Chapter 18 #2
Something about her vote of confidence made him feel better and worse in equal measure. Then she said, “Don’t make this decision based on what you think you can and cannot do,” and she was right, he knew it. They should make the decision based on the chance of discovery.
He ran their security measures through his head, looking for weak spots, as she lay in his arms. He didn’t see how a wizard could pierce them without setting off his charm and Beatrix’s. They just needed to be consistently, absolutely careful.
“Perhaps we should keep on going,” he said finally. “What do you think?”
“Yes.” With a vehemence that surprised him, she added: “Some things are so vital they must be done.”
“Speaking of which …” he said with a sigh.
Out they went into the lovely, unreal spring morning.
Beatrix stared intently at the grassy expanse onto which she wanted to teleport, like every other dreamside night for the past week and a half.
And like every other dreamside night for the past week and a half, she couldn’t manage it.
She finally let out a frustrated scream, disappeared from where she stood and reappeared on the grass, but when he followed her there, she shook her head.
“Rearranged the world again,” she said. “I couldn’t take it any longer. I can’t do it and I hate not being able to!”
“You’ll get there,” he said, slipping his hand into hers. “You can do it.”
She nodded, but he could see in her eyes that she didn’t truly believe it. And he didn’t truly believe he could develop a defense against his weapon. They had more faith in each other than they did in themselves.
On Monday, he let Beatrix in, reset the spell, checked every square inch of the house with an even higher level of care than usual, and stayed in the attic all day and late into the night, trying to live up to her belief in him.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—each was a nearly carbon copy: He never left the house, he never let his guard down, he never allowed himself to think for more than a moment that he would fail.
Early Sunday morning, slumped in the kitchen, he thought of nothing but. Explosions killing tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands. Death he designed. Death that could come anywhere, anytime.
The doorbell rang. He dragged himself up to get it and found Lydia Harper on his porch.
“You look ill, Omnimancer,” she said, peering at him with concern.
“Just … tired,” he said, unable to come up with a better word for it.
“I hate to bother you with a request for cold relief when you look worse than I do.”
“No, no—come in and I’ll get you something.”
He sat her in the kitchen with a cup of coffee while he checked the house, suspecting she was not in fact here for a brew.
“No, I’m not,” she murmured when he put the question to her on his return. “Beatrix warned me to be especially careful where we could be overheard.”
His stomach twisted. “How did she warn you?” Where could she speak candidly to her sister except in this house?
“Wrote me a note in a room with no tele-vision cameras, then burned it.”
He laughed, feeling a bit cheered by that. Unconquerable Beatrix, conspiring under the magiocracy’s nose.
“I thought I’d stop by before church to see how it’s going,” she said, and she did not have to elaborate on what “it” was.
“I’ve been to six,” he said. “No problems. I’m hoping to get three more done today and the last one next weekend.”
“Oh, that’s such a relief.” Miss Harper smiled at him—not quite Beatrix’s charming, ironic smile, but reminiscent of it. “Thank you very much, Omnimancer.”
“Are you holding today’s League meeting at your house?” he asked, wondering how she could plan anything that way.
She leaned in. “Not exactly, no. We’ll go through the motions there without talking about anything important, just to keep up appearances. The actual meeting is at Senator Gray’s house.”
“But Gray’s been bugged, too!”
“Yes, but most of his house is clean. He agreed to let us use the kitchen and said he’d play records in his office to cover up stray noises.”
That improved his opinion of the man. Still: “He’s outside of town. I can’t swear he doesn’t have more recording devices now than he did when I checked.”
“I’m hoping for the best.” She shrugged. “In terms of unfortunate possibilities, we could have another informer in the ranks just as easily as he could have more bugs, in which case the magiocracy will know everything, recording device or no.”
He nodded.
She paused for a moment, looking at him. “How are you—really?”
He opened his mouth to say “OK,” then shook his head. “Completely and utterly frazzled. You?”
She nodded. “Yes. That.”
They sat for a moment in silence, not drinking their coffee. Her next words were halting: “I feel guilty asking you this, Omnimancer …”
He realized with a start that he welcomed another request for help. He wanted an assignment. For all the stress of the skulking and spying, he was accomplishing something, and the same could not be said for his months in the attic.
“Go ahead,” he prompted. “Ask.”
She shifted in her seat. She looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. “What do you and Beatrix want? That is, do you intend to keep your romance a secret for the foreseeable future?”
He stared blankly at her, lost for words.
“I know I should ask Beatrix, really I do, but it’s so hard to talk about anything now, and it’s not as if it were easy before, and I—I—” She stopped and put her face in her hands.
“She doesn’t confide in me. I suppose I haven’t confided enough in her, either, but I don’t know how to fix this, and while it would be good to understand for strategy’s sake if you planned to marry soon, I mostly just want to know because … she’s my sister. And I love her.”
He swallowed, feeling intensely sorry for Lydia Harper and Beatrix too, for surely Beatrix felt the same sense of loss and frustration.
She loved her sister. She loved her so much that the thought of losing her brought on panic attacks.
Why, before wizards bugged their house, was it so hard for them to talk to each other?
“Omnimancer, please say something,” Miss Harper said, looking at him now, her voice cracking.
“There is no romance,” he said slowly, trying to figure out how much to explain about a situation Beatrix had apparently said nothing whatsoever about.
She gaped. “I … I’m so sorry, I completely misread—”
“No, you didn’t,” he said, unwilling to let her twist in the wind. “It’s just a complicated mess.” He steeled himself and pressed on. “I fell in love with her, and we think the Vow she took to do me no harm is forcing her to feel the same way about me.”
Miss Harper’s eyes widened. She frowned, then—thoughtful, not angry. “How do you know? How can you tell the difference between that and the real thing?”
It was so hard to put into words. He tried.
“The timing, for one. She didn’t detect any romantic feelings for me until I developed them for her, and it happened almost at the same time.
Consider what a dramatic shift it was—she’d disliked and distrusted me, for good reason.
And we’ve had enough experience with the Vows to understand how overpowering they can be. ”
“How so?” she said—quietly, nonconfrontationally.
And the dam broke. He told her almost everything.
How terrible the first Vow had been for Beatrix, how he should have undone it immediately and hadn’t.
How they tied themselves more tightly together with each successive Vow until they found they could not extract themselves.
He told her about the wrenching difficulty of not succumbing and the synchronous dreams (though he didn’t tell her what happened there—that was simply too much) and the guilt he felt like an exoskeleton and his fear that Beatrix couldn’t take much more of it.
“Oh God,” he said, head in his hands, palms wet. “And I shouldn’t have told you any of that—Beatrix must have needed more time.”
“Who have you had to talk to about this?” she said. “Besides Beatrix, that is.”
His laugh was hollow. “No one. I’ve been going insane, Miss Harper.”
She took his hands and pulled them from his face, forcing him to look at her.
“First off, I think it’s past time to drop the formalities and call me Lydia.
Secondly, it seems to me that if you both loved each other—if you knew you loved each other—these unbreakable Vows would be manageable.
Better than manageable, even, given the advantages of a nightly meeting where no one else can snoop.
What has turned this into soul-crushing horror is the knowledge, or at least the very strong suspicion, that Beatrix does not love you and is continually forced to feel as if she did. ”
He nodded. “And if she ever stops fighting it …”
“That would be worse?”
“Yes. So it’s a trap with no way out.”
She sighed. “I wish I could think of something helpful.”
He wanted to explain what a relief it was just to tell this to someone, and what an undeserved gift it had been that she’d listened without judgment.
But as he opened his mouth, she added, “I hate to think of Beatrix holding this in all these months! She surely must need to—” She blinked. “She has talked to someone about it, hasn’t she. She’s told Ella.”
“Most of it,” he admitted. “Not all of it.”
“I’m glad,” Miss Harper—Lydia—said softly. “But I wish, you don’t know how much I wish, that we had the sort of relationship she and Ella have. It’s like … like Ella’s her sister, and not me.”
“She loves you,” he said. “Fiercely.”
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think she understands me, and I’m sure I don’t truly understand her.”
He wondered if he could help them. He understood Beatrix. He’d been in her head, as she would say; he felt her emotions. He knew her on a deeper and more instinctual level than he knew anyone.
“And I hardly see her anymore,” Lydia said. “When she’s not working, she and Ella keep haring off out of town—”
Wait. What?