Chapter 27
When Peter was confident that Misses Knight and Dane could cast the protection spells reliably—and that he had recovered from touching Miss Harper—he set them practicing and turned to face his assistant.
She stood with her back against the wall.
She looked as if she wanted to press right through to the other side, to be anywhere but there.
“Let me see to your hair,” he said.
“Going to pull it all out?”
“Of course not,” he said, stung by the edge to her words. “Under the circumstances, we’ll have to risk a spell.”
She sat on the edge of the empty bed, removing first her hat and then the pins holding her hair up.
It cascaded over her shoulders, glinting.
Any young wizard would kill for that look.
It had taken him a year to get all his hair to turn silver, a year of incremental changes, and that shift had come quicker than most.
How had she done it?
She didn’t know. So he asked an easier question. “Have you ever been to Merlin’s? The wizard-run salon in Georgetown,” he added, seeing her blank look—which quickly changed to incredulous.
“The place that charges as much for a hairstyling as you pay me in a week? What do you think?”
“I was thinking you might have been there when you were rich and I was poor,” he snapped.
She had the grace to blush. “No.”
“Well—they use spells to color hair. But while they have the expertise to get exactly the desired shade, I don’t. I can probably turn yours brown, but it won’t be the right one.”
She shrugged. “As long as it’s not a lot lighter, no one will notice. Brown is brown is brown.”
“Wizard Garrett will notice.”
She said nothing for a moment, her face unreadable. Trying to think of a way around that problem?
But then she murmured, “It may have been someone in his unit who tried to kill Lydia. I can’t see him anymore.”
That was the outcome he’d wanted for weeks. But it was hard to savor the victory when he considered that Garrett might have been stringing her along as part of a plot against her sister.
“Thank you for not saying, ‘I told you so.’” She looked more weary than upset. “Will you cast that spell on my hair, or should I?”
“Let me show you something first.” He almost put out a hand to help her up but caught himself just in time. “Come to the bathroom.”
He got there first and flipped on the light. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the mirror.
Her lips formed an oh but no sound came out. Her hair shone.
“I thought you should see the full effect before it’s gone,” he said. “It suits you. I’m sorry we have to cover it up.”
She stood, unmoving, for an extended moment. Then she seemed to come back to herself. “It certainly is more arresting than brown. But as I don’t want to be arrested ...”
“Right. Hold still, and I’ll do my best.” He dug into a pocket for a leaf and pressed it to the back of her head.
She flinched.
Perhaps she really was afraid of him. Or perhaps it was simple loathing. “Feax brūn,” he said, bone-deep despair setting in.
A truly awful sludge-brown tendrilled its way outward from where the leaf had been, covering perhaps a fifth of her hair with a color that made him flinch. “Oh no” slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it.
She angled her head to see what he’d done and stared at the mirror in open-mouthed shock. She started to shake.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Laughter burst out of her. “I—I take it back. This brown”—she paused to let more laughter out—“this brown stands alone.”
“Maybe it won’t look quite so horrible when it’s not strand-by-strand with silver.”
“Omnimancer,” she said, calmer now, “do you think I give two figs about the color of my hair?”
That was just one of the things he liked about her. He pressed another leaf to a still-silver area and murmured the spell again. This time the color that burst out was the brown of coffee with a smidgeon of creamer not fully stirred in, rich and dark and varied.
He heard her breath catch in her throat.
He dove into his pocket for more leaves.
“Feax brūn,” he said, her remembered laughter in his ears, and the sludge was gone, replaced with the color he’d seen nearly every day for six weeks.
“Feax brūn,” he said, thinking of her expression when he’d told her he wanted her to brew, and half her hair was the right shade.
“Feax brūn”—Miss Harper practically dancing into his house with the primer in her arms.
“Feax brūn”—Beatrix. Beatrix, smart, capable, driven.
She touched her hair. It gleamed auburn here and there where the light hit it just so. “How did you do that?” she whispered.
“I thought of you.” He sighed, wondering if that sounded like an admission of how he felt. “So much of magic is intent.”
She nodded. She looked as if she wanted to say something but was having trouble finding the words. Or the courage.
“Ah.” Miss Dane, framed in the doorway. “I wondered how you were going to deal with that. What about the rest of us—what will happen to our hair?”
He cleared his throat. “If you’re casting a handful of protection spells a day, you shouldn’t have more than a few silver hairs each week. Just keep an eye out.”
He glanced at Miss Harper, but the moment was gone. She twisted her hair up and secured it, not looking at him.
Miss Knight, squeezing around Miss Dane, raised her eyebrows at him. “You’d better give Beatrix permission to speak freely to us or she’ll be in danger of choking to death.”
He was getting tired of Miss Knight, who looked at him so mistrustfully. Miss Knight, who could have no opinion of him that was not influenced by Miss Harper. “She’s in no danger as long as you don’t ask her several dozen questions in a row,” he said, crossing his arms.
“What are you trying to hide?”
“Eighty percent of wizardry is classified. What am I not trying to hide?”
She frowned. “I want to see the contracts underlying your Vows to each other. I want to see them tonight.”
“Ella—” Miss Harper said.
“You’ve had her under a Vow for five weeks, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted, bewildered. Was it that obvious? Had he been making her ill?
“Five weeks ago,” Miss Knight said to the women like a prosecutor making a pronouncement to a jury, “I found Beatrix sobbing in the forest. When I asked what had happened, she choked over her words—choked—and eventually managed to convey that he’d done something.
But she wouldn’t say what. Only that he was awful. ”
The room went unnaturally silent.
“What’s in that Vow?” Miss Knight said after a moment. “What are you making her do?”
“Nothing,” he stuttered. He’d pictured her cursing him, never crying. She’d been so steely. “I’m not making her do anything except brew and keep this secret.”
He glanced at Miss Harper. She looked back at him, expression resigned. You’re going to ask me to confirm that lie by omission, it said, clear as day. You’re going to ask and I can’t possibly say otherwise.
“You have my express permission to tell these women everything,” he said.
Her eyes went wide.
“Everything,” he repeated, glad she’d sealed her confederates’ lips as tightly as he’d sealed hers.
“Well?” Miss Knight asked.
Miss Harper hesitated.
“Beatrix,” her friend said, taking her hand and pulling her toward the door, as if his nearness was silencing her. “What happened?”
“He could have explained what he wanted,” she said, slowly, “but then I could have informed on him and gotten him sent to jail for years. He ... he didn’t trust me enough to ask. So he kept leaving temptations in my path until I broke the magic-use law and gave him leverage.”
That was a very generous description of what had occurred.
“Oh, Beatrix,” Miss Dane said, her tone outraged.
Peter glared at his former teacher—something he never would have dared to do at thirteen. “You’re telling me if you came across a classified document entitled ‘Instances of Magical Ability in the Female Population,’ you wouldn’t have read it?”
“Speaking of which,” Lydia Harper put in, “how is it that Beatrix, Rosemarie, Ella and Meg all can use magic when girls never managed so much as an inch of levitation in all the years they were allowed in the entrance exams?”
“Magical aptitude manifests later for girls than for boys. It turns out that almost all women are capable of spellcasting, though not to the extent that wizards are,” he said. “The National Institute for Magical Research discovered this almost ninety years ago, and it’s been top secret ever since.”
The trio clustered around his assistant reacted with exactly as much indignation as he would have, had the shoe been on the other foot.
“What justification did they gin up?” Miss Knight demanded.
“That women are exhausted by spellwork—which is true after a day of it, I’m afraid, at least for me,” Miss Harper said.
“It gets better with practice, but it’s still very tiring.
Oh, and they also said that educating us would take jobs from far more deserving men.
They saw no reason to tell anyone unless things got desperate. A major war, say.”
“Too bad we haven’t had one since then,” Miss Knight said dryly.
“Don’t tempt fate,” Miss Dane said.
Miss Harper snorted. “Why, Rosemarie, that sounds like just your thing. A strategic opportunity.”
“Twenty million people were killed during the World War. The single bit of credit I’ll give to wizards is that they kept Europe from launching an encore.”
Miss Knight cleared her throat. “Back to the contract, if you don’t mind. And let’s not forget that he targeted you because of your mother.”
“I didn’t!” he said.
“He didn’t,” Miss Harper agreed. “It turns out he was aware I, ah, sneaked into the magic exam at the end of seventh grade.”
The younger Miss Harper made a sound that was suspiciously close to a swallowed chuckle. “What, dressed as a boy?”
“Named Benedick.”