Delusion (11 page)

“That’s what they’re doing?” Phil asked.

Arden nodded. “It is the Exaltation, the drawing-up of the island’s power. The Essence flows through them and thence through the world. It is the most—” He broke off abruptly, and she saw from the corner of her eye that his face was contorted in anguish. “You can’t imagine it. When you surrender yourself to the Exaltation, when you’re a vessel for the powers of the earth, there’s no fear left in you, no loneliness, no sorrow. It is intimate and vast, all at once. You’re held oh so tenderly, and you know that nothing bad can ever touch you again.”

He wasn’t speaking to her. She doubted he even remembered she was there. He was gazing out over the lake, the lawn, with the yearning of a lover for his beloved.

“Why aren’t you with them?” she asked.

He started, recalling where he was, who he was with. “I’m in disgrace, remember? Because of you. They may never let me draw the Essence again.” He lowered his voice to the barest whisper. “Damn it, kill me or release me. I cannot live like this!”

“The Essence sounds like a drug,” Phil said. “Or love.”

“It’s nothing like love,” he spat. “Love is a corrupt thing, a lie. The Essence is pure. Ah!” He pressed his temples distractedly. “See your brother and go, and don’t return. Please.”

“What harm can we do?” Phil asked.

“You’re disrupting everything!” he said between tightly clenched teeth. He’d worked so hard to find his serenity again, and now it was beginning to crumble. He felt like he had as a child, helpless in the face of screams and beatings, until the Essence had risen up in him, given him peace and power. And he felt as he had, not so long ago, when he thought he found something even better than the Essence and had been crushed for his blasphemy. He’d always been able to find refuge in his power. What if he was never allowed to use it again? What if he was cursed, as Phil’s ancestor had been, stripped of his power and cast out, empty and alone? It would be worse than being a commoner. He’d be like an Albion.

He watched Phil watching the Exaltation, her brow knitted, her full lips pursed. She could feel nothing of what was going on down there. Even though he was forbidden to use his power, his skin prickled with acute awareness of the massive amounts of Essence surging up from the ground. It was like a teasing, intimate touch that promised no fulfillment.

He couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Phil and her sister, to feel none of it.

Yes, he could, he decided, with a flash of sympathy for the girls. It must feel like death.

On the stone beside them, Thomas was telling Fee in hushed ecstasy what was happening. He would touch her arm to bring her attention to one thing, then lean into her strawberry waves to whisper in her ear.

“The colors are lovely,” Fee said. The mercury mist had thinned, and the air around the men seemed charged with prismatic colors.

“You can see them? Most commoners can’t. Drawing Essence from different sources makes different colors. Green from plants, red from animals, and see those swirls of amber and gold? They’re from the Earth. From near the surface, anyway, where there are living things. It gets darker, the deeper you go. Of course,” he added confidentially, “very few can draw up the black Essence from the Earth’s heart. And look here.”

He placed his hand over Fee’s, enveloping it in a glittering white glow that sparked with sudden jewel accents. “This is the Essence of my body. We have everything in us, you see, parts of all the world. We can feel a trace of everything the Essence has touched.” He closed his eyes. “I feel roots, mushroom spores, worms. You really feel nothing?”

“I see the glow, but I feel nothing.”

“There must be something I can do,” he said, gazing at her as a physician might look on his patient on her deathbed, wracking his brains for a cure. “Let me try. Let me fill you, please! It won’t hurt.”

Fee, who a second ago had been completely under the romantic spell of the moment, broke into giggles again.

“Let me fill you with my Essence,” Thomas said again with throaty passion. “I don’t know what’s keeping you from feeling it, but I’m sure I can thrust through. It might be difficult to break through your barrier, but once you know how splendid it feels—”

At that point Fee had to stand up and walk away.

Confused, Thomas looked over his shoulder at Phil. “I don’t know how you live without the Essence, but you both certainly seem to be exceptionally jolly girls. Fee’s hardly stopped laughing since I met her.”

When she’d regained enough of her composure, Fee sat at Thomas’s side once again and they fell into easy conversation.

(“I don’t know what I would have done if he’d tried to put his Essence into me,” Fee told her sister when they were in bed that night. “I honestly think I might have let him.”

“What, right there in front of everybody?” Phil asked, forcing her face to be very serious.

“Well, all those men were doing it, weren’t they?”)

Phil sat on another of the Three Dwarves, and Arden remained standing nearby, his arms crossed, his feet braced in a wide stance. Full night fell, and at length the magicians rose without ceremony and went their separate ways.

“Even though I couldn’t feel anything, it was still lovely, wasn’t it, Phil?” Fee said. “Like watching monks do a very quiet magic show. Proper magic, I mean—our kind. Do you think we could get colors like that in the Hall of Delusion?” She sighed. “It makes me happy to think there’s still a quiet, peaceful place in the world. The war’s not really here, is it?”

“The
nation
is at war,” Phil said. “And no matter how well these men hide themselves, they are part of England.” She turned to Arden. “You say England is the heart of the world? Well, the heart is under attack.”

“Those are commoner matters, for commoners to settle amongst themselves,” Arden said. “There’ll always be an England . . .”

In the starlight, Fee began to hum the popular Vera Lynn tune.

“...And we’ll always be here, guarding it, helping the Essence to flow, keeping the world alive.”

“But what if the Germans invade? What if they win? It won’t be England anymore!”

“Do you think it matters what kind of rabble are scurrying around out there?” he said with a contemptuous glower. “Do you think the race of people who huddle there now have lived there forever? When we raised this isle,” he said, as if he had been intimately involved in it himself, “we, the Masters of Drycraeft, were the only inhabitants. Others moved in, Celtic tribes, Vikings, Romans, Saxons, all waging their silly little wars, all killing one another, all conquering and immediately thinking they’d been here since the dawn of time. Through all of it, we have been the same—untouched. It doesn’t matter to us.”

Phil drew breath to shout him into sense, when Thomas asked, timidly, “What is war?”

It stopped her cold.
It’s explosions and screaming,
she thought, remembering the first night of the Blitz.
It’s pain and loss and blood, resignation and determination. It’s being steel and jelly all at once.

“It’s...fighting,” she said inadequately. “It’s when two nations, or many nations, fight each other. When their soldiers kill one another, and they bomb cities.”

“Why?”

“Well, Germany invaded Poland.”

“Why?”

The details were a little hazy, but she thought she understood the generalities. “For land and power. He—Hitler, that is—wants to build an empire.”

“So those countries are at war?”

“Poland was defeated, and England and France declared war in its defense. Then France fell, and now it’s mostly us. England against Germany, and Italy, and Japan, too, I suppose.”

“But,” Thomas said, his perfect brow tragically crinkled, “
why?
”

“Well, Hitler started it all. He killed thousands, tens of thousands in Poland. Soldiers and civilians.”

“With his own hands?”

“No, no, with his army, and tanks and planes. And he’s still killing. He’s been bombing England. Just the night before we left, they dropped bombs all over London. It was...it was . . .” She shook her head and looked away.

“Others kill at this man’s bidding?” Thomas gasped, leaping to his feet. “Master Arden, does the Headmaster know about this? There should be a conclave. The masters should drain this madman’s Essence, return it to the earth.”

Arden looked not at the young prentice but at the girls. “Do you see what you’ve done? You and your disruptive Albion blood. We don’t interfere in the outside world. Commoners’ futile scrabbling for power, their politics, their hatreds and their...loves...are nothing to us. We tend the Essence. We keep the earth alive. The College of Drycraeft doesn’t need to know about your paltry little war. You’ve muddled this young fool’s head with a few words. Do you see why you shouldn’t be here?”

And he found, to his surprise and chagrin, that Phil looked at him with pity, much the same pity with which he’d regarded her when he realized what it must mean for her to lack any connection to the Essence. Like he was the monster, the ignorant, inadequate one.

The war was nothing to him. England, as a nation, was nothing to him. In the end, the earth would be the same, no matter how many millions were slaughtered. The war would be over one day, and the College of Drycraeft would continue its service, untroubled, forever. It had to.

I still don’t know if we should leave Stan there,” Phil said to Fee the following morning.

“You mean Prentice Stanislaus?” Fee asked with a chuckle as she rinsed suds from the breakfast dishes. “He was so happy, couldn’t you see? He has to be someplace for the duration of the war. If he has real magic, shouldn’t he be allowed to learn how to use it properly?”

“I suppose,” Phil admitted, drying with a clean rag. “But they mean to keep him there forever! Do you know, they’re not even allowed to leave the college grounds. It’s a prison. They’re indoctrinating them. And why aren’t there any women there, eh?”

“All the better,” Fee said.

“Fee, it isn’t natural. They’ll teach him to hate his own family because we’re commoners. Commoners! Ugh, I just wanted to slap that Arden’s smug face whenever he used the word. Like they’re nature’s nobility. I ought to claim his stupid life after all.”

“Phil!”

“Oh, I don’t mean it, of course. But it’s such a
wasted
life, isn’t it?”

“They say they keep the world alive.”

“I can’t believe those magicians are so vital that the world would die without them. It’s like any gentlemen’s club—they make up secret histories and obscure rules to make themselves feel important and exclude others. If they all enlisted, the world would muddle on, same as it always has.”

“They’re not doing any harm,” Fee said, always willing to see the best.

“But they aren’t doing any good. And the trouble is, they’re so convinced they are. A quarter of them are of an age to join up, and the rest should be doing something useful. They could be in a munitions factory, or planting potatoes—not to say what they could be doing with their magic. Only think, our family’s magic, which is all falsehood and illusion, is doing more to win the war than real powers that could kill Germans. Between them and the villagers, we’re handing Germany a victory.” Phil closed her eyes. “I feel like I’m in a dream. Am I the only one who knows what’s happening?”

“Maybe they’re right. The war might never come here.”

“But if it does, we have to be ready! They’re like little chicks, watching the fox and thinking they’re too fluffy and cute to be eaten.”

She heard a chuckle behind her. “Try telling Eamon Dooley the mechanic he’s a fresh-pipped chick,” Algernon said, feeling his way to the kitchen door. “That might goad him into volunteering, if you’re still on that fool’s errand.”

“I am, actually, and I will. Who else can I get?”

“I was joking. No one in Bittersweet will train or drill or save rubber and scrap. Not if a panzer unit rolled through. You’re wasting your time, kiddo.”

She might have been satisfied with scowls and rantings, but the
kiddo
pushed her over the edge.

“You would do it, wouldn’t you? If you could see, you’d form a branch of the Home Guard, wouldn’t you?”

“If I could see, I’d be at the front now.”

“You know what I mean. You’re not like everyone here. You’ve seen war. You
know.
Would you help me, if you could?”

He was seeing something with those sightless eyes, she was sure of it. The sea walls at Dunkirk, the harbor churning and red.

“I would,” he said at last.

“Good,” she said smugly. “Then you will.”

“I...no...I can’t.”

“You were in the British Expeditionary Force. You’re a soldier. Even if you can’t see, you can tell me what to do. Damnit, all you have to do is stand there, being a hero, and you’ll shame and inspire ’em into action.”

“You’re a fool if you think I’m a hero.”

“You enlisted. You did your duty. You’re a hero. Please help me. Bittersweet has to be ready for invasion, and it has to do its part for the war effort.”

“It’s a Sisyphean battle, and there are cows to be milked.”

“I’ll milk the damned cows! Just please, tell me how to organize an army!”

He shuffled awkwardly away, and Phil’s hopes deflated. Then without turning back, he said, “What the hell. I’m no use on the farm. Yesterday I tried to milk the bull.”

“You’ll help?” Phil squealed.

“For all the good it will do. I might as well be useless at one thing as another.”

Phil had her speech prepared, just the right balance of inspirational patriotism, bullying, and the promise of tea and biscuits (Fee’s contribution to the scheme). She rapped at the mechanic’s door and was greeted by a red-bearded giant.

“Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “If I could have a moment of your time, I’d like to talk with you about—”

“This girl here says you’re a great fuzzy chick who’s too far tucked up his ma’s feathers to learn how to fire a rifle or dig a trench like a man,” Algernon interrupted. “That true?”

Phil blushed pink; the mechanic flushed bright scarlet and looked on the verge of apoplexy. “Who’s been spreading such bald-faced lies!” he demanded.