Chapter 2
The sprawling Victorian designated as home and office for Ellicott Mills’ omnimancer sat just up the street from Croft’s at the top of the town’s highest hill.
Peter spent most of the climb wondering if he would dare do what had sprung into his mind when Beatrix Harper coolly took him to task for patronizing her.
She would either be ideal or a monumental mistake.
Then they crested the hill and he got a close look at the house, which drove every other thought from his head.
The front porch sagged. The window pane above the door was broken. The wood siding proved to be gray not on purpose but because the light-blue paint was all but worn away.
The panic he’d suppressed as he fled D.C. flared up again. “How long have you been without an omnimancer?”
“Five years,” Miss Harper said.
“Five? This looks like it’s been falling apart for twenty.”
She said nothing. She probably had no intention of speaking to him unless required. Her mouth was set in a tight line, her hands in fists at her sides.
“What idiot preceded me?” he asked.
“The same one who was here when you left.”
“Graham?” He couldn’t believe it, he really couldn’t. “Wasn’t he at least seventy when we were thirteen?”
“Yes.”
Peter ran a hand over his eyes. Then he reached into a coat pocket and extracted a maple leaf. “Onirnan,” he murmured, and the leaf obligingly crinkled, withered and turned to dust. With a tremendous groan, the old door opened.
The house smelled stale with a hint of decay.
As he blinked, eyes adjusting to the switch from midday sun to drapery-darkened gloom, something skittered over his boot.
He used up another maple leaf lighting the front hall—the electricity had clearly been shut off—and took a quick inventory.
Mouse droppings. Peeling wallpaper. Water damage to the wood floor, courtesy of the broken pane.
This did not bode well.
He rushed down the hallway, looking for the entrance to the cellar and finding it cattycorner to the kitchen.
A fistful of leaves, a hurried spellword, and the cavernous underground level lit up like daylight to reveal exactly what he had feared: piles of compost rather than carefully preserved magical fuel.
He said the foulest word in his vocabulary. A soft but unmistakable snort issued from behind him.
“This amuses you, does it?” He rounded on Miss Harper and she fell back a step, something he could never make her do when they were children.
“I ought to have at least a year’s worth of ready leaves here.
Instead, I have nothing. For five years, did no one in town think to ask Washington for an annual walk-through to renew the spells on this wretched place? ”
She shot him a look of unadulterated disdain. “Yes. Every year, in fact. But Ellicott Mills seems to be near the bottom of the priority list.”
“So I’m left with perhaps four weeks to harvest everything I’ll need through winter.”
“Can’t you order more?”
“No,” he said.
“But Omnimancer Graham—”
“We cannot count on supplies from Washington.”
She threw up her hands. “Surely if they’ve sent you here, they’ll give you what you need to do the job!”
This was the moment for an explanation. But he didn’t feel like explaining. He felt like snapping, so he did that instead. “Who do you think is more familiar with the inner workings of the capital, Miss Harper—you or I?”
That silenced her.
“Putting this house to rights with magic is out of the question—we can’t waste the fuel.” He slammed the cellar door behind them. “Make some headway here while I see to the leaves.”
“Shouldn’t we both be harvesting until the leaves turn?” she said, no doubt seeing that job as the less disgusting of the two.
He glanced at the high heels peeking out from her ankle-length dress. “Your outfit is ill-suited for climbing trees.”
“Not by choice,” Miss Harper muttered.
“Clear the ruined leaves out of the cellar—dump them in the back yard. Work on the brewing room next, then the hallway, then the receiving room.”
He left her fuming by the front door. If he took a slight bit of malicious satisfaction from the life reversal that left a member of the high-and-mighty Harper clan cleaning his house, well—it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done. Not by a long shot.
By the time he returned, his haul of picked and magically preserved leaves trailing behind him like a flock of unusually obedient birds, his arms and stomach both ached. When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember.
The hallway that greeted him when he stepped into the house bore no relation to the one he’d left.
She’d cleaned the cherrywood floor until it shone, covered the rain-ruined area under the broken window pane with a throw rug and found something to restick the wallpaper to the walls.
He fixed the window with two of his new leaves, deposited the rest—perhaps a week’s worth—in a cellar now smelling of lemon and thanked his lucky stars that Miss Harper believed any task was worth doing well, even if for a wizard.
He found her in the receiving room, wrestling a substantial chair behind the desk that was now his. Large sections of her green dress were gray with grime. Wisps of hair had escaped her bun. She looked as exhausted as he felt.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
While he had her off-balance with that obviously unexpected courtesy, he added, “Come with me to the brewing room so we can take inventory.”
“But ...” she said to his back as he walked out.
He knew her hours at Croft’s store were eight to four-thirty, and it was now twenty minutes until six. He didn’t have a choice but to work like a maniac, and so—by extension—neither did she. At least she would be getting paid for it.
“Do you have anything to write on?” he asked as she trailed into the room, wiping her hands on her ruined skirt.
“No.” She managed to convey quite a bit of emotion in that one syllable.
He plucked a new oak leaf from his coat and watched for her reaction as he cast his spell.
His ultimate success or failure depended largely on her true opinion of magic remaining unchanged from their childhood, when—he was almost certain—she’d disguised herself as a boy to take the magical-ability test.
The leaf disintegrated between his thumb and forefinger, re-emerging as a long, parchment-thin piece of paper. Miss Harper’s expression gave nothing away.
With a sigh, he handed her the paper and a pen fished from another pocket.
“All right,” he said, opening up cabinet doors to reveal the several hundred bottles of ingredients an omnimancer needed for brewing requests. “It’s alphabetical; that’s a mercy.”
He made quick work of half the contents.
Once fresh, they were now clearly ruined, and Miss Harper scribbled furiously to keep up with his rapid-fire recitation of items he would need to purchase.
But every liquid or dried spice—from the anise seed to the zedoary oil—needed to be opened, sniffed, held up to the light and in some cases tasted.
By the time they finished, it was past seven o’clock.
“I really must go.” There was a strangled quality to her voice, as if she were holding back what she really wanted to say. She struck him as one provocation away from stabbing him with his own pen. “My sister expected me home two hours ago.”
“Ah, yes, the famous Lydia Harper.” He plucked the list—and the pen—from her hands. “I hope she won’t disown you for—how did she put it? ‘Helping to oil the gears of the machinery that steamrolls over typics’?”
“I’m not so much oiling the gears as being ground under them,” she said, gesturing at her ruined clothing.
He pulled a pair of leaves from his pocket, heart accelerating. “Shall I fix that for you?”
“No! Don’t cast magic on me.”
Well … shit.
He tucked the leaves back with shaking fingers. He’d miscalculated, then. Again. Not as badly as the last time, granted, but the stakes were far too high for more errors.
“Do you have a moral objection, Miss Harper?” He kept his voice steady, as if the answer hardly mattered. “I suppose you must, considering the tenets of the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic. Fire and brimstone await me, or so I hear.”
“You can’t possibly be aware of my sister without also realizing that not everyone in our organization has the same concerns,” she said, eyes burning with an anger that didn’t match the cool contempt in her voice.
“And yours are ...?”
“I object to the idea that only the few who can wield magic are qualified to run this country.” The words were quiet.
The emotion in them was not. “I object to men pointing to magic as a reason to discriminate against women, even though ninety-eight percent of them can’t perform a lick of it, either. ”
Yes. Yes.
“And I very much object to being forced to work for you as punishment for backtalk,” she said, hands once again clenched into fists.
He laughed, lightheaded with hope and fatigue. “That’s not why I’m doing it.”
“Oh? Why, then?”
“Because you’re an excellent employee, Miss Harper. I’ll see you tomorrow at eight. And yes,” he added before she could protest, “I am aware tomorrow is a Saturday.”