Delusion (7 page)

“If you’ll only let me explain,” she tried again.

The man seemed to gather his courage. He planted his feet squarely, stared her fiercely in the eye—and Phil was certain he was about to sic his bailiff on her.
Oh well,
she thought. Perhaps he’d give a few pounds, but all hopes of her own personal antiaircraft gun flew away on the breeze. The man looked angry enough to loose the dogs on her, and she was glad that even though he was evidently a lord, he didn’t have medieval rights over those on his land. He’d probably send her to the dungeon, all for trying to save England.
All nobles,
she thought,
should be sent to the front lines.

The man closed his black eyes, concentrating deeply. Very faintly, so subtly that Phil began to rub her eyes, colors began to coalesce from the air and gather around him. Amber deep as honey rose in a pulsating swirl from the earth, and emerald and ruby lights danced like sparks in an opal, whirling faster and faster until he suddenly flung open his eyes in a manic stare and shouted, “Die, intruder!”

Behind her, speckled starlings began to fall from the sky, hitting the ground with soft feather-muffled thuds like dud artillery. The grass around her withered, and the purple clovers grew ashen.

Phil, looking at his intense, handsome face, didn’t notice. She blinked at him, wondered if it was possible to have sunstroke in the crisp fall weather, and said, “That’s not very hospitable.”

He stared at her, aghast. “What are you?” he breathed, as from behind him came the scurrying steps of men who seemed unaccustomed to hurrying. Two were portly and dressed in velvet smoking jackets. The third looked like an aging film star, perhaps eighty, but tall and lean with a steel-gray goatee. He wore tweeds with leather patches on the elbows and held a drooping unlit ivory pipe.

They may not be the most martial material,
Phil thought,
but at least they are men. The portly ones can be plane spotters, but that fine old gentleman should be leading drills.
He was clothed like a professor, but there was an unmistakable military air about the way he stood in perfect parade rest. She addressed herself to him. The young dark fellow looked ill.

“I’m awfully sorry to have disturbed you, but I’ve come from the village on important business.”

He ignored her. “What have you done, Master Arden?” the old man said.

“Headmaster Rudyard, I...the commoner crossed the divide and I feared—”

Phil pressed her lips together in smug satisfaction to see the arrogant young man taken down a peg. Abashed and stammering, he stared down at the dead starlings and looked as if he wanted to sink into the earth.

“In fear, and not with thoughtful purpose, you used the forbidden magic. You sought to kill a human.”

“But she is only a commoner, and somehow she can see us. She can cross the divide!”

“Silence! The only saving grace is that you failed. I do not know what shames me more—that you attempted the taboo magic, or that your powers were not equal to it. Perhaps we were too hasty in advancing you from journeyman. Arden, you are henceforth in durance, and forbidden to draw from the earth until we have decided your punishment.”

Phil smiled. This distinguished old bloke was evidently in charge and was putting that Arden fellow properly in his place. She didn’t understand half of it, but any minute now the gentleman would apologize, and to make it up to her, he’d be obligated to help with the Home Guard.

“Will you fuddle her at once, Headmaster?” one of the plump men asked in a stage whisper.

“I shall, and she’ll be quickly on her way, none the wiser.” He looked steadily at Phil for a moment until she felt uncomfortable. Again, the air grew heavy with translucent color, and she blinked heavily in the intense sunlight, wondering what on earth was wrong with her eyes.

“It’s men we need, and weapons, too. Or money, I suppose. Sir? You have been a soldier, sir?” The stiffness of his spine and an intensity in his eyes made her certain.

He flicked a disdainful glance at Arden, then spread his fingers parallel to the ground and assumed a look of intense concentration. After a moment he stopped with a sigh. “Not a single thing. She should be bound with all the force of the Essence—but nothing. The power is here, in me, but it has no effect on her.” The other men looked frightened, but the old gentleman only said, “Curious.”

“I knew my magic wasn’t faulty!” Arden said, and Headmaster Rudyard frowned him into silence.

He addressed Phil at last. “As for you, my lady, will you come with me?” He held out his arm.

Phil had scarcely been listening to their conversation. She saw herself facing down a troop of German invaders, so well equipped that they surrendered on sight. She placed her hand in the crook of his arm and marched through that writhing Eden of vines and flowers toward Stour Manor as proudly as if she were taking her third curtain call after a death-defying escape.
Some men,
she thought,
know how to treat a visitor—and a lady.

As she passed, she surreptitiously stuck her tongue out at Arden and mouthed, “Beast!”

She was not quite so pleased when, at the great arched entrance, a half-dozen men in the oddest assortment of clothes seized her and carried her off, kicking, clawing, and cursing like a sailor, to a dark room, where they bound her hand and foot with hemp ropes and tossed her onto a chaise.

She felt slightly better when Arden was brought into the room, too, where he submitted to being tied to a chair.

Her mood improved considerably when she let her breath out and found that the ropes were just slack enough to work with. The considerate men had bound her hands behind her, so it was easy enough to reach the tiny pocket she had sewn into the back waistband of every garment she owned—a sensible precaution for a girl who makes her living by letting herself be tied up. She bypassed the handcuff key and the two slivers of metal, pointed at one end, cocked at the other, and plucked out the razor blade.

And when she was free and her eyes had fully adjusted to the gloom, she was practically ecstatic, for the fools had locked her in a sort of armory. Amid heads and horns and stuffed beasts hung fowling pieces and rifles and impossibly long-barreled muskets, all quite old but clean and oiled. There were swords and daggers, pikes and flails—all manner of deadly, pointy things. She shrugged off the ropes, snatched up the deadliest, pointiest thing she could find—a curved Rajput tulwar sword—and pressed the tip to Arden’s throat before he could think to call for help. She looked as if she’d done it a hundred times before. She hadn’t. She’d done it a thousand times at least, rehearsing for the grand decapitation scene the Albions so often used for their finale.

“Now,” she said in her most thrilling stage voice, “tell me what the bloody hell is going on here!”

Arden wished with all his heart he’d managed to kill her after all, even if it meant his demotion back to journeyman or, worse yet, his expulsion from the College of Drycraeft, the English school of magic.

I don’t fear death!” Arden said, lifting his chin to expose his throat more fully to the blade. All the same, his neck was tight with tension, its sinews standing out. In the saltcellar hollows above his collarbone where his white shirt gaped, Phil could see his pulse beating, swift and strong.

“Of course you don’t,” Phil said sweetly. “But you do fear pain. Or you’ll soon learn to.” She pushed the tip a fraction harder against his skin. “Tell me why they tied me up. What is this place?”

She fervently hoped he’d say something, because she really had no idea what to do next. On the stage, this was her cue to swing the blade back dramatically, angling it to catch the blue light aimed by a hidden stagehand, and then with a ululating battle cry chop off his head. Well, not his head, exactly, but a waxwork simulacrum with a balloon full of viscous blood-red syrup that was substituted at the last instant. And of course the sword was flimsy foil that would hardly cut a blancmange. She knew in her heart she was all show. There was no way she’d hurt someone who was tied up, not even this arrogant nutcake who’d blathered on about magic and killing and...Oh! That must be it. He was crazy, just like Uncle Walter. Well, that explained him.
What a shame,
she thought, pulling her blade back and cocking her head to study him. He was rather good-looking, if you liked that black-haired, arrogant, surly sort . . .

Perhaps it explained the others, too. Yes, this must be an insane asylum. Because the things the other men had talked about, things she’d barely heard at the time, lost as she was in her own dreams of guns and arms, were now slowly coming back to her. And they only made sense if this was a house of lunatics.

What Arden said next confirmed it.

“We are magicians in the College of Drycraeft, servants of the earth and ministers of the Essence that flows through her. And you, whoever you are, are an unnatural aberration who will no doubt be killed as soon as the masters have time to confer.”

Privately, he hoped they would not confer too long, though given the glacial pace of most of the college’s decisions, the girl’s ridiculously red hair would go gray before they came to any conclusion. It was one of many things that irked him about the college, but now that he was a master, he hoped to institute certain reforms.

“If you’re a magician, why don’t you get out of those ropes? Or don’t you do escapism?”

Arden glared at her. “I’ve given my word not to draw from the Essence. I can do no magic until the Conclave of Masters decides my punishment.”

“Hmm. Convenient, isn’t it?” She lowered the tulwar and went to the door, listening intently. “Tell me how to get out of this place. Is this an official asylum, then, or does your family just have an unfortunate gene?”

“You think I’m insane?”

“They say if you have wit enough to ask, you aren’t. I’d supposed that’s why you aren’t at the front. If you aren’t crazy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big hale fellow like you. You should be fighting for your country instead of playing children’s games. Magicians, indeed! You should have picked your shill a little more carefully. I’m one of the Albions, and what I don’t know about magic you could fit on the head of a pin.” She tossed her hair and made a
humph
sound. Arden, against his will, liked the one but not the other.

Albion? Albion! Godric Albion, the Traitor! Realization upon realization rushed at him, overwhelmed him, and suddenly he was screaming for help, pulling against his ropes until his skin peeled away.

“Shut up!” Phil hissed desperately. If he brought all those madmen running...even with her weapon, she might not be able to hold them off.

Arden ignored her. It all made sense. If this girl was who he thought she was, her ancestor was stripped of his magic almost three hundred years ago. The textbooks said that made him a commoner, devoid of any ability to use the Essence. But there were whispers that it had made him something even worse than a commoner. What if he, and his descendants, were utterly separate from the Essence, immune to it? If she was here to attack them, there was nothing their magic could do to her. An Albion had almost destroyed the college before. He wouldn’t let this one do the same.

He shouted for help until he hardly had breath. What this girl’s sudden appearance meant, he could not say for sure. All he knew was that something very close to panic had seized him. She must be put down, like vermin.

“Be quiet, now, or I’ll—” She raised the tulwar, this time aiming the spiked pommel at his head. A hard blow might knock him unconscious. Or it might kill him.

She couldn’t, not quite. Puffing an exasperated sigh at what she called her weakness, she ran to the door and listened again, then slipped out and down the portrait-lined corridor. Arden’s yells echoed behind her.

Holding her tulwar high—she had visions of impaling herself in a headlong fall, and wouldn’t that be a pretty way to go?—she dashed around corner after corner, getting ever more helplessly lost. It wasn’t until she chanced peeking behind a closed door and caught a glimpse out a window that she even realized she was on the second floor. She could see the lake and the blushing maples and tried to keep that orientation in mind when she resumed her search for an exit. She barreled past a line of little boys who looked at her in thrilled amazement, though not fear. Racing, armed, red hair flying, Phil was like an air raid siren shrilling through their rote lives.

Were there no stairs in this damned place? It was all hallways and rooms. She checked more and more doors. Some led to empty bedrooms, some to vacant classrooms, but none led to egress. Nearly at the end of her tether, she flung open one more door and found a man just stepping out of a claw-footed bath. Phil was about to retreat in shame when she decided, no, this had gone on far too long. Pointing her blade at his chubby pink and white nakedness, she said, “Show me how to get out of this madhouse.”

He fumbled for his spectacles, gave a girlish shriek when at last he saw the interloper clearly, and dove for the nearest garment he could find, which, alas, was no more than a polka-dotted necktie. Still, it covered the vital bits if he didn’t walk too fast, so Phil gritted her teeth, torn between mirth and mortification, and urged him with gentle pokes out to the corridor.

He led her silently, with nervous backward glances, to an ornate double door carved with spiral patterns. There he stopped, trembling.

“Oh, very well,” she said, and pushed both doors open herself. But instead of a rush of sunlight and freedom, she saw a spacious, windowless, torch-lit room with a massive wooden table in its center. Seated around it, in chairs only a step down from thrones, were some twenty men and one little boy half-hidden in the shadows.

Phil turned on her nearly naked guide with a snarl, but before she could flee, he gathered the last, perhaps only, drop of his courage and shoved her as hard as he could, propelling her into the room. His momentum sent him after her, and he collapsed in a dead faint, his necktie, unfortunately, askew.

The doors closed behind them, apparently of their own volition.