Delusion

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “Now,” she said in her most thrilling stage voice, “tell me what the bloody hell is going on here!”

  Arden wished with all his heart he’d managed to kill her after all, even if it meant his demotion back to journeyman or, worse yet, his expulsion from the College of Drycraeft, the English school of magic.

  Chapter 5

  I don’t fear death!” Arden said, lifting his chin to expose his throat more fully to the blade. All the same, his neck was tight with tension, its sinews standing out. In the saltcellar hollows above his collarbone where his white shirt gaped, Phil could see his pulse beating, swift and strong.

  “Of course you don’t,” Phil said sweetly. “But you do fear pain. Or you’ll soon learn to.” She pushed the tip a fraction harder against his skin. “Tell me why they tied me up. What is this place?”

  She fervently hoped he’d say something, because she really had no idea what to do next. On the stage, this was her cue to swing the blade back dramatically, angling it to catch the blue light aimed by a hidden stagehand, and then with a ululating battle cry chop off his head. Well, not his head, exactly, but a waxwork simulacrum with a balloon full of viscous blood-red syrup that was substituted at the last instant. And of course the sword was flimsy foil that would hardly cut a blancmange. She knew in her heart she was all show. There was no way she’d hurt someone who was tied up, not even this arrogant nutcake who’d blathered on about magic and killing and...Oh! That must be it. He was crazy, just like Uncle Walter. Well, that explained him. What a shame, she thought, pulling her blade back and cocking her head to study him. He was rather good-looking, if you liked that black-haired, arrogant, surly sort . . .

  Perhaps it explained the others, too. Yes, this must be an insane asylum. Because the things the other men had talked about, things she’d barely heard at the time, lost as she was in her own dreams of guns and arms, were now slowly coming back to her. And they only made sense if this was a house of lunatics.

  What Arden said next confirmed it.

  “We are magicians in the College of Drycraeft, servants of the earth and ministers of the Essence that flows through her. And you, whoever you are, are an unnatural aberration who will no doubt be killed as soon as the masters have time to confer.”

  Privately, he hoped they would not confer too long, though given the glacial pace of most of the college’s decisions, the girl’s ridiculously red hair would go gray before they came to any conclusion. It was one of many things that irked him about the college, but now that he was a master, he hoped to institute certain reforms.

  “If you’re a magician, why don’t you get out of those ropes? Or don’t you do escapism?”

  Arden glared at her. “I’ve given my word not to draw from the Essence. I can do no magic until the Conclave of Masters decides my punishment.”

  “Hmm. Convenient, isn’t it?” She lowered the tulwar and went to the door, listening intently. “Tell me how to get out of this place. Is this an official asylum, then, or does your family just have an unfortunate gene?”

  “You think I’m insane?”

  “They say if you have wit enough to ask, you aren’t. I’d supposed that’s why you aren’t at the front. If you aren’t crazy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big hale fellow like you. You should be fighting for your country instead of playing children’s games. Magicians, indeed! You should have picked your shill a little more carefully. I’m one of the Albions, and what I don’t know about magic you could fit on the head of a pin.” She tossed her hair and made a humph sound. Arden, against his will, liked the one but not the other.

  Albion? Albion! Godric Albion, the Traitor! Realization upon realization rushed at him, overwhelmed him, and suddenly he was screaming for help, pulling against his ropes until his skin peeled away.

  “Shut up!” Phil hissed desperately. If he brought all those madmen running...even with her weapon, she might not be able to hold them off.

  Arden ignored her. It all made sense. If this girl was who he thought she was, her ancestor was stripped of his magic almost three hundred years ago. The textbooks said that made him a commoner, devoid of any ability to use the Essence. But there were whispers that it had made him something even worse than a commoner. What if he, and his descendants, were utterly separate from the Essence, immune to it? If she was here to attack them, there was nothing their magic could do to her. An Albion had almost destroyed the college before. He wouldn’t let this one do the same.

  He shouted for help until he hardly had breath. What this girl’s sudden appearance meant, he could not say for sure. All he knew was that something very close to panic had seized him. She must be put down, like vermin.

  “Be quiet, now, or I’ll—” She raised the tulwar, this time aiming the spiked pommel at his head. A hard blow might knock him unconscious. Or it might kill him.

  She couldn’t, not quite. Puffing an exasperated sigh at what she called her weakness, she ran to the door and listened again, then slipped out and down the portrait-lined corridor. Arden’s yells echoed behind her.

  Holding her tulwar high—she had visions of impaling herself in a headlong fall, and wouldn’t that be a pretty way to go?—she dashed around corner after corner, getting ever more helplessly lost. It wasn’t until she chanced peeking behind a closed door and caught a glimpse out a window that she even realized she was on the second floor. She could see the lake and the blushing maples and tried to keep that orientation in mind when she resumed her search for an exit. She barreled past a line of little boys who looked at her in thrilled amazement, though not fear. Racing, armed, red hair flying, Phil was like an air raid siren shrilling through their rote lives.

  Were there no stairs in this damned place? It was all hallways and rooms. She checked more and more doors. Some led to empty bedrooms, some to vacant classrooms, but none led to egress. Nearly at the end of her tether, she flung open one more door and found a man just stepping out of a claw-footed bath. Phil was about to retreat in shame when she decided, no, this had gone on far too long. Pointing her blade at his chubby pink and white nakedness, she said, “Show me how to get out of this madhouse.”

  He fumbled for his spectacles, gave a girlish shriek when at last he saw the interloper clearly, and dove for the nearest garment he could find, which, alas, was no more than a polka-dotted necktie. Still, it covered the vital bits if he didn’t walk too fast, so Phil gritted her teeth, torn between mirth and mortification, and urged him with gentle pokes out to the corridor.

  He led her silently, with nervous backward glances, to an ornate double door carved with spiral patterns. There he stopped, trembling.

  “Oh, very well,” she said, and pushed both doors open herself. But instead of a rush of sunlight and freedom, she saw a spacious, windowless, torch-lit room with a massive wooden table in its center. Seated around it, in chairs only a step down from thrones, were some twenty men and one little boy half-hidden in the shadows.

  Phil turned on her nearly naked guide with a snarl, but before she could flee, he gathered the last, perhaps only, drop of his courage and shoved her as hard as he could, propelling her into the room. His momentum sent him after her, and he collapsed in a dead faint, his necktie, unfortunately, askew.

  The doors closed behind them, apparently of their own volition.

  She tugged at the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. Whirling, she glared at the conclave. “How dare you treat me like this! I’m an English citizen and a representative of the Home Guard”—a lie in a good cause—“and my sister and my...my father will be coming in search of me.” Her voice, which had started out stage-strong, began to falter, and she felt like she was on the verge of tears. Whatever happens, she told herself, I’ll never let them fall. If you can’t be brave, at least you can act like someone who is brave. She’d acted like an executioner and a mer-girl and a snared fox and a queen onstage. Surely she could act like someone who felt no fear.

  She steeled herself as one of the men rose. It was the g
entleman she’d met earlier, whose arm she’d taken so trustingly. Well, she had a thing or two to say to him!

  Unfortunately, with all those eyes on her in the flickering torchlight, she couldn’t quite recall what they were at the moment.

  “You are a resourceful girl,” he said, walking a step or two nearer but stopping when she made a motion with the sword. He turned to one of the men still seated. “I say, Barnaby, did you by any chance tie her up in the Game Room?” His tone was affable, but Phil noticed an edge to it.

  “It is the only room that’s never in use, Headmaster Rudyard, and I thought—”

  “You thought you’d put our prisoner in a ROOMFUL OF WEAPONS!” For a breath he looked furious, and most of the people in the room, including Phil, cringed, but the next moment he was all smiles and bonhomie again. Like correcting a dog with a sharp word, Phil thought. And like a dog, the man who had erred looked abashed but slavishly eager to please the next time.

  The Headmaster turned again to Phil. “You see, we are so unworldly here at Stour that we forget some of the subtleties of life. Such as, do not arm your enemy. Particularly when it may not be in your power to disarm her.”

  “I’m not your enemy,” Phil said.

  “No? Is not the mongoose the enemy of the krait? The little snake may bite and bite, but the mongoose is immune to its deadly venom, you see. Immune.” He let the word linger.

  “I just want to leave,” Phil said desperately, reaching back to try the door again. She knew she could pick the lock—doors or chains or handcuffs, it made no difference to her—but it would take her a few seconds at least, perhaps longer if it was a tricky device, and she couldn’t turn away from these men. Maybe she could do it one-handed behind her back, as she did the handcuffs and the simple padlocks they used onstage, but she couldn’t do it left-handed and didn’t dare shift her sword.

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible, young lady. You’ve stumbled on a secret organization.”

  “Are you Nazis?” she gasped, electrified.

  The Headmaster frowned in puzzlement and bent to confer with one of the men in a brief whisper, then shook his head. “No, we are not Nazis. We are...something else.”

  “If this is an asylum, I understand you don’t want word to get out. Is this where the nobility sends their batty sons and crazy cousins? Fine, that’s none of my business. But surely you know that you can’t keep me here. I’m sorry I came onto your property, but the worst you can do is have me before the magistrate on trespassing charges.” She hoped that if everything she said was rational and practical, this might all somehow start to make sense.

  “We are not mad,” the Headmaster said, smiling gently within the shelter of his neat silver goatee. “It is only that we ought to kill you.”

  He said it so calmly, it actually slipped by her for a second. Oh, well, if that’s all... Then the full force of her dire situation struck her. Even if she was brave enough to hack through some of them, she’d be overpowered by sheer numbers. This was her finale, and she had to decide how to face it. This was the water tank escape in the third minute, when her lungs were burning and her brain was screaming breathe! and at any moment her mouth would obey and gulp in a deep breath of death.

  She gripped her tulwar tighter and narrowed her eyes at the Headmaster. She would launch a preemptive attack, and he, their leader, would be the first to fall to her blade. She hoped that might throw the others into such disarray that she could make her escape.

  At least, she thought with a brief melodramatic return of her usual stage theatrics, I will take a few of them with me when I die!

  She took a step toward the Headmaster, over the prone fleshy form of her erstwhile guide, and pointed her sword tip at his chest.

  “We ought to kill you,” he said, without moving or seeming the least concerned. “But we cannot. One of our number has spoken for you. A prentice, it is true, but our laws are ancient and unequivocal. Any objection to a death sentence must be honored.”

  A small figure materialized from the flickering torch-shadows at the edge of the room.

  Phil dropped her sword with a clatter and had the boy in her arms in a heartbeat. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Madmen and murder—they couldn’t count for anything in a world that allowed miracles.

  Her little adopted brother Stan was alive.

  She hugged him fiercely, burying her face in his dark shaggy curls. She kept her eyes closed for the longest time, only feeling him, afraid to look at him directly in case she’d been wrong. But no, he smelled like her Stan, too. When he came to the Albion family, he had had nothing more than a spare shirt and a string of sandalwood beads, tied up in a handkerchief. The beads never lost their smell. He kept them between his folded clothes, and their sweet warm spice always hung about him. Phil took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

  “Stanislaus Bambula has joined our order in the College of Drycraeft as a junior prentice. He claims—he swears—that you are no threat to us, and so we must let you live. Against our better judgment, I might add. Against my better judgment.”

  She looked into Stan’s otter-brown eyes, eyes so dark they were almost black, but with an earthy depth, a softness, that black eyes never quite attain. Black eyes glitter—they reflect, like glass or obsidian. The darkest brown eyes draw you in.

  “Why did they take you?” she asked, kneeling and gazing up at her brother.

  “Don’t worry, Phil,” he said, and she felt her heart catch at that familiar voice, the strange mix of Shakespearean precision and Cockney and some vague central European accent he’d picked up in his short but varied life.

  “Don’t worry?” she asked, incredulous. “Come on, we’re leaving right now.” She glared over his shoulder at the gathering of men, daring them to stop her.

  “I can’t,” Stan said gently. “I won’t. This is where I belong.”

  “You’re confused. What happened? Were you hurt in the bombings? Did they bring you here?” Her fingers traced spider steps over his skull but found no injury.

  “I wasn’t hurt,” he said, enduring her fussing with a little squirm. “And yes, they brought me here. But as soon as I arrived I knew—oh, Phil, this is home. Or as close to home as I’ll ever have, without my own mum.”

  Phil frowned. He’d never said a word about his family, and she’d always assumed they’d died or abandoned him when he was too young to remember them.

  “Our home is at the Hall of Delusion,” she said firmly. “At least it was, and it will be again as soon as it’s safe, but in any case your home is with us.” She rose and took his hand, giving it a tug, but he stood firm, surprisingly stolid for his size.

  “This is where I belong,” he said. “I would have been here long ago, if only I’d known, but my mother always told me...well, that doesn’t matter now. Believe me, I’m safe here, and happy.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. These men—lunatics or perverts or whatever they might be—have kidnapped you and...and tricked you! I’m not leaving without you.” She gave his hand another pull, but before it could dissolve into a battle, Head-master Rudyard stepped nearer.

  “As well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, they said when I was a boy. It is clear that she won’t leave without further assurance of your safety, Prentice Stanislaus. We may not kill her, we cannot contain her with magic, and I’m sure we can only toss her back over the ha-ha so many times before she decides to make herself a true nuisance. You say she is safe, prentice? Well, you may hold the future of the College of Drycraeft in your hands. If you think she can be trusted to hold her tongue, why don’t you tell her about us.”

  Stan nodded. “And about her, sir?”

  The Headmaster’s silver caterpillar eyebrows twitched upward. “No. We know nothing about her, lad. We only suspect, and that is no better than the wagging tongues of old gossips. Go someplace you can be alone. The solar, perhaps. If we are very fortunate, she’ll tell the world and end up locked in an asylum for the rest of he
r life and will trouble us no more.”

  Phil snaked out an arm and recaptured her sword. “Somewhere outside the manor, if you please.”

  The Headmaster chuckled. “Of course, of course. You are no prisoner—anymore.”

  “Neither is Stan,” she retorted.

  He did not answer her directly, only studied her for a long moment before saying, “Don’t leave the grounds too quickly. There is still a matter I must discuss with you.”

  The doors clicked behind her, unlocking and swinging ajar. Holding Stan tightly, she backed out, telling herself that no matter what Stan might say, she was taking him back to Weasel Rue with her, even if she had to drag him all the way.

  Stan led her through the woods, past vines growing as fast as twining snakes that reached for her arms. Unseen in the shrubbery, something large moved, making a sound between a purr and a growl. When the landscape opened near the lake’s mossy bank, she glimpsed a flash of prancing white. A horse, she assured herself, wide-eyed. For there was no way she could have seen a horn.

  “What is this place?” she breathed. If Rousseau had painted a madhouse, it would look like this. But Stan seemed to have no fear, so she clung to him and kept her terror secret when a golden bear lumbered across their path, ignoring them as it reared up to eat pink lychee nuts.

  They sat together under the Japanese maples, on a high bank overlooking the lake. For a long moment Stan gazed over the water, watching the reflection of passing clouds until the surface was shattered by the stout, olive-colored body of a hunting pike. When at last he spoke, he didn’t answer her directly.

  “My mother never danced for me, but she told me of the nights when the campfires were so bright they blinded the moon, when fiddlers played songs that would lure gods from the heavens and ghosts from below, when the caravans looked like palaces. On those nights, she told me, she would dance, and it was beyond the power of any eye to look away from her. They took her when she was heavy with me, away from her family, away from her lovers, and locked her away in a place they called a university, in Dresden. It was a prison. There she bore me, and there we stayed for five years.”