“And you did understand?” Phil asked, thinking perhaps her sister was lulling her until she could summon a few hardy men with a straitjacket (from which she could escape within thirty seconds). “Stan, alive? Magic, real?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Fee said absently, twitching her apron at an errant hen. She’d rather hoped that when her life took a literary turn, it would involve a male protagonist, but still, Stan and magic were a good start. Anything might follow. “Mind the bantams. They’re tricky. What should I wear?”
Phil just grinned at her darling sister. Grief might crush Fee, but she took even the most shocking happiness as no more than her due. Every good thing in her life simply confirmed her immutable faith that the world was a lovely place. Bombs and death had shaken her, but she was still the eternal optimist.
When the chickens were cooped and settling nicely, the rooster strutting in the dusty confines like a thwarted martinet, the two girls set off hand in hand together down the rutted path toward the open hills. Along the way, Phil told her more of what she’d gleaned from her time at Stour. One matter was apparently the most important, because Fee kept returning to it.
“Do you mean there’s not one woman at the college? Not a single one?”
Phil managed to suppress both a grin and a groan and told her for the dozenth time, “All I saw were men. Men and boys, from eight or ten, to eighty.”
“But, er, enough in between, right?”
“I distinctly remember kicking a fellow of about twenty in the stomach when they were tying me up, so yes, I’d say there are a few eligible men there. But you’re not to go falling in love with any of them. Or all of them. I know you, Fee! These aren’t normal men.”
Fee gave her hips a little shimmy. “We’ll see about that.”
“You know what I mean. They’re odd. And dangerous.”
“Oh, Phil, you don’t really know me at all, do you?” she asked, most unfairly. “I only fall a little in love with every man I meet. Just the tiniest, littlest bit, just for fun. I can’t help that. But I’ll only fall truly in love with one man, and odds are I won’t meet him in the College of Drycraeft. There’s a world full of men, and only one right one for me. So a girl has to shop around a bit to find out who he is, you see? I’m there to see Stan. If flirtation happens, I promise it will be completely accidental.”
But the shimmy stayed in her hips as they walked across the gloaming. She’d chosen a jade-green shantung that was far too summery, but it had the advantage of twitching seductively with her every move, so she made the supreme sacrifice of warmth for style and was pleased with the results. Her gas mask, bouncing against her swaying hip in its cloth-of-gold drawstring satchel, spoiled the lines somewhat, but neither sister ever left home without hers.
They ascended the last promontory, and the grand prospect of Stour spread before them.
“Oh,” Fee breathed, “it’s right, so exactly right.” She’d been desperately afraid that it would be a dowdy brick lump in the middle of a manicured lawn, without romance or charm, but its extravagance left her briefly speechless. It was better than ruins! The baobabs and banyans, the milling herds of delicate antelopes, the perfumes of Araby in the air—she took them all as only her due.
Anything could happen in a place like this, she thought. Duels for her honor, quests to win her hand, and poetry galore! The gloaming was pinkening where the sun lowered just behind the hills, while from the leaden clouds on the far horizon, a swift wind was wuthering. A bird that might well be a nightingale sang a dulcet melody into the imminent twilight, and one bright heavenly body that Fee firmly told herself was Venus hovered in the sky. Nature and architecture were conspiring to give Fee exactly the setting she craved. Even without romance, it was almost good enough. Almost.
Phil, unaffected by the picturesque glories around her, said, “Now stay close to me, beware of bears, and if anyone tries any funny business, you run away and leave me to handle it.”
“That’s what Lord Grumley used to call his indiscretions with chorus girls—funny business.” He was the Shakespearean roué whom the girls good-naturedly allowed to believe was corrupting them. “Do you remember he’d pull his cravat over his eyes before every grope, on the ostrich theory? ‘Sin unseen ain’t sin at all,’ he used to say, the old dear. How that man loved the blackout.”
“There won’t be any of that kind of funny business,” Phil said firmly.
She led Fee to the ha-ha and leaped the gap first. Fee, more hesitant, paced the edge and made a few false starts before she jumped. She looked like a silky gazelle...until the landing, when her ankle turned in the soft earth, and she crumpled to the ground with a gasping “Oh!”
Phil had little patience for a girl who wore heels and a shantung frock cross-country, so she didn’t rush to comfort Fee, on the principle that those who ought to know better must take the consequences, even beloved sisters. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No,” Fee said pathetically, her abalone-gray eyes welling. “But look! My very last pair of decent stockings!” She raised one slender leg until her skirt fell well above her thigh, revealing a rosy garter belt. There, on the knee, was a hole that descended in a ladder down to her ankle. “I can clean the dress, if I’m lucky, or turn it into a blouse or tunic, but the stockings are hopeless, Phil! Hopeless!” She let her leg fall and flung herself back dramatically on the soft turf, making her hemline inch higher.
Phil, knowing her sister was in jest—mostly, anyway—was about to laugh and drag her to her feet, when a figure dashed out of the shadowed landscape and scooped Fee into its arms. His arms, for the interloper was broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped and said in a strong baritone, “Be still, gentle maiden, and I will succor thee.”
Fee began to scowl, knowing it would be like Phil to arrange such a ridiculous act and script with someone just to mock her romantic sensibilities. No one had said such a thing in the last several centuries—outside her own fantasies. Angry at having her secret dreams teased, she struggled and looked up at the man who held her, ready to launch a tirade. Then she stopped, mute and spellbound.
Venus had fallen in love with such a man and welcomed him to a bed of lynx fur. Sleeping Endymion looked so, and comely, foolish Paris. He was a classical statue given breath and life, chiseled and soft all at once. Fee had never seen anyone quite so handsome, and she considered herself something of an expert on masculine beauty. But where the faces of most good-looking men plainly say, look at me, his only begged, humbly and sincerely, to be allowed to look on her.
“Dry your tears, my lady,” he said, staring, staring, as if she were the first of her kind, a sublimely rare creature born into his hands. “Where is the pain? Be still, and I will heal you.”
He set her down again in the springy grass and began to feel her ankle.
“There?” he asked.
“No,” Fee gasped. “Not there.”
He moved higher, his amber eyes anxiously watching her reaction. “There?” he asked, caressing her knee.
Fee’s breath began to come fast. “No,” she murmured. “Not quite . . .”
His hand crept up to her thigh, pressing gently just beneath her silken hem, checking for tenderness, and Fee gave a hysterical little pant while Phil watched, wondering if the boy was going to be seduced or smacked.
“Whatever you’re doing up there, Prentice Thomas, it’s not healing,” said a voice, cold and harsh. Arden stepped from the shadows. “She’s another unnatural monster whom the Essence can’t touch.” He glared at Phil.
“Nothing monstrous could have such a lovely form,” Thomas said, and Arden laughed sharply.
“You know nothing of the world, prentice. If danger and evil were hideous, everyone could avoid them. The wickedest things are cloaked in beauty.”
Gentle disbelief clouded Thomas’s face. “You’re wrong, you must be, Master Arden. I read in a poem, beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Slowly, like a man waking to a revelation, he turned away from
his master to look again at reclining Fee, and they regarded each other with the promise of everything in the world hanging in the space between them, the unheard melody, the unbestowed kiss, the sweetness and the wild ecstasy. Fee found her own echo in his eyes, and she loved, and he loved, like Arcadian innocents.
Of course, Fee was in many ways more of a satyress than a shepherdess, and she knew she was prone to falling in love—just a little bit in love, mind you—at the drop of a hat. But this—why, he sounded like something out of Scott, or even her dear Jane! Though she couldn’t imagine even the wickedest Austen seducer creeping up her inner thigh . . .
“You spend far too much time in the library, prentice,” Arden said. “Time you should be using to perfect your magic. Why aren’t you with the others at the Exaltation?”
“I’m on guard duty,” the young prentice said, losing his chivalric tone.
“Then escort these intruders off the grounds.”
“We’re here to see Stan,” Phil said, “and you know you can’t make us leave.”
She saw his big fists clench at his sides, and for a moment she was afraid of what he could do. He might not be able to use magic on her, but he looked like one of those Hungarian fellows in storybooks who turn into wolves at the slightest provocation—and she’d left her sword at home.
Arden closed his eyes for a moment, controlling himself. Headmaster Rudyard said Phil was to be allowed on the grounds, and while he wasn’t quite ready to openly defy the head of the College, he wasn’t happy about it.
“Prentice Stanislaus is otherwise occupied,” he said.
“He’s participating in his first Exaltation,” Thomas said dreamily. “We couldn’t possibly disturb him at such a moment.”
“We’ll wait,” Phil said, and Arden made a growling sound.
“I’ll take you there.” Thomas helped Fee to her feet, forgetting to release her hand. “It’s such a beautiful experience.”
“You’re wasting your time with these two, prentice. They don’t have a spark of Essence in them. They won’t feel thing.”
“But everything on earth has the Essence within it. How can they be without Essence? They are alive, aren’t they?” He squeezed Fee’s warm hand. “Yet I can feel nothing in her.” He cocked his lovely head at Fee in perplexed pity. “How do you bear it?” he asked. “You must feel so lonely, so empty. There is some part of you waiting to be filled.”
Fee cast a look at her sister, saying in their own telepathy, That’s what Lord Grumly would say!
“I know!” Thomas said. “I will fill that place for you!”
Fee pulled away and fell on Phil’s shoulder, giggling uncontrollably. Phil looked over her sister’s head and inadvertently caught Arden’s eye. For one unguarded moment, they smiled knowingly at each other at Thomas’s earnest innocence. Then Arden caught himself, scowled, and looked away.
“They’ll be a nuisance,” Arden said. “I’d better go with you, to make sure they don’t interrupt the Exaltation. If they do, I’ll throw them off the grounds myself, whatever the Headmaster says.” His hands tightened into fists again and stalked away. “Come along!”
The boy took Fee’s hand as naturally as breathing and led her as a child leads another down a happy path.
Phil followed in their wake, marveling that Fee had done it again. Of course, it was easy with a young man who probably hadn’t seen a woman for years. Well, let Fee have her fun. She knew her sister wouldn’t take it seriously. She never did.
Thomas guided them to a cluster of large flat-topped rocks perched on a rise. “The Three Dwarves,” he called them, explaining that they were supposed to come alive and wander at night. “Not that we believe it,” he quickly added.
Oh no, thought Phil. Magic is quite enough without dwarves being real, as well.
“Here,” he said, settling Fee and helping her tuck her skirt away from the furry absinthe-colored moss. “You’ll have a perfect view.”
Phil looked over the broad lake basin and surrounding landscaped lawn and saw perhaps four hundred men scattered over the grounds, silent and still, surrounded by a mercury-colored mist. “What are they doing?” she asked. Here were men, fighting men, wasting their time looking at stars or meditating, when they could be preparing for invasion—saving England!
“They’re keeping the world alive,” Thomas said matter-of- factly.
Phil laughed, and Arden stepped swiftly to her side and said sharply, “Be quiet. You don’t know anything.” He was so close to her, so quickly, that again she felt a little afraid. It embarrassed her, so she forced herself not to flinch away.
“Then tell me.”
“Why? So you can laugh some more?”
When she saw his face, she bit back her tart reply and said, even more gently than she meant to, “Tell me.”
He did, and was so intent on his tale he completely forgot to step away from Phil. He spoke in a hushed murmur in her ear, just loud enough for Fee to hear, too.
“The earth is a body, through which the Essence flows,” he said. “Like blood, it swirls to every corner of the globe.”
She desperately wanted to point out that a globe has no corners, but she held her tongue, lest he stop his lesson.
“But like blood, the Essence would grow sluggish and stagnant if it did not have a heart to pump it. England is that heart, and we help the Essence circulate throughout the world. England exists because of us, and the earth could not exist without us.”
“What do you mean, England exists because of you?” The whole thing struck her as supremely arrogant.
“There have been hearts before England existed, other islands that have been raised by magicians and sunk by indolence or treachery. Tir Na Nog vanished almost before memory, and after it, Atlantis and Lyonesse were cast beneath the waves. Each time the world was almost lost, but each time the greatest from among the magicians who survived gathered their powers and the Earth’s Essence and raised a new sanctuary, a new center of the world. They put their magic, their selves, into it, so that the islands became, each in turn, repositories of power. In this age, it is England. There is Essence everywhere, but vast amounts course through English soil, far more than anywhere else. We tend it, we guide it through its channels.”
“That’s what they’re doing?” Phil asked.
Arden nodded. “It is the Exaltation, the drawing-up of the island’s power. The Essence flows through them and thence through the world. It is the most—” He broke off abruptly, and she saw from the corner of her eye that his face was contorted in anguish. “You can’t imagine it. When you surrender yourself to the Exaltation, when you’re a vessel for the powers of the earth, there’s no fear left in you, no loneliness, no sorrow. It is intimate and vast, all at once. You’re held oh so tenderly, and you know that nothing bad can ever touch you again.”
He wasn’t speaking to her. She doubted he even remembered she was there. He was gazing out over the lake, the lawn, with the yearning of a lover for his beloved.
“Why aren’t you with them?” she asked.
He started, recalling where he was, who he was with. “I’m in disgrace, remember? Because of you. They may never let me draw the Essence again.” He lowered his voice to the barest whisper. “Damn it, kill me or release me. I cannot live like this!”
“The Essence sounds like a drug,” Phil said. “Or love.”
“It’s nothing like love,” he spat. “Love is a corrupt thing, a lie. The Essence is pure. Ah!” He pressed his temples distractedly. “See your brother and go, and don’t return. Please.”
“What harm can we do?” Phil asked.
“You’re disrupting everything!” he said between tightly clenched teeth. He’d worked so hard to find his serenity again, and now it was beginning to crumble. He felt like he had as a child, helpless in the face of screams and beatings, until the Essence had risen up in him, given him peace and power. And he felt as he had, not so long ago, when he thought he found something even better than the
Essence and had been crushed for his blasphemy. He’d always been able to find refuge in his power. What if he was never allowed to use it again? What if he was cursed, as Phil’s ancestor had been, stripped of his power and cast out, empty and alone? It would be worse than being a commoner. He’d be like an Albion.
He watched Phil watching the Exaltation, her brow knitted, her full lips pursed. She could feel nothing of what was going on down there. Even though he was forbidden to use his power, his skin prickled with acute awareness of the massive amounts of Essence surging up from the ground. It was like a teasing, intimate touch that promised no fulfillment.
He couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Phil and her sister, to feel none of it.
Yes, he could, he decided, with a flash of sympathy for the girls. It must feel like death.
On the stone beside them, Thomas was telling Fee in hushed ecstasy what was happening. He would touch her arm to bring her attention to one thing, then lean into her strawberry waves to whisper in her ear.
“The colors are lovely,” Fee said. The mercury mist had thinned, and the air around the men seemed charged with prismatic colors.
“You can see them? Most commoners can’t. Drawing Essence from different sources makes different colors. Green from plants, red from animals, and see those swirls of amber and gold? They’re from the Earth. From near the surface, anyway, where there are living things. It gets darker, the deeper you go. Of course,” he added confidentially, “very few can draw up the black Essence from the Earth’s heart. And look here.”
He placed his hand over Fee’s, enveloping it in a glittering white glow that sparked with sudden jewel accents. “This is the Essence of my body. We have everything in us, you see, parts of all the world. We can feel a trace of everything the Essence has touched.” He closed his eyes. “I feel roots, mushroom spores, worms. You really feel nothing?”
“I see the glow, but I feel nothing.”
“There must be something I can do,” he said, gazing at her as a physician might look on his patient on her deathbed, wracking his brains for a cure. “Let me try. Let me fill you, please! It won’t hurt.”
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