“I thought you said if you could hang upside down with a passel of men trying to peer at your knickers, you could do anything,” Fee reminded her.
Phil was about to tell Fee to mind her own knickers when a hoarse voice from the sofa said, “That, I’d pay to see.”
Phil almost didn’t recognize Uncle Walter without his WWI gas mask on. Hunkered in his room, chained to the radiator, he’d been a ruined hulk, a decrepit shell sunk in his memories. She’d thought of him as Mrs. Pippin’s uncle, but now she realized he must be her brother, and Algernon’s uncle. He was in his late forties at most, with a long nose and small, bird-bright eyes. He hadn’t been out of his room since the Albions arrived, but now he sat on the sofa. It was evidently one of his good days.
“I saw you out there with them,” he said. “You’re wasting your time, you know.”
“Yes,” Phil said, “that does seem to be the general consensus.”
“It’s not just Bittersweet, though. People don’t think about things, if they can help it. Especially when it comes to war. People rush into it without thinking, and they hide from it without thinking. I’ve seen ten thousand boys run straight into enemy fire without thinking a single thought. Do it, someone says, and they do. And then ministers and men dither and mutter with empty pates when a few minutes of violence would stem a lifetime of bloodshed. They don’t think, you see. Ah, but where does that get you most of the time? Crazy or dead. Well, everything gets you dead, doesn’t it. Eventually. Can’t win.”
Perhaps not such a good day after all,
Phil thought. She backed up a step.
“War’s like tennis,” Uncle Walter went on, perched on the edge of the sofa with his elbows on his knees. “You lob the ball to me. What can I do but knock it back, then you to me, over and over? If I don’t, I lose. You won’t put down your racket, for then you’d lose. One man who stops to think in the middle of the battlefield is dead. Ten million men who stop to think in the heat of war are a generation of angels who will make a heaven on earth.”
Phil didn’t quite grasp what he was saying, but Fee drifted to sit at his side and asked, “What’s the answer, then?”
“Ah, but that would require thinking, pet, and I gave that up with my marbles and my gun. Let’s speak of pleasanter things. Which of you used to hang upside down in her knickers?”
“That would be me, and the answer’s easy,” Phil said. “You defend yourself and what you love. They started it. We stop it.”
He cocked his head up at her. “Spoken like a true heroine.”
“War’s not nice, but I won’t feel guilty for thrashing someone who threatens me.”
“They lob the ball, you return it.
Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
”
“Better that than getting whacked in the loaf with a tennis ball,” Phil said, and Uncle Walter gave a laugh that sounded perfectly sane. “Look here, I want your help.”
“Anything to oblige, my dear.” For a moment she could see the man he’d been, gay and insouciant and twenty, charming the local ladies in the years leading up to the War to End All Wars.
“I need you to help me drill my Home Guard volunteers.”
All at once his eyes glazed over, and without a word he stood, brushed past them, and shuffled down the hall. The girls stared at each other for a moment, then followed him. By the time they got to his doorway, he had already chained himself to the radiator and was struggling with shaking fingers to pull his old army-issue gas mask over his glistening brow.
Phil squatted beside him and pulled the mask away. “Look at me. No—look at me!” She threw the mask across the room. “I know you’re not crazy. Not really. It’s just a dumb show to escape reality. You saw terrible things. Maybe you did terrible things. But can you be so selfish as to hide in your room when England needs you?”
“England doesn’t need another man to shoot metal into meat.”
“We have to make sure the best side wins.”
“There is no best side.”
“How can you say that?
We
don’t round up people and call them undesirable.
We
don’t work people with different opinions to death in labor camps.
We
don’t try to take over the world.”
“Only because it hasn’t occurred to us. Or because it wouldn’t be useful to whoever’s in charge. Believe me, all humans are beasts. Go away.”
“Pick up a gun and teach us how to fight!”
He closed his eyes, stuck his fingers in his ears, and began a singsong chant. “Hit the ball, lob it back...hit the ball, lob it back.”
However Phil shouted, however she shook him, he wouldn’t acknowledge her after that.
“I’ll get through to him somehow.”
Fee took her sister in their familiar embrace, forehead to forehead. “Hasn’t he suffered enough? Let him be, Phil.”
“I have to do what I can, and more than I can, even if it comes to naught,” Phil said at last. “Maybe I’m going about it all wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Fee asked. She pulled her sister down onto the bed and began brushing out her hair, curling the tips around her fingers.
“This morning the villagers didn’t care a fig for the war, and now I have twelve volunteers for the Home Guard, and half the rest of Bittersweet is at least thinking about doing their bit. It wasn’t my doing, I know that. I have tea and Diana the Green-Eyed-Monster to thank.”
“Mostly tea, I think.”
“Exactly. Everyone has something that will spur him to action. I just have to find it.”
Fee looked perplexed. “You mean, for Uncle Walter?”
“No, you goose—for the magicians! Why should they be any different from the villagers? Blind, stupid, closed-minded, parochial —until you give them a damned good reason not to be. I just have to find their tea.”
“But you said it yourself—all they care about is their college.”
“Out of the hundreds of men there, surely a few would care about England, given the chance,” Phil said. “Think what just one real magician could do. Here I am, teaching bakers and mechanics to slip handcuffs, when the magicians could pluck bombs from the sky!”
“But how will you convince them?”
“We just have to figure out what they need, what they long for, what they lack.”
“They need women,” Fee said promptly. “But if you’re not up for seduction . . .”
“Well, I don’t have to seduce them, but maybe I could show them something they haven’t seen in a while.”
Fee giggled.
“I didn’t mean
that,
” she said.
“Not even to win the war?”
“Well, certainly then. Now there’s a thought. Flashing bosoms on the battlefield to distract enemy soldiers. You know they can’t resist staring.”
“It would never work. Our side would stare, too. Oh, we should tell Uncle Walter! Bosoms might bring about the ten million angels on the battlefield, all laying down their arms at once.”
Phil was still contemplating the conundrum the next morning —what does a man who can make anything with magic really need? She determined to grill Thomas that evening when he sneaked back to Weasel Rue as promised. If she could separate Fee from his lips. Honestly, you’d think the girl had never bussed a fellow, the way she went on.
True to his word, Thomas crept up to Weasel Rue farm near dusk.
“I can’t stay long,” he said. “I’m supposed to be out feeling the star Essence, which is the most boring thing on earth because no one can really feel it, but we all pretend to, faintly, and then look smug. May I have another kiss?”
Phil rolled her eyes, but Fee obliged, and soon she was so involved in this pleasant pursuit that she hardly flinched when Master Arden emerged from the gloaming and cried, “Ha!”
“A regular boys’ night out,” Phil said. “And you pass yourselves off as such models of monklike decorum! Off to the pub for a pint, are you?”
“I’m here to collect this wastrel before he’s discovered missing,” Arden said. “Take your hands off that hussy and come along, prentice.”
No one called Fee a hussy, unless it was Phil herself. She swung for his face at exactly the same time Thomas charged him, shoulder first like a rugby forward, and barreled him to the ground. Once Thomas had the master pinned, he was like the dog who caught the car, having no idea what to do with his prize.
“Take it back,” Thomas said.
“How dare you, you insolent—”
“Take it back, please,” Thomas said calmly. “I won’t let you up, else.”
Arden hooked his foot under Thomas’s hip and pushed him off. “Come with me now, or I’ll—”
“I love her!” Thomas said, trying to hold Arden down.
“Love doesn’t exist!” Arden said, and punched Thomas’s naïve, angelic face, knocking him back onto the turf. Arden stood, looking ashamed, and brushed himself off, while Fee flung herself onto Thomas, covering his face with kisses (not realizing that’s the very last thing a freshly punched person wants).
Phil stood between the men with her arms crossed. “You’re not welcome here.”
“This boy is my responsibility. Come, Thomas.” His voice was paternal—stern and gentle—and Phil could tell how sorry he was.
Thomas got unsteadily to his feet. “I understand it now,” he said softly.
“Understand what?” Arden asked.
“War,” Thomas said. “I know now why someone will fight, why someone will kill. I love her, Arden. There is no love in the college, but I’ve found it, on my own. You can’t take it away. I won’t let you.” He steeled himself and squared his broad shoulders, while Fee cooed and petted his battered face. “I won’t let you,” he said again, in deadly earnest.
“You know you have no choice,” Arden replied. “You belong to the College of Drycraeft for life. You can’t have a lover, or a wife, or a family. You’re deluding yourself with this...oh, very well, she’s not a hussy,” he amended, seeing Thomas’s eyes glitter dangerously. “But it’s a fleeting experience, a passing physical sensation, nothing as enduring as our link to the Essence.”
“You don’t know,” Thomas said hotly. “It’s far better than the Essence.”
“I
do
know. I—” He broke off. “Leave it for your journeyman year, prentice. Then you can dally with all the women you like, and be serving the college at the same time. Return to your studies, and in a week this girl will be nothing to you.”
“I won’t go back. You can’t make me!”
“What a child you are,” Arden said, shaking his head, and then the air began to glow with opal fire.
“No!” Thomas shouted, going suddenly stiff. “You can’t take me back! I won’t! I want to leave the college. Please!” He began to rise off the ground, his body tense and frozen. His next cry was cut off as the immobilization reached his mouth.
Fee dodged around her sister and fell at Arden’s feet. “Please let him make his own choice,” she begged him. “Forget about love. I know you despise it. Only think of him. Don’t keep him a prisoner. If your Essence is the joy you say it is, shouldn’t it be a pleasure to be at your college, not a punishment?”
“You don’t understand. You couldn’t. It isn’t up to me. The other masters would track him down and bring him back—or kill him.”
“No!” She clung to his trousers, and Arden looked embarrassed. “Can’t you hide him, or—or—”
“There’s nothing I can do. Particularly after the trouble I’m already in. Thomas is my prentice, bound to me. I’m responsible for his training and his conduct. If the other masters couldn’t find him, I’d be punished in his stead.” He gave a sardonic laugh and looked at Phil. “If you mean to make your claim on my life, you’d best be quick about it. There may be others clamoring for it, even if Thomas returns.”
“How can you stay in that terrible place?” Phil asked.
She expected him to staunchly defend the college again, but he only said, “Cloistered peace is better than the fever of the world.”
For a moment, Phil thought he looked like Uncle Walter, in that instant before he sank into his episodes of madness, voluntary or real.
Arden has suffered,
Phil realized,
and he shuts himself into the College of Drycraeft as others lock themselves into lunacy or the bottle to escape their pain.
She felt a fleeting tenderness that was rare for her, a Fee-like desire to offer comfort.
Arden turned on his heel, and Thomas, hovering, immobile as a trussed and frozen carcass, drifted behind him.
“Phil, do something!” Fee said.
“What can I do?”
“You can knock him down.”
“He’d only get up again.”
“Not if you knocked him hard enough.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Arden said, stopping, arms crossed. “Can’t you two just let it go? Everything you’ve done has caused change and disruption. All we want is to be left alone. The college has endured for hundreds of years, after the last Albions tore it apart.” He stopped short.
“What did you say?” Phil asked sharply.
“Nothing.”
“You mean, there have been other Albions who knew about you?”
“That’s not for me to say.”
“Phil,” Fee whispered urgently into her ear, “what about Thomas?”
“Oh, fine, we’ll go with them and see what we can do.”
“I forbid it!” Arden said.
“You might be able to do your hocus-pocus on that poor boy, but you know you can’t touch us.”
“I could knock
you
down.”
If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was starting to find this all just a little bit funny.
“Let Thomas go, and we’ll all go to Stour together,” Phil said.
Arden looked doubtful.
“He won’t try to run,” Fee said.
“And you could stop him if he did,” said Phil. “You know it’s wrong to keep someone against his will. Your college might as well be a prison. Let us talk to your headmaster. I’m sure he’ll listen to reason.”
“He’d die to protect the college.”
“Yes, yes, I know that. You’d all die for your Essence, but you won’t lift a finger for your fellow Englishman. But letting one boy leave isn’t going to tear the place apart.”
They’re like gadflies,
Arden thought, looking at the girls. Wisps of things with their hair like sunset, commingling in the evening breeze as they stood shoulder to shoulder, insignificant beside him, a master of the Essence, and yet somehow he could not rid himself of them. They buzzed their arguments and darted in with their incandescent emotions, stinging him until he thought he’d go mad. Short of pummeling them—and despite his peaceful vows he was sorely tempted—there was no way to evade them. He was skilled enough to open a portal and go directly to Stour in an instant, but what would that avail him? They’d just hike there and be pounding at the door within an hour and would never, never go away until they’d turned the entire college on its head.