Chapter 13
Beatrix dunked a rag into a bucket and scoured the tile floor in her parents’ room. Except it wasn’t her parents’ room. Or, rather, it was their room, but they weren’t her parents.
This seemed perfectly reasonable.
As she neared the air-conditioning vent (oh, to have air conditioning), she heard the voice of her mother—who wasn’t her mother—filtering up from two floors below. She caught “next year’s crop of students.” Then “scholarship.” She froze, straining to hear the rest.
“Angela Smithson certainly seems deserving,” said Mrs. Price, her prim tones unmistakable.
“Her grades are average, but I would like her to have a chance at bettering herself,” Beatrix’s not-mother said. “And Betsy Stevens, too. She wants to be a nurse.”
“There is of course Peter Blackwell to consider.” Mrs. Price said this as if she were barely holding back a tut-tut.
“No.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Price’s response covered up the sound of Beatrix’s gasp. “His background is unfortunate, but you must admit he is an excellent student.”
Mrs. Harper lowered her voice. “The girls and boys we send represent us, Amelia. They’re the face of Ellicott Mills, and an illegitimate child is an embarrassment.”
Beatrix wanted to scream down the vent, How can the child possibly be to blame? But she couldn’t form the words. Her tongue felt iced over.
Mrs. Price was demurring. Mrs. Price, the compassionate one of the conversation. “You realize his grandmother will never be able to scrape the money together to send him.”
“I refuse to condone licentious behavior by providing a scholarship to the result. I’d sooner quit.”
“Well ... far be it from me to argue otherwise,” Mrs. Price said. “Could I possibly have another slice of that delightful pineapple upside-down cake?”
Beatrix staggered to her feet. The room seemed to be closing in on her.
The entire town was closing in—she would never get free.
She caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door: a shaken thirteen-year-old boy, one knee peeking through threadbare pants, chocolate-brown hair cropped painfully short.
She woke gulping air, her sister leaning over her.
“Are you all right?” Lydia asked, putting a hand on her arm.
“Dream,” Beatrix gasped. “Bad dream.”
“Yes, but are you OK?”
No. “Yes.” The room was dark. She squinted at the wall clock but could not make it out. “What time is it?”
“Just past one. You’ve been asleep for twelve hours—I couldn’t rouse you for dinner. Bee, are you sure you’re not sick?”
“I wasn’t feeling well when I got home, but I seem to be better,” she said, honestly enough.
“Well—all right.” Lydia looked for a moment as if she would say something else, but in the end she put a hand to Beatrix’s forehead, seemed reassured and slipped back to her own bed against the other wall.
The gesture reminded Beatrix of their mother.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Her dreams were normally insubstantial, but this was the second night in a row of cinematic detail. Was it the stress of the Vow? The use of magic? What if the essence of it—stripping away horrible flourishes of the imagination—was the honest truth?
She lay awake for what felt like hours, trying to convince herself that her mother—her witty, wonderful mother—would never have treated a child so unjustly. But the dream undermined her certainty in a way that Blackwell’s cruel words had not.
When the stinging heat of Peter’s early-warning charm woke him, his first groggy thought was of Martinelli, back for another visit. But the room was too dark for it to be anything but the middle of the night.
That cleared away the grogginess like an electric shock.
He repeated the procedure of that other morning but even faster this time, jumping into pants with one hand while fishing out a leaf with the other.
He bit out the identification spell. The leaf’s ashes formed the face of a wizard with high cheekbones, a mischievous smile and a slightly aquiline nose.
Peter hadn’t a clue who it was.
Another flare-up of his charm—followed by the faint sound of the front door opening and snicking shut—suggested an imminent face-to-face meeting.
Focus. He had to focus. He spun about, grabbed the pillows off the top of the bed and arranged them under his covers to approximate a body.
He created an illusory bit of silver hair peeking from the top, as if he were sleeping on his stomach, and cast two spells on his own body in quick succession—one to make himself invisible and the other to form a layer of protection that would repel at least an initial barrage.
He waited in a corner near the bedroom door, the leaf in each hand damp with his sweat, tension weighing on every muscle.
But the seconds stretched into minutes. No intruder.
No creaking stairs to telegraph one heading his way.
The wizard hadn’t come for him, then—or at least, not primarily. Ten to one he’d come for evidence.
Slowly, agonizingly so, Peter turned the doorknob and inched the door open.
He could see no sign of anyone in the hallway, but he didn’t expect to—a wizard sent to gather intelligence would have a high enough security clearance to know the invisibility spell.
And all manner of booby-trap enchantments, too.
But at least any spell cast since the break-in would be fresh enough for an incantometer to pick up. Peter pulled his from a pocket and crept out.
The measurement device was quiescent until he got to the top of the staircase.
There it registered a spell, a strong one.
His money was on a tripwire, something that if crossed would alert the wizard that company was coming.
Best not to nullify if he could help it.
With a few more readings, he determined that the spell stretched from the second-to-top step straight up to the ceiling.
Well, the staircase was too squeaky a prospect anyway.
He climbed over the railing—a challenge with limbs he couldn’t see—and swung his way along it until he was close enough to drop to the floor without a thud.
Light shone from the receiving room. Pocketing the incantometer, he picked his way across the floor, taking soft, shallow breaths.
The wizard was rifling through the desk drawer, as visible as you please. Tall. Athletic build. Quick, quiet and obviously not new to this sort of assignment. He showed no sign of realizing he was not alone.
Peter, skulking near the open door in an eerie echo of two days prior, watched the man produce a leaf—with the fluid speed of a gunslinger—and cast a spell that didn’t exist.
The room and everything in it turned a neon shade of red, with four exceptions: a compact rectangular area stretching about three feet above the floor, one of the front legs of the desk, a spot the size of stacked paper on top of the desk and the air around the lamp.
Spells, all of them. This wizard could find the location of spells cast days earlier.
The directory- and report-shaped areas were Miss Harper’s spells, both a dull white against the red.
The spell he’d cast on the lamp nine days earlier, to light it up until he could get the electricity turned on, looked dimmer still.
But the rotten desk leg he’d shored up with magic that same day more than a week ago glowed brightly.
It wasn’t a temporary spell, and it showed.
The wizard made a beeline for it, moving with a noiselessness too complete to be natural skill. He nullified the spell and prodded the leg from all angles, as if he thought it could be hiding something.
Peter turned and crept down the hall on the balls of his bare feet, heart moving infinitely faster than the rest of him.
He’d destroyed the 1933 report and Miss Harper’s copy, just in case, but he had something else in his possession that would immediately land him in prison if discovered.
It sat in the cellar, cloaked with several strong spells, and if the wizard went down there—which he almost certainly would—he’d find it within seconds.
The fear of making noise only slightly outweighed the anxiety that the man would finish with the receiving room any moment and come out. Finally, Peter reached the cellar door. The knob turned without complaint, but then—disaster. The door stuck and opened with a sound like cracking wood.
The wizard appeared in the hallway the next second, staring almost right at him.
Peter wasn’t especially religious, despite Pastor Hattington’s best efforts, but now the only thought that panic had not chased out of his head was a most sincere prayer: Please, God—let this new spell require demarcation.
The wizard dipped fingers into a pocket and came out with four onyx stones.
Thank you, amen.
As the man set a stone in one of the far corners of the hallway, then the other, Peter inched to the cattycorner kitchen—doorway, no door—and slipped through.
The wizard’s spell could show where magic had been cast. Presumably it also picked up on spells cast elsewhere on objects that were then moved into the area in question, as long as the spells were still operative.
Peter’s escape was good only if this bit of sorcery didn’t reveal spells that had simply passed through, so it was with a feeling of slow suffocation that he watched the man set stones in the other two corners and extract a leaf.
Close enough to touch. To hear. Peter held his breath.
“Lang rēad lēoht,” the wizard murmured.
The red spell lit up the hallway with two interruptions: the window pane and chandelier at the other end.
Peter tried to push back a dizzying rush of relief. This ordeal wasn’t over yet.
The intruder retrieved the stones with a spell, swiveling to catch each one speeding at him, and paused as if to consider his next move. Kitchen. Cellar. Brewing room.