Chapter 27 #3
Ella, apparently giving up on her, tried to cast the teleportation spell under her breath twice.
It didn’t work, and the image Beatrix was building in her mind faded.
Couch, old radio, worn rug, calendar, mothballs, she thought frantically as the wizard (not Morse, younger than Morse) fired spells in quick succession.
With each attempt he turned, going from wildly off to dangerously close in a matter of seconds. Couch, radio—
Ella’s third attempt clicked. They collapsed onto the rug, doing nothing for a moment but gasping air in great, shaky breaths.
Then Beatrix cast the spell detector, needing a second try herself, so badly was her voice trembling.
All that glowed white were a few places they’d cast spells earlier that day, but she pushed herself up to put a hand through each one and ensure it wasn’t hiding anything.
“We have to go back to the hospital,” she said, fear making her voice shake. “They’ve changed their minds! That wizard was waiting to attack Lydia—”
“No, he was waiting for you.” Ella sounded dead certain. “Don’t you think he would have already made his move, otherwise? Shoved the guard from the door, shouted your name, and made a commotion running in to announce himself as invisible Peter Blackwell?”
Beatrix had to admit the sense of that. But then a different reason for alarm occurred to her: The wizard in the scarlet coat grabbed her as soon as she bumped into him—too quickly if he’d been surprised, confused or assuming her to be a colleague.
Had he known she might arrive cloaked in invisibility?
Was the magiocracy aware she could do magic?
Beatrix slid back onto the rug, wrapping her arms around her legs and pressing her head to her knees. Did they figure it out when Peter couldn’t take a Vow? Did they assume she’d been casting spells for him for a while? What did this mean?
The more she thought about that last question, though, the calmer she got.
The magiocracy had no intention of releasing Peter regardless.
She was already facing life in prison on false charges.
She couldn’t see how wizards knowing about her spellcasting appreciably worsened the situation she and Peter were already in.
A creak and a sudden dent in the couch gave evidence that Ella—still invisible—had just sat there. “I say this realizing that I’m the one who convinced you to go to the hospital in the first place, but we’re agreed that we’re not going back, right? Not ever?”
Beatrix sighed. She didn’t have Ella’s pre-transformation knack for knitting disguises, so she didn’t see an alternative but to trust that Joan, Dot, Marilyn and Gray were doing all they could for her sister. “Right,” she said heavily. “I agree.”
“Do you think you could undo the invisibility?” Ella gave a bitter huff of a laugh. “It was a relief at first not to see myself, but now I’m starting to get the creeps.”
Beatrix needed the better part of ten minutes to manage it. A definite improvement over the time it took to knit them invisible in the first place, but hardly promising. She groaned as she slumped on the couch next to Ella.
“So,” Ella said, glancing at her, “did you feel an overwhelming urge to kill the guy?” Her tone suggested mild curiosity. Her face betrayed how much the answer mattered to her.
Beatrix hesitated, casting her mind back to the minute or two (was that all it had been?) that they’d run for their lives. “No,” she said.
Ella nodded, her lips a thin line. “Very stressful moment, I’d say.”
“Yes,” Beatrix murmured.
“Perhaps knitting played no part in what I did. Perhaps it was just … me.”
“But it wasn’t like you at all.” Beatrix shook her head. “It probably takes more knitting to get to the point where it interacts with stress. I’ve only come back to it in the last few hours, after all.”
Ella stared at her hands. “Maybe.”
“Look, I’m seriously afraid,” Beatrix said. “You have to promise to do something if I start going crazy. I don’t know that I would step away from the cliff again—last time it felt so necessary that it’s a wonder I didn’t kill Garrett myself. It was like … like …”
“Like an insistent inner voice.”
“Yes.”
“The one that normally tells you not to do that questionable thing you’re thinking about doing.”
Beatrix gave a watery laugh. “Exactly.”
“And when you heard its advice,” Ella said, voice cracking, “you don’t even remember thinking, ‘Yes, I must,’ you just started doing it as if there obviously wasn’t anything else you could be doing.”
“Almost like a—” Beatrix stopped, staring at her in blank shock. The rest of the sentence came out in a rasp: “Like a Vow.”
Ella’s mouth worked open and shut. She cleared her throat. “But I’m still under that Vow, surely? I’m still me, even if I’ve transformed my body into my brother’s. And I haven’t felt any recent crazy urges or compulsions.”
“Since you changed yourself?”
“Right. Well, a little after that, really. I was so flush with triumph at doing it that I rushed right down to my father’s and didn’t think about the consequences—didn’t figure out that I was stuck—for about a week.”
Beatrix clutched her arm. “When did you change over?”
“March. March 15, to be exact—that date will be seared into my brain for the rest of my life.”
Beatrix jumped up and ran to the wall with the calendar. Monday, March 15. So close to her wedding that she could place it exactly amid everything else that had happened: It was three days after their run-in with Frederick Draden, the real Frederick Draden—and, more importantly …
“Eight days later, I burned the contract you signed. I was afraid the wizards would find it, and”—her voice caught—“I figured the Vow was probably a dud from the start because you didn’t take it with your real name.”
Ella shook her head, wide-eyed. “No, I’m pretty sure it worked.
When you ordered me to tell you whether I was the spy, there was something about the way my answer slipped out that felt …
involuntary.” She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling.
“Do you really think—could it really have been …?”
“We both Vowed to protect Lydia ‘to the utmost’ of our abilities. And in each of those situations, she faced a threat we were trying to stop, weren’t we?”
The Plan B recruit gone wrong. Garrett. Every wizard in a wide radius around the Capitol—Ella’s mad attempt to topple a government she was sure would stomp out the League and Lydia both.
And after that, sick with regret but still driven to do something, Ella threw herself irrevocably into the very last body she would choose if her mind had not been co-opted.
Ella started to laugh. Sharp. Frantic. “So—so we should have thought to add a sentence to our Vows that said, ‘Not including killing people or turning ourselves into our rapist brothers, of course’? Is that it?”
“I knew it was a bad idea.” Beatrix looked away, unable to face her friend. “I knew the Vow was horrible and I didn’t try to stop you from taking it. I didn’t even warn you.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. It’s far more my fault than if it had been the knitting! At least in that case, I had no idea what the consequences might be, which is bad enough, but the Vow—the Vow I knew from personal experience is mercilessly effective at forcing your hand!”
Ella stood up from the couch and put an arm around her. “Stop,” she said quietly. “We were all half an hour removed from seeing what we thought was an attempt on Lydia’s life. None of us were doing our best thinking that night.”
Beatrix leaned into her friend, breath hitching.
“Plan B,” she said, the thought coming at her abruptly. “Would we have even tried it if we hadn’t been under Vows?”
Ella cocked her head. “I still think that was a pretty good idea. If Lydia hadn’t stopped us …”
She trailed off, the rest self-evident. If they’d seen Plan B through, there would probably have been no attempt on Lydia’s life. Rosemarie would be with them, safe. Peter might not have been taken.
If the Vow was the reason she’d wanted to avert the march, she wished that she’d heeded its warning.
“Look, it’s good news if it was the Vows,” Ella said tentatively. “Now you can knit as much as you need to.”
Beatrix clapped a hand to her forehead. “I could have been practicing all these months!”
“Right, well—we’ve still got … um … twenty-one hours and ten minutes.”
Twenty-one hours and ten minutes before their risky field trip with Vice President Draden. She lifted her chin. “Let’s not waste a second of it.”
He burst in as they were finishing dinner. Martinelli, facing the door, said “Morse” from the side of his mouth, and that was the only warning that Peter—his back to the door—received before he was dragged out of his seat.
“Well?” Morse glared at him. “What have you accomplished?”
“I—ah—made some progress.”
“Explain.”
“I’m almost certain we’ve identified the reason the explosive radius shrunk. We think two of the spells and one of the runes are setting off a problematic reciprocal—”
“You can fix it?”
“I believe so, yes,” Peter said.
“What progress have you made toward your actual goal?”
“Well, first I need to get the radius back to—”
“Your goal,” Morse said, softly, malevolently, “is five miles. You have three days to get it done.”
Peter stared at him, shocked. “What?”
Morse said nothing. Peter saw his own stricken expression reflected back at him in the wizard’s dark glasses.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Martinelli said, putting himself between them again and—Peter winced—poking Morse in the chest. “That’s impossible, and anyone who knows a whit about R&D will tell—”
Morse flicked a hand. Martinelli flew backward, arcing over the table and hitting his seat with an oof.
“Look, I haven’t a clue how to get it to five miles!” Peter said. “No one does! There’s absolutely no way I can figure out a solution in just three days!”
“I don’t believe you,” Morse said.
God, what did he know? “I’m telling you the—”
“Three days.”
Morse left, not adding “or else,” not needing to bring up the specter of what he would do to Beatrix. What was so important about three days, Peter couldn’t begin to guess, but what would befall Beatrix if he didn’t follow Morse’s order was all too clear.