Chapter 8 #2
She patted his shoulder. If he’d replaced her with Billy Peterson, his clumsy nephew, he needed the sympathy more than she did. “I suspect Omnimancer Blackwell’s mind was already made up before he asked.”
“I didn’t really—well—argue with him.” Croft couldn’t seem to look her in the eye. “The missus had been after me to bring Billy on.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “You gave me a job when no one in town would, and I will always be grateful for that.”
Croft leaned in. “I did manage to do you one good turn in this whole mess.”
“Oh?” She grinned at his conspiratorial air. “What?”
“Padded your wage by fifty cents an hour when he asked how much I was paying you.”
She burst into helpless laughter at the thought of honest Sam Croft lying through his teeth like that. “Thank you. Very quick thinking.”
Another crash sounded from the back.
“Lord give me strength,” he muttered. “Well, then—what can I get for you?”
Beatrix left with the items on her list and a promise of ginger to come.
She nodded to the butcher as he unlocked his shop, passed by the trio of boarded-up stores with an internal sigh and worked her way up Main Street, pausing at the omnimancer’s driveway to glance down at the town laid out below.
Ellicott Mills might not be the place it was before the Second Great Depression—let alone the first—but she would never tire of this sight.
The houses tucked into every hill. The eight-fifteen train puffing into the station.
The patchwork of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century buildings—wood, brick, granite—squeezed together on Main Street like a set of mismatched but interesting teeth.
She turned back to the mansion in time to witness something she’d never seen before: two men winking into existence where the second before there had been only air. Holy smoke. She’d heard that wizards could travel like that, but she hadn’t entirely believed it.
Only one of the pair standing on the porch was a wizard.
The other man’s hair was a normal gray rather than silver, clipped short.
He wore dark blue, a uniform of some sort, and she caught the glint of medals on his chest before he pulled free of his magical chauffeur and banged on the front door. Bashed at it, actually.
A military officer. Why?
Blackwell let the man in and closed the door behind them, leaving the wizard on the porch.
Chauffeurs never got to come in. How unfair.
The wizard paid no attention to her—he seemed to be inspecting the exterior of the house—so she amused herself by staring at him as she walked up the long driveway.
While Blackwell was arresting mainly by virtue of his silver hair, this man would have been striking even without the telltale sign of magic use.
He was tall, taller than either Blackwell or the officer.
His cheekbones were high, his eyes dark—a detail she couldn’t help but notice when he finally trained them on her.
“I’m afraid the omnimancer is occupied,” he said, blocking the way.
Chauffeur who secretly yearned to be a bodyguard? She tried not to smile at the thought of bored wizards doing nothing but taking important typics from one place to another—perhaps omnimancers weren’t the bottom rung of the magiocracy—but her lips quirked anyway.
“I know he is,” she said, slipping by him. “Don’t worry, I won’t interrupt.”
He frowned. He probably wasn’t used to recalcitrance from the hoi polloi. “If you would just wait here ...”
“Omnimancer Blackwell is my employer,” she said. “I’m restocking the brewing room on his orders.”
This information came as a surprise, if his raised eyebrows were any indication. She opened her bag to show him the ingredients inside. “Nothing alarming—am I free to pass?”
“All right, Miss ...?”
“Harper,” she said—and watched those dark-brown eyes widen and his mouth fall open. “Good day,” she said, hurrying through the door before he could ask what her connection was to the Miss Harper.
She passed by the receiving room—door shut tight—and unloaded the shopping in the brewing room. Then, overcome with curiosity, she pressed an ear against the connecting wall in hopes of finding out why an important-looking member of the armed forces was paying a call on Blackwell.
She couldn’t hear a thing. Not stray words, not a hum of background noise, nothing. Magic, clearly. Ah well.
She glanced about for the brewing guide to take another look at the recipes Blackwell intended to follow.
She found it on the preparation table, sitting next to a textbook entitled Brexton Casting Level 1: Starter Spells.
What on earth would he need that for? She almost picked it up to see before recollecting herself. Classified.
Utterly maddening.
The risk of anyone catching her was low, but she resisted the impulse and re-read the brewing recipes instead.
Then she gathered what she hoped were the proper tools.
What proved hardest to find was the timer, an ornate double-clock specimen lying upside down in the highest cabinet, and she had just set it on the table when she heard the receiving-room door creak open.
“—expected of you.” A deep voice. The officer’s, obviously. Hard to tell whether he was angry or simply driving a point home.
“I’m doing what I must.” Blackwell, sounding weary. “Good-bye, General.”
Beatrix peeked into the hallway in time to see the front door close behind the man.
She retreated, disquieted, before Blackwell could see her.
That snippet of conversation made it sound as if he had been sent here on an assignment and the general stopped by to get a report. What if Lydia and Rosemarie were right?
No. A general wouldn’t be running an anti-League campaign.
The armed forces were the last bastion of federal power where wizards held relatively few positions of authority, and besides—surely they would judge a colonel or major sufficient against a monstrous regiment of women.
Not to mention that they wouldn’t show up in broad daylight and blow Blackwell’s cover.
Speak of the devil: Blackwell swept into the room as if nothing unusual had just happened.
“Ready, Miss Harper? Ah—you certainly are,” he said, catching sight of the table. “Good. Hand me your old dress, will you?”
She watched with the familiar mix of anticipation and vexation as he plucked half-a-dozen leaves from one of his many pockets and murmured several spellwords. The dress expanded and contracted in his grasp, as if an invisible, out-of-breath woman had just slipped it on.
Then it split down the front—from the high neckline all the way to the ankle-length skirt.
The lace at the bodice pulled free and fell in a heap on the floor.
The leg-of-mutton puffed sleeves, fashionable when it had been her mother’s dress but long since out of style, sucked in to form a sleek line from shoulder to wrist. The fabric hiccupped six times in quick succession, popping out pockets.
She leaned on the table for support. “You’ve made me a wizard’s coat.”
“Not yet—it needs to have a few spells worked into the fabric. Then it’ll be just the thing for protecting your clothing while you’re brewing.”
He extracted several more leaves, laid the dress-turned-duster flat on the floor and ran his hands over it, muttering more words of power as he went. Flipping the coat over, he repeated the procedure.
“Voilà,” he said, standing and holding it open for her.
She slipped her arms into it and ran a hand down one sleeve. It felt—there was no other word for it—alive. She had to suppress the urge to spin around in it like a six-year-old.
“Thank you,” she said, suspecting he could hear the emotion clogging her throat.
“Button up, wash your hands and let’s begin. Have you prepared a pomegranate before?”
“Never.”
“Your time has come.” He handed her a long knife. “Just score the skin—don’t cut all the way through.”
She managed that without incident, breaking the fruit apart the way the manual suggested. The diagram did not do the insides justice. The ruby-red pips—seeds surrounded by juice sacs—practically glowed.
“They’re beautiful,” she murmured.
“Yes, but more work to juice than an orange. It’s fortunate we have two mortars and pestles to speed up the process.”
She picked out a large handful of pips and handed him the fruit so he could do the same. For a minute they crushed in silence. Then she caught his expression. “Is something wrong?”
His frown turned into a half-hearted smile. “No—it’s just that pomegranates always make me think of hell.”
She choked back a startled laugh. “What?”
“The myth of Persephone and Hades.”
Her lack of recognition must have been clearly written on her face, for he said: “Hades, lord of the underworld, falls in love with Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess. He skips the step of courting her and simply drags her down to the underworld with him.”
A bit like some employers she knew.
“Zeus eventually steps in to make him send her back, but Hades gives Persephone a handful of pomegranate pips as she goes.” He poured the squashed remains of his pips through the strainer she’d set up over the glass jar.
“You see, if you eat or drink while in the underworld, you are doomed to spend eternity there, goddess or no.”
She could feel goose bumps rising on her arms, never mind that it was a myth. “Did she know?”
“I never got that impression.”
“What a rotten trick.”
“Mm.” Blackwell plucked out more pips. “She ate the tempting gift, as you might expect, and must spend every winter with her captor. Forever.”
Beatrix added her juice to the mix. “Funny how I no longer feel any desire to give this fruit a try.”
“Most wizards feel the same way, actually. Pomegranate pips are paired with a fairly dark spell to make contracts binding. Appropriately enough.”
Her curiosity was well and truly piqued. “How does that work? Do you eat while casting?”