Chapter 19
By the time they got back to the house after the real meeting to put on the fake one for the cameras’ benefit, Beatrix’s stomach was kinked in stressful knots.
She should have felt better as the performance unfolded like a masterful bit of bureaucratic theater—a conversation about a possible march in a totally different location on the wrong day.
She certainly admired how well Rosemarie, directing this, pulled it off.
But she felt anxious all the same. And she could see from the strain on her sister’s face that Lydia—unlike Ella—was not having fun playacting.
“Are you all right?” she said quietly to Lydia as the “meeting” broke up.
Lydia gave a wan smile that spoke volumes.
She needed to get her out of this house. What had come of all her good intentions on that score? At the very least, she needed to take Lydia on a walk the moment everyone cleared out. She put her arm around her sister. “Would you like to—”
“Oh, Beatrix!” Dot hobbled over, grimacing. “These shoes my mother gave me for Christmas don’t seem to have been designed by someone who has ever seen a human foot. Would you mind driving me back to campus? I can’t face the walk.”
She dropped Dot off at her dorm and circled back. Inside the now-quiet house, Rosemarie was washing the dishes, the odd-woman-out tenant Miss Massey was in her room and Ella was in hers, bent over her students’ homework, but Lydia was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s my sister?” she asked Rosemarie, trying not to sound as worried as she felt. Lydia was not supposed to be alone. Those were the rules to protect her.
Rosemarie turned off the water and dried her hands. “Oh, running an errand.” She punctuated that with a meaningful look and walked to the sitting room, which did not have a tele-vision camera.
Once there, she extracted a note from her pocket that said, in Lydia’s handwriting: Going with OB to his house—be back later.
Is something wrong? Beatrix wrote below it, wondering what could have happened. Her charms were quiet. Nothing had disrupted either meeting.
Not that I know of, Rosemarie wrote in her lovely, flowing cursive, then handed the note over and left.
Beatrix sat down, unsettled. For months now, she’d been hooked into Peter’s life so fully, knowing most everything he was doing and thinking, that this unexpected meeting with Lydia felt … odd. Uncomfortable.
Misguided jealousy? She didn’t think so. She rubbed her stomach, which had yet to unkink. What would they want to meet about without everyone else?
She leapt to her feet in horror. Without thinking, without finding Ella first, she ran headlong out the back door and into the forest.
The knock on the door sounded like Beatrix’s, but rushed. Desperate. She’d felt trouble through their connection, then—he wondered if she already suspected what that trouble was.
He didn’t want her here. He wasn’t ready for this. But he left Lydia in the kitchen with her head in her hands and opened the door.
He looked at Beatrix, her face revealing nothing, and wondered if she’d given him so much as a passing thought while betraying his trust and endangering him.
“May—” Her voice cracked and her shoulders sagged. “May I come in, Omnimancer?”
He stepped back to make way, closed the door and pointed to the receiving room, not trusting himself to talk.
He took far longer to check the house than he needed, knowing he had to get his emotions under control.
But when he finally stepped into the receiving room with her sister trailing behind him, one look at her brought it all back like a maelstrom.
Why? he wanted to scream. Why would you do this to me?
He cast the spell to check this final room and saw the evidence of the Vows that bound them lighting up as bright as always.
She reached out a hand and put her fingers right through it, wishing no doubt that she could sever their connection so easily.
He finished his task and leaned against the desk, crossing his arms to keep them from trembling.
Beatrix, sitting nearby, looked not at him but at the two boxes on the desk—boxes full of leaves she’d surely taken from him.
“What have you done, Bee?” Her sister sounded so young—all her steely confidence gone. “Oh God, what have you done?”
Beatrix turned to her sister and immediately glanced away. “I—”
“No,” he said. “Beatrix Jane Harper—” He stopped, feeling sick, and tried again. “Beatrix Jane Harper …” Good God, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to call on her Vow to make her tell the truth, even though that was clearly the only way they would get it.
Now she looked at him, eyes dry but full of a despair that stabbed at him in a way tears wouldn’t have. “Go on. It’s the only way you’ll believe what I say, isn’t it?”
“Beatrix Jane Harper,” he said, choking up, forcing himself to keep talking, “tell us what you have done involving magic and League leaders—and anyone else. Tell us truthfully—what, how and when, or it will harm Lydia Josephine Harper, her efforts with the League, the League itself and me. Assuming,” he added bitterly, “that it’s possible to harm us more than you’ve already done. ”
She winced and looked as if she wanted to say something about that, but then the story poured out of her like water from an opened hydrant—rapid, overwhelming.
How she and Miss Knight (of course Miss Knight, God damn Miss Knight) had taught the four women spellcasting shortly before Christmas.
How they in turn had each taught two other women, and those women had each taught two more, and so on to roughly two hundred fifty, where the number now stood, last she’d checked.
How it would quickly grow to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands—women who’d all agreed to come to Washington when she said so to expose the magiocracy in a massive lie and trigger a sea change.
How careful they had tried to be to avoid problems with recruits.
How they’d hit a snag nonetheless and had disguised themselves as wizards to convince the would-be informer that this was all a magiocracy plan to defuse League members’ “fear of magic” so they would stop pushing for political change.
How they’d stolen leaves from him. How they’d bought leaves from the magical supply shop.
How they’d just distributed the purchase to get recruits through winter.
When the flow of information finally stopped, the silence that followed was broken only by Beatrix’s gasping breaths.
How was he to undo this disaster? Two hundred fifty women!
And she was right—her numbers could top 100,000 in June, assuming each round of recruits took only two weeks to see their task through and he could still calculate accurately while in the middle of a breakdown. Oh, God. Oh, God.
“You’ve risked everything we’ve worked for years to achieve,” Lydia said, the words quiet, the emotion in them not. “How could you do this to me?”
Beatrix wrapped her arms around her stomach and turned to him. “Ask me,” she pleaded. “Not just what or how or when—ask me why.”
“You told me why,” he objected. “In the cellar, when this terrible idea occurred to you. It’s about women’s rights—”
“No,” she said, urgently. “I mean, tangentially, yes, but that’s not why I did it. That’s not even why I thought of it. Please ask me why!”
Her sister’s expression hardened. “Do you know what? The reason doesn’t matter—there’s nothing that could make it better. You did this behind my back because you knew I’d never, ever agree. I don’t understand how your Vow to me even let you do something so clearly harmful to me and the League!”
In that instant he realized what it had been about, really about. It was so obvious, he should have caught on weeks ago—and had he done so, he would have understood that only by calling on her Vow would he have had a chance to stop it.
“Intent matters,” he told Lydia. A wave of sadness papered over his anger, and he sighed. “The Vow allowed it because she was doing this to try to protect you.”
Lydia looked outraged. “What?”
“Yes,” Beatrix whispered. Now—not before, when they’d both yelled at her and condemned her—her eyes welled with tears.
Her sister paced in a tight oval near them. “Why, for the love of all that is good, did you think this would protect me?”
Beatrix leaned toward her sister, hands clasped over her knees. “Because the magiocracy will cease to see you as a threat if they suddenly have to contend with thirty thousand or fifty thousand or seventy thousand women demanding equal magic-using rights.”
“And then what?” Lydia glared at her. “Do you really think that will revolutionize the magiocracy? No, they’ll find some second-rate jobs to stick these women in—‘Assist the omnimancers, there’s a good girl’—”
Beatrix winced. So did he.
“—and nothing will really change,” her sister said, throwing up her hands.
“Lydia, I—”
“This is not what we wanted! Equal rights for women, and men, regardless of whether they use magic. Haven’t you listened to a single speech I’ve given?”
“Lydia—”
“And have you forgotten what I’ve gone through to win this position and how easily I could lose it?
For God’s sake, the magiocracy put recording devices in every room of our house!
They’re hoping to catch me—or someone close to me—doing something wrong.
Something stupid. And what have you been doing the past month if not that? ”
“It’s not wrong.” Beatrix lifted her chin. “It’s illegal, but it’s not wrong. And I’ll break any law I have to if it keeps you alive.”
Her sister pressed her fingers to her temples. “Listen to me: They’re not trying to kill me.”
“What?” he said, thinking he’d misheard her.
Beatrix’s eyes were wide with shock. “How can you say that?”