Delusion

by Laura L. Sullivan

  And so Phil acquired her own pair of sappers.

  Chapter 14

  The people of Bittersweet got themselves ready for a war they hardly believed was there.

  Then the war came for them.

  It was nearly October, and the hops were all in, drying comfortably in their oast houses, waiting to become beer. The guest pickers had gone home to their bombarded city. It was in the lull between hops and apples that life in Bittersweet changed. To Mr. Henshawe’s amazement, he received an official document requesting the names and ages of all his customers.

  “Cheek!” he said, and tossed it.

  The following week he received another, this time accompanied by a stern sheet listing the scheduled fines for rationing violations, including being an uncooperative shopkeeper. This time, with great grumbling, he complied, and not long after that the first ration books arrived.

  Unlike the rest of England, Bittersweet was well fixed for meat, butter, cheese, and eggs. Everyone had a vegetable garden, and besides apples there were damsons and sloes growing wild. There was no danger of starvation.

  There was, however, great risk of grumpiness.

  “Ten ounces of sugar a week?” Mrs. Enery gasped when Mr. Henshawe handed over her ration book. “Belt tightening indeed. My Enery will have to give up his roly-poly if I’m to have spotted dick for the gels at bridge. Still, to win the war . . .”

  “That’s ten ounces of sugar a month,” the grocer said, and ducked behind the counter as Mrs. Enery vented her wrath on an unfortunate turnip.

  And tea, the prop and support of the English people, barely trickled into Bittersweet.

  There is some comfort in communal grumbling. It was mild misery, but it was shared misery for a good cause, and for the first week of rationing, everyone was well pleased.

  But there was no comfort to be had with the first draft notice.

  There were four young men between eighteen and twenty-five in Bittersweet. In the space of a few days, three of them were called up, and the fourth, deprived of his lifelong friends, signed on to follow them.

  Their mothers wept unashamedly at the train station, draping themselves in a moist, gelatinous way over their embarrassed sons and then, when the engine pulled away, falling into one another’s arms as the town’s three-man band played “God Save the King” and “Apple Blossom Time.”

  The whole town had turned out, tight-lipped (save the mums) and doing their best to make the boys believe they were full-fledged heroes off to save their nation, while each was sure they were sending their young citizens off to die.

  The train that carried the recruits off brought day-old papers, and those who subscribed grimly took their copies. Now that Bittersweet cared about the war, everyone read the news. Several families had even ordered wireless sets and invited their neighbors in to hear nightly reports—Churchill’s gritty reassurance and cheering patriotic music, interspersed with baffling phrases that may have referred to the latest exhibit of surrealist art or may have been coded messages to the resistance. When they wanted to be particularly riled up, they fine-tuned their sets to catch the voice of the traitorous English citizen, Lord Haw Haw, broadcasting on the Nazi propaganda program, Germany Calling.

  Once talk had been of hops and apples, of sheep and lumbago, of rusts and mites and scales. Now everything was War.

  Walking through the dispirited village after the young soldiers had departed, Phil felt desolate. She looked at the nearest yards, their botanical beauty disrupted by the half-subterranean corrugated steel arches of Anderson shelters. Windows that had once been open and bright with borders of starched white lace curtains were now dark and forbidding. Hanging curtains couldn’t stifle all the homefire glow, so most people tacked the edges down and never bothered to unpin them in the daylight.

  “I was right to open their eyes, wasn’t I, Fee?” she asked, frowning anxiously. The image of those four boys going off to war haunted her. She knew the odds were, at least one of them wouldn’t return. “Maybe I should have left Bittersweet alone. What’s the harm of a hundred or so people living in peace and ignorance, with plenty of sugar and their windows ablaze at midnight? What battle is lost for being four soldiers shy? Oh, I know, I know—I did the right thing. But it almost feels wrong!”

  From the edge of the training field, Arden tried to put his finger on the proper metaphor for Phil. He knew he was at a profound disadvantage, having read none of the right books from which he could crib. He had never been to Arabia, had no idea what a burning oasis might look like at sunset against golden desert sands. He really could not say whether Phil, in her tight goldenrod sweater, her fiery hair unbound, most resembled a doubloon-laden treasure ship with billowing crimson sails, or a tropical island volcano erupting magma from a mountain of frangipani.

  A flame, he decided at last. A flame that ignites what it touches. This girl had blazed through the village, undoing the subtle befuddlement Rudyard had orchestrated, and she had singed every student at Stour.

  And consumed me, he confessed to himself.

  “View haloo!” Phil cried across the field when she spied him, and sprinted over before he could retreat. “Caught you before you could go to ground. Why do you always lurk, eh? Afraid of a bit of fisticuffs? Come on, spar with me. I promise I won’t beat you too badly.”

  “No, I—”

  She shrugged before he could make a coherent argument and flopped on the ground at his feet, suddenly boneless. “Oh, but I’m weary!” she said. “You’d think, being a teacher, I’d just shout advice from the sidelines, but somehow I seem to do twice the work. Do I ever ache! Here, do me a favor and press right there.” She contorted her arms until she pointed to a hollow between her shoulder blade and her spine.

  “I really don’t think—”

  “Don’t think, just do. It will hurt me like the dickens, so you ought to enjoy it. Use your knuckles, or better yet your elbow, and dig right in. It’s too tight for words. Ah! Oh! Yes! Harder! Ow! Not quite so hard. Ah, you’re liking that now, aren’t you?”

  At those words he abruptly stopped, for he had indeed very much liked his fingers grasping the rough yellow wool of her shoulder, the nearness of his body to hers as he worked her tight muscle loose, the taste, the crinkled texture of the single flaming hair that wafted its way into his mouth.

  “You’ve done an amazing job with them,” Arden admitted.

  “Well, they’ve been pining for action. You can’t keep grown men cooped up and impotent. Even monks make Benedictine and get up to lord knows what behind their walls. How on earth did you keep the boys from rebelling for hundreds of years? Hey! Rapp!” she shouted as he sparred. “Don’t cuddle him—kill him!”

  “There has been rebellion before,” Arden said. “Led by your ancestor, Godric Albion.”

  “You said there had been other Albions here before, but I thought you were being metaphorical. Other annoying commoner girls who frowned at you and called you cowards.”

  He looked down at the sunburned part in her hair and fought the urge to trace it with his finger.

  “There was a clique of five or so journeyman going about their wanderings in the seventeenth century. Now they are forced to split up, but back then they traveled in groups. They made their way to the court of King Charles I and found the noble life so congenial they never left. Godric Albion was a favorite of the king, a sort of court jester and sage adviser combined, using the Essence to charm one and all. They were granted titles, land, political appointments—knowing all the while they’d have to disappear and return to the college for the rest of their lives. And they might have gone back placidly, if the Civil War hadn’t begun. They were friends of King Charles, you see. Godric persuaded the other four journeymen to stay and fight, and he sneaked back to the college and recruited more, until the college was torn apart. The Schism, we call it.”

  “But they were stopped, right?” She had great gaps in her historical knowledge, but she knew the story of the first Charles’s
execution because she was always fascinated by his son, the romantic second Charles, he of the black curling lovelocks and a thousand mistresses.

  “Aye. They were hunted down and dragged back to the college, to be publicly drained. Every magician, down to the youngest prentice, was forced to drain a part of the criminals’ lives, so none would never forget what happened to traitors. A few escaped and fled to the Continent. Their descendants, and those they trained, are the Dresden magicians.”

  “And Godric?”

  “They caught him, too, but they didn’t kill him. They wanted him to suffer unspeakable torments for what he’d done, so they took away his link to the Essence.”

  “They made him a commoner? Oh, a fate worse than death!”

  “He thought so. He tried to kill himself after, throwing himself out a window. Only it wasn’t high enough, and they saved him, then turned him over to Cromwell. He spent the rest of the war in prison, and then the college lost track of him.”

  “And he’s really my ancestor?”

  “Presumably. I’d always wondered about him. It didn’t seem to me that it was possible to simply turn someone from magician to commoner. But when I figured out what you are, it made sense. I thought you’d come to Stour to do what your ancestor did. I thought you knew, that your family had plotted through the generations to destroy us, or lure us back into the world.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “We need to use all our magic for the Exaltation. Out there we’d go mad with power, and the world would die.”

  “Hogwash. You wouldn’t go mad, I can tell that.”

  “We all do, when we’re on our Journeying. In one way or another, we’re drunk with it. Then most of us become disgusted with ourselves and crawl home, repentant.”

  “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?”

  Chapter 15

  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.”