Huddled in a hollow not far away, the first assassin had the same thought when he spied a ruby-haired woman peeking from behind a rough hemlock trunk. He’d assumed the Fräulein was sending him after a younger woman, but perhaps it was only the distance, the hard lines of fear, that made the woman methodically firing the gun (with great accuracy, at targets that, mysteriously, never fell) seem older. He stilled his breath, slowed his heart, and lovingly eased back the trigger. He never missed.
Nor did Uncle Walter, not even when he was shaking with hopeless fury at the death of the woman who’d been his childhood crush, before she’d fallen head over heels for Enery.
Quicker than he deserves,
Walter thought as half of the man’s head scattered in a snowdrift, and he looked for another life to end, entirely forgetting his dangling handcuff.
One of the assassins was a champion duelist, with knives strapped to his arms and legs. His favorite, though, was the heavy saber with which he’d dueled at the university. He ignored the battle around him and made his way straight to Weasel Rue.
The last assassin left on the field looked down at the girl, his quarry. She couldn’t be sleeping, though the gunfire was sporadic now, and snow-muffled. He stepped back, out of spatter range, and took careful aim.
At the touch of his finger on the trigger, Phil’s eyes opened, and she screamed.
At the first pressure of his finger on the trigger, the assassin melted.
And Phil continued to scream like a whipping wind, because she could
feel
him melting. She could feel everything around her—the rocks, the dirt, the microscopic life. The very air tingled with the Essence, and she was engulfed in a deluge of awareness, of power, that stretched to the earth’s core but found its terrible focus in her.
She stood, only peripherally conscious of the fighting nearby. It was part of the background in her Essence-trance, neither more nor less important than the dread of a small seed sprouting subterraneanly at her feet as it was inexorably consumed by a creeping fungus. The world was sentient now, and everything was pain and fear, moments of victory when one animal ate, quick sorrow then nothing as it was eaten in turn, and always, through it all, the Essence, blind and indifferent, flowing from earth to air to being without preference, without pity.
“Arden, retreat!” Hereweald shouted from across the field. The fighting had been going on only a moment, but already it was clear that Arden and his allies were doomed. They were brave, they were strong, but their lives had been dedicated to tranquillity, and they simply could not make themselves be merciless.
The commoners were faring little better. The Dresdeners had begun with mere defense, focusing their attacks on the other magicians, but as the inevitability of their victory became more and more apparent, they began to pick off the commoners whenever they could spy them. They drained their Essence, their lives, and became all the stronger. Henshawe the grocer, dashing from trunk to trunk, was caught; his friend the baker died trying to drag his lifeless body to safety.
Arden, pallid and shaking, was holding off the Kommandant and two other Dresdeners at once, but he couldn’t last much longer. Hereweald called him again. “Back, Arden! We can’t take them!”
“We can’t abandon the commoners!” he cried. “Felton, circle round and cover their escape!”
“They’re nothing, leave them!” Hereweald shouted, and tried to drag his friend away. “Our duty’s to our brother magicians. We have to live to tell them the truth.”
“No!” Arden struggled against the hands that pulled at him. He saw another commoner, the tavernkeeper who’d brought barrels of ale to the hopper huts on donkey-back every Saturday, crumple as Bergen ripped his life from him.
Then Arden’s concentration broke, and he lost his hold on the Kommandant. Across the gap the man grinned as he began to crush Arden’s skull.
Through the chaos and the numbness of universal pain, Phil heard a sound. All else fell silent. The screaming of trees as the sap in their twigs froze, the crashing of molecules, the ripping of dividing cells—they all fell back to the farthest reaches of her preternatural awareness in deference to the one sound that had any real meaning to her: the sound of Arden suffering.
She stood, and felt like she moved swiftly, though around her everything seemed to be suspended in a viscous web. Outrage rose, roiling and boiling, and she could not tell if she was drawing it from the world or producing it herself. She frowned, and the world frowned, and decided unequivocally that Arden, of all the tormented organisms writhing on the planet, must live.
She’d saved Arden from death before, from the same adversary, and had done her mortal best with her fists alone. This time too she did her best, and it was volcanic.
She killed, she burned, she rent and tore everything that was not Arden. Impassive, she saw—and again, felt—humans die, and none of it mattered to her, so long as Arden lived. For a moment, she was more than a magician—she was a god, cruel and indifferent as the cosmos.
Then, her body at last coming to its senses and shutting down, she fell in a limp heap, a flash of flame on sunset-touched white.
Don’t get too near her,” Felton said, but Arden paid him no heed. He pulled her into his arms and bent close, whispering inarticulate pleas, salting her face with tears.
When at last she opened her eyes, the three magicians who remained cringed back, but Phil’s tragic face cracked in a radiant smile when she saw Arden safe and whole. The rest of the world, everything that touched the Essence, was still there, but it murmured unobtrusively in the background now, and for the moment at least, she could devote herself to Arden.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“God, is it ever!” muttered Hereweald. Slowly, what she had done came back to her, and she looked beyond Arden to see the cataclysm of her own making. There was a great scar in the land, utterly devoid of life. Not a plant, not a microbe, not a magician or commoner remained.
“Did I do that?” she asked, fragile as a fledgling, knowing the answer.
“I don’t know what happened,” Arden said, helping her to her feet. “I gave you your powers back—your family’s powers. At least, I thought I did.”
“How could I do . . .” She made a helpless gesture toward the carnage. The tide of Essence ebbed further, leaving memory on her mind’s shores. “Eamon Dooley—I killed him.”
“And all the Dresdeners,” Felton said encouragingly. One must look on the bright side.
“Nearly all,” Hereweald corrected. “I saw that blond bitch crawling away, and Bergen was with her.”
“The Stour fighters?” she asked.
“Gone, all but us.”
“The Home Guard?” she asked, shaking. “Uncle Walter?”
“Everyone who was close to the fighting is dead,” Arden said gently. Only those near him had been spared.
Dead,
Phil thought bleakly. Put like that, it seemed simple, an on-off switch that happened to be set to off.
What I did was murder. What I am is a monster.
“What did you do to me, Arden?” she wailed. The
everything
loomed again, and she had to fight off the myriad voices and sensations, the endless eddies of the Essence that plagued her.
“I gave you a piece of myself. It was supposed to renew your link to the Essence.”
“It did, oh, it did!” she said hysterically, feeling a man have a heart attack in Manchester, a flea biting a cat in Jaipur, a copepod in the North Sea beating its antennae like oars. “Make it stop, Arden. Please. I can’t bear it!” She covered her ears, but that did nothing. She covered her face, beat her head against the snow, and felt the Essence rising in her again, blessing her with unwanted connectedness, threatening to take over her mind, drive her to madness.
And if I go mad, I’ll lose control again, and
—
“Arden, take it away or kill me. I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt everyone. I can’t stop it!”
But somehow, with his loving hands in her hair, his warm breath on the back of her neck, she found she could. Moving very carefully, as if her whole body were a reservoir full to the brim that any sudden move might cause to overspill, she stood once more.
I am Phil Albion,
she thought.
I am myself. I am not this thing that was put inside me.
“Do what they did to Godric Albion, please. I do not want magic.”
He tried, reaching out with his own Essence, but nothing worked. Her power clung to her, greedily.
“It’s just like before. I’d swear the Essence isn’t touching you.” He gathered the last vestiges of his strength and lifted a single strand of her hair, trying to change its color. “Nothing. You’re still immune to the Essence when it is wielded at you.” Awestruck, he said, “Phil, your power is incredible. Try something else. Show me what other things you can do.”
She made the slightest gesture with her fingers, at the ruined land, the blight she had caused. “That is what I can do,” she said, closing her fingers in a fist. “And I will never, never use magic again.”
“You’ll learn to control it, Phil. I’ll help you. It will get easier. There’s just so much power in you—no wonder it exploded like that. Generations of potential, all waiting to ignite. I know you’re shocked. What happened—it’s horrible. But if you hadn’t stepped in, my friends and yours would have died just as surely, at the hands of the Dresdeners. You still killed the enemy, and that’s the important thing. We’d have been lost without you. England would have fallen if the Dresdeners had won. You saved England, Phil! Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting for all along? Just think what you can do now!”
“You don’t understand, Arden. You told me the Essence is good, pure. You can’t have felt what I’m feeling now. It
hurts!
If I blink, if I flinch, it will take me over again—and I don’t know what I’ll do! I don’t want to kill. I don’t want this. Oh, Arden, you ruined me!” But she clung to her seducer, the man who had ushered her from innocence to experience, and loved him still.
There came a small, bright note in the shape of Joey, who staggered out of the holly bushes covered in gore.
“Did I do that?” Phil asked as she hugged him tight.
“Naw, bullet grazed my forehead. I’m a right mess, ain’t I? Hardly hurts, though don’t let on to Tilda.” Tilda, a plump, nurturing sort, his chosen sweetheart after he’d given Phil up as a lost cause, could be counted on to make a very pleasant fuss.
“Blimey!” he said, wiping the blood from his eyes and getting his first good look at the carnage. “Did I do
that?
Must have used too much gunpowder. Where are the others?”
If there’s one small consolation to being given near-godlike powers and slaughtering a good many of your friends, it should be the undisputed privilege of telling your story first and receiving unlimited sympathy. But when Phil and the others dragged themselves back to Weasel Rue, she had only to take one look at her sister’s stricken face to think that her own troubles must be fairly trivial, after all. She sent the weary men into the house with Stan and caught her sister’s hand.
Fee perched on the porch, holding two pieces of paper. One, the featherweight airmail parchment, was obviously from Thomas; Phil could see his large, loopy scrawl. The other was a half-sheet telegram.
Fee took a long, shuddering breath. “They regret to inform me...missing in action.”
Grief, Phil could have handled, somber depression or wild weeping. What she could not bear was to see Fee diminishing before her eyes until she became a shell, a shadow. Fee’s great blue-pearl eyes were empty, as if everything dear to her had fled—all hope, all love, every tomorrow.
“No,” Phil said gently, taking her by the shoulders and leaning into her. She knew what it felt like to be losing yourself. “I won’t let you go.” She pressed her forehead to Fee’s deathly cold one and tried with all her will to use their old familiar embrace to revive her. Their hair entwined, their eyelashes brushing, Phil reached out to her, seeking that alchemical blending that had solaced them so often before.
Stay with me, Fee,
she begged.
Don’t give in to grief. It will pass, it will join the great sorrow that is life.
She felt something electric pass between them and pulled back sharply, gasping. In giving herself to Fee, to be her prop and her support, she’d very nearly passed on a thread of her life, which would have awakened the dormant Albion power in Fee, too.
Fee, emerging slightly from the void of her woe, examined her sister. If there was anything that could drag her from her misery, it was the need to succor her beloved Phil. “What is it?” she asked, slipping easily into the role of comforter.
Phil told her, doing her best to be brave, but Fee knew her too well.
She regarded Phil solemnly. “I’ve never had a burden that you didn’t gladly bear with me,” she said. “What you feel, I feel. We will always be together, in everything.” She took Phil’s hands, her own surprisingly strong. “Share it with me, Phil. I don’t know if it will make your weight lighter, but at least we will bear it together.” She pulled Phil to her again, but her sister fought her.
“No, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s a curse. I feel like I’m going bonkers, like I’m about to fly in a thousand pieces. I killed our friends, Fee! I killed Uncle Walter, and Eamon, and—”
“Shh...hush, dear. It’s not your fault.”
“But it is! I—”
She pulled Phil to her one last time and repeated, very firmly, in exactly the tone Mum used, “It’s not your fault.”
Phil stayed in her embrace, but she kept the Essence, and herself tightly in check. “Fee, no,” she said weakly.
Fee, playing as dirty as siblings always do, whispered, in a hurt tone, “Would you really deny me the power that might help me save Thomas, if perhaps he’s still alive?”
Abandoning herself to the inevitable, Phil let go.
When the magicians returned a few minutes later, they found Fee burnished with an inner luminescence, grinning at all the world like it was her best friend.
“Oh, Phil, it’s lovely!” she said, staring at nothing with a look of absolute adoration. “I can feel things under the snow, waiting.” Her face lit up even more. “A worm, Phil, so cozy—can you feel him? And my, it just goes on and on, doesn’t it? How do you keep track? Ah, that’s what you meant about the crazy part, I see now. But it’s like a symphony, all playing together. What does it matter if there are twenty instruments or a billion? It’s all the same song.”