We need to find pre-immortals," she reminded him as she stood to gather her plate and cup. "Hopefully before someone chops off their heads."

That evening, Methos reached out for a preimmortal, the girl named Shariade. Her quickening pulsed in muted tones of pink and gold. The next morning he dimly sensed another, a boy, across the sea. He looked for Amanda, too, but couldn't find her. The next day, he told Karla he was ready.

"You need to learn to link before you go in a circle," she told him, so Karla and Methos practiced linking their quickenings, first with the orb and then without it. To his relief, it wasn't anything like a mind-meld, more like psychically holding hands, and it led to an increase in sensing range. Chelle was willing to practice with him, but Cassandra said no.

"If we don't practice, how will we manage in a circle?" he asked when he tracked her down in the kitchen, busy with preparations for the evening meal.

"Others will be with us then. It won't be just you and me."

"You're saying we need chaperones?"

Cassandra kept cutting potatoes, her gaze on her work. "Yes."

That was one way of saying she didn't want to be alone with him. Methos left her to the chopping of vegetables and went back to the orb. Three days later, Karla said they could try the circle.

"Do we have to strip?" he asked belatedly, as the four of them climbed the tower stairs.

Cassandra looked back at him over her shoulder. "Do you want to?"

"Not particularly. You?"

She didn't even answer, just kept climbing stairs.

"We already know what we're looking for," Karla explained from behind him. "We don't have to be as open to the world."

"Ah," he said, making a mental note to add that to the user manual he was writing.

On the rooftop, Cassandra started playing the flute, long notes in no musical pattern that Methos could hear. Chelle placed her clay pot (the current incarnation of the sacred cauldron of rebirth) upside down in the center of the star, and Methos placed the orb on top of it, the epitome of a crystal ball.

Then Karla touched the sword's pommel to the orb, which melted and then reformed, encasing both cauldron and hilt. Karla let go and took her place on the east point of the star, between Methos and Cassandra and facing Chelle. At the center of the star stood the upright blade, pointing to the sky, a sword in a stone. Or an antenna.

Cassandra was humming now, low and resonant, and they each set their fingertips to the reshaped crystal. Methos could feel vibration down to his toes. Karla slid her hand over to touch his, and their quickenings linked, just as before. Then Chelle's hand brushed his, and another link was formed. The humming sounded in harmony, and he felt as if he were standing, swaying a bit and holding onto their hands, instead of just barely touching. He watched as Cassandra reached out to Karla and Chelle, forming links with them, and then the circle was formed.

The vibrations surged, almost painful, then settled into a comforting hum, like a cat's purr. In his mind's eye, Chelle and Karla were steady glows, but he couldn't feel anything from Cassandra, except for a fleeting impression of an eggshell, iridescent and smooth.

"Find them," Chelle said. "We need to bring them home."

With the others, Methos focused on locating the pulsing sparks of preimmortals, and a thin beam of blue, like a search light, sprang from the tip of the upright blade. Suddenly Methos could see Shariade's quickening, bright as a pulsar. And there was the boy across the water, so much clearer now. Tauseen was young, hungry and cold, living in India. Methos made note of the town. He reached farther and sensed a crying baby in New Zealand, and then cold dark sweeps of water and nothingness, until a Methos found an eleven-year-old boy in Argentina, halfway around the world.

He found immortals, too, and tried to ignore them, but it was dizzying work, and Methos was glad when Chelle called a halt to it and Karla retrieved her blade. Methos picked up the orb, dark and warm.

"Write it all down," Cassandra said and passed out stylus and pads. "We'll compare notes in the morning, after a good night's sleep. Tomorrow night, we'll work on linking with each other more directly, and then we'll search the moon and Mars."

By Sunday, they had identified nine pre-immortals in the solar system, six of them on Earth. "We'll tell them they've been awarded a scholarship to any Phinyx school they choose," Cassandra said. "Their families can come too."

Methos went to India to pick up the boy who didn't have a family. Tauseen did not speak a word on the long trip to Sunearth School, and at meals he ate quickly and in fear. Methos told him stories and talked about the school where Tauseen would live and the things he could learn. Methos could see that the boy didn't believe him.

At the school, Tauseen obediently went off with one of the teachers, never looking back. "Will he ever be able to bond?" Chelle asked in concern.

"It may be too late for him," Cassandra said as they watched the boy go. "An unhappy childhood can damage a person deeply."

Methos hadn't found Kronos until he was seven.

Chelle cursed softly. "We get damaged enough later on. We don't need to start out that way, too. We need to find them sooner, Cass."

"I know. But on my own I can't search far. And even if you stayed on Earth to help, there are twenty-one other inhabited worlds."

Chelle was biting her lip in frustration. "If we only knew where we came from, how we got here..."

Methos didn't have an answer for that. No one did.

"I was so lucky in my parents," Chelle said, watching three young students walk by.

"So was I," Cassandra said.

"How was your childhood, Methos?" Chelle asked.

"Fine." He supposed. He didn't remember. Not a mother or a father, not a name or a tribe. He didn't even remember his first death. Nothing until that first quickening. Methos backed up against the wall as a swarm of women entered the courtyard. "Alumnae?" he asked when the twittering mob had passed.

"Yes, we have homecoming at the New Year, along with Remembrance," Cassandra said.

Which, in the current calendar, came at the end of Autumn for the northern hemisphere. He himself liked to have the year begin in spring.

"Many of the sisters return," Cassandra continued.

Like swallows. Immortals came, too. Aspen and Lo'siq came for the school's Remembrance ceremony, and Amanda and Elena arrived the day after. Amanda had black hair now, and she and Elena were arm in arm and both dressed in red. Elena greeted him warmly, so apparently Amanda hadn't told Elena about the Game.

"I'm glad you'll be here for our Remembrance ceremony tonight, viejo," Elena said, kissing him on the cheek and taking his hand.

Methos wasn't planning on attending.

"How's the orb?" Amanda asked him as he carried her bags to her room.

"Very interesting. Thanks for leaving it for me."

"Karla's idea."

"Was it," he murmured. "Did she also tell you to leave the school?"

"Yes, to clear the way for you."

Methos decided to find out exactly what Karla was so certain of.

Amanda pulled open her door, and he set the bags in the closet of the room. She was already staring out the window, and he joined her there. "Thank you for not telling Elena."

Amanda shrugged. "It's your mess. It's your job."


Cassandra did not agree. "If you don't tell Elena by tomorrow night, then I will," Cassandra said to him at dinner.

Methos sat back in his chair and let Karla do the talking this time.

"Immortals will still fight each other, Cassandra," she said.

"Not as much."

"Once is all it takes," Methos observed.

Karla leaned forward. "If there's no Game, then there's no Holy Ground. We'll have no sanctuary anywhere. Why lose that, yet gain nothing?"

The doors to the dining hall opened, and all three of them turned at the approach of a preimmortal. Little Shariade and her grandmother stood framed in the doorway, looking about them with wide eyes.

"For her," Cassandra said. "And for all the other children, so they don't have to grow up with a lie that destroys." She stood and went to the doorway, and Methos watched as she went down on one knee to talk to Shariade face-to-face. In just a moment or two, Cassandra got the girl to smile and then to laugh.

"She's a good mother," Karla said. She finished her beer. "Not many of us are."

Duncan had been a wonderful father. He would have wanted to adopt Tauseen, provide a home, become a family. Duncan would have taught their son how to fence and play chess and split wood with an axe and everything a father should teach a son.

It would have been a good life.

Instead Methos was at a school of women, and Cassandra was pushing him hard. Karla had an agenda, too. "Why do you want me to use the orb?" Methos asked Karla.

"Because of what I scryed on the equinox. You're the key."

"The key to what?"

Her faint smile was neither friendly nor kind. "You tell me."

He did not know.

Karla pushed back her chair and stood. "Time to start the fire for the Remembrance ceremony. Coming?"

"Yes," Methos decided suddenly. Duncan would have wanted him to.

Methos and Karla started a small fire in the grove, and the other six immortals gathered there as dusk fell. It was the usual sort of thing: music and silence, lighting candles, striking a gong, and people calling out the names of those who had died in the past twenty years or so: Ceirdwyn of the Iceni, Jon Richter, Sofia Yildirim, Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, Kyra of Sparta…

Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.

Amanda was the first to say that name, followed by Elena and then Cassandra and Chelle together. Methos whispered it to himself.

Stories came next, helped by bottles of wine. Methos had stayed in the shadows, silent, throughout the ceremony, but Amanda and Elena pulled him into the circle around the fire, and then he was sitting between them, with an arm around each one. Throughout the night, they all made toasts and told stories, remembering the dead with laughter and tears.

Silence crept in, spattered with pops and hisses from the flames. A log fell. The fire burned low. In the east, the light began to grow. "How many of us are left?" asked Lo'siq, the youngest of them all, barely a century old.

"Eighty-nine," Cassandra told her.

"How many women?"

"Twenty-one."

One-third of whom were sitting right there. Even with the nine pre-immortals they'd just found, and the five at other schools, Immortals were an endangered species.

"I wonder if one of us will get it," Lo'siq said next. "The Prize."

Methos held his breath, but the four women who knew the truth just stared at the flames.

"I wanted Duncan to win it," Elena said, her words slurred with drink and fatigue and grief. "Or maybe Ceirdwyn. I liked her." She leaned around Methos to look at Amanda. "How about you?"

"Oh, I've given up wondering. Just like Methos." Amanda reached for the bottle and poured herself another drink.

Elena was looking at him now, head tilted and curious, just like a cat. Cassandra was in watching mode: an intent, patient stare. And they both had sharp claws. But now was definitely not the time.

"To Duncan," Methos said, raising his glass of wine. "And to Connor and Ceirdwyn and Sofia and Jon and Kyra. And to all the others, down through the years." Methos had long ago lost count of how many that was.

Karla rose, and Methos got to his feet, giving Elena a hand. Amanda managed it on her own.

They stood in a circle, all eight immortals, then raised their glasses and drank one last toast to the dead. Cassandra held out her arm and ritually poured out what was left in her cup. The red wine soaked into the ground.

How much blood had been poured upon the dark and thirsty Earth? How many heads had gone tumbling, gushing and spurting and finally dribbling out blood? How many sacrifices had been made?

Earth was the eater of men, but she did not ask to be fed. People prepared these feasts for her, and she had to accept them, the butchered bodies of her children. Earth, the mother of all.

Shariade's blood would one day feed the Earth, he knew. And Tauseen's. And all the other children, and all the women, and all the men. Thousands upon thousands of them, murdered in the name of the Game and the non-existent Prize.

Karla poured her wine next, watching him the whole time, a challenge in her eyes. If he was the key, where was the door? Could there actually be a way out of this hell he had helped create all those years ago? Methos wasn't certain, but he knew he had to try.

Duncan would have wanted him to.


To be continued in Part II - The Keepers