Delusion (9 page)

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “You mean, it’s
real
magic?”

He nodded.

“And this place—they can all do it?”

“It’s a school. They call it the College of Drycraeft. The college of magic, in other words.”

“That’s what that bastard said, the one who mumbled nonsense about . . .” She gasped. “Do you mean when he glared at me and told me to die, he was really doing magic to kill me?” Her hand went to her throat.

“That’s what he meant to do, yes. That’s why he’s in so much trouble. It is absolutely forbidden to use the killing magic. I’ve only been here a few days, and I know that much already.”

“But I’m alive!”

“Mm-hmm...well . . .” He shifted his gaze away. He wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but this was his sister, practically, and maybe she had the right to know.

Phil saved him from any further conscience wrangling. “Ha! Is he the class dunce? I wish you could have seen his face when I didn’t oblige him by dropping dead! Well, I hope they leave him tied up all night. Serves him right!”

Stan didn’t mention that he’d likely get much worse than that.

“What happened to you and your mother, then? In Dresden.”

“It was a terrible place.” He shuddered. “For five years she pretended docility and obedience and schemed to escape. She taught me to hide my powers as best I could, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t!” He squeezed his eyes shut and went on. “They can’t draw on the Essence there as they can in England, I don’t quite know why. They are mad for power, though. They suck it from the earth, from beasts, and make use of anyone with even a hint of magic to help them gather more. It is hard to explain. I’m only just learning how my own powers work. The Germans, they used my mother like a milk cow, draining her daily for their own use. And they would have used me likewise, if we hadn’t escaped.

“We couldn’t go back to her people, and they’d think to look for us in Eastern Europe, so we fled west, to England. But they found us. They found me. I was just coming into my power. I didn’t know how to shield it, and they tracked us down. My mother gave herself up to help me get away. They...they killed her.”

Phil put her arms around him and let her flaming hair fall over his face, while his small body shook with silent sobs.

“I soon learned to hide my powers,” he said when he grew calm, “and for a time I lived in an orphanage.”

“Where you met Hector.”

“But I couldn’t conceal my magic entirely, and eventually they found me again. I had to run. I made Hector come with me.”

Magic—real? Phil could scarcely fathom it. She twirled the sword she held point down in the dirt. She’d thought it was a formidable weapon, but imagine being able to change a person’s mind, to make him fall in love, to kill him, all with a thought.

Why, powers like that could win the war!

For either side . . .

“Then—was it only three days ago?—I was walking down by the river, and someone put a cloth with something nasty over my face. The next thing I knew, I was here. I thought it would be like the German school—Mother always told me to do whatever I could to stay out of the clutches of magicians. So I drained the Essence out of five masters before they convinced me that they were different. I realized this is exactly where I want to be. Where I need to be.”

“You killed them?”

“Oh, no, just made them unconscious. We all have Earth Essence in us. Every living thing does. It’s like energy, a life force. If you have a little taken away, you weaken. If you lose too much, you die.”

She pictured entire battlefields of Germans falling unconscious. She pictured Hitler, dying, just because someone willed it. Why, to have even one of these magicians fighting on England’s side could turn the war.

Before she could think it through, Headmaster Rudyard picked his way through the ferns. She gripped the tulwar more tightly but didn’t raise it.

“We have something very serious to discuss,” he said, pacing like a general, hands clasped in the small of his back. “One of our number—the man you met before, Master Arden—committed a crime against you.”

“String him up,” Phil said casually, tossing her hair.

“By which you mean hanging? No, that is not our way,” he said. “Had he succeeded in killing you, without authorization from the conclave, we would have little choice but to kill him. But it would not be by hanging. The entire college would have joined to drain him of his Essence. His life would pass through us and thence to the earth.”

Phil stared at him, wide-eyed. “Just like that? What if...I mean, obviously I’m no threat . . .” The Headmaster pulled a wry face. “But if I had been, say, coming at him with a sword, wouldn’t he be justified in fighting back?”

“No, certainly not. We are peaceful. To take a life, a human life, is blasphemy against everything we stand for.”

“What exactly
do
you stand for?” Phil asked.

“There is no time for that at the moment. Your arrival places us in a delicate situation. Master Arden tried to kill you.”

“And thank goodness he’s at the bottom of his class, eh? I’m glad he’s incompetent.”

“Master Arden may be rash, may even be criminal, but he is a Master of Drycraeft, and his magic does not fail. What he did would have killed anyone, even another master. Even, perhaps, me. But it had no effect on you. Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

“I’m told that you and your family are stage magicians, illusionists. That you have been for centuries. I believe that generations of practicing the very antithesis of real magic has in some way made you immune to our power.”

Phil saw the Headmaster’s eyes flick fleetingly to meet Stan’s. It sounded fishy to her. She hadn’t really paid attention in school, but she gathered that the theory of acquired traits had been put to rest some eighty years ago. Giraffes did not get long necks by stretching them daily, and people did not become immune to real magic simply by actively not believing in it.

On the other hand, until recently she thought it was a proven fact that the only kind of magic in the world was the sort the Albions practiced. Perhaps facts needed to be rearranged.

“You mean, you can’t cast a spell on me?” Phil asked.

“They aren’t spells—there are no incantations or words of power. There is only the Essence. But yes, it seems that nothing magical can touch you. Arden could not kill you. I could not chain or fuddle you to make you forget you ever saw us. Stour has such magical barriers around it that no one who is not a magician can set foot on the grounds, and yet you hopped past the safeguards.” He gave a little laugh. “Do you see now why you worried us?”

“Honestly, the only reason I came here was to get volunteers for the Home Guard.”

“And now that I’ve had a moment to think about it, I see that you’re no threat to us. Even if you told the world and led an army here, they couldn’t breach our defenses. They could bump their noses against the very walls of Stour and never know it was there. Ah, but here he is. The criminal.”

They turned to find Master Arden with a four-man escort. His arms were bound behind his back, and his face was so ostentatiously stoic, with such a terribly stiff upper lip that is was obvious he was concealing great distress. Fear was there, Phil could see it plainly, but hatred, too, and something even more bitter.

“You!” he spat, and half-lunged, half-stumbled toward her.

“Peace, Master Arden,” the Headmaster said. “If she had been any other, you would even now be lying cold in the ground.”

“If she were any other, I never would have—”

The Headmaster stared steadily at him, and as a barely seen bolt of crystalline lightning arced through the air, Arden fell suddenly silent, magically robbed of the power of speech. The ropes that tied his arms unknotted themselves and coiled at his feet. He looked like he desperately wanted to run, or to hurl himself at Phil, but he stood, trembling, his sharp-cut cheeks flushed.

“Given the peculiar circumstances,” the Headmaster went on, “the conclave has decided not to punish you.”

Arden let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Death, severance from the Essence, banishment—one was as bad as the other. And yet, there was a part of him that had almost hoped . . .

“We have decided rather that the crime was not against our order but against the girl. She will decide whether you live or die for performing the killing magic.”

Arden opened his mouth to protest, but he still couldn’t speak. At the mercy of that Medusa, with her snakes of red hair and terrible sword and absurdly flippant manner? Didn’t they see what a danger she was, with her traitor’s blood? What if there were more like her? What if she brought them into the college with more swords, or guns? The order had been secret, utterly concealed from the outside world for centuries. The girl might be nothing, true, merely a fluke or a freak, but what if she was a harbinger of an invasion?

The Headmaster turned to Phil. “You have his life in your hands. What would you do with it?”

Then she did the most hurtful thing of all. She laughed. “His life? What would I want with that useless thing?”

Arden hated her as he had never hated another human being before. Not his father who beat him, not his mother who wouldn’t protect him, not even Ruby, who had laughed at him, too, called him a small fish, and gone to a backstreet doctor as soon as she found out she was pregnant.

“You release him, then?” the Headmaster asked.

Phil tapped her dimpled chin with one finger, contemplating. “No...no, I don’t think he should get off that easy. Let him owe me his life. I’ll claim it when I want it.”

Arden managed to make a choking sound, but the Headmaster nodded. “Very well. Go now, and do not return until you claim him.”

“I’ll go,” Phil said, “but I’ll be back sooner than that. I’ve got to look after my little brother, don’t I?”

She gave Stan a swift kiss and ruffled his unruly curls.

“And I’ll be taking this for the war effort,” she added, swinging the tulwar perilously close to Arden’s throat. He flinched.

“Don’t worry, magician,” she said with a wink. “Not yet, anyway.”

Phil ran home, past the waiting oast houses and the fields of mingled grumbling and laughing from the hop pickers.

Stan’s alive!
She sang it to herself as she jogged. She had to write to Mum and Dad at once, and oh, Hector, too. Could they get leave? And wouldn’t Fee be thrilled! The thought of seeing Fee’s face light up was in itself almost as good as the fact of having Stan back again.

Then she stopped dead in the middle of the path, flanked by apple trees laden with nearly ripe red-checked fruit. Should she tell Fee?

That there could even be any doubt startled her. She shared everything with Fee—her first kiss, her irrational fear of fresh figs, her doubts about Hector. Fee was her confidante, her second self. There was no trivial pain or worry with which she didn’t burden Fee, nor yet any poetic fancy or romantic whim Fee failed to inflict on her. They shared everything.

Of course she had to tell Fee that Stan was alive.

Only, was there any way to do it without revealing the existence of the College of Drycraeft?

It was too strange, too confusing, and for all that she was apparently immune to magic, and her sister presumably would be as well, too dangerous for Fee to be involved. Phil felt herself to be perfectly capable of dealing with masses of men who may or may not have wanted her dead, but she knew Fee wasn’t made of such stern stuff. What would she have done if she’d been the one tied up? Wept or fainted or quoted Tennyson. And although they said they meant her no harm, well, who could guess what might happen? Better to keep Fee well out of it.

She trotted off again and was still undecided as Weasel Rue came into sight. She was usually good at off-the-cuff lying—she called it improvisational acting—but try as she might, she couldn’t think of any way to tell one piece of news without the other.

She came to a panting halt in front of Fee, who sat on a bundle of hay, cuddling and cooing to a rooster that eyed Phil balefully. Phil did everything she could to school her expression. She bit her tongue, clenched her nails into her palms, thought of an audience full of critics from the
Daily Mail, London News,
the
Times,
and the
Guardian,
all expecting her to keep a straight face. For any other audience, it would have worked.

Fee flew into her arms, pressed herself to her sister’s damp forehead, squealed when the rooster tried to stab her with spurs he forgot had been removed with a hot potato the week before, and threw her heart and soul into the breathless words, “Tell me!”

And so, against her better judgment, Phil did.

Fee pushed her sister’s hair out of her face and stared at her, eyelash to eyelash, for a long moment. Then she rolled her eyes elaborately skyward and sighed.

“Fee, I know it sounds impossible, but you have to believe—”

“Hush,” she replied, frowning.

“I’m not crazy.”

“Of course you’re not,” Fee said absently, doing a fair pantomime of lunacy herself by pointing straight upward and ticking her arm downward ten degrees at a time, all the while making faces like a monkey doing math. “Bother! I don’t know how explorers and natives and such manage it. She said get the fowl in at six, but I can’t remember if I ever set my watch to summer time, and I always used to set it fast so I’d be on time for our shows, then I set it ahead another half-hour last night to make sure I’d get up early, and now I don’t know if its noon or midnight.” She squinted up at the sun. “What time does that sun look like to you? Do you think it would put the hens off their laying if I shut them up a little early?”

“Have you heard a word I said?” Phil asked.

“Oh, more than one!” she said, catching her sister’s hand. “And if you’ll just help me get the chickens shut up, we can be on our way to see Stan.”

“You mean you believe me?”

Fee gave her sister an odd look. Belief—in anything at all—had never been a problem for her. If any of her favorite authors had made a little brother vanish in a bomb barrage only to reappear under the most extraordinary circumstances, she would have accepted it without blinking. She’d always known her own life was destined to be a story, and was rather surprised it had waited until now.