An Exclusive Preview of Strands of Fire: A Tale of Magic in the Great War

Marcus

You are aware that once I sought the Grail,
Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
And it was told that through my infant wail
There rose immortal semblances of song.

-Siegfried Sassoon-

Jane squeezed my hand tightly. Her fingers interlaced with mine as we walked down a crowded street in Dublin. Her other hand gripped my arm between bicep and elbow.

“You nervous?” I asked.

“I’m playing the part,” she said as she skirted a pothole filled with muddy water.

“I think we’re already in with these folks. It’s been a couple weeks already. If they thought we were spies, we’d have sensed it by now.”

“I’m not nervous,” she whispered.

“It’s natural to look nervous on a night like this. They told us they were sharing something big tonight. We should be a little nervous. It’d be weird to look too confident, in fact.”

“Marcus, you’re the nervous one. Clearly. Your knees are practically wobbling.”

I sighed. It wasn’t only the meeting wobbling my knees. It didn’t matter how many evening we’d already gone out pretending to be married, it weirded me out.

I tried not to think about how many times we’d held hands before this trip to Ireland. In the past, there was never any danger of it coming across as romantic. Whenever we’d huddled close or wrapped up in an embrace, it was for comfort and support. No more questions needed.

But for this mission, a prolonged one at that, we needed to be in love, a convincing kind of love, or things might go sideways. I knew it was pretend, but we’d never needed to pretend like this before, and she had no qualms about leaning into the bit. She was a good actress. It was weird.

So despite all of Dublin’s many fascinating sights, sounds, and smells, all I managed to concentrate on was whether I was crushing the fingers she laced between mine.

The sun had already set, and lights from pubs and night clubs illuminated the streets around us. Above, the tall, dark facades of buildings on our left and right made me a little claustrophobic. They stared like angry faces that knew who we really were—not deserters and separatist sympathizers, but Marcus and Jane, the only flying members of what Dupont had decided to call the Arcane Escadrille. Atkins hadn’t liked that much. After all, we were supposed to be confidential, and usually confidential units didn’t have flashy nicknames.

“Why are you so stiff?” Jane protested. “Please. There is nervous and there is petrified.”

“I’m just getting into the character. If I were really a deserter, I would be petrified.”

“Not deserters,” she said.

“Right. Worse. Defectors.”

“Yes,” she replied as she put my arm around her waist. We were getting closer to our destination. Ahead, light from the pub we sought spilled out into the street, and patrons caroused at tables of different heights just outside. “It’s not like we’re meeting the President of Sinn Fein tonight or anything. You know Cillian well, by now. He likes you.”

I tried hard not to let the weight of my wrist and arm settle on her hip and considered how awkward an arrangement it was to walk while having your arm draped around someone like this in the first place. Her waist shifted and moved as she walked, and the only natural way to rest my hand was to settle it on the groove of her side. As soon as I managed that, the movement came easier.

“Is this all right?” I asked, a little embarrassed. Before she rolled her eyes or cocked her eyebrow to suggest the question was stupid, a warmth had washed over her expression.

Or was that just the streetlights of Dublin casting her in a strange light?

“Marcus, I know this is uncomfortable. It will be less uncomfortable if you stop treating me like a dangerous animal,” she said.

I laughed.

“Maybe a lion cub,” I said, memories tugging at my mind. A long while back, the Lafayette Escadrille had adopted two lion cubs as their mascot. The lions made themselves at home on the airbase and behaved more like dogs than wild animals. They had taken a particular liking to my best friend, Raoul Lufbery.

The thought of him nearly stopped me in place. With my free hand, I reached for the machine gun round in my pocket. The casing was perfectly polished by Luf’s own hand before he—

Jane squeezed my torso.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up Lufbery,” she whispered. I must have looked confused. “You always stare at the ground like that when you think about him.”

“You didn’t. I did,” I replied without warmth.

Luf was my hero. I idolized him like an older brother. He meant everything to me. And he was gone. He went after a German recon plane and never came back.

I’d been at war since I was young, since the war was young. I’d lost a lot of friends. I’d never been angry at one before.

His death was still fresh. His loss had changed Jane and me as individuals and as a partnership. We were scared to talk about him. It was like watching a squad member go out of formation to engage someone on his own. I had no way of communicating what I knew, and she had no way to do the same. I didn’t know how either of us would look by the time we were done processing the grief. Sometimes, it popped up in scary ways, like how she’d succumbed to a fit of violence a few nights previous when pumping rounds into a dead German pilot and his dead gunner.

I shook my head to rid myself of the gloom. We were Marcus and Jane. We’d gone through hell and made it back. I wouldn’t fail her now.

We sauntered into the pub and pushed our way through a mass of drinkers. It was a small place with a big bar. Around us, all types mingled on the worn wooden booths and polished counter. Amputees, rough old men with leathery skin, young women done up in curls and makeup to accentuate their beauty, widows done up in curls and makeup to cover their age. Most of the men between ages eighteen and thirty were either injured, crazy, or absent altogether.

I made my way toward a stool by the bar, recently made vacant by a young woman running off after her group friends that headed out the door.

“It looks like Mr. Ryan is occupied,” I said to Jane. “Here. Have a seat.”

“What? So you can hover over me like a bodyguard? I don’t think so.”

I glanced around. Amidst the crowded room, Mr. Ryan, the bartender of the pub and the keeper of the door behind the counter, was busy tossing out a disorderly veteran who’d had a pint too many.

“I don’t think another is going to open up.”

She rolled her eyes again before putting both of her arms around my neck and tugging me onto the stool. When I was firmly planted, she took a seat on my lap and leaned playfully into my chest.

Suddenly, I considered it would be easier to unjam a mounted Lewis gun than to act natural. But I tried.

“Put your arms around me,” Jane said through smiling teeth.

“What?”

“Can you please pretend to be enjoying yourself?”

“Oh, right,” I said, trying to smile. I wrapped my arms around Jane’s waist again, and she laughed. I laughed, too. What else was there to do with my awkward energy, let it sweat out of my palms?

Jane played the part well, rocking back and forth, saying silly things just loud enough for the people beside us to hear, things like, “It’s so nice having you home” and “You didn’t dally with any of those French girls, did you?”

After a few minutes of this, when I was convinced she was really about to plant a big wet kiss on my lips to sell the bit, Mr. Ryan returned behind the counter. I raised my hand to call him over.

“Mr. Ryan, we’re here for—”

“Two?” he replied, cutting me off.

“Oh right,” I stuttered. We weren’t supposed to know him personally, even if we’d been coming here each night for the past few weeks. He turned his back to me and started pouring something from a bottle into two shot glasses. He turned back around, planted them on the bar. His fingernails had grime wedged under them, and he was missing a tooth. He grinned.

Each evening, he tested us again with two shots and false conversation that sounded a little too sincere.

“She’s a beauty,” he said, nodding at Jane. She beamed and pretended to be shy. I looked at her.

We’d been teased a lot since meeting. Other guys on base had batted their eyelashes at me plenty of times or told me she was beautiful with a mocking lilt. They’d shared no small number of crass jokes at our expense. At first, I’d fought it. Then I realized the more I let others know it bothered me, the stronger it came on.

But Mr. Ryan was sincere. And he was right. Painted as some of the other young women in the bar, with rosy cheeks, cherry lips, and darkly painted eyes, she might have had her pick of the men in the room.

“Don’t remind me,” I told him.

“With a beauty like that on my lap, I’d look a bit more happy if I were you,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being playful or casting doubt on our cover. I forced a laugh.

“How affectionate do you want me?” I asked, then burrowed my nose into Jane’s hair. The panic still grew. Whenever anyone asked questions about our marriage, my heart started racing for fear of being discovered. I wasn’t an operative. I was a pilot. I had no business pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

“You going to drink?” he said. Jane’s hair was perfumed.

“What?” I asked, pulling myself back to his attention.

“You going to drink?” he asked again solemnly, pointing at the glasses on the bar. I hesitated. He knew I didn’t drink. I didn’t do it to calm my nerves on a flight, and I certainly couldn’t now when I needed all my social wits to keep from blowing our mission. Besides, I had no idea what was in the glasses. For all I knew, Mr. Ryan had found out we were with the government and poisoned the—

Jane swooped forward, grabbed them, and downed one after the other. I stared in shock. She winced and shook her head from side to side before holding one glass above her head and slamming them back down on the bar. A couple of women to our right clapped. One of them mouthed the word “wow.”

“I want to dance!” Jane said, slipping off my lap. It was the first time I’d noticed the fiddle playing from the corner of the room.

“In a minute, darling,” I said as I pulled her back toward me. I turned back to the barkeep. “Say, we’re supposed to be meeting a friend here. Maybe you’ve seen them.”

He shrugged. He shrugged every night we rehearsed this script. I knew what he’d say next.

“What’s the name?”

“Casement,” I said, repeating the code word we’d been provided. He paused, then whispered.

“That was last night’s friend,” he said.

“There’s a new friend tonight?” I asked.

“There’s a new friend.”

“I don’t know the new friend.”

“Then I can’t let you through the door.”

Jane’s plastered-on smile faltered. She took the reins again, tossed her curls, and pouted.

“New friend?” she asked. “That’s odd. Margaret didn’t mention any new—”

At mention of the name Margaret, the man relaxed.

“Keep your voice down,” he said. “Everyone’s spooked right now. They arrested over a hundred of the Feiners only a little bit ago. The new word is Eamon. Come on, then.”

We followed him to a darkly lacquered door in the corner of the room. He cracked it and went back to polishing his glassware, leaving us to slip inside. The sounds of the pub muffled in an instant as we closed it behind us.

Inside, we navigated a dark, creaking stairwell up a few flights before light peeked out from under a door. We knocked three times slowly and waited.

After a hushed shuffling of feet, the door opened.

“Well, there you two are.”

Margaret’s worried face appeared in the crack between the frame and the door.

“Sorry, Margaret,” I said. “You know Jane, always fussing about her hair.”

Jane jabbed me in the side. She didn’t hold back any, either, and I doubled over.

“I’ll never do it for you again if you keep up like that,” Jane said. Margaret ushered us inside and locked the door behind us. The apartment was shabby, dilapidated, downright broken, but I loved it. We’d only been meeting with the Irish nationalists for a couple of weeks, but something about them felt homey and welcoming. It’d been a long time since I’d experienced such a thing. Even my tenure at the Lafayette, which was full of congeniality and friendship, had undertones of transience. But here… These folks would have kept you forever if you wanted.

Unless, secretly, you were betraying them, that is. I pushed the thought to the back of my mind.

We sat in a small group of what were by now familiar faces. Margaret stood near the kitchen, while her cousin Beth and her friend Grace conversed on two rickety chairs by the door. Cillian, the sole man I’d met so far in connection to this unit of the Sinn Feiners, wore a tortured expression at rest but couldn’t help himself throwing a welcoming arm around you. I had taken an instant liking to him, and the affection had only grown from there.

“You’ll be all right while the men talk over here?” I asked Jane before bracing for another poke. She shook her head at me and broke off to speak with Margaret and the others.

“Be careful, Markie,” said Cillian. “Or that Jane of yours will have you sleeping alone tonight.”

I laughed and joined him by the window. He offered me the second half of the cigarette he’d been smoking. I waved it off but smiled as I sat beside him.

“Look at them,” he said, nodding toward the women. “They were born for this type of thing. You see how animated and excited they all are? Have you ever paused to think, Markie, what a war of women would look like?”

I cocked my head and wondered. Once, I’d have said there’d be no such war. My mother and Jane shaped my understanding of women. My mother was relentlessly sweet, and Jane had challenged my perceptions of violence since our early days together.

But then, lately, Jane had been changing. The girl in front of me now was not the girl I met in Gengoult. Had a man’s war affected her, or did she have the soldier’s fury in her all along?

“I don’t want to think about that,” I replied.

“Nor do I,” he said. “I think that’s why men fight the wars. Men are treacherous, and bloodthirsty, yes. But if women ran the wars, I don’t know if I’d ever trust a peace treaty. They know something we don’t.”

I furrowed my eyebrows, snorted, and turned to him.

“You been drinking, Cillian?” I asked.

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” he said.

Margaret waved us over to a torn and battered couch.

“Get over here, you,” she called. “There’s news.”

Cillian put an arm around my shoulders, a gesture half-rooted in affection, half in a desire for support. He had only one leg—a gift from his time serving the King at the front lines. When he’d had a little too much, the one leg counted for half. But he wore sympathy well, and his hardships rendered him all the more likable.

“You’ve just cut off an important conversation,” he told Margaret as I helped him onto the couch. I sat down beside him and pulled Jane onto my lap.

“Oh, I heard your conversation,” said Grace. “Philosophy at its finest.”

“Did you forget how to whisper during your time at the front?” asked Beth.

“Hush now, all of you!” Margaret said, batting the air again as though to swat away a pesky fly. She owned the gesture for how often she used it. It would always remind me of her, the same way a half-hearted shrug would always remind me of Luf.

I caught Jane performing that half-hearted shrug from time to time.

A rat scurried across the room, but we paid no heed of it. Rats were co-tenants with the Dubliners, I’d learned, and it was best to ignore them. There was no beating them.

But despite the busted furniture, the bare rugs, and the rodents running wild, a warmth spread over me. I wanted to live in these moments, now. I squeezed Jane tighter, and she turned to me in concern. I shook my head to let her know nothing was wrong, but I didn’t let up.

I could live this life, if fate would allow it. It was not optimal, but it would do. By now, I wasn’t too picky.

“There are rumors coming down from the top,” Margaret said.

“What kind of rumors?” asked Grace.

“There’s a shipment that’s come in,” she went on.

“Not more weapons,” Cillian’s voice droned in disappointment. “I won’t believe that—not after the failed smuggling that was meant to support our boys and girls in the Rising.”

“It’s a weapon, but it’s no gun,” Margaret said. “And they’re only telling a few of us about it. Don’t want it getting out that the leaders of the Feiners have gone crazy.”

This was what we’d come for this evening. Our task was to infiltrate this branch of the Sinn Fein movement and discover if there were seeds of another uprising, like the one that had happened two years prior.

Or at least, that’s what I thought the assignment was.

“Does this weapon concern my husband and me?” Jane asked. I let go of her, confused. What did she mean?

“Aye,” Margaret replied. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Grace. Cillian and Margaret shared a troubled glance. It wasn’t lost on the others in the room.

“No, Margaret. You’d told us you’d given those beliefs up,” Beth whined. “Really? A magic weapon?”

My heart sank. I hadn’t asked many questions about why we’d be stationed in Dublin so far from any aerial action. Truth be told, the assignment came on the tail of a frank conversation I’d had with Smith about getting Jane away from combat. When they gave me the vague directions of  cozying up to Irish nationalists, I thought it was Smith making good on his word.

But he wasn’t. We were still playing the same game. I stared at the woman sitting in my lap. Had Jane known the truth?

“Why shouldn’t I?” Margaret replied, voice turning sharp.

“There’s no magic out there.” Beth stood and crossed to the window. “It’s all a bunch of stories and tall tales to keep children from misbehaving. I wondered why you two brought these outsiders in so quickly.”

“They’re not just stories, Beth. Tell them, Cillian! Tell them what you’ve seen.”

“Cillian’s drunk. And even when he’s sober you can’t trust half of what he says!”

“I resent that!” Cillian replied.

I pulled Jane closer to my mouth while they argued.

“You knew about this?” I whispered. She set her jaw and tried to pull away, but I held her fast. “Why didn’t you tell me we were here for magic?”

“We can’t all get lost in our grief,” she replied. “And besides, I shouldn’t have needed to tell you.”

“What’s wrong with you two?” asked Margaret when she noticed our quiet back and forth.

“Nothing,” Jane replied. “Just nervous.”

Everyone turned to me. Jane squeezed my hand tightly, not in support, in warning. My head reeled, and all my blood was rushing to my face. She shouldn’t have needed to tell me. That was true, but that wasn’t all of it. Smith, Atkins, Dupont, Jane… I hadn’t been shy about voicing my complaints when we didn’t get all the details on an assignment. Maybe they’d given up on me.

“Darling?” Jane asked. I coughed out some guttural disbelief. Darling. Here I’d been enjoying our play acting. I was embarrassed for that, too. Yes, I knew it was pretend, but I didn’t know it was pretend this way. I thought it was pretend the other way. “Are you well, darling?”

I turned my gaze on Margaret.

“You mean to tell me that you think Sinn Fein has received a shipment of magical weapons?”

Margaret took my question as encouragement. She tried to hide her smile.

“I don’t know the details, but I think it’s just one.”

Jane hadn’t eased her grip on my hand. She sensed my volatility, had realized the extent of my ignorance. My feelings were stupid. She was right. I should have known. I wasn’t a child. I wouldn’t blow our cover.

I only needed a moment to reconcile that I hadn’t found us some cozy assignment. Jane was in danger. Again.

“I don’t want to,” I said quietly. Cillian put a knowing hand on my back.

“Look at that, Beth.” His voice was solemn and respectful. “You don’t have to believe a drunk old amputee. But I recognize that face. I see it in the morning after nightmares that I’ve been called back to the front. If the magic weren’t real, why would he fear so at its mention?”

Grace and Beth quieted. Maybe they weren’t convinced about the magic, but they might be convinced that whatever had come in this new shipment carried its fair share of danger.

“We all have our demons,” Margaret said. “I don’t pretend to know what you’ve seen or done, but you came to us with your hands outstretched. We doubted the letters, but now with you here, I’ve found myself hoping in a way I haven’t since the Rising.”

“Maybe it’s a false alarm,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “The British government arrested one hundred and fifty Sinn Feiners a week ago with little pretense. They said Joseph Dowling was set ashore in County Clare by the Germans. He said that the Germans were planning military action in Ireland. So they locked up one hundred and fifty of us! But we know the truth. When Dowling came ashore, he had time before they found him, time enough to set the wheels in motion.”

“You mean he smuggled the weapon in and stowed it somewhere?” Jane asked.

“He gave it to the right people, but we’ve been fooled before. The failed weapons shipment before the Rising was a disaster. There are many who believe it was a set up. We want to be thorough. When word got round that we had two new recruits with an alleged reputation for magical information, not many believed it. But I did. And now, it’s time for us to prove ourselves.”

Jane put her hand in my hair and leaned my head against hers.

“How do you know we’re not the set up?” I asked.

Margaret paused, but Cillian laughed.

“Oh, please, look at you. Look at how you reacted when you heard the words ‘magic weapon.’ And besides, I can tell. You don’t want their war. We’re the same, you and I.”

My superiors’ masterstroke landed with Cillian’s vote of confidence. By keeping me in the dark, they preserved the horror of this discovery. Smith wanted me to believe he’d got us a safe assignment hundreds of miles from the front so that this moment would be sincere.

Meanwhile, Atkins had lined up our search for the next great magical artifact all while landing a devastating blow to the Irish movement for Independence. My stomach churned as I looked at the hopeful faces in the room. I’d been hiding here, but their war was now. Their battle was not in a trench. It was everywhere.

“We will help,” Jane said. “We want to help.”

But one of us could not decide, and everyone there knew it. Again, all eyes turned on me. I swallowed.

“Can you give me a day to think about it?”