Delusion (29 page)

From pride in her craft, if nothing else, Phil was determined to put on a good show. She and Fee sewed outlandish new costumes from Miss Merriall’s bountiful trunks and practiced in their rooms, in the fields, and finally locked inside the meeting hall where the performance would take place, the windows papered over against prying eyes.

“I don’t know why the magicians want to come, anyway,” Phil said, prickly and nervous.

“They’re curious. All they’ve seen is our close-up magic. Maybe Arden will come, and you two can finally—”

“Don’t say his name!” Phil roared, and stormed out.

For Phil to yell at her beloved sister was a character change as worrying as a sudden compulsion to rob liquor stores might be in another person. Fee had no idea what had happened between Arden and Phil—and her sister’s stubborn reticence was another worrying symptom—but that moment made Fee resolve to be a busybody.

The next day, the morning of the performance, Fee layered herself in flannel and wool and trudged through ankle-deep snow to the hopper huts. The sky, overcast since dawn, was lowering menacingly, and both the temperature and the barometer were beginning to drop sharply. Fee’s loose hair crackled over her shoulders as she greeted the few magicians who were about. Most were either still holed up against the cold or had arrangements to stay with the friends they’d made in the village.

Without making it look like her sole purpose, she made her way to Arden’s hut and rapped at the door.

She hardly recognized the man who answered. He looked hunted and harried, with dark circles under his eyes on a face gone gaunt and new lines etched deeply in his brow, which smoothed slightly at the sight of Fee.

“Come inside, out of the cold,” he said tenderly, for whatever else might be clouding him, he was full of sympathy for the girl. Even he didn’t know that Thomas still lived. It was easy at the moment for Fee to encourage his compassion, for she was indeed melancholy—it had been four days since she’d received a letter from Thomas, and she was half frantic. Had he been deployed? Had he met someone else? Was he dead? Four days was a lifetime, and her fancy whirled with ways he could come to grief.

“Thanks,” she said, stamping off the snow. “My, how pretty!” she couldn’t help exclaiming when she looked around. The rough room had been lavishly furnished, with a lapis and cream Tabriz carpet in the ancient fish-admiring-the-moon motif cast upon the concrete floor. Tapestries fluttered against the wall when a gust slipped through the closing door, and candles flickered in scattered, rune-bedecked earthenware jars. The bed was deep amethyst and took up half the room.

Fee looked around for a place to sit, but there was only the bed, and somehow its empurpled bulk suddenly made her feel, for all her experience, prim and prudish in reaction. She leaned against the tapestry-covered wall instead.

After a few pleasantries, awkward on each side, she said, “I hope you’re coming to our performance tonight.”

There was a long silence, and then, “Ah yes, it is Christmas. I’d lost track. I ought to light a candle. My mother always did.” He reached for one of the stubby earthenware jars, then pulled his hand back as if he’d been electrified. “Not these, though,” he said, shoving it away. A gift from Hildemar, it bore the
Wolfsangel
rune, the wolf trap.
The wolves are lured in with flesh,
she’d explained to him gleefully,
and they are hooked like fish and left to dangle from a tree.

He jerked one of the candles out and lit it, melting a pool of wax directly onto the windowsill and anchoring the naked candle as it hardened.

“There.” The way was lit for her. Only, he knew she would never come. And if she did, he would turn her away. He’d made himself unworthy.

“What did you ask?” he said, as if startled from a dream. “No, I cannot go. I have to . . .” He let it trail off. He didn’t have the strength to lie, and now it didn’t matter. Fräulein Hildemar had told him last night, amid moans and caresses, that the Dresdeners were ready to descend on Stour.

They will all be back in the manor soon, no?
she’d asked.
They must be together for the attack to succeed. We will separate the loyal few, and as for the rest
...And she’d folded him in her ivory limbs and thrown her head back, laughing in mad ecstatic passion at the thought of killing the men who’d been his friends, his brothers, for almost as long as he could remember. And he had smiled, too, and reached for her throat, and how he’d turned murderous rage into a caress, he did not know.

“Please come, Arden. I want you to. And you know that Phil wants—”

He made a low, bestial sound of pain and turned away.

Fee knew that sound. She, who lived in constant fear that some army telegram would carry her the news that would make her moan like that, knew it was the sound of a broken heart. “She needs you, Arden.”

“What?” He turned.

“She . . .” Fee did not enjoy lying, but she was quite good at it. “She’s doing a new escape for the grand finale, and even though she can’t quite get it right, she’s determined to do it anyway. You know how stubborn she is. She’s been doing it with the safeties in place so far, but I’m terrified that tonight, when she does it for real, something will go wrong. If it does, she could die.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped, but he remained impassive.

“Please. If you’re there ready with the Essence . . .”

“You know the Essence can’t touch her.”

“But if she fails, she’ll be falling on spikes. You can turn the spikes into daffodils, or melt them, or send them to Timbuktu.”

“Surely one of the other magicians—”

“You, Arden. You’re the only one I trust to keep her safe.” Then, feeling as if she might be jinxing herself, she pulled out her big guns. Her chin trembled, her eyes, tear-filled, seemed suddenly twice their normal size, and she whispered, “I lost Thomas. Please don’t let me lose my sister, too.”

He tried to inhale to steady himself, but his chest tightened and his diaphragm seized, as if a very powerful magician were cutting off his breath. He found no relief until he uttered the promise, “I will come.”

He did not know what Rudyard planned to counter the Dresdeners’ attack—he hadn’t even told the Headmaster yet—but he knew that if anyone was to lead a forlorn hope, or be a sacrificial pawn, it would be him. Even if he survived, Rudyard had said in no uncertain terms that he might be executed so as not to be a blight on the passive, pacifist order. Arden knew he should be raging against death, but if he was to die to preserve the college, to keep the Essence flowing, it would almost be a welcome rest. His only regret was Phil.

His day of reckoning was near at hand. Every man is entitled to a final pleasure, a final torture, rather, to remind him of what he’ll miss in death—a last meal, a last cigarette, a shot of whiskey for comfort and courage. Yes, he would have a moment of solace before the war. He would see her one last time, his lovely, gallant shot of courage. But he would not let her see him.

Preparing for her Bittersweet debut, Phil was revivified. How easily she slipped into the familiar old routines of false eyelashes and mica glitter, of limbering up her shoulders almost to the point of dislocation, of chanting a litany of cues and perfectly synchronized timing.
This is my life,
she thought, with very little of the torment of resignation—
illusion, show business, the best kind of life there is.
It was the murmuring anticipation of the audience that made her heart beat, the gasp, the awe-filled silence just before thundering applause, that gave her breath and life.
Love is nothing,
she resolutely told herself as she peeked through the curtain at the packed house, friends that now blurred into that anonymous and beloved thing, an audience.
Even the war—that’s other people’s business. I was deluded enough to think I could change the course of the war. Let me do what I do best. I was foolish to stray.

She slithered into her first costume, a dark jade chiffon one-piece that covered as much skin as a Land Girl uniform but managed to be as lascivious as a harem costume, skintight in some places, flowing in others, and astonishingly transparent without revealing a blush of what are known as the good bits.

Fee, embraced in a pale silver-green costume of the same design, peeked out the window as she smoothed on her Paint the Town Pink lipstick. “It’s a regular blizzard tonight,” she said, pursing and blotting. “We could practically do the Disappearing World.”

“Don’t say that,” Phil said with a shudder. “When I think of that night . . .”

“I know. I always felt like it was almost our fault, for doing that illusion.”

“Me too. Silly, isn’t it? To think that magic could . . .” She caught her breath and resolutely painted on a sable swath of eyeliner, giving the delicate task her entire focus.
The show. That’s all you can think about tonight. And tomorrow, and for the rest of your life.

Joey, serving as stagehand-of-all-work, exercised his privilege of entering the dressing room without knocking (hoping for a glimpse of something) and told them, “Five minutes till curtain.”

Fee pulled her sister up and held her by the shoulders. She longed to tell her that Arden would be in the audience, but she wasn’t sure how Phil would react. She might very well storm off into the blizzard and hike back to Weasel Rue in her costume, indifferent to frostbite. Well, better leave it up to Arden, then. Remembering the tiny groan that was the demolition of his heart, Fee rather thought he’d do something.

So she gave Phil her own love, pulling her in their forehead-to-forehead embrace, becoming that chimera creature. “We have each other,” she whispered. “Whatever happens, I’ll be with you. Never forget that.”

Phil felt tears burning her eyes, which, with her copious eyeliner, would have been disastrous. She broke the embrace, opening her eyes wide and rolling her head back, letting the tears dry in their own good time.

“I’m ready.”

Arden trailed behind the other magicians, intending to slip into the back, unseen, and escape the moment the curtain fell and Phil was safe. As he was leaving, a form materialized from among the skeletal hop trellises, a form that swelled from intangibility to generous, fleshy proportions.

“You shouldn’t be here in daylight,” he said, squinting at her through the molten sunset.

“Ah, what does it matter? In a few days the fools will be huddled back in Stour, and we will destroy them all with one fell swoop.” She nuzzled him. “Come, there’s time for sport, and then I must go to Stour and mark the layout for the attack. It’s a shame we have to destroy the castle along with the magicians. It has been rebuilt even finer than before, though I’d prefer something inspired by the baroque splendor of Dresden. What ill luck everyone escaped the bomb! Did you do that? Come now, the truth! Bergen said you weren’t at the Exaltation when it fell.”

“It was an accident, I assure you,” he said stiffly.

“Such modesty! Well, you’ll reap rewards enough for your part in destroying the college. You will be one of our generals!” She began to draw him back toward his hut, but he resisted, which brought a look of faint amazement.

“I have to go to Bittersweet. I’ll meet with you tomorrow, once I know precisely when the magicians will move back into Stour.”

She tried to persuade him, but when he was adamant, shrugged her lovely shoulders and said she’d go with him.

“Are you mad? A hundred magicians will be there, and most of them would kill you on sight if they realized who you are.”
Including me.

Her lips curled. “They won’t have any idea who I am. I can fuddle them all.”

“That’s not possible. Do you realize the kind of power it takes to sway a magician on his mettle? Even if you try, they’ll know someone’s meddling with them.”

He couldn’t shake her. He knew he should give up all idea of seeing Phil one last time, but he thought,
What harm can it do? The Fräulein won’t know my thoughts, Phil won’t see either of us. I must have this last good thing.

So he told her, “There is a gathering of commoners and magicians tonight.”

She gave a delicate shudder of revulsion.

“While they’re together, I’d like you to point out all of those you’ve swayed to our side. I know you haven’t told me all of them.”

“Secrecy is essential in these matters,” she said.

“Not from me,” he said sternly, and noticed she seemed to regard him with renewed respect. She liked to have him under her thumb, true, but it also seemed to give her pleasure when he asserted himself.

“You’re right. If you are to be by my side when we rule, nothing should be kept from you.” She inclined her head in apparent acquiescence but could not quite hide the hint of a smirk.

She conjured a beaver cloak for herself and set out into the driving snow. Arden, in thin breeches with his fine linen shirt open to the freezing air, followed. When they arrived, just as the performance was starting, he tried to lead her to the back entrance, but she ignored him and continued to the side.

“Why mingle with the plebs?” she said, shedding the cloak, which dissolved to nothingness in the snow. “If it’s the audience you want to see, we’ll get a better view from backstage. What a paltry place this is. Oh, if you could have been in a box at the Semperoper—the Strauss premieres, under the aegis of Dionysus and his panthers! We will bring such wonders to this backward land!”

“Wasn’t Strauss a commoner?” Arden began, but she shushed him and, gathering the Essence to her, opened a door in the wall, through which Arden could clearly see both the massed, eager audience and—oh God, there was Phil, poised and commanding...and apparently clad in a green cloud.

“Come forward,” the Fräulein said, taking him by the hand and leading him to the wings of the stage. “They can’t see a thing. You could spit in each of their faces, and none would know we are here.”

It was true—not a single eye was on them, only on Phil and her sister as they playfully palmed cards and made coins dance with false transfers and French drops until the spectators were dazzled. Audience members were called up to have never-ending scarves produced from their noses and trembling white doves from their hats.