He was lightly pressed against perhaps one square inch of her body, fully clothed. It seemed to reverberate through every part of her.
“No,” she admitted.
“Well, that settles it.” He sighed. “Must be the Vow.”
CHAPTER 32
The knock was tentative. Heart kicking up, Peter walked across the attic and opened the door.
“I just finished for the day,” Beatrix said. “Could I… come in?”
“Please,” he said, feeling pathetically grateful that she had not changed her mind since the previous evening.
She stopped in the middle of the room, looking around. “I’ve been wondering: Why didn’t you soundproof this place? Keep me from hearing the explosions and thinking… what I thought?”
“Because I wanted you to hear me if I had to call for help.”
She shivered. After all the explosions she’d seen through his eyes, he knew she could well imagine what might go wrong.
“Here,” he added, handing over his notebook—his record of failure.
She read it, frowning thoughtfully. “You’re looking for the magic words.”
“Yes.”
“Why not take the strongest protective spell—beorgan?—and bulk that up with runes and other paraphernalia?”
“Researchers have tried.” He brushed a rogue bit of hair behind his ear. “The results fall so far short, I was sure I needed to come up with something stronger as a foundation.”
“Something revolutionary.”
“Yes.”
She hummed under her breath. “What about the power of three?”
“It doesn’t addthatmuch kick to protective spells.”
“I suppose it doesn’t add anything to explosive spells, or you would have been casting them in trios.”
He nodded. “There seems to be no power-of-three effect for destruction. Thank God.”
“How about trying a language other than Old English?”
“That’s not my area of expertise, but the language specialists insist it’s better than anything else—beats the heck out of Greek and Latin. The entire European continent uses it.”
She sighed. “Well, it wasn’t likely that I’d think of anything you didn’t, but I’ll keep trying. Why don’t you continue where you left off?”
He worked down his list of new ideas on an over-the-hill apple, getting nowhere as usual, eyes stinging. After a while, she interrupted with a cautious, “Omnimancer …”
His heart twisted. “Don’t call me that,” he said quietly. “Please.”
“Peter,” she amended, eyes on the apple rather than on him. “If the Army wants a big explosion, what would stop them from laying down a bunch of payload stones in the right proximity to each other?”
“It doesn’t work. You can’t connect more than one payload stone to the transmitter at a time, and when we tried two that were each attached to a separate transmitter …” He shrugged. “It’s a type of interference. The spells are on the same magical wavelength, and they cancel each other out. Even when we tried to set them off miles apart.”
She nodded, clearly relieved. Then another unsettling thought hit her—he could feel her anxiety before the words rushed out: “If they discover you sabotaged the weapon ...”
“They’ll execute me.”
