“Good thing you didn’t press it. I don’t think his sanity could take it. I know mine hardly can. When do you start?”
“After tea I have my first shooting lesson.”
“Then you’ll train the rest?”
“I’ll do my best. Do you suppose our teachers did it this way —cramming the night before to stay just one step ahead of their students? I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have felt so stupid all those years. Are you coming to Stour with me?” She was going to collect more guns, teach a passel of pacifists how to make their very first fist, and of course tell them about the attempt on her life.
“Naturally,” Fee said, and to Phil’s disgust, she simpered.
“Are you aware that you look like an utter nincompoop every time you so much as think of Thomas? If I ever fall in love, I promise I’m going to be sensible about it.”
“Speaking of which, heard from Hector?”
“Bugger all,” Phil said, and ran to her room to dig through her pile of dirty clothes. She emerged, a bit disheveled, a moment later with the letter she’d received two days ago and promptly forgotten amid all the bustle and excitement and danger.
Guiltily, she tore it open.
“What does he say?” Fee asked.
Phil skimmed through. “Training is going well. He gave his sergeant a black eye during hand-to-hand combat training, but he didn’t get disciplined because the sergeant said it was better than a bayonet in the gut, and he might get a medal out of it, or a pension. The sergeant, not Hector. Let’s see...he doesn’t know where they’ll be posted to, and he couldn’t tell me anyway, but he has a feeling those French lessons might pay off. Hopes to go to Poland, though, to...oh!” She bit her lip. “To see if he can find any of Stan’s Romany relatives and let them know what happened. I didn’t write to tell him yet, did you? I’ll do that right away, and Mum and Dad, too. It’s inexcusable of me—and of you, too, so that makes me feel a bit better. Love to you, of course, and that’s it.”
Fee deftly plucked it out of her hand.
“Here! Give that back!”
“If that’s all there is to it, why not let me read it,” Fee said, dancing out of the way. “Oh ho!” She read aloud as Phil chased her around the table. “‘One of the lads from Shropshire, who I don’t think ever saw the inside of a schoolroom, asked Sarge if he could have three days of “passionate leave” because his sister was sick. Sarge said if he needed passionate leave for his sister, then everything he heard about Shropshire was true. Tell me, Phil, are you missing me too terribly? Should I ask my sergeant for passionate leave to visit you?’ Oh, Phil! If you really don’t care for him, you have to tell him.” She sniggered. “Before he requests passionate leave.”
“Oh, he’s just joshing, and you know he means compassionate. Anyway, I never gave him any reason to think it would be anything serious.”
“Didn’t you? I remember you two being late to rehearsal, you with your hair mussed and him with a goofy face.”
“You’re a fine one to talk!”
“I adore Hector, but you know he isn’t the one for you.”
“He might be. If not him, who else?”
“Perhaps a certain Master of Drycraeft who stares his eyes out whenever you aren’t looking.”
Phil blew a raspberry. “Arden? He doesn’t know what he wants, about anything.”
“Oh, men have a way of figuring these things out, given time.”
“Listen to you—you fall in love, and suddenly you’re the voice of wisdom.”
“I might be wrong about Arden, but you know I’m right about Hector. You have to tell him you’re not in love with him.”
“Just what he needs when he’s about to be deployed—a Dear John letter.”
“Better than letting him think he’s coming home to you with a veil and orange blossoms.”
“And I’ll get a letter in return saying ‘When did I ever propose?’ No, better to just say nothing.”
Fee shrugged and did just that. A few minutes later, after she’d painted her lips in a pretty pink pout, they set off for Stour.
The found the college in an uproar.
Arden—who would never admit he’d been watching for them for hours—ran out the door to meet them. “Another German magician came,” he said, breathless after dashing down four flights of stairs.
“Was anyone hurt?” Phil asked.
“No, she opened a gateway to the journeyman dormitory, and—”
“She!” Fee shrilled in indignation.
“So the lads say. Several resisted, and she drained them insensible, but she managed to whisper promises to a few. Of course, they all said later they only listened to gather information for the masters to use, but one of the young louts—a journeyman named Bergen—has been spouting about parasite races and supermen and lord knows what rot.”
The girls exchanged looks. “That’s Nazi talk,” Phil said.
“But what would the magicians have against the Jewish people?” Fee asked.
“All people,” Phil said, bristling. “Isn’t that what she meant, Arden? We’re the parasites, the nonmagic.”
“We had to confine him to his room after we caught him lecturing the prentices about magicians being the master race, and crushing the undesirables under our heels. To think that such a thing could take hold here in the college, after everything we’ve drilled into them.”
“Drilling makes for parroting, not belief,” Phil said. “Besides, I gather you think magicians are superior to the rest of humanity.”
“We are,” he said, not noticing Phil’s expression as he scanned the grounds for any more disturbance. “But that’s beside the point. Because we’re better, we stay separate. Our only purpose is to tend the Essence. Any talk of being masters is fundamentally against our creed. We could rule, easily, but we have more important things to do with our power.”
“Ah, so you’re fine with the racial superiority part of Nazi ideology,” Phil said archly. “Just not the world dominance part. Very reassuring.”
“It isn’t a question of race,” he said. “It’s a question of ability. I am more powerful than you, by virtue of my ability to control the Essence. Therefore I’m superior. It’s only logical. But I don’t need to dominate you.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Phil said under her breath, but Arden had looked away again.
“Where is Jereboam? He’s supposed to have to the journeymen gathered for your lesson.”
“I don’t think there will be a lesson,” Phil said, taking Fee’s hand and turning away.
“What? Of course there will. Just give me a moment to gather them. That Dresden magician was right about one thing—we’re weaklings and cowards. To think we’ll have to rely on crude instruments like knives and guns and fists when, if we only trained in practical use of the Essence, we could wipe those traitors from the face of the earth. Where are you going?” he added imperiously as the sisters walked away.
“We vermin would rather leave things to the supermen, if you don’t mind. Just a few more meetings, and I’m sure you’ll all be good little fascists, using us commoners for forced labor.”
“Phil! I never meant—”
She whirled to face him suddenly, scarlet hair flying, hands on her hips. “My people—my parasitic, subhuman, commoner people—are fighting a war against the very idea of superiority. You have some turbaned fop and a German siren pop into your school—we have tanks waiting across the Channel, and planes dropping firebombs on us every night, and a madman controlling all of Europe! And you have the nerve to tell me you’re superior to the rest of the world, but it doesn’t really matter because you’re too goddamned noble to rub it in our stupid little commoner faces? You, who won’t lift a finger to stop millions of people from dying, have the gall to think you’re better than my Mum and Dad and brother, who are risking their lives to keep the world sane and safe for everyone?”
“I never meant—”
“I was almost killed last night, j
ust for helping you!”
“What!”
“And do you know who they sent to kill me? Someone both you and the Nazis think is subhuman. A nonmagic Jew. A Jewish prisoner. A starving, desperate, probably tortured man who was weeping when he pulled the trigger.”
“My God!” Arden cried, in his distress unconsciously falling back to his eight-year-old self, for there was no religion at the college. “Are you hurt?”
“What do you care? I’m just an inferior commoner. Oh, that’s right, I can be useful to you. Slave labor to teach you how to protect yourselves, when you won’t do a thing for my people. Come on, Fee.”
She tugged her sister along. Fee allowed herself to be led, a bit reluctantly, perhaps, because she was desperate to see Thomas, but family came first.
Arden ran after them. “Wait, you don’t understand.” He grabbed Phil by the shoulder to stop her.
She knocked him away with the back of her hand, then slapped him across the face. “You’re either an isolationist superior magician, or you’re part of the world. Make your choice. You can’t have it both ways.”
The girls stormed off (well, Phil stormed, Fee drifted like a misty morning rain) as Arden, gaping, watched them.
“Weren’t you a little hard on him?” Fee asked, once they were out of earshot.
“Don’t you dare start on me!” Phil snapped.
“Aren’t you shooting yourself in the foot, just a bit? And I do hope saying that doesn’t jinx you with Uncle Walter tonight, but really, fighting Germans is fighting Germans, and if those Dresden magicians are helping Hitler—”
“Arden and the rest could do it themselves, so much better than I ever could. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have their power! I damned well wouldn’t let it go to waste like they do.”
“If there’s a chance they’ll help, you better go back.”
“No!” Her pride had been stung, and she wasn’t ready to yield. “If they want my help, let them come to me.”
How foolish Fee is, Phil mused as they walked, thinking Arden has any interest in me. And how foolish I am, to be intrigued by the possibility.
Good lord, woman, do you want to shoot your own head off?” Uncle Walter ranted. “No! Now you’ll shoot me instead. Toward the target, please.”
“But in movies they always hold their pistols up next to their heads, pointing at the sky.”
“That’s cinematography, not shooting. Did it ever occur to you that real life might be different?”
It had, but only recently, when she’d seen how terribly, viscously red spilled blood was.
He drilled her for an hour with the pistol, then introduced her to the rudiments of riflery. He reviewed the few firearms she’d gotten from the magicians. “They’ll do,” he said. “Archaic, but the principle’s the same: gunpowder, lead, and blow a hole in the person you don’t care for.”
Saving her life seemed to have brought Uncle Walter out of his shell shock, real or feigned, for the time being.
“I’d forgotten,” he said, “that there’s fighting, and then there’s fighting for something. In the trenches, it all gets blurred. When someone tries to kill a pretty girl, though, you remember that there are sometimes good reasons to do very unpleasant things. The problem is when kings and generals tell you to fight; when you’re fighting to hold an imaginary line, not for a damsel in distress.”
“Uncle Walter,” she asked later, as she broke down the pistol to clean and oil it, “do you really believe me? About the magicians, I mean?”
“Seems an odd sort of thing for you to make up. I can think of a thousand more convincing lies. It’s not significantly more likely that a starving refugee would break into a farm in the middle of nowhere and try to murder you in your bath, than it is that German magicians are trying to assassinate you.”
“But still.”
Uncle Walter shrugged. “I believe you about the magicians. I’ve seen one before, I think.”
Now she was sure he was losing his tenuous hold on sanity again.
“It was in the war. I was holed up in a sniper position on a rise, while a skirmish was going on below me. The Germans were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned; it should have been an easy victory. Then—and I could see it quite clearly through my spotting scope—a long-haired young man in a sort of parody of a uniform, rough olive wool, but cut in wide-legged flowing trousers and a puff-sleeved jacket, with a great shining opal necklace at his throat, raised his arms, and all at once our men began dropping like flies. Nearly the whole battalion was wiped out in the space of a minute. Gas, the report said, but what kind of gas picks and chooses its victims by uniform color? The Germans were in among us, but not one of them succumbed.”
“It didn’t affect you?”
“Well, I was hidden, up above the fighting, picking off officers, and no one had noticed me. I put a bullet in the fellow’s brain, and the survivors, no more than a dozen or so, escaped.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Ah, no. I was still gung ho then and didn’t want to be marked as unfit for duty. And now you say you’re trying to get England’s own magicians into the war? Glory, can you picture it? A silent war for once, death without the booms and bangs.”
She tried but still couldn’t convince him to train either the magicians or the Home Guard himself. “I’m teaching you to shoot so you can protect yourself and your sister, that’s all.” He’d dipped his toe back into the waters of the world, but he wasn’t willing to take the plunge.
As he left, he said, “Next time, if you’re a good girl, I might even let you have bullets.”
Alone in the field, Phil pantomimed the things she would teach her Home Guard the next morning, and so she was in a particularly militant frame of mind when Arden came tramping over the hill. Why then, she wondered, annoyed with herself, did she feel a surge of relief? Why did her heart give a leaping little flutter when he appeared?
When Phil finally found her tongue, she was not at her most diplomatic. “Come to apologize?” she asked sharply.
“No,” Arden said, swinging a heavy satchel from his shoulder. “I’ve come to remind you about your part of our bargain. Our weapons in exchange for your training. We never promised to help you with your war. We can’t, you know that. And our personal beliefs don’t matter when we each have our own war to fight, do they? You need what I can give you, and I need you. Er, we need you.”
He unzipped the elongated bag and drew out five matched and gleaming rifles.
“Where did those come from?” Phil asked. “I’d swear they weren’t in the game room.” Their stocks were made out of some burnished, leopard-spotted wood, the metal components were the shining blue-black of a raven’s wing, and though her experience with rifles encompassed all of one hour, she knew, the moment she picked one of them up, that it was perfectly balanced, light, true.
“Some of the younger masters and I have been tinkering,” he said, as Phil checked to see if it was unloaded, raised it to her shoulder, and dry-fired into the distant shrubbery. “We copied the rifle that seemed the most modern, and improved it a bit.”
“So you made these with magic? The Essence, I mean?”
“Well, I didn’t, because I’m still not allowed to. But my friends did.”
“Can I use them, then?” Phil asked.
“Haven’t you figured that much out yet?” he said. “The Essence doesn’t touch you, true.” He fixed his gaze steadily on her. “See, nothing, no matter how much Essence I draw.”
“What did you try to do?”
“Change that ridiculous hair of yours to something a bit quieter.”
Phil felt compelled to pull a lock over her shoulder and check, just to be sure. “Don’t do that anymore,” she warned.
“You know it won’t work. Why should you mind?”
“It just gives me the willies to think you could change someone utterly against her will, make her do things she doesn’t want to do, feel things she doesn’t want to feel.”
/>
She almost wished she could blame some of what she was feeling on magic. It would make things far less confusing.
“But the Essence can also be used to make things, real things,” Arden said. “And once they’re in the world, there’s no difference between what we create and what comes about naturally.” He gave a little chuckle. “You can see the jungle and the wild beasts at Stour, right? We created them, too.”
Phil marveled at the rifles a moment longer, still half-expecting them to dissolve in her hands. Arden took advantage of her distraction to glare at a serpentine tendril that tumbled on her cheek. It annoyed him, and he wanted very much to tuck it behind her ear. When she finally looked up and caught him staring, he coughed and stepped back.
“Well,” he said brusquely, “does our agreement still hold? I’ve done my part, and I’ll get you a few more rifles if you like. You’ll come tomorrow morning?”
“I suppose,” she said grudgingly. In her heart she was relieved that he’d made it easy for her to come back.
I guess an apology was too much to hope for, she thought as Arden strode away.
Then he turned, and her heart gave another one of its ridiculous dickey-bird leaps as he walked back and stood close, too close, oh lord, far too close, did these magicians have no sense of propriety?
“I am sorry,” he said.
And before she could renew their conflict by belligerently pinning him down as to exactly what he was sorry for, he left.
Chapter 13
Don’t you think it’s terribly hard on him?” Fee asked as she leaned her head awkwardly out the window, letting the sun’s last rays dry her strawberry masses of waves as she combed them into smooth obedience. “He must be pulled in a thousand directions. Well, three, at least.” She knew Phil was, in her own way, as emotional a creature as she was, but she fought it so hard that it was always easier to stick to facts and certainties than feelings and exaggeration.
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