“Most of you?”
“It’s a dangerous world out there. Journeymen sometimes meet with accidents if they let themselves get carried away.”
“You mean—”
“Not such a peaceful order after all, are we? They’re hunted down. I never knew it happened until I became a master myself. One of my friends, a journeyman a few years my senior, never came home. They told me he was hit by a bus.” He blinked quickly. “But it’s necessary,” he said, as though trying very hard to convince himself.
Phil jumped up suddenly, unnerved by his talk. When she was on edge at home, she sparred with Geoffrey. Now she needed to punch something, and Arden was the closest object at hand. “Put up your hands,” she said, and hardly giving him time to brace himself, punched his cupped palm as hard as she could. “Now hit me!” she ordered when she was out of breath. As he swung, and she blocked and dodged, he made his confession.
“It could have been me,” he said, narrowly missing her with an uppercut.
“You were in love,” she said, remembering, and wondered why she was assaulted with a splinter of jealousy, sharp and insidiously probing. She stopped simply evading and went on the attack, jabbing him in the stomach. It made her feel a little better.
“I thought I was in love. An entirely different thing.”
She shrugged and danced out of his range. “I wouldn’t know. But I imagine it feels about the same, at the time. For her, you would have left the college?”
“I would have, once.”
She looked at him, expecting to find anguish, regret. She saw only anger. His attack became fierce.
“You thought I couldn’t go mad with power?” he asked. “I loved her. I lied just now. I didn’t
think
I loved her. I
loved
her, with all my soul. I was wrong to love her. No, she was the wrong person to love. But I did love her. She came to me one day and told me she was pregnant. I told her I’d do anything for her, work my fingers to the bone, be her slave, all to make sure she and our child were happy. Do you know what she did? She laughed and said all she needed was fifty dollars so she could get rid of it. It. Our child was an
it.
She was a singer, you see, on the make, looking for a patron. ‘You’re a swell kid,’ she told me, ‘but you’re small time. I’ve got prospects.’ She patted me on the cheek—it was worse than a slap—and slipped away. I thought I’d die. And then I decided to punish her.”
“Like—like you did your father?” Phil panted.
“I might have, I was so hurt. But I wanted to hurt her, too, and make the punishment fit the crime. She’d found someone else right away. Or she’d had him already, I don’t know. A rich man, a merchant, with a diamond on his pinky and another on his tie. He would have set her up in her own show. She was really quite good, you know. Only I made her come back to me.”
“I thought you couldn’t make anyone do something they didn’t want to do.”
“That’s so...but it was easy enough to make her want to do it. I can make a lump of coal with the Essence, and I can make a diamond, too. I made her think I was rich, that she’d thrown a good thing away. And then . . .” He looked away. “Then I made her crawl. I made her grovel and debase herself as no woman ever has before. I, who would have been her slave, forced her to be my slave instead. And when I was thoroughly disgusted with her and myself, I left her in the gutter, weeping for me. Oh, don’t worry,” he added bitterly. “I’m sure she bounced back within a week. Probably told her merchant she was caring for her sick mother and took up with him again.”
Phil’s hands suddenly dropped to her side, and Arden barely had time to check his next punch. When she said nothing, he asked, in challenge, “Well, what do you think of me now?” He didn’t know what had possessed him, telling her that. She’d despise him—as well she should. He despised himself for it.
Strange thoughts were filling Phil’s head, things she wouldn’t even tell Fee. But all she said, as the sun sank to the rim of the western hills, was, “She did throw a good thing away, the silly chit.” And then, coach and drill sergeant again, she bellowed, “Felton! Forget Queensberry. If he’s open below the belt,
hit
below the belt!”
Arden argued with himself for the next half-hour and almost won. Finally, by a supreme effort of will, dredging up some distant memory of what might be the proper thing to do at the moment, he asked almost angrily, “May I walk you home?”
The setting alone would have been enough to make Fee fall in love—the sky, twilight purple and deepening by the moment to star-pricked charcoal; the froggy churr of a nightjar like a trembling heart; and a man, darkly vital and obviously brimming with a thousand unsaid things, beside her.
Phil, however, might just as well have placed a naked sword between them to keep them chastely separate. She walked beside Arden but kept a measured distance, almost intimate but not quite. He would have to make the effort to surmount that little extra gap between them.
“We...I...we can’t thank you enough,” he said.
“I thought I was the disruptive influence that was set to bring down the college,” Phil countered, mentally kicking herself.
Why do I have to say these things? Fee would have sighed dreamily, and that would have been that.
Of course, the last thing I need right now is for that particular thing to be that.
Then why on earth didn’t I say “No, you can’t walk me home”?
“You’re really very...strong. For someone your size, I mean,” Arden said, realizing what a conversational wasteland his life had been until now. The college certainly hadn’t taught him how to make small talk or pay compliments. Strong for her size? Was that what a girl wanted to hear? He should have asked Thomas, if he hadn’t been ashamed. In this, the prentice had surpassed the master.
“I have to be strong,” she said. “My kind of magic is very physically demanding. I’m getting out of practice, though. I haven’t escaped from a straitjacket in weeks. Maybe one of these days you can tie me up and—”
No, no, no, don’t lead him there,
she fumed.
Of course, he’s the only man in the world who wouldn’t make a randy joke about it.
“I will if you like. I wouldn’t mind seeing how you do it. I couldn’t, really, that first day we met. You were so well tied up, and you got out of it so fast. Like magic.”
She looked at him quickly enough to catch the tail end of his smile.
“Oh, that wasn’t even a trick—that was good planning. I always have a pick or two and a bit of razor sewn into my clothes, just in case.”
“That’s how you do it onstage, then, at the—what was it—Hall of Illusion?”
“No, onstage it’s the real thing. Well, the real fake thing. It’s all trickery of one sort or another. And it isn’t Illusion—it’s Delusion.”
He looked at her quizzically. The small talk was coming more naturally now, creating a comfortable buffer between all the things he wanted to say and shouldn’t.
“An illusion is a creation that you know can’t exist, but you see it, experience it anyway. You let yourself be fooled—you’re complicit. A delusion, on the other hand, gives you something that you ought to know could never be real, but presents it so convincingly that you have no choice but to believe it. Other magicians just do illusions. The Albions are so great they can force people to believe what they know isn’t real.”
“Are commoners—forgive me, are people really so gullible?”
She shrugged. “People trust what they see, what they’re told. Tell an audience that you’re going to make the Victoria Memorial disappear, and though they’ll claim they don’t believe it’s possible, they’ll be primed for it. Oh, you can make people accept all sorts of outlandish things.”
Not me,
Arden thought stoutly.
A Master of Drycraeft can see through any deceit.
“You might get a chance to see some of what we do,” Phil went on. “The Home Guard has been asking Fee and me to put on a magic show for their Christmas celebration. We don’t have any props, of course, and we’d have to requisition every light and mirror in town to make it really spectacular, but we should be able to put on a fairly good show. You’re welcome to come, if—”
“There are a lot of
ifs,
aren’t there.”
“There always are, it seems. If the war isn’t over and I’m not home. If we’re not bombed to smithereens by then.”
“If Rudyard still lets me sneak out of Stour. If you haven’t decided to claim my life.”
They were nearing Weasel Rue. The nestled farmhouse somehow managed to look cozy and inviting even without a candle in the window or a light under the door crack. Well blacked out, Phil thought with satisfaction. She stopped at the rustic post and rail fence that nominally separated the farmhouse grounds from the farming acres proper.
Foolish to get attached to a place,
she thought, looking at the unlovely, snaking house. It wasn’t home, it was only where she happened to live. Or if it was home, it was because Fee was there. Just as foolish to get attached to people. Phil had made such good friends here, though. She wished more than anything that the war would end and she could return to her normal life in London, and yet...
How perverse of me to almost be glad if it lasts just a little while longer.
“Arden, are we friends?” she asked suddenly.
She had turned and was leaning her elbows back on the fence, hips canted forward, searching his face.
This is the moment,
he thought.
Now is when I decide if I will follow Thomas’s unwise path, or be sensible. My only purpose is to help the Essence flow through the world. Love has proven itself a worthless thing, and the fact that a beautiful, passionate, generally insufferable girl is gazing up at me in the darkness, mere inches away, is no reason at all why I should touch that preposterous red hair of hers.
He did touch it, but only because that perpetually stray lock was about to go in her eye, and it was annoying him. There, now that it was safely tucked behind her ear, there was certainly no reason why his hand should linger on her cheek.
Though, somehow, it did.
“I didn’t think it would be possible,” he said, letting his fingers slide along the strong line of her jaw, while his thumb found eternal solace in the dimple of her chin.
“Most things are possible.”
Not this, though,
Arden told himself, even as his thumb, restless after all, touched her parted lips . . .
The front door of Weasel Rue opened, and the bright light streaming from within drew shadows from their bodies, entwined, for an instant, then abruptly separate.
Damn,
each thought.
The person in the doorway couldn’t see clearly out into the night. “Phil, is that you?” a familiar voice called.
Silhouetted against the cheerful farmhouse light stood Hector, manly in full uniform, grinning like a schoolboy.
“Who is that?” Arden asked, trying and failing to keep the jealousy out of his voice.
“He’s my...brother,” she said, which was true enough. “I should go.” She tore herself away, the phantom of Arden’s touch still on her lips. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” he promised.
She ran off, and he lingered at the fence watching her, glad beyond belief that he’d made the unwise choice after all. Tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow!
With an indulgent grin, happy for her happiness, Arden watched Phil’s brother race out to meet her...catch her up in his arms and whirl her around...kiss her...kiss her again, hard and lingering on the lips he’d only this very moment decided were his forever.
I was right,
he thought bitterly, turning away.
Love is a lie.
Phil, surprised, confused, and too polite to do what she really wanted to do, which was to shove Hector away and explain in a word that she had no desire to marry him, stayed in his arms because she couldn’t immediately bring herself to crush someone she did, sincerely, love. Finally her lack of response gave him his first hint, and when he pulled away, still smiling, more tentatively now, her face told him the rest, and his smile trembled and collapsed.
“I got two days of ‘passionate leave,’” he said, drawing himself up and forcing himself, as the army had taught him, to be indifferent and brave and oh so very English. “I thought I’d surprise you.”
“You did! I’m so...of course I’m so happy to see you, darling.” He winced at the word. “Come inside and tell me absolutely everything. Only...you go in, I’ll be there in a jiffy.” She sneaked a look over her shoulder into the night. Had Arden seen? She had to explain.
Hector allowed himself to be guided into the house, and Phil sprinted back to the fence. “Arden!” she called in a hoarse whisper. But he was gone.
She started to run after him but caught herself. She couldn’t treat Hector like that. Despite their misunderstanding, he was still, as she’d told Arden, her brother, her own dear brother home on fleeting leave, and she had to spend every possible moment with him. Arden would surely understand. Perhaps, in the shadows, he had not seen that unbrotherly kiss.
Tomorrow,
he’d said. She caught her breath, the possibilities tingling through her body. Tonight she belonged to Hector, as his loving sister. But tomorrow! Oh, tomorrow!
Arden stormed into Stour with such ferocity that the little prentice who’d been set to watch for him trembled with dread as he relayed his message: Report to Headmaster Rudyard immediately.
“Tell him I’ll see him in the morning,” Arden snapped, and the little prentice burst into tears.
“Please, master, if you don’t go, he’ll think I didn’t do my job, and he’ll—”
“Oh, very well,” he said, sweeping majestically past the sniveling child. He wanted to be alone, to hit something, to curse something, to set the world ablaze with the Essence and burn out the shameful feelings that—even now, even knowing her perfidy—ravaged his breast.
“I know what you’re up to,” Headmaster Rudyard said as soon as Arden entered his office.
For a moment he thought this must mean his uncontrollable passion for Phil, and with an angry flush rising to his cheeks, he was about to tell the Headmaster it was none of his damned business, and get the fight he was looking for. But Rudyard forestalled him.