Delusion (26 page)

She clambered over the mansion that had become a cairn until she found the place where, roughly, Thomas’s body might lie. For he must be dead. Not even a magician could survive a hundred tons of rocks, explosion, and fire. Still, because she had to do everything, she called for him and dragged ineffectually at great slabs of stone until members of her muster firmly pulled her aside and persuaded the massive stones to slowly shift themselves.

She stayed past the point of hope, because she couldn’t bear to face Fee. Let her have one more night of happy dreams, before life became a nightmare.

They pulled four bodies from the rubble—three magicians who had been ill, excused from the Exaltation, and a young prentice who had been locked in his room as punishment for tying notes to the legs of the castle pigeons, in hopes one would miraculously fly to London and tell his mother he was alive and missing her. Two others were unaccounted for: an elderly master, and Thomas. Parts of the prentice quarters had been reduced to charred dust by a direct hit from one of the tightly clustered bombs. His body might never be recovered.

Arden remained aloof, standing under an elm with Headmaster Rudyard, murmuring in earnest conversation through the night. Rudyard would sometimes issue edicts or examine the carnage, but Arden never joined his brother magicians.

“He’s not even helping,” Phil said bitterly as she rested with Stan. “Doesn’t he care about the men who might be trapped? He claims that the only thing he cares about is the college, but there he stands, with his arms folded, frowning and doing nothing.”

“It’s not the college he cares about, it’s the Essence,” Stan said.

“A blind, cold, unfeeling force. It’s like fighting for gravity. Empty and meaningless. Do you know what he said? Oh!”

The hints suddenly coalesced into a possibility she didn’t want to believe. He’s insufferable, he’s confused...but not that—not that!

He had been in Stour when Rapp was murdered. Washing his hands...blood in the basin, from the cut, he said, but what if...And when Hereweald and Felton and the others were destroying the German plane, Arden had stopped them. Was he just following the college’s pacifist tenents, or was it something more sinister? Was he in fact saving an ally? German or English, it didn’t matter, he said. Germans in England? German magicians in Stour? Did he care, so long as the Essence was honored and circulated through the earth?

Was Arden siding with the Germans?

No, it couldn’t be. She knew he was angry with Rudyard and the other old masters who were nothing but talk without action. He was defying them, yes, organizing the young masters and training with guns and fists, strengthening his magical abilities, but it was to fight the Dresden magicians, not to overthrow the college leadership and turn Stour over to the Germans. She knew he looked down on commoners, but he couldn’t want to rule and enslave them, as the Dresden magicians did.

There had to be something she wasn’t seeing. She mistrusted the Headmaster, who had lied about the portal and was a pacifist only when it was convenient. But if he would kill his own journeymen for threatening the order merely with their absence, why on earth wouldn’t he move against the Germans? Did he really believe they weren’t a threat, or could he be the one in collusion?

She stroked Stan’s cheek and gazed into his wise little face. He looked as if he hadn’t been young in years. She bit her lip...and told him everything.

“I don’t know...I don’t know,” he said. “I thought this was a good place. Mother said to stay free, always, but I thought the College of Drycraeft was for learning and peace and...is it true? They kill journeymen who won’t return? Kill them and lie about it? Then perhaps they are worse than the Germans. My mother was their slave, and she knew it, so she could defy them. Are we slaves here, but never know it until the moment we try to break free? But not Arden, I’d swear it. He’s
good.
Like you, and your family, and Hector.”

“But maybe he’s been led astray,” Phil said, grasping for the least damning possibility. “Do you remember when Geoffrey came home a Blackshirt because Oswald Mosley was all about the working class and ending unemployment? He was so proud of his lightning bolt for a day or two—until he realized that the British Union was really a bunch of fascists. You’ve all been fed so many lies here at the college. Maybe the Germans gave him more lies, and he doesn’t understand what it would mean, to England, to the world. He’s a little arrogant, sure, but he doesn’t want to subjugate the commoners. I know it!”

Stan agreed to watch him and report back.

“Kiss Fee for me, Phil,” he said when she departed.

Phil began her weary walk through the cold dawn, to tell Fee her true love was gone.

At Weasel Rue, the chickens were squawking for release. Seizing the chance for delay, Phil unlatched their doors and evaded their demanding, beady-eyed stares and insistent pecks before finally, with heavy steps, letting herself into the house. Again, she was glad Mrs. Pippin left them entirely to their own devices. She couldn’t have borne a lecture.

She snaked her way down the long hallway to their room. The blackout curtains were still drawn, and the room was dusky. She could just see the red-gold glints of Fee’s hair spread across the pillow.

“Fee,” she whispered.

“Mmm, there you are,” Fee replied with a languid stretch.

“Fee, it’s...it’s Thomas.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it. I hope you don’t mind. I would have sent him away, but since it looked like you weren’t coming back tonight . . .”

A golden-haired form unburied itself from the covers. “Hullo, Phil.”

Phil threw herself onto the bed and for the next full minute indiscriminately kissed everything she could find—Fee and Thomas, the blankets, the pillows, her own hands clasped in relief.

“I thought you might be cross I was in your bed,” Thomas said, and got Phil’s last kiss on his forehead.

“What do I care where you sleep—you’re alive!”

Thomas, who’d been alive for nearly eighteen years without anyone commenting on it, looked puzzled. She told them what happened.

“They’ll be so relieved to hear you weren’t killed,” Phil said.

Thomas and Fee exchanged a look, and Fee squeezed his hand. “I’m not going back,” he said.

“What! They’ll kill you! You said so yourself.”

“I would have stayed loyal to them forever, if they’d told us the truth,” he said. “But it’s wrong to kill a person for thinking, for loving, for questioning. Exterminated like vermin, at the will of the Headmaster! Rudyard has set himself up like a god, telling us all the while that magicians must avoid power at all costs.”

“It makes you wonder what else they’re lying about,” Phil said.

“Exactly. I can’t stay there. They’re sheep, I tell you, blind and gullible, and at the mercy of the Headmaster. Not all of them, though. Not Arden.” He glowed with hero worship. “He’s got such a following! Not just Felton and the others who want to defend Stour. There are whispers all over the college about a brave new world for magicians, where we’re not hemmed in and dominated, where we can think and act for ourselves.”

A brave new world. Wasn’t that what the Kommandant said? Was the entire college lured by the Dresden magicians’ offer of power at the expense of commoners? Or was it just a coincidence, this familiar rhetoric, the temptation to crib from Shakespeare (and Kipling and Huxley)?

“Thank goodness this happened,” Thomas went on. “Oh, what a terrible thing to say! But I’m free now.”

“You’ll have to be careful, though. They can track down the boys they abduct, so what if a journeyman finds you?”

“It will only matter for a little while. Soon enough I’ll be out of England.”

“Where are you going?”

He looked at Fee, who was suddenly like a statue of Grace Darling, impossibly stoic, the epitome of brave English womanhood.

“He’s going to war,” she said, pitching her voice low so it didn’t tremble.

She was losing her love after all.

Don’t do it,
Phil wanted to say.
Run away to Ireland and live in a hovel with Fee until the war’s over and done with.
Go to America and plant corn and make fat happy babies together. Hell, go back to Stour and be a sheep, or a Nazi magician, or whatever they tell you to be. No more death, please.
A few weeks ago she would have sent every boy in England to Europe with a rifle over his shoulder. Now she was like Fee when she saw a desiccated worm, overcome with universal pity.

But: “Thank you,” she said. “For England, thank you. You’re better than the lot of them. Better than Arden, a thousandfold.”
How strange that I’m crying, and Fee’s eyes are dry. I’m not at all like I thought I was.

An hour later they were at the railroad station to see Thomas off. Luckily it was the day the London workers were scheduled to come for the apple picking. It had been an easy matter to smuggle Thomas into Fee’s bed for the night, but Mrs. Pippin might finally put her foot down if her evacuee kept a man in the house for several days. He planned to catch the train on its southerly jaunt to the Brighton coast and find an army recruiter from there.

“But you’re not eighteen,” Fee said, unable to tell him not to go, but grasping for the last possible loophole.

“I can make a birth certificate that says I’m older, or fuddle the recruiter into believing anything. Don’t worry, love. Someone needs to stop this war. Just wait until I’m over there!”

What terrible times these are,
Phil thought. He was an Arcadian innocent who didn’t even know what war was, and now—off to kill. Did it happen to every man, eventually, this bloodlust? She’d been so full of it herself, so bent on revenge after seeing the first pieces of her country destroyed. The closer she got to the war, though, the more real it became. Her gung-ho jingoism faded, and in her heart she wished she could handcuff herself to a radiator and stay in the darkness until the war was over.

The problem with that is, I can shim the handcuffs open,
she thought with a mirthless laugh. There was no avoiding gruesome reality, there was only getting through it, with tricks and bluffs if necessary, and putting on a game face. Which Phil did admirably now, watching with a cheerful, reassuring smile as Fee and Thomas bade each other farewell, all the while very deliberately
not
thinking about Arden, not one little bit.

She thought about other things, though. The Dresden magicians hadn’t won the war for Germany yet, after a year of fighting. In fact, as England bullied its way to air supremacy and redoubled her efforts by sea, it seemed the tide was slowly turning, if not quite in England’s favor, at least not in such a rip current against it. Why hadn’t the Dresden magicians killed the king and Churchill, a few admirals and field marshals, thrown the country into chaos, and brought down all of England’s planes? And why, for that matter, after that stunning initial display of aggression, hadn’t they made an all-out attack on the college?

If they hadn’t, it must be because they couldn’t. The Dresdeners were milking other, unwilling magicians to get more power, but it still wasn’t enough. They needed numbers. They needed the hundreds of magicians at Stour.

If they got them, the war would be over in a heartbeat. England would lose, and though Hitler couldn’t know it, he’d lose, too, as the magicians dominated the commoners.

I have to change tactics,
she thought.
I have to find a way to keep the college from turning against commoners despite what the Germans say. I have to make them see that they’re just people, the same as commoners. Only, how do you convince a man who can tear a plane from the sky that he’s ordinary?

Fee and Thomas came out of the postmistress’s office, he looking glum, she with that peculiarly maniacal expression that comes of trying to hide wild elation.

“What do you think?” Fee said. “That bomber of yours came down a couple of miles north of us and plowed up a big length of track. She says London can’t spare men or metal to fix it for at least a few weeks. We’re a nonessential line. The entire branch line will be shut down.” At the last minute she pulled her face into an appropriate expression of disappointment, but she couldn’t quite hold it.

Just then Mrs. Pippin stormed down the main street in the greatest huff Phil had ever seen.

“Supposed to meet the London sluts and drunkards today, and what do they tell me? A great bloody big plane took out the railroad last night, and no trains can get through. Don’t those damned Germans know I have to get the apples picked? With petrol rationed as it is, I’ll never get the workers in by the road, and if I don’t have them here in the next few days, I’ll lose half the harvest. I’m ruined—ruined!”

Phil had an idea and started to follow Mrs. Pippin.

“You go with her, Fee,” Thomas said. “I have a long, hard walk ahead of me.”

“What do you mean?” Fee asked, seeing her reprieve fly.

“I’ll go on foot until I meet the next connecting line.”

“But that’s at least thirty miles!”

“I can’t wait. The longer I’m here in England, the longer the war will last.”

He was as confident as a child on the roof wearing a cape, certain he can fly. But then, Thomas probably
could
fly, if he really put his mind to it.

He took hold of the strawberry tips of her hair and wrapped the tresses around his wrists, binding himself to her. Then, without another word, without a kiss or a farewell, he untangled himself and ran south along the train tracks.

Fee turned away.
I can’t watch him get smaller and smaller until he’s gone,
she thought resolutely.
It’s too prophetic. He’s going away awhile, and he’ll be back. I have to believe that. I do believe it. If he doesn’t come back I’ll—I’ll go and get him myself!

But what choice do you have?” Phil railed at Headmaster Rudyard later that day. He’d left his office door open, expecting Jereboam, and was ambushed by Phil instead. “They were freezing last night, and that was when they were working hard. Tonight, without proper shelter, they’ll have chilblains and frostbite, and it will only get colder.”