Chapter 12 #2
At that point she turned and saw Ella—saw her hair. The color was changing, starting at the roots and flowing down from there, strand by strand, until there was no black left. Silver, glinting in the light in precisely the way a wizard’s did.
“Oh,” she said, more gasp than word. “Oh, Ella. How did you … That’s …”
“This is my real color now. For days you’ve been looking at an illusion and not knowing it, so”—Ella’s lips twisted into a spare smile—“I can do more than just my dress.”
Ella took one of the ponytail holders, made a wizard-like queue of her hair, and frowned at her dress and coat. “But I haven’t tried to make a skirt into pants. See what you can do with your hair while I work on that.”
Beatrix’s hair was also genuinely silver, but the color was covered up by the dye spell Peter had cast. If she had the Brown’s Lexicon with her, she could just undo the enchantment. As it was, she had no idea what spell to cast. There was nothing for it but to try it Ella’s way.
Persuasion. All right. She closed her eyes. Oh hair, wouldn’t you like to be silver? You are, you know. Wouldn’t you like to show your true color?
It felt slightly ridiculous. She peeked in the mirror. Brown all the way.
You are silver. Be yourself. Be silver.
Brown.
She tried longer one-sided conversations to no avail.
Minutes ticked by, wasted. How much time would they have?
Finally, the dread of the situation overcoming her, she devolved into babbling: Please, I need you to be silver, I need to fix this mistake, I can’t let this disaster happen—oh God, what if they send Lydia to prison?
Just give me what I had before, please, please, please—
Then it happened, the click of something settling into place.
Beatrix opened her eyes to hair the right color and gulped air to suppress the panic before it set off a full-blown attack.
What it took to get magic to work this way, at least for her, was a powerful piece of evidence in favor of her blinding-fear theory.
She turned around to find that Ella had made herself a credible shirt, pants and masculine boots, apparently without working herself into a shaky mess.
“I don’t think I can manage anything more—could you do my clothes?” Beatrix pleaded.
Ella nodded. “Let me work on this first, though,” she said, gesturing to her long winter coat. “Yours is already wizardy enough.”
Beatrix watched her stare at it with the same determination she used when taking on any task—picking through an overgrown part of the forest, arguing with Rosemarie, zipping through grading.
Nothing happened for a minute. Then it began to change.
The color shifted from bright blue to dark gray, the fabric thinned, the two pockets multiplied to eight.
“OK, hold as still as you can,” she said, and shortly Beatrix’s dress and shoes morphed into wizard-appropriate attire. She felt the spot where her new shirt met pants—it was completely smooth to the touch, still a dress even though it didn’t look like one.
“What do you think, Cinderella?” Ella gave her a grim smile. “Are we ready for the ball?”
They peered at themselves in the long mirror on the bathroom door. Beatrix frowned. They looked an awful lot like women masquerading as men. It was their faces—more than their figures, which Ella had obscured fairly well—that gave them away.
“We need squarer jaws,” she said a bit desperately. “Can you fix that?”
Ella hesitated. Beatrix tried not to panic, but it was getting harder by the second. They couldn’t go outside this way. “What are we going to do?” she said, more to herself than to Ella.
But Ella, setting her too-feminine jaw, said, “Hang on, give me a chance—let me try you first so I have something besides the mirror to look at.”
Nothing happened for what felt like a long time, for all that it was probably no more than a minute or two.
Then Ella flinched. “It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ll fix it,” she said—not sounding entirely sure of that—as Beatrix turned reflexively to the mirror.
Her face had puffed out like a balloon. Not for real, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it.
“All right,” Ella said after another quiet-as-death stretch. “Now you can look.”
Beatrix did, warily, and stared at the face that gazed back at her. Ella had given her a square jaw, all right—aggressively so—along with thicker eyebrows and a broader nose. She swallowed and caught sight of an Adam’s apple pressing out from her throat.
“I doubt even your sister would recognize you now,” Ella said.
“That’s amazing,” Beatrix whispered. “Ella, you’re amazing. I take back all my teasing about your illusions.”
Ella grinned. Then she glared at herself in the mirror and managed—more quickly this time—to repeat the process on her own face. She altered not only her jaw but also her nose, making it longer and sharper.
“If only you could do something about our voices,” Beatrix said.
Ella scoffed. “You don’t need magic for that. You just need to—”
“Is everything OK?” Joan, from the other side of the bathroom door, was equal parts muffled and strained. “Can I come in?”
Ella put a finger to her lips, then flung open the door. She grabbed Joan by the arm, pulled her into the bathroom and barked in a menacing voice a good octave lower than her own, “Yes, do come in and explain yourself, Miss Hamilton.”
“Ella,” Beatrix snapped. “Are you trying to give her a heart attack?”
“Beatrix?” Joan sagged against the door. “Good Lord, I was certain you both were wizards!”
“Oh good,” Ella said, waving an insouciant hand. “That’s the look we were going for.”
“I think you should do most of the talking.” Beatrix glanced in the mirror one last time. Now or never. “Joan, could you write down Eliza Sadler’s address for us?”
Miss Sadler lived in a tidy neighborhood of small bungalows twenty minutes north.
They parked in an alley where no one would see them exiting a car far older than any wizard would be caught driving, then walked to her house.
Little boys dragging sleds paused to stare. Even in the dark, they stood out.
So much hinged on this wild plan. Beatrix ruthlessly squashed the terror and the feeling that they’d taken the wrong option—that they should have come clean to Peter. She let her borrowed face settle into a forbidding expression as she knocked on the door.
It opened with the loud complaint of the aged and badly oiled.
Miss Sadler blinked at them in evident surprise.
Beatrix was just about to launch into what they’d planned to say if the woman hadn’t called the authorities yet—we wizards have eyes and ears everywhere—when Miss Sadler said, “My goodness, I thought you weren’t coming for another twenty minutes. ”
Oh no.
“Our last assignment took less time than expected,” Ella said in that put-on voice. Beatrix had heard her imitate many people before, usually with uncanny accuracy, but it was still unsettling how much she did not sound like herself. “I’m Wizard Smith and this is Wizard Brown. May we come in?”
Miss Sadler, who was shorter than Ella and looked at least ten years older than Beatrix, had a handsome face marred by the prim set of her mouth.
She absolutely insisted on giving them tea and cake before sitting down to answer questions.
Their protestations that time was of the essence were of no use.
This was a woman who, once determined on a course of action, could not be dissuaded.
Worse and worse.
Beatrix looked at the second hand ticking inexorably forward on the clock in the sitting room. Thirteen minutes left.
“There now,” Miss Sadler said, setting down full tea cups next to the cake. “That’s proper. Well, Wizard Smith, Wizard Brown, I have information I feel I must share about illegal magic use.”
She paused.
“Go on,” Beatrix said, unable to hide her impatience.
“I’ve discovered that members of the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic, of all people, are casting spells.”
At least she got right to the point. Beatrix turned to Ella, who gave a theatrical sigh on cue. “Shall we—”
“No,” Beatrix said, crossing her arms.
“Come on, chief, let me explain.”
“This is highly classified,” Beatrix hissed, trying to hit the right volume to allow Miss Sadler to hear but not think it was for her benefit.
“The harm’s already been done, boss,” Ella said, sounding exactly like an exasperated underling.
Beatrix twisted her borrowed face into a scowl and pretended to think while glancing at Miss Sadler out of the corner of her eye. The woman was watching with rapt attention.
“I want her word as an American citizen that she won’t breathe a syllable of this,” Beatrix said, wagging a finger at Ella.
Ella cleared her throat. “Miss Sadler—”
“Yes, yes! Of course I give you my word.”
“As a loyal American citizen,” Ella prompted.
“As a loyal American citizen, I swear I won’t say a thing,” Miss Sadler said, hands clasped.
Beatrix hoped to God that they weren’t about to make their biggest mistake yet.
“I’m sure you understand that prohibiting magic,” Ella said, leaning toward Miss Sadler in a confidential sort of way, “would put our national security at risk.”
“Well—yes, I suppose it would,” Miss Sadler said.
“As the League has strengthened in number, we have become concerned about the possibility that it might actually succeed in its ill-thought-out goal.” Ella paused.
“Therefore, we have, ah, placed certain operatives in the League to discourage such talk and to teach some of the more amenable women a few basic spells. One is less likely to fear the known than the unknown, you see. With luck, this nonsense about prohibition will peter out within a year or two.”
Miss Sadler blinked. “But that’s not what the person who tried to recruit me said …”
“No, we could hardly admit to it, could we?” Beatrix glared at Ella, as if she didn’t appreciate having it admitted to now.