“I would have anyway. It needed to be done.” He hesitated. “Has it occurred to you that if you hadn’t intervened on my behalf, you’d be free?”
She looked up with a jerk, unable to believe how calmly he’d asked that. “No! What a horrible thought!”
“Why?”
“Why?Because you have important work to do? Because you shouldn’t die in your early thirties? Because—” She faltered.Because I need you.
“If I’d never made you take a Vow,” he said, words quiet, “you might have eventually fallen in love with me on your own. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, is it?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “I can’t think rationally about you.”
She braced herself for arguments, persuasion, seduction. But he simply nodded, which was most effective of all. He understood her, knew intimately how her mind worked, and there was nothing—nothing—more seductive than that. Perhaps he thought patience would win out.
Perhaps he would be right.
“I was so certain I’d run out of time,” he said, glancing at the wall behind him. Changing the subject. “Even when you burst in, I thought it was too late.”
A jolt of adrenaline hit—in a good way—at this reminder. She’d been so massively relieved by the results that she hadn’t had the opportunity to feel excited. Now the import of what she’d done set in.
“Peter ... I thought so, too. So I gave up onfordest. I needed something faster.”
“You don’t mean—” His eyes widened as she nodded. “The wild magic that saved your sister—you did it again?”
She could feel her happy grin stretching wider and wider.“Yes.”
“How?” He leaned forward in his urgency.
“It’s not like spellcasting at all. It’s an appeal.”
He digested this. “Show me?”
She stood, wondering if it would work when she wasn’t desperate. Nothing could top a plea to save someone you loved—feltlike you loved, whether you actually did or not. But she threw her arms wide, tipped her head back, closed her eyes.Please.She thought about what she wanted.Please.She remembered in a flash the feel of the fabric on her skin, the fine stitch work, the autumn colors.Please.She exhaled and felt something click, like a record-player needle slipping into the groove.
Then she looked. Between them lay the quilt from his bed two floors up.
“Oh my God,” Peter whispered. “Oh my God.”
His hands shook as he reached out to touch it. She couldn’t tell if he was amazed or spooked. He looked up at her and said, “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”
“Magic without a spell. Without fuel.”
“Not just that.Impossiblemagic.”
“I saw Wizard Garrett call his canteen to him once,” she said, but then the rest of that memory came back to her—why it had worked.
“You need the object you’re calling to be in a magically prepared room,” Peter said. “My quilt wasn’t. No one haseverbeen able to do what you just managed.”
He scrambled to his feet, swaying for a second before getting his balance, and retrieved something from the far corner of the cellar. The five-pound weight.
Impossible not to think of her first magic lesson. Same place, object, company. Still, neither of them was really the same now, were they?
Arms out. Head back. Eyes closed.Please. Please.
The results were slower this time. But she did it. The weight hit the ceiling with a resoundingthwack, flakes of plaster floating down from the point of impact like snow.
“Oh,” she gasped. She wanted to dance about.
Peter steadied himself on the stairwell railing. “That’s ten feet. If not for the ceiling, I’m sure it would have gone far higher.”
