Petty Magic by Camille Deangelis Page B

unarmed combat instructors. He was very fond of saying, “Don’t think so bloody much!” whenever a recruit was slow to respond. It was the classroom time with him I relished most, though; with each new day I learned more about the circumstances of his capture and escape. “There was a second,” he said. “One second, that’s all I had, to leap out the open door and disappear into the forest along the track. I am only here speaking to you now because I did not hesitate.”
    He was informal and quick to laugh, but he never made light of the task before us and the consequences of failure. “Boys and girls, there is a reason our species has thrived, has dominated all other creatures on God’s green earth since the dawn of time. Why? Because the human survival instinct is second to none, that’s why.
    “Our language, our civilization—these are just the trappings. It is our instinct that preserved our distant ancestors from the beasts on the African plains, and you must trust that instinct above all else. If you recall only one thing from all your weeks of training, let it be this.” He paused, gazing around the room at each of his pupils in turn. “If you hesitate,” he said, “all will be lost.” The excitement and admiration he inspired was very nearly palpable; they were fine words, all the more so because he had lived them.
    Then someone had to go and ask what would happen if you shot a comrade by mistake. “Anybody who kicks down the door is, in all likelihood, no friend of yours,” Robbins replied, and the group erupted in laughter. “Again,” he went on above the snickering, “it is a matter of intuition, a matter of instinct.
    “You must divorce yourself from all sentiment,” he said. “There can be no tender thoughts of your mother—no thoughts at all, if you can help it. You cannot save the life of a child at the price of your associates’.”
    Then he told us that there was no shame in confessing ourselves unsuited to the task, and that if so our job prospects for other branches of government or military service would be unaffected. At times you could see a doubt flicker across their faces, but the majority of my classmates were to decide it was much too late to turn back now. You could only pretend to be the man or woman you wanted to become, and hope and pray you would eventually grow into it. So everyone prayed—everyone but me.
    O THER WOMEN at Mallaig were much friendlier, but they weren’t the ones in training to be parachuted into France. All the cooks and housekeeping staff had given themselves aliases—Mrs. Wrench, Mrs. Pitch, Mrs. Axel, Mrs. Sledge—and they attended to our needs with jollity and a brisk sort of affection. They considered themselves den mothers as much as maintenance staff, though the head cook, Mrs. Dowel, ran a very tight operation. After all, no self-respecting beldame lets her cauldron—full of soup , which is fully edible , mind you, no bat wings or eyeballs in the mix—run dry.
    Of course, I knew what they were from the get-go; if a beldame ever wants to see if there are kindred nearby, she needs only to look at the crescent moon on the base of her thumbnail. The moon will glow if there are other beldames about, as I found when I shut myself in the WC upon my arrival.
    At our first supper I lifted my teacup to find a strange symbol scrawled in black ink on the napkin:

    One of the other recruits had already noticed and was craning her neck to make sense of it, her brow knotted. “What is that?”
    “Haven’t the faintest,” I replied coolly as I took a sip. She would tell the others, of course—but let them talk.
    Mrs. Dowel was making the rounds, stopping by each table in the canteen to ask if everyone had enjoyed their meal, and on the far side of the room I heard Robbins declare her hearty lamb stew had gone to a better place. When she paused at our table to lap up the compliments, I gave her a look that said I accepted her invitation to meet her