Delusion (33 page)

“It will be hard for me to see you again for a while,” he said.

“As hard as for me
not
to see you again?” she asked, plaintively.

“I’ll be going back and forth between my hut and the Fräulein, and Stour.”

“Which the farmhouse is conveniently between.”

“If she sees me with you—”

“Oh, I know,” Phil said with a pout. “Only, are you going to have to—you know.”

“I’ll try not to, beloved, but if she suspects I’m playing her false, she’ll change her plans, and we’ll be lost. I have to keep her convinced, and if it means—doing
that
—well then, I must.” Thank goodness she didn’t know what else he’d done to keep the Fräulein convinced. He would never tell her about Mrs. Abernathy, traces of whose life still seemed to tickle his nerves.

“You must,” Phil echoed. “Oh, Arden! I know it’s only a body.” She gave him such a bold caress that he almost had to carry her back upstairs and politely but firmly evict Fee from the bed, unless the hay in the cowshed might do. “But don’t you see?” she asked, lingering maddeningly. “It’s
my
body now!”

Then she sent him off into the frozen world, to lie, as he’d been taught.

The battle (or as the Dresdeners knew it, the attack) came together exactly like a premiere. Early on, there was Phil and Fee’s audacious plan, the guarantee of resounding success, the confidently sketched diagrams that bade the laws of physics to stand aside ever so slightly...followed by grueling work, and then, at the last moment, a flurry of confusion bordering on absolute hysterical pandemonium.

As always, though, the show went on.

“Impossible!” Arden told Rudyard when the Headmaster suggested evacuating Stour days ahead of the attack. “The Fräulein said they’ll strike immediately after the Exaltation on the first day the magicians return. Everyone has to be there.”

“Then how do we escape? They’ll detect a portal, and anyway, half our magicians aren’t advanced enough to create one. We need to let the Germans believe they’ve won so we can continue our work.”

“They will see us going into Stour—but we won’t actually be going inside.”

Arden explained, but Rudyard didn’t like it. “More commoner interference,” he snapped automatically, which made Arden briefly lose his tightly checked temper.

“Drop that codswallop, Rudyard. I know better than that now. Everything we do is for the commoners. At least let one help us.”

Reluctantly, he agreed. “Only be sure it will work,” Rudyard cautioned. “I will let the men die—all of them—before I let them fight. What have you told those who will stay behind, inside Stour?”

“Only that they must do their duty to the Essence.”

“Be sure they do. And as for you—”

“I will be with my brothers, never fear. Now mind you, the Germans know our routines. Everything about the Exaltation must go exactly as usual, or they’ll scrap their plans, and then we won’t know when they’ll attack.”

“And that would be disastrous,” Rudyard said. “Can you imagine a world where boys grew up with free use of their powers?” He shuddered. “Arden, I’ve changed my mind about something. Your willingness to sacrifice yourself has proven to me once and for all that no one but you can succeed me. You were so willing to die for what is right—a lesser man might not have understood. Send the others in, instruct them well—but you, Master Arden, you may live. And one day you will be Headmaster in my place.”

Rudyard beamed at his young master, awaiting gratitude, and when he gave it, patted him like a good dog.

The snow, mercifully, held, coating the world in thick white drifts that blurred form.

Arden stood on the hill and watched the final Exaltation that the College of Drycraeft would ever perform. He could still feel the miraculous currents of Essence rise and fall, and that marvelous sense of plunging into a warm viscous pool of
everything.

Casually, he glanced at a thick plantation of hemlock trees, their weeping, needled boughs caressing and overlapping each other in a coniferous orgy to make a dense thicket, in the center of which waited Phil and her Home Guard. Their faces were whitened with stage greasepaint, the gunmetal shine of their weapons was dulled. Swathed with whatever incongruous and unseasonal white clothes they could find to cover their winter work clothes and make them all but vanish in the snow, they waited, primed and silent, for the invasion Phil swore was at hand.

Silent, except for Mrs. Enery, her hair under a crocheted ivory tam-o’-shanter, who exclaimed, “Blimey, they
have
rebuilt Stour!”

Phil had told them the Germans were attacking a secret military installation built on the old Stour grounds.

“Was that what them professors were really about?” Eamon had asked. “I knew something fishy was afoot.”

Phil had been vague about how she knew, and insisted there wasn’t nearly enough time to summon help from London.

They were soldiers now, and they didn’t question their commander. Tensely happy, they would have been joking if not for the strict command for quiet.

Phil, who knew what they were up against and what was at stake, wasn’t so sanguine. But the Home Guard was only a single arm of a many-tentacled attack, and she hoped they would need to be little more than a distraction.

Belly-crawling from one to the other, she reviewed their part one final time and was about to make her way to her own position to the rear of where the Germans would gather, when a crouching figure slipped into the thicket and, with the regrettable grace learned in a barbed-wire youth, dropped to his elbows.

“Uncle Walter!” His rifle strap was twisted tightly about his left forearm to brace it for deadly accuracy, but from his right wrist dangled handcuffs, one cuff clamped, the other loose.

He saw where she was looking. “Just in case I can’t stop,” he said with a rueful wink.

She fell beside him. “How did you know we were here?”

“Fee was fretting too much to lie well. The lad with her told me the rest. He was sensible enough to think I might be of some use.” That would be Stan, at Weasel Rue with Fee for safekeeping. “And your tracks are fresh in the snow.” Damn. It was still falling steadily, though, and with half an hour yet to go, she was sure they’d be covered. The Dresdeners were planning to open their portals in one tight cluster, and not scout around, Arden said, so they should be safe either way.

“We don’t need you,” Phil said. “Fine thing if you go off your nut in the middle of battle. Go home.”

“I’ve seen them shoot,” he said flatly. “Trust me, you need me.”

And since it was impossible to shift him, he stayed.

Phil crept to her own position and used a compact to catch the sunset rays and flash a confirmation of her location to Joey, crouched with an abundance of matches in a small hoary defile. She found her own store of weapons, hidden the day before, and unwrapped a rifle and her good old tulwar from their waterproof oilskin. There, everything was in place, and now she was free to have a small and private panic.

Ah, but there was Arden, walking across the white open meadow between Stour and the timber. Her panic didn’t quite leave at the sight of him, but it suddenly had a companion at its side, bolstering it to a more useful sort of panic, the kind that makes people think swiftly and act even faster, the kind that keeps soldiers sharp. Standing staunchly beside the trembling fear of death was the thing for which she was willing to risk her life—the love of Arden, and love for Arden.

He was to take a position between her and Stour, where the Dresdeners would soon gather.

What the hell was he doing? The moment before curtain is no time for improvisation, and Arden was rewriting the script by walking straight to her hiding place.

He didn’t see her until he was almost on top of her, and then it was her aquamarine eyes he spotted first, their pre-Raphaelite luminosity peering from under a furry white Russian
ushanka.
The rest was cloaked in white wool and fur, invisible. Ah yes, there was another part of her he could see now—a slender bare hand, pink with cold, clutching the hilt of her curved tulwar. He could not stomach the thought of Phil’s body, Phil’s smile, Phil’s sweet, soft hands roiling in the middle of a fight. For though the Dresdeners’ magic could not harm her, the men they were bringing with them certainly could—and certainly would, if Arden didn’t keep Phil out of the fighting.

He’d learned about it that very morning, when the Fräulein slipped into his hut at dawn to make sure everything went as planned. Then lightly, but holding his eye all the while, she said, “I’ll be bringing a few commoners along, too, and you mustn’t let your appetites tempt you, dear boy.” For he’d let on that, beguiled by what she’d taught him, he was wreaking havoc among the local commoners. “They are what you would call a necessary evil. Two soldiers and a champion duelist.”

“What on earth do you need them for?”

Now she didn’t bother containing her malicious glee. “We’ll be eliminating the Albions. Whatever their lineage, they are, after all, only commoners now, and their peculiarity makes them a threat. The one who colors her hair such an improbable hue in particular. Bergen tells me you fancied her, once.”

So that was it—he’d played his part of devotion to the Fräulein perfectly, but he hadn’t been able to hide his adoration of Phil. The unguarded instant in the moment she fell to the spikes—yes, that was when the Fräulein knew. And Bergen, the swine! Now he had two scores to settle with the traitorous journeyman—Rapp’s death, and this.

“Before you opened my eyes, Hildemar,” he said. “Would you rather I kill her for you? I don’t see why loathsome commoners should be involved.”

She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes serene azure poison. “No, this way is best.” And of course, with everything hanging on that evening, he said nothing more. In a few hours the Dresdeners would be killed, all the college would know the truth—and the brave new world would begin.

But there wouldn’t be a world for him without Phil at his side. He feared—he knew in his soul—what kind of man he would become if he lost her.

“Do you love me?” he asked Phil now.

A little part of Phil crumpled inside. She knew he was going to use her love as blackmail. “Maybe a bit,” she said, all the love in the world radiating plainly from her worried face.

“Then you have to stay out of the fighting. They’re sending assassins to kill you.”

“They’ve done it before,” she said, shrugging a small avalanche of snow from her shoulders.

“More than one—and professionals this time.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“No, you can’t. You’re an astonishing woman, Phil, but you’re not a soldier, nor a killer. They are, and they’re coming for you. You have to take Fee and leave, now. Leave Bittersweet, leave England if at all possible.”

“Nonsense. Just like a man, thinking that because I love you, you can order me around. You’re fighting—so will I. Do you honestly think I’d leave you?”

Desperate, Arden fell to his knees and tried another dirty trick. “Think of Fee, then. She can’t defend herself at all, and the assassins will be coming after both of you.”

This almost worked. “But if they’re coming at the same time as the Dresden magicians, we’ll be able to knock them off, too. They have no idea we’re here. We have eight fighters, plus me, and a few extra surprises. Between us and your magicians, we should be able to wipe them out in the first salvo.”

“But if we can’t? The Fräulein is more powerful than I am, and your Home Guard—they’re not proven. If one magician spots them, they’re dead. If only one assassin gets through,
you’re
dead. If not now, then they’ll hunt you down.”

“It’s war, Arden. No one is safe, ever. It’s what the rest of us have been living with for more than a year. I’ll be careful.”

“It’s not enough!” he cried, anguished. “I
need
you safe. Safe and waiting for me, so when this night is over, we can stand hand in hand and change the world. We can, Phil—we can free the Essence, free the magicians, and one day make every human a magician in his own right. But I need you, or . . .”

“Or what, Arden?”

“You know what I’ve done,” he said in a low growl. “I’m not good—not on my own. My father, Ruby—hell, even you. And the things I’ve thought...Phil, the Fräulein taught me something, and I can’t stop longing for it.” He pounded his thighs with his clenched fists. “It’s like a drug, rising in my blood and demanding that I have more and more.”

Barely whispering, he told her about draining the life from Mrs. Abernathy.

“When I felt it, it was like I’d been thirsty all my days and only then discovered water. I only had it for an instant—I gave it to her—but I want more. Oh, help me Phil, I want more!”

She held his head to her breast.

“I won’t, though, I swear it. I hate myself for what I feel. As long as you’re with me, I can control it, but without you, I’ll become what the old Headmasters feared. I’ll be the reason all magicians are shackled and chained.”

“I can’t run away now,” she whispered into his sable hair. “I have a part to play. The Home Guard is counting on me.”

Arden rocked back on his heels, and Phil shrank from his grim, set face.

“Then you give me no choice.”

She thought it was an embrace, at first, the deliberately lighthearted
good luck
and
until we meet again
parting of people who know they’ll jinx themselves if they acknowledge the terrible possibilities by saying something as final as
goodbye.
He held her arms just above the elbow; he kissed her lightly on the brow.

Then he stabbed her in the heart.

No, it can’t be real, she thought, suddenly rigid and powerless. There was another stabbing, and another, a thousand all over her body in an instant, rending her with something that was not exactly pain, not yet, but somehow worse for the fact, like plunging your hand in scalding water that for the first second feels cold, knowing the agonizing damage is done, irrevocably, before you can feel it.

Then through the pain that was not pain came a sweetness, pure and eternal, rising from a time before worry, an age before suffering. She heard a throbbing and knew it was her mother’s heartbeat from within. Gravity abandoned her, and direction; color and form fled from her wide-staring eyes, and she returned, ah, with such blessed relief, to a place she’d almost forgotten, a memory older than her own body. She was herself, and she was everything...and it was bliss.