There was a time when he’d firmly believed the college needed to be shaken up. Once, when he’d laid his head on a creamy breast and dreamed of a different future, he’d rehearsed the very words he’d say to Headmaster Rudyard.
I’m devoted to the Essence,
he would have said,
and will be all my life. But now that I’m trained and trustworthy, why not serve the world
in
the world. I would never use my abilities for power, or to change the course of events that don’t concern me. Please, Headmaster, let me be free to love, to live, to—
But he’d never had the chance to speak those words. His dreams had dissolved in Ruby’s mocking laugh, the future he imagined washed down the drain of some back-alley clinic.
Now—he couldn’t help it—he wondered if the fault had been not with love but with its object. Seeing those two fools together, part of him wanted to say it was no more than the lust of young blood. But another part thought,
What if it is real? What will the college be killing by keeping them apart?
And even if it was as false as saccharine, shouldn’t they be allowed to discover it for themselves? If there was no pain at Stour, neither was there joy, save that which was to be found in the Essence. And that could be had anywhere, from Cornwall to Kent to Northumberland.
The Headmaster would never allow it. All the magicians were drilled from their first days at the college, when their home lives and kidnapping were still fresh, in why they were forbidden to leave.
Gently, he eased the boy to the ground and freed him from his magical bonds. Thomas rubbed his stiff limbs. “I didn’t stop to think that you might be punished, too, master,” he said meekly. “You’ve always been so kind to me. I’d never do anything to make you suffer.” He turned to Fee. “I cannot leave the college if Master Arden will be punished.”
“But—”
“Would you follow me if it meant your sister would come to harm? Don’t lose hope, my love,” he said when her eyes silvered with tears. “When he sees I’m in earnest, Headmaster Rudyard will have to let me go.”
“You’re forgetting the lessons of the past, prentice. He’d never risk another Schism. That was the fault of one man leaving.”
“Yes, but—”
“Save your breath for the hike, prentice, and for kissing your sweetheart goodbye.”
“You would let him go, if it were up to you?” Fee asked.
Arden didn’t answer.
Thomas and Fee walked slowly ahead. His arm held her shoulders, while both of hers encircled his waist, and her head lay on his breast. How they could locomote like that was beyond Phil, but she supposed that love made people insensible to comfort and practicality.
Phil and Arden walked several paces behind, a suitable distance apart. “I thought you weren’t supposed to use the Essence,” Phil said as they strolled along the rutted track.
He’d forgotten. It was such a part of him that he’d used it as naturally as blinking.
“I suppose I’ll be punished for that, too.”
“The very idea that they can discipline a grown man like a schoolboy,” Phil scoffed. “Flogging?” She sounded hopeful.
“No, you know we don’t condone violence of any kind.”
“Hmm, like punching your prentice?”
“I—I made a mistake.”
“You shouldn’t have done it to the poor boy, but I like that you have it in you. Not a bad right hook.”
He gave her a slantendicular glance.
“Are all the others like you, then? Keeping up a pretense of pacifism but full of pent-up rage? You tried to kill me with magic, and you knocked the snot out of Thomas, who by the way took it like a champion and knocked you down cleanly enough before. It strikes me that the currents run deeper than they appear to among you magicians. So what will they do to you, then?”
“If Thomas got away—if I allowed him to get away—they might well drain me. But for using the Essence when I’m under prohibition, they’ll likely add to my current sentence.”
“But obviously you can still use the Essence. They just trust you not to?”
“There must be trust with the kind of power we wield. Trust, and control.”
But not enough trust,
he thought.
And too much control.
No!
he chided himself.
I’ve resigned myself to the way things must be. I must not think like that ever again.
“When I was in school, we did whatever we could to get around our punishment. There was a girl who kept herself in candy money by selling prewritten sheets saying
I will not
a hundred times. In French and Latin and German, too. Cut our punishment in half, just having to fill in the crime.”
He gave her a puzzled look.
“You know, the standard punishment, one hundred lines of
I will not
whatever. Dip Edith’s pigtails in the inkwell. Make spitballs. Pass notes.”
“I was only in school for a year. I started late, because...my mother was ill.”
“And you started once she was well again?”
“I started after she died.”
She didn’t want to picture the little boy he’d been. She didn’t want to feel sympathy.
“Mum kept me home until I was seven. She knew she was dying. Then when she was gone, my father sent me to school. The College of Drycraeft took me when I was eight.”
“Your poor father! He must have been mad with grief when they stole you away.”
“He was dead by then. When they found me, I was living on the street.”
It was getting harder and harder to fight the sympathy, and she really wished he wouldn’t tell her about his childhood. He was so easy to hate that kind thoughts about him were unsettling. “How terrible, to lose father and mother both. How did he die?”
He was silent for so long, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Of course, he hates me, and regrets he’s said so much.
Then, as they came within earshot of the griping and giggling hop pickers in the hanging trellised gardens, he said in a very low voice, “I killed him.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, hoping he was being metaphorical, suffering from some misplaced guilt that his father suffered a heart attack while working hard to provide for his son.
“What do you think it means? I came into my powers, and I drained him of his Essence.”
“It was an accident?”
“By no means. I had no idea what I was doing, mind you, but you couldn’t call it an accident.”
“But why?”
“He was a son of a bitch who beat me since I could stand, and beat my mother on her deathbed when she tried to protect me,” he said. “He died in under a minute, and I ran away. If I’d known what I was about, he would have lasted a month, writhing and screaming all the while.”
One magician, at least, was no pacifist, but a tiger in chains. Oh, but what a thing for a small boy to endure, first the abuse, and then the terrible responsibility of ending it.
Phil slowed, and Arden shortened his steps, too, so that they fell even farther behind the loving couple. From the darkening hop gardens came familiar London accents, coarse jesting, and cigarette smoke, hidden behind the row of hopper huts, tempting beckonings of her past life. It was the patter that filled the streets of her memory, the voices of charwomen and servants and East End housewives, as omnipresent a background there as birdsong was here. She wished she were home, then remembered, home might be a pile of rubble, now or in a day’s time. This was a new world, where babies were bombed to oblivion on the day of their birth, and little boys executed their fathers with magic. She didn’t understand it. Something had gone so horribly wrong, somewhere . . .
“It’s not your fault,” she told him, and almost reached out a hand to touch his shoulder but caught herself. He saw the gesture, though. “In any case, he deserved it, didn’t he, for what he did to you and your mum? Maybe not the writhing and screaming bit—”
“The college believes that all life is equally valuable. The Essence within is what counts. The Essence is incorruptible.”
“Do they know what you did?”
“Of course. It’s a common enough story. When a child comes into his powers, he doesn’t know how to use them. Without training, without control, he’s a danger. That’s why we always have journeymen out on search. Usually we get them just as they’re budding, before they do any inadvertent harm.”
“Or advertent harm,” she added, not sure if there was such a word.
“I’ve been absolved, and that chapter of my life is over now.”
“You don’t regret it, though.”
He left the answer unsaid, and in the heavy silence of the unspoken, they walked the rest of the way to Stour.
Say goodbye to me now,” Thomas said, stopping at the barrier between the mundane and the magical and catching Fee’s hands.
“You’re giving up? You’re not even going to try to leave?”
“I’ll try, dearest, but if the Headmaster refuses, I dare not disobey. Our happiness is not the only thing at stake. For you, I would risk everything. My life would be nothing, sacrificed to my love for you.”
Fee sniffed and was lost to sight in his embrace.
“I don’t know why the Headmaster insists on keeping sentimental novels in the college library,” Arden said in an aside to Phil. “Fills their heads with such utter nonsense. How could that fool think giving up his life would serve the cause of their love?”
“That’s a step. You admit they’re in love now?”
“Oh, I suppose they think they are, and that’s as good as the real thing for now. It’s all Romeo and Juliet and young Werther in his head, though.”
“And Jane Austen and the Brontës in hers. At least her fantasies have a happy ending.”
“Thomas’s a dreamer, but he’s got a practical streak in there somewhere. He knows he can’t leave. He just should have known sooner. For both their sakes.”
They watched Thomas push Fee far enough back to look into her eyes. “I would give up my life to be with you,” he said, and Phil suppressed a snort. “But I can’t hurt Arden. He’s my teacher, and my friend. It is a matter of honor. I could not love you, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.”
“Ugh, honor!” Fee said with absolute contempt. “I wouldn’t mind if you left me to go to war, but this? Sealing yourself up in a nunnery? If you want Richard Lovelace, remember, stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. You’ve all walled yourselves up with fear. They want to confine you, but you’ve made your own dungeon of your mind, all of you, thinking you have to be shut off from everything that is wondrous about the world. You let yourselves be pent. If you all objected—”
“But we won’t. And I can’t. Oh, sweet, sweet love! I wish I’d never beheld you. My heart is rent from me, and my soul. Farewell.” And he held her, tangled in her hair and fettered to her eye.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Phil whispered to Arden.
He shook his head. “It will be like the pulling of a tooth—pain, but only for a moment, and then an empty place that one gets accustomed to. They will live. I did.”
“You were in love?”
“We’d best go. They’ll be gathered in the great room for the conclave. Hell. I ought to drain him unconscious and put him to bed. Prentice, are you certain you want to ask the Headmaster? You know how it will end.”
“I do. But I have to try.” He released Fee and marched resolutely off, leaving the others to follow him into Stour.
Magic or not, I don’t see how anyone could miss this,” Phil said as they walked on a gently undulating carpet of morning glories that reached their tendrils toward the massive pointed arch of the entranceway. She hadn’t properly appreciated Stour’s grandeur before, having been seized by a multitude of hands the last time she passed through, but now she couldn’t see how any kind of magic could make Stour invisible. It was a fairy-tale creation—either that or a nightmare ghost-castle, she couldn’t decide which. It was as if some impulsive child had been given an army of masons and told them, Towers! Stained glass! Points and spires! Higher! More!
Perhaps, she decided, it stayed hidden because it was simply too improbable. What the eye cannot believe, it often refuses to see. That thing with a horn cantered past them, and she resolutely closed her eyes until it was gone.
“Cathedral air,” Fee said, breathing deeply once they were inside. She wasn’t religious, but she liked to be in big churches. She would stand in the middle of the nave and throw her head back, so that some people assumed she was a student studying the architecture of the vaulting, while others thought she must be a budding young saint in the first ecstatic stages of beatification.
They followed Thomas’s echoing footsteps though the deserted halls until they heard a door open and slam.
“He’s inside,” Arden said.
“Aren’t we going in?” Fee asked.
“No, better not. They mistrust women, and you two are prime examples of their worst fears. You wait here. I’ll go in, and if I don’t come back—”
“We’ll say a kind word at your memorial,” Phil said.
Before the door banged closed again, they caught a glimpse of masses of men in all sorts of outlandish costumes from the last three hundred years, standing packed together in what might originally have been a ballroom or banquet hall.
“I do like their fashion sense,” Fee said, leaning against a bas-relief in the wall. “Thomas told me they make all their clothes with their magic, according to pictures in books, and everyone picks whatever style appeals most. Imagine not having to follow trends, but wearing a chiton one day and a farthingale the next. Oh, I wish we were magic, too!”
“We are, just as much as we need to be. I wonder what happens to the magic women, anyway.”
“Thomas said they have their own school, somewhere, but they don’t have to stay there all their lives.”
“That’s odd.”
“Right. So it doesn’t make sense that the men have to be—”
They heard a muffled shout from within, cries first of indignation, then of fear.
“He can’t be fighting them!” Fee said, and surged toward the door.
“Wait!” Phil said, catching her sleeve. “There are hundreds of men in there. What do you think you can do against all of them?”
“What can you do against the German army? But you still try. Let me go!”