Chapter 26 #2
“Please forgive me,” Beatrix murmured. “For—” She paused. For depriving you of some self-determination? For making you risk a prison sentence? For moving things along without really explaining the consequences? Finally she settled on, “For not believing in you enough.”
“Forgiven. Forgotten. I can’t wait to cast another spell.”
Rosemarie went through the motions with considerably less enthusiasm.
She needed three tries to get the incantation to take, enough time for Beatrix to recall with a nauseating twist to her stomach that not every woman in the long-ago field tests had managed spellcasting, and ate the pomegranate pips with a grimness that seemed more fitting for the occasion than Ella’s reaction.
“Your turn,” Rosemarie said to Meg, stepping out.
Meg, still sitting in the oversized chair, didn’t move. Beatrix realized she hadn’t heard their treasurer say an intelligible word since the attack.
“Meg?” she said. “Are you all right?”
The girl burst into tears.
Lydia sat on the edge of the chair and put an arm around her. “Of course you aren’t all right. None of us are. But we’ll get through this.”
“They’ve just admitted we have a real chance, you know,” Ella put in. “So, in a certain light: Hooray!”
“I—I d-didn’t—expect—” Meg covered her face with her hands, taking gasping breaths. “I d-didn’t think in a m-million years—”
“I know,” Lydia said, rocking her back and forth. Beatrix had to remind herself that the two were the same age, classmates. Meg seemed so much younger.
“Don’t ever let her guard your sister by herself,” Blackwell murmured behind her.
They waited until Meg cried herself out.
Then Beatrix, feeling like a worm, held out the third contract until Meg took it and signed with an unsteady hand.
It might no longer matter whether their treasurer could learn protection spells, but she needed even more pressingly to take a Vow.
You could never tell what a person might do if sufficiently frightened.
She took Meg’s arm and led her—propelled her—to the circles. Blackwell, tension practically radiating off him, handed over the leaves and pips. Meg sniffled, staring at the contract.
“Go ahead,” Beatrix said, and she hadn’t meant to snap, she really hadn’t, but her nerves were wound so tight she was finding it hard to catch her breath.
“Ic—ic—” Meg wiped at her eyes with the back of the hand that held the leaves. “Ic ...”
Seconds went by without another attempt. “Meg,” Beatrix said, this time intending the sharp edge.
“Ic gehāte.” The words were whisper-soft. Nothing happened.
“Louder.”
“Ic—ic gehāte.”
“Again.”
“Ic—I can’t—I c-can’t—please—I don’t want to break the law, I don’t want to do magic—”
“Margaret Wallace!” Beatrix grabbed her by the elbows. “Stop sniveling, stand up straight and focus!”
Meg, trembling, babbled the spellwords over and over until finally one pair did the trick. She choked down the pips, took a few stumbling steps and collapsed onto the carpeting, leaving Beatrix swaying in the hated double-circle.
Of the three Vows, this was the one most like hers on that horrible, wretched day. Except this time she’d been Blackwell.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Meg, I’m so sorry.”
Lydia, shooting her a look, helped Meg up. Rosemarie, always the pragmatist, simply shrugged. Then someone took her arm and gently urged her out of the demarcated area.
Blackwell.
“Miss Harper,” he murmured—and stopped as Ella stepped in front of them, arms crossed.
“Hang on,” she said. The emotion in her voice was unmistakable. Suspicion. “Beatrix, I think you should take the Vow, too. Just in case.”
“She’s not going to do anything to hurt her own sister,” Blackwell protested.
“Even so.” Ella was frowning now. “Rosemarie, can I get an amen?”
“I don’t see any harm in it—any additional harm,” Rosemarie said.
Blackwell made an aggravated sound in the back of his throat. “Really, there’s no reason—”
“I’ll do it,” Beatrix said.
“Good,” Ella said. “You can Vow to me.”
“No.” Blackwell’s hand tightened around her arm in warning, not that she needed one. God only knew what problems that might cause. It could link her with Ella. It might even link all three of them. “Two people should never Vow to each other on the same night. She can Vow to me.”
Ella glared at him. But she didn’t argue.
Beatrix wrote out another version of the contract, this time with her name, as Ella watched silently over her shoulder.
She stepped into the circle, the very air seeming to push back against her.
Did her mistreatment of Meg give Ella reason to doubt her judgment?
Was that the driving force behind this demand?
And what side effects might she suffer from a third Vow connecting her with Blackwell?
He joined her, pips in one hand, leaves in the other. She took the leaves, trying not to touch him, and squeezed her eyes shut, wanting to block out ... everything.
“Ic gehāte,” she said. The spell zipped out of her, and yet she felt instinctively that it wasn’t right. But when she forced herself to look, the paper glowed up at her.
He took her hand. She started so violently, she nearly jerked him into her circle.
“Easy—easy,” he said, barely loud enough to make out. “Here.”
She felt the three pips tumble from his other hand into her palm, but she couldn’t pull free of his gaze. He looked at her like it hurt him to do it. She thought she could feel his heart racing through the pulse in his hand, but perhaps it was just hers.
Only the recollection that Ella, Meg, Rosemarie and her sister were all watching gave her the strength to break the connection and put the pips in her mouth. It was ridiculous to pretend she didn’t want him. Because oh, she did. She did.
She swallowed, willing herself to be rational. This was madness. She had to hope he didn’t want her, too, because that would be even worse.
His breath hitched in his throat as she backed out of the circle, exactly as it might if she unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her lips to his chest. Madness.
Blackwell knelt to slip the demarcation stones into his pockets. When he stood, she could see no sign that he was struggling with unwanted feelings. His voice was calm as he said, “Ready to practice?”
So she’d merely projected her feelings onto him. That was a mercy.
“Let’s start with a simple levitation spell, something you can actually see working,” he added. “Then we’ll move on to protection.”
He found a telephone directory and set it where the circles had been. “The spellword is āhebban,” he said.
Ella said it once, confidently. Rosemarie rolled the unfamiliar word on her tongue a few times. Meg, slumped on the bed, said nothing.
Blackwell held out a pair of leaves. “Who’s first?”
Ella—of course. She snatched them from his hand, planted her feet beside the directory and spent a short moment arranging herself as if she’d done it all her life. Back straight. Shoulders squared. Arm out. Fingers flexed.
“āhebban!” she commanded, and her target launched into the air—decidedly higher than Beatrix had managed.
“Just over four feet,” Blackwell estimated, eyebrows raised. “Miss Knight—if you were a boy, you’d pass the wizarding exam.”
Ella had been circling the directory—practically dancing around it—but this seemed to bring her back to earth. She laughed, more bitter than amused. “Yes. If I’d been a boy, my life would have been very different indeed.”
Blackwell released the spell and handed leaves to Rosemarie. She said the spellword every bit as vigorously as Ella had—Rosemarie was nothing if not forceful—but the directory rose only about as high as it had for Beatrix.
“Miss ... Wallace?” Blackwell glanced at the bed where their treasurer had collapsed. “Are you well enough to try?”
Meg’s “no” was barely more than a whisper.
Beatrix pressed against the wall, reassuring in its solidity, and stared miserably at the floor. Meg had done nothing wrong. How could she have treated her as she had?
“The strongest protective spell is beorgan,” Blackwell said, continuing the lesson. “It holds up against attack spells, at least initially. Also falling cranes.”
Meg moaned. Not a fan of black humor.
“You can cast it directly onto someone or something, though if you have time you’ll get better results with demarcation stones.
” He held up one of the onyx examples. “You can bury some around your property and cast the spell on your house. You can set up a circle around the younger Miss Harper and cast it on her. But be aware that beorgan fails after roughly three minutes of bombardment by high-level attack spells, if you don’t reapply. ”
“Still,” Ella said, “that sounds pretty good.”
“Yes, but there are other downsides,” Blackwell said.
“Most importantly, the spell must be cast without error so it settles on Miss Harper rather than as a bubble around her. A beorgan-protected subject can breathe normally when it’s on their skin, but if it’s, say, half an inch around them, they’ll rapidly run out of air. ”
Lydia winced. Beatrix shivered.
“And that’s not all.” He set the remains of the pomegranate on the tile floor of the bathroom. “Miss Knight, would you cast the spell?”
Ella managed it as quickly as her first two. Blackwell picked the fruit up and handed it to her.
“Oh!” She stared at it in dismay. “Well—crud. You can feel the spell. It’s like a metal casing.”
She passed it to Rosemarie, who grimaced and handed it to Lydia.
“If anyone so much as brushed up against me, it would be obvious something was wrong,” she said. “I couldn’t shake a single hand. I’d have to run from hugs.”
Blackwell nodded. “And watch what happens when you aim spells at it.”
He set the fruit back on the tile, extracted leaves and murmured an incantation under his breath. It clanged as it hit, and the protective enchantment went visible under the strain—a barely-there pearlescent sheen with an impossible-to-miss scorch mark where his spell pummeled Ella’s.
Ella and Rosemarie both said something, but their words were background noise. All Beatrix could concentrate on was the distinctive sound Blackwell’s spell made as it ate away the protection. A sound like french fries in oil.
“What are you casting?” she said, voice reedy.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Nothing I’m going to teach you.”
“Omnimancer—”
“No, Miss Harper.”
Eventually, Ella’s spell gave way. Boom.
Fordēst. He’d cast fordēst.
“There’s a protective spell you can’t feel, that’s not visible when struck and that won’t asphyxiate you if you do it wrong,” he said, tapping the pomegranate, which he’d avoided damaging.
“That’s scield—I cast it on you as you were running for the car.
But it’s far less effective. It should protect you from something like a car crash, or even a bullet, but it certainly won’t stop a powerful spell.
So use it at your own risk. Watch and see. ”
He cast the weaker protection on the fruit.
Beatrix wanted to follow Meg’s lead and lie on the other bed, pressing her face into the pillow.
He’d been so invaluable in the last few hours—companionable, even—that she’d forgotten about his daily explosions.
About the dread of not knowing, but knowing it couldn’t be anything good.
They’d thrown in their lot with an enigma. Perhaps they all stood in opposition to the government, but she and Lydia and the rest of the League weren’t traitors. They weren’t terrorists.
She had no confidence whatsoever that she could say the same of Blackwell.
Once again he murmured the attack spell. Splat went the pomegranate all over the tile.
“See?” Blackwell looked down at the blood-red mess. “Risky.”