Delusion (24 page)

“I have to go,” he said, tucking his feet underneath him and rising.

“Oh,” Phil said, and he searched her voice for regret.

“There’s something I have to do. But tomorrow? You’re coming again, right?” Tomorrow. Just last night, that word had held such promise. Now Arden sounded cold, angry, impossibly distant. “I come every day.”

“Well, yes. I’ll see you then.”

She watched him walk toward Stour, all elongated shadow and mist, and felt, inexplicably, that she’d just lost him.

No,
she amended,
I never had him. We’re not of the same world, there’s no possibility of happiness. He won’t forsake his order, and I can’t join it. Not that I would, even if I had his powers.

Could it really be true?
she wondered.
My ancestor, a magician? And if he hadn’t rebelled so many centuries ago, I could have been one, too?

No, silly, of course not,
she chided herself.
Magicians can’t have families, so the Albions wouldn’t have been the Albions. If I even existed, I would have been conceived by some randy journeyman and raised without any knowledge of my father. Oh, Dad, how I miss you and Mum!

She hadn’t gotten a letter from them or her brother yet, but they’d told her to expect that—their group was top secret, their mission and location classified, and it was unlikely they’d be able to get any mail out for quite some time. “Don’t fret about us,” Mum had whispered to her with her goodbye kiss. “We’re too valuable to be put in harm’s way.”

If Godric Albion hadn’t had his magic stripped from him,
Phil thought,
Mum and Dad and Geoffrey could defeat the entire Axis force all on their own. I could smash every German bomber against the Dover cliffs and keep London and Hull and Manchester from being bombed. Or perhaps I couldn’t. They seem to believe girl magicians aren’t worth much. Then again, I think they’re wrong about a few other things.

She dozed and dreamed, lulled by fiddling crickets and the drone of half-frozen cicadas, knowing she should be getting home but reluctant to leave the spot of earth that was still faintly warm from Arden’s body. She held her palm over the radiating heat, a bit of his life still hovering beside her, and thought,
That’s as near as I’ll ever come to feeling the Essence for myself.

“I’m close,” she’d told Fee that morning. “I can see their opinions changing daily. Arden and his five followers are willing to do anything to save the college, but soon, very soon, I’ll convince them to go a step farther. I’ve had to tread carefully, but they have had a taste of rebellion now, and they like it. And I know exactly what to test them on.”

She would have that evening, if Arden hadn’t left in such a hurry. Because, she told herself, her own desires were nothing to the needs of her country, and however her fantasies about Arden might shatter, there was still England to be saved.

Like very reliable German clockwork, the insect drone intensified, as if a great cicada god loomed in the heavens. Then the creatures of the ground fell silent, in awe of the mechanical monsters flying overhead.

For the past week Bittersweet, which hadn’t seen a German plane even at the height of the Battle of Britain, was witness to steady convoys of German bombers and supporting fighters making their way to London each evening. Other routes had become too heavily guarded by the RAF and its spectacularly improved radar array, so they sneaked through the relative safety of the agricultural corridor, of which Bittersweet was the isolated heart.

There had been pandemonium the first night they were spotted. Joey, on watch, had run through town blowing a bugle until he was breathless (they hadn’t invested in a siren), and villagers tumbled from their homes in their flannels and nightshirts and, in the case of the well-fashioned mechanic Eamon Dooley, in nothing at all but his Home Guard armband and his stirrup pump, much to the delight of his female neighbors. Buckets were filled to douse fires, sandbags slit to dump on incendiaries, and the villagers, forgetting their shelters, stood on the main street, watching squadrons of planes fill the skies.

No bombs fell; Bittersweet was too small a target.

“What’s the matter, ain’t we good enough for you?” shouted a furious Mrs. Enery as she shook her fist at the diminishing aircraft.

Now, on schedule, a wave of bombers passed overhead, and Phil cursed them as she did every night, wishing them fuel leaks and gremlins galore. If only Arden had stayed, she was sure she could have convinced him tonight.

“There’s one sure way,” Fee had told her a few days ago. “A man in love will do anything for his sweetheart—if he knows she loves him back.”

“Love him? Why on earth would I get myself as hopelessly tangled as you? Your love is doomed. No, don’t sniff at me, you knew it from the start. There’s no future in it.”

“But oh, what a present.”

“Why should I love someone I can’t have? If I don’t want good, safe, practical Hector, why would I want Arden?”

“That’s your problem, Phil. You
think
about love. A person can’t decide to love someone, she just does, because she has no other choice, and damn the consequences.”

Alone in the heavy silence of the planes’ wakes, the spot beside her grown cold, she knew Fee was right.

How had it happened? There had been no revelation, no epiphany, only a slowly breaking dawn. No, she thought grimly—not dawn, but a descent into night, a love born of crepuscular shadow and imminent blackness.

I love him, but that doesn’t change a thing. We can’t be together.

I’m a soldier, as much as a girl on the home front can be, and this is war. There is no place for love.

An unintelligible cacophony of shouts came from Stour. The Exaltation must be over, and the magicians, the younger ones at least, were like students freed from class.

The sounds grew louder, and their tenor changed. She couldn’t make out any words, but something was wrong, she was certain of it. Tying her hair into a double knot at the nape of her neck (she’d loosened it automatically when Arden had approached, which she only now dimly realized was a symptom of her feelings), she ran for the college.

She grabbed the first magician she recognized. “Hereweald, what’s going on?”

“Rapp Schnurr’s been murdered!”

She went cold, felt faint. “German magicians?”

“No. At least...there’s no sign that anyone opened a portal.”

“You could tell, even afterward?”

“Oh yes, it takes an awful lot of Essence. You couldn’t miss it—it would be like missing a gunshot. We’ve all been on alert.”

“Maybe you didn’t feel it because of the Exaltation?”

He shook his head. “There was no portal. Someone here at Stour killed him.”

Phil dug her fingers into the interstices of the golden stone walls, keeping herself upright with sheer force of will.

“But everyone was at the Exaltation, right?” she asked.

“Not Rapp. He wasn’t ready for it yet. A few of the youngest prentices were inside Stour, and one or two people who were ill.”

“And Arden.”

“And Arden. But how could you think he would—”

“I didn’t mean that!” Phil cried, appalled. “Only, is he safe? Have you accounted for him yet?” One look at her blanched, desperate face, and Hereweald knew her secret.
Lucky devil that Arden,
he thought. He’d spent more than a few nights rehearsing and discarding romantic speeches for Phil himself.

“Stay here. I’ll find him.”

Only Phil, being Phil, did not stay there. She paced, she stopped and interrogated every magician she knew by sight, and finally, driven to distraction with worry, she plunged into the heart of Stour.

She’d been inside the college a few times by then and knew her way around. The magicians’ dormitories were in the east wing, with masters on the ground floor, mere collegians who never earned the name of master on the second, journeymen on the third, and prentices on the fourth and clustered in the attic rooms. Rapp, because of his age, had been placed with the journeymen, though he was classed as the greenest prentice.

She went to the third floor first. Surely Arden would be there, determined to find out what had happened to poor Rapp. It was easy to find his room. Magicians of all ranks filled the chamber and milled in the hall. Arden wasn’t among them. She pushed her way through.

Headmaster Rudyard stood at Rapp’s bedside, looking solemn but not overly disturbed. Phil could see Rapp’s bare feet hanging over the edge of the bed. She stepped closer.

I’m not ready for war,
she told herself, barely breathing. The neat, round seared-edged bullet holes in paper targets; the pheasants dying like blissful martyrs, expressionless, with a sacred heart of blood on their breasts; the glove-cushioned punches—she thought they had sufficiently prepared her for violence. She’d seen a man die, shot before her very eyes, and still, it was nothing to this.

She stared, but somehow she was more aware of things at the periphery of her vision than she was of her bludgeoned friend. At the window, a diaphanous curtain swelled in the chill breeze. In the corner, sudden movement when a middle-aged master bent and was sick. A very tall, beefy blond journeyman, standing on the edge of the crowd like a centurion, a head taller than anyone else, staring, not at the body, but at her.

Then, steeling herself, she forced herself to look, to really look at her murdered friend.

He hadn’t been drained—there had been nothing peaceful about his final moment. He’d been beaten to death, and the heavy stone that was the murder weapon lay discarded on the floor, half under the tumbled bedclothes. Rapp’s face was...gone. Whoever had done this had not been content merely to kill him.

“Who did this?” she whispered to Rudyard.

“One of the Dresden magicians came through a portal.”

“No, that’s not possible. Hereweald said—” She broke off. To speak of it might reveal Arden and the other masters’ rebellious activities. “He told me the night the Kommandant came that you can tell—almost hear—when a portal is opened.”

“And I did sense a portal opening,” Rudyard said gravely. “Now go. This is a college matter, no affair for commoners.”

There were disgruntled noises from the other magicians.

“It’s
her
affair,” one muttered.

“She’s the only one who can properly fight the Dresden magicians,” another said.

An elderly collegian on frail shaking legs said querulously, “If you’d made her welcome, she might have been here, stopped this abomination. No magicians killing magicians in
my
day.”

“This will be discussed tomorrow in a Conclave of Masters,” Rudyard said smoothly, emphasizing the last word to exclude the old man, who had never graduated to that august level. “For now, assign a detail to bury the body and . . .”

“That’s it?” Phil asked. “Bury him and talk behind closed doors? Why aren’t you opening a portal in Dresden and smiting all of
them
in their beds? You have to do something. He was my friend. He was killed because he refused to kill me.”

“Then perhaps this is your fault,” he said brusquely, and quit the room, leaving Phil stunned.

Several other magicians left with him, but the few who remained patted her on the shoulder and spoke words of sympathy.

“He’s merged with the Essence now,” the ancient collegian said, squinting at her with kindly, rheumy eyes. In his journeyman days he’d loved a girl who, in his fading memory at least, resembled Phil. But he’d returned to the fold. “Don’t weep for him. The pain is gone now.”

But when she looked again at the bloody pulp where Rapp’s face had been, she knew the old man was wrong. Pain like that echoes through the world forever.

Wearily, she descended the stairs to the masters’ floor and sought out Arden’s room. She knew it was near the climbing wisteria, for he’d complained about the stubborn, clinging branches blocking his view.

On the third try she found it, an austere room with its window flung wide open. Thick creeping branches clawed their way in like cadaverous hands, rooted to the inner walls. The window had not been closed for months, at least, and the air had a cathedral chill.

Arden—oh, alive, thank heaven—stood with his back to her, washing his hands in a basin. He was scrubbing them with such a peculiar ferocity that he didn’t hear her enter, and he turned with a start when she softly called his name, splashing a spray of russet water across the floor.

“You’re safe?” she asked, standing perfectly still so she didn’t throw herself into his arms.

“I—I cut myself.” He held up his hand. Blood welled sluggishly from a slice on his finger.

She was ashamed that for an instant Arden’s small wound caused her almost as much heartache as Rapp’s death.

“I thought they might have gotten you, too,” she stammered. “Please, may I sit down?” Without waiting for permission, she collapsed onto his rumpled bed, and when her knees gave way, so did the rest of her. “I’m sorry,” she said between sobs. “It’s just...his face! And you, alone here. I thought . . .” She sniffed, and tried to pull herself together, and wondered why he didn’t wrap his body comfortingly around hers and tell her everything would be all right, even if it was a lie.

But he did not come to her, and she sniffed again, a self-pitying sniff that again shamed her. To her surprise, she caught a whiff of something familiar—almost, she would swear, the Jean Patou scent Mum wore when Dad took her dancing, Adieu Sagesse, Farewell Wisdom, the heady melange of neroli and spicy carnations, with animal base notes. She thought of Mum, glowing, on Dad’s arm. Where was she now? An office in England or a trench in France?

No, it was only a ghost scent, the longing for Mum’s comfort in lieu of Arden’s. Only the dried dead flowerheads of Stour’s gardens.

She drew a deep, shuddering breath and told him about Rapp Schnur.

“And Hereweald says there was no portal, but Rudyard says there was. What does it mean, Arden? You said he would...eliminate certain magicians. Could he have killed Rapp?”

“No, it is not possible,” Arden said, but he crossed to the window and gave her his back.