Thomas, who’d been alive for nearly eighteen years without anyone commenting on it, looked puzzled. She told them what happened.
“They’ll be so relieved to hear you weren’t killed,” Phil said.
Thomas and Fee exchanged a look, and Fee squeezed his hand. “I’m not going back,” he said.
“What! They’ll kill you! You said so yourself.”
“I would have stayed loyal to them forever, if they’d told us the truth,” he said. “But it’s wrong to kill a person for thinking, for loving, for questioning. Exterminated like vermin, at the will of the Headmaster! Rudyard has set himself up like a god, telling us all the while that magicians must avoid power at all costs.”
“It makes you wonder what else they’re lying about,” Phil said.
“Exactly. I can’t stay there. They’re sheep, I tell you, blind and gullible, and at the mercy of the Headmaster. Not all of them, though. Not Arden.” He glowed with hero worship. “He’s got such a following! Not just Felton and the others who want to defend Stour. There are whispers all over the college about a brave new world for magicians, where we’re not hemmed in and dominated, where we can think and act for ourselves.”
A brave new world. Wasn’t that what the Kommandant said? Was the entire college lured by the Dresden magicians’ offer of power at the expense of commoners? Or was it just a coincidence, this familiar rhetoric, the temptation to crib from Shakespeare (and Kipling and Huxley)?
“Thank goodness this happened,” Thomas went on. “Oh, what a terrible thing to say! But I’m free now.”
“You’ll have to be careful, though. They can track down the boys they abduct, so what if a journeyman finds you?”
“It will only matter for a little while. Soon enough I’ll be out of England.”
“Where are you going?”
He looked at Fee, who was suddenly like a statue of Grace Darling, impossibly stoic, the epitome of brave English womanhood.
“He’s going to war,” she said, pitching her voice low so it didn’t tremble.
She was losing her love after all.
Don’t do it, Phil wanted to say. Run away to Ireland and live in a hovel with Fee until the war’s over and done with. Go to America and plant corn and make fat happy babies together. Hell, go back to Stour and be a sheep, or a Nazi magician, or whatever they tell you to be. No more death, please. A few weeks ago she would have sent every boy in England to Europe with a rifle over his shoulder. Now she was like Fee when she saw a desiccated worm, overcome with universal pity.
But: “Thank you,” she said. “For England, thank you. You’re better than the lot of them. Better than Arden, a thousandfold.” How strange that I’m crying, and Fee’s eyes are dry. I’m not at all like I thought I was.
An hour later they were at the railroad station to see Thomas off. Luckily it was the day the London workers were scheduled to come for the apple picking. It had been an easy matter to smuggle Thomas into Fee’s bed for the night, but Mrs. Pippin might finally put her foot down if her evacuee kept a man in the house for several days. He planned to catch the train on its southerly jaunt to the Brighton coast and find an army recruiter from there.
“But you’re not eighteen,” Fee said, unable to tell him not to go, but grasping for the last possible loophole.
“I can make a birth certificate that says I’m older, or fuddle the recruiter into believing anything. Don’t worry, love. Someone needs to stop this war. Just wait until I’m over there!”
What terrible times these are, Phil thought. He was an Arcadian innocent who didn’t even know what war was, and now—off to kill. Did it happen to every man, eventually, this bloodlust? She’d been so full of it herself, so bent on revenge after seeing the first pieces of her country destroyed. The closer she got to the war, though, the more real it became. Her gung-ho jingoism faded, and in her heart she wished she could handcuff herself to a radiator and stay in the darkness until the war was over.
The problem with that is, I can shim the handcuffs open, she thought with a mirthless laugh. There was no avoiding gruesome reality, there was only getting through it, with tricks and bluffs if necessary, and putting on a game face. Which Phil did admirably now, watching with a cheerful, reassuring smile as Fee and Thomas bade each other farewell, all the while very deliberately not thinking about Arden, not one little bit.
She thought about other things, though. The Dresden magicians hadn’t won the war for Germany yet, after a year of fighting. In fact, as England bullied its way to air supremacy and redoubled her efforts by sea, it seemed the tide was slowly turning, if not quite in England’s favor, at least not in such a rip current against it. Why hadn’t the Dresden magicians killed the king and Churchill, a few admirals and field marshals, thrown the country into chaos, and brought down all of England’s planes? And why, for that matter, after that stunning initial display of aggression, hadn’t they made an all-out attack on the college?
If they hadn’t, it must be because they couldn’t. The Dresdeners were milking other, unwilling magicians to get more power, but it still wasn’t enough. They needed numbers. They needed the hundreds of magicians at Stour.
If they got them, the war would be over in a heartbeat. England would lose, and though Hitler couldn’t know it, he’d lose, too, as the magicians dominated the commoners.
I have to change tactics, she thought. I have to find a way to keep the college from turning against commoners despite what the Germans say. I have to make them see that they’re just people, the same as commoners. Only, how do you convince a man who can tear a plane from the sky that he’s ordinary?
Fee and Thomas came out of the postmistress’s office, he looking glum, she with that peculiarly maniacal expression that comes of trying to hide wild elation.
“What do you think?” Fee said. “That bomber of yours came down a couple of miles north of us and plowed up a big length of track. She says London can’t spare men or metal to fix it for at least a few weeks. We’re a nonessential line. The entire branch line will be shut down.” At the last minute she pulled her face into an appropriate expression of disappointment, but she couldn’t quite hold it.
Just then Mrs. Pippin stormed down the main street in the greatest huff Phil had ever seen.
“Supposed to meet the London sluts and drunkards today, and what do they tell me? A great bloody big plane took out the railroad last night, and no trains can get through. Don’t those damned Germans know I have to get the apples picked? With petrol rationed as it is, I’ll never get the workers in by the road, and if I don’t have them here in the next few days, I’ll lose half the harvest. I’m ruined—ruined!”
Phil had an idea and started to follow Mrs. Pippin.
“You go with her, Fee,” Thomas said. “I have a long, hard walk ahead of me.”
“What do you mean?” Fee asked, seeing her reprieve fly.
“I’ll go on foot until I meet the next connecting line.”
“But that’s at least thirty miles!”
“I can’t wait. The longer I’m here in England, the longer the war will last.”
He was as confident as a child on the roof wearing a cape, certain he can fly. But then, Thomas probably could fly, if he really put his mind to it.
He took hold of the strawberry tips of her hair and wrapped the tresses around his wrists, binding himself to her. Then, without another word, without a kiss or a farewell, he untangled himself and ran south along the train tracks.
Fee turned away. I can’t watch him get smaller and smaller until he’s gone, she thought resolutely. It’s too prophetic. He’s going away awhile, and he’ll be back. I have to believe that. I do believe it. If he doesn’t come back I’ll—I’ll go and get him myself!
But what choice do you have?” Phil railed at Headmaster Rudyard later that day. He’d left his office door open, expecting Jereboam, and was ambushed by Phil instead. “They were freezing last night, and that was when they were working hard. Tonight, without proper shelter, they
’ll have chilblains and frostbite, and it will only get colder.”
“There’s room for some in the parts of Stour that still stand,” the Headmaster countered.
“This office and the library are the only intact buildings.”
“And the rest will use the Essence to construct adequate shelter.”
“Ha!” Phil said. “Did you see the hut some of the journeymen tried to erect? It leaned like the Tower of Pisa and finally fell on one of them when he tried to nap inside. He’s nursing a broken ankle and a concussion now. They can make tents at best. You’re the only one who has any knowledge of architecture, and you’ll be busy rebuilding Stour. What’s the harm? It will be for two weeks at the most.”
After much arguing the Headmaster said, “Very well, then. The younger men may go. They’ll be under the direction of a master, and they will perform the Exaltation near their temporary homes. It is close enough to Stour that it shouldn’t make much difference. Close, compared to the wide world.”
And so, beyond Phil’s wildest belief, Headmaster Rudyard agreed that some hundred of his journeymen and masters should for a time leave Stour and live among the commoners, picking apples and assisting with the cider press work by day, and sleeping in the hopper huts by night.
Then another surprise. “Is Mrs. Abernathy still alive?”
It took Phil a moment to place the name. Ah yes, the dear, deaf old woman who, when she’d tried to talk about rationing, thought Phil was hungry and loaded her with food. “Hale as can be expected for a woman of ninety,” she said.
“And Mrs. Braeburn?”
Phil wracked her memory and recalled her first day in Bittersweet. “Granny Braeburn? She died not too long ago. Ninety-five, I think she was.”
“She was the assistant cook at Stour when I was a boy. She used to save the marrow for me, my favorite. And she had a biscuit cutter in the shape of a sailing ship. Father disapproved, but when I had tea in the nursery, I could always play Navy and Pirates with my toast.”
When he’d been captured as a boy, he hadn’t tied messages to pigeons—he’d escaped. How had he been turned into such a steadfast, brutally loyal magician?
“Do you know everyone in Bittersweet?”
“When I returned to Stour in my thirties after Mafeking, as a magician, not a lord, I used to sneak out and watch my old friends. They were friends to me, you know. Tenants to my father, practically serfs, but to me...I had to fuddle them so they didn’t know me, but I looked after every one of them, in the beginning. They were my responsibility as lord of Stour. That didn’t change. I couldn’t study architecture anymore, but I could give my dependents beautiful homes. I couldn’t mediate their disputes or advise them about their farms, but I could use the Essence to make a drunkard decide to be sober, to make the hops and apples flourish. When the Great War came, twenty young men from Bittersweet enlisted the day war was declared. I knew every one of them. Only one came back.”
“Uncle Walter.”
“I remember him as a baby. When I was lord of Stour after my father died, I attended every christening. Walter spat up in the baptismal font, then grinned like a demonic cherub at the vicar. When I saw what war had done to that baby, I swore none of my former tenants would fight in a war again. What a fool I was.”
Phil shook her head.
“You can’t stop it,” the Headmaster went on. “You can only thank heaven there’s a limit to what commoners can do to each other.”
“There is no limit,” Phil said, certain.
“Oh, you’d be surprised.” He stood abruptly. “Enough of this. Memories do no one any good. Three weeks they may help with the harvest.”
“You’ll have Stour rebuilt that soon?”
“No. But it does no good to plan too far ahead in these times. We’ll see what happens in three weeks.”
Chapter 19
No, ye daft toff. You cup your palm around it so, like you’re grabbing a nice handful of titty, then you give ’er a lift and a bit of a twist, and off she comes.”
Mr. Tremlett, one of Mrs. Pippin’s orchard men, was giving the new apple pickers their first lesson. He’d been told they were scholars evacuated from their university and sent to Stour. The gossip said the poor blighters were surprised when they showed up with all their trunks and laboratory gizmos and found that Stour was no more than a ruin. Seems it had been left on the surveys as an intact mansion all these years. Now they had volunteered to help with the apple harvest in exchange for living quarters.
And a good thing, too. Besides Mrs. Pippin’s vast acres, there were the Finchley groves (Diana’s family), not to mention all the orts and jots growing here and there. Every family in Bittersweet had an acre or two, and the land was fertile enough that even if they left their trees mostly to their own devices, they were guaranteed a decent crop for eating, drinking, and selling.
Mostly for drinking. Hops go for beer, and apples go for cider.
“It ain’t really a tit, Professor,” he called in exasperation. “Don’t stare at it and caress it. Just yank it off and drop it in the basket. Aye, that’s it. Keep up that pace, and you might have the tree bare inside of a fortnight.”
When they had the basics down, the magicians (or professors, as they were universally known) were divvied up among Bittersweet’s various orchards. Most of the villagers joined in the picking, too, and though they were sometimes baffled by the magicians’ peculiar ways, they unanimously pronounced them good eggs.
It was remarkable how spirits had lifted in Bittersweet. They’d found their wartime cheer, the manner the rest of the nation had adopted a year ago, defiance in a smile, stoicism in a joke. Housewives and hostesses put aside old differences to pool their sugar and have grand bridge parties, playing not for coin but for the even scarcer tea and chocolate. They compared the blackout bruises acquired from bumps in the dark. The village, not long ago a somber, deadly place, now rippled with laughter and jokes, all of which they shared like a generous banquet with their guest workers.
The magicians, reserved and diffident at first, found they weren’t proof against commoner camaraderie.
“I think them being so worn out makes it easier,” Fee said as the sisters walked home from the post office. Still no word from Thomas, and though the postmistress promised to send a bicycle messenger to Weasel Rue if anything came, Fee still had to check at least once, often twice a day. “They tried not to fraternize, but by evening they just don’t have the resistance not to laugh at Eamon’s jokes.”
Probably the biggest contribution to the magician-commoner détente was the tapping of last year’s casks.
It was a Bittersweet tradition that when the first apple of the year was plucked, the last barrels of the year before that had been fermented and aged to perfection were opened. Though cider might be ready for general consumption within two months of pressing, the villagers were connoisseurs.
“The Headmaster never forbade it,” Felton said, raising his cup.
“And apples are known to be healthy,” Hereweald added, tipping his, and so the others followed suit, and before long they went from exchanging civilities with the commoners, to exchanging pleasantries, to exchanging pats on the back and tipsy bearish hugs. That night of celebration set the tone for the rest of the apple picking, and to the magicians’ astonishment, they found they rather liked commoners.
All, apparently, except Arden.
He was nominally in charge, even over some of the masters his senior in years and rank, and lived in a hopper hut all his own, the very last in the long row. This caused some resentment among the other magicians, for they were berthed eight and ten to a house, sleeping on pallets on the floor (albeit covered in downy silken cushions they’d conjured up—their dwellings, though cramped, looked like pashas’ tents), but most of them had already formed a special bond in training in Phil’s muster, and they used their new closeness to try out advanced, occasionally dangerous manipulation of the Essence. Phil quizzed them daily, and all were c
ertain there had been no further incursions from the Dresden magicians, but now free from the Headmaster’s eye, they were more determined than ever to be ready. The clique of five had expanded, and every day more magicians were proving themselves perfectly willing to violate everything they’d been taught—as long as no one found out.
From all this, Arden remained aloof. He’d rise early to stalk through the hopper hut village and count his charges. He didn’t pick apples, though he would stride through the orchards with his hands clasped behind his back, never admonishing but frowning severely when any of the magicians became too familiar with one of the villagers, particularly the females.
There weren’t a great many unattached young women in Bittersweet, but by the second week of the harvest, their numbers miraculously swelled as word reached outlying farms and letters sped to the rare distant cousin who had migrated thirty miles away to a neighboring town. Perhaps no one said in quite so many words that Bittersweet swarmed with unattached, eligible young men, but like bees to a flower (or as Phil said with annoyance, like flies to dung, for they all seemed eager to lay their eggs), the women came.
Phil joined in the picking, but Arden rarely spoke to her. She watched him, though, stealthy and intense, as she’d watch a competing illusionist to ferret out the secret of some unknown trick. What do you have up your sleeve, Arden? she wondered. The things she’d briefly suspected—they couldn’t be true.
At least Phil’s plan seemed to be working. Slightly under a hundred magicians were working side by side with commoners, treating them like equals. They gossiped about the war, and when someone brought a battery-powered wireless to the groves, they clustered around it, shoulder to shoulder with the villagers, gasping when they heard about the latest casualties, cheering at a successful strike by the RAF. They flirted and argued and ate side by side, and their bond with the commoners grew stronger by the day.
Only, it would all be over soon. The plucked apples were sweetening in the shade, and the press works were being greased. The harvest was almost over, and there would be no excuse for the magicians to stay. Would they go back to their cloister and turn their backs on their new friends in their hour of need, or would they stand up to the Headmaster and hundreds of years of tradition, and fight, for themselves and for England?
Delusion Page 21
