“What idiot preceded me?” he asked.
“The same one who was here when you left.”
“Graham?” He couldn’t believe it, he really couldn’t. “Wasn’t he at least seventy when we were thirteen?”
“Yes.”
Peter ran a hand over his eyes. Then he reached into a coat pocket and extracted a maple leaf.“Onirnan,” he murmured, and the leaf obligingly crinkled, withered and turned to dust. With a tremendous groan, the old door opened.
The house smelled stale with a hint of decay. As he blinked, eyes adjusting to the switch from midday sun to drapery-darkened gloom, something skittered over his boot. He used up another maple leaf lighting the front hall—the electricity had clearly been shut off—and took a quick inventory. Mouse droppings. Peeling wallpaper. Water damage to the wood floor, courtesy of the broken pane.
This did not bode well.
He rushed down the hallway, looking for the entrance to the cellar and finding it cattycorner to the kitchen. A fistful of leaves, a hurried spellword, and the cavernous underground level lit up like daylight to reveal exactly what he had feared: piles of compost rather than carefully preserved magical fuel.
He said the foulest word in his vocabulary. A soft but unmistakable snort issued from behind him.
“This amuses you, does it?” He rounded on Miss Harper and she fell back a step, something he could never make her do when they were children. “I ought to have at least a year’s worth of ready leaves here. Instead, I have nothing. For five years, didno onein town think to ask Washington for an annual walk-through to renew the spells on this wretched place?”
She shot him a look of unadulterated disdain. “Yes. Every year, in fact. But Ellicott Mills seems to be near the bottom of the priority list.”
“So I’m left with perhaps four weeks to harvest everything I’ll need through winter.”
“Can’t you order more?”
“No,” he said.
“But Omnimancer Graham?—”
“We cannot count on supplies from Washington.”
She threw up her hands. “Surely if they’ve sent you here, they’ll give you what you need to do the job!”
This was the moment for an explanation. But he didn’t feel like explaining. He felt like snapping, so he did that instead. “Who do you think is more familiar with the inner workings of the capital, Miss Harper—you or I?”
That silenced her.
“Putting this house to rights with magic is out of the question—we can’t waste the fuel.” He slammed the cellar door behind them. “Make some headway here while I see to the leaves.”
“Shouldn’t we both be harvesting until the leaves turn?” she said, no doubt seeing that job as the less disgusting of the two.
He glanced at the high heels peeking out from her ankle-length dress. “Your outfit is ill-suited for climbing trees.”
“Not by choice,” Miss Harper muttered.
“Clear the ruined leaves out of the cellar—dump them in the back yard. Work on the brewing room next, then the hallway, then the receiving room.”
He left her fuming by the front door. If he took a slight bit of malicious satisfaction from the life reversal that left a member of the high-and-mighty Harper clan cleaninghishouse, well—it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done. Not by a long shot.
By the time he returned, his haul of picked and magically preserved leaves trailing behind him like a flock of unusually obedient birds, his arms and stomach both ached. When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember.
The hallway that greeted him when he stepped into the house bore no relation to the one he’d left. She’d cleaned the cherrywood floor until it shone, covered the rain-ruined area under the broken window pane with a throw rug and found something to restick the wallpaper to the walls. He fixed the window with two of his new leaves, deposited the rest—perhaps a week’s worth—in a cellar now smelling of lemon and thanked his lucky stars that Miss Harper believed any task was worth doing well, even if for a wizard.
He found her in the receiving room, wrestling a substantial chair behind the desk that was now his. Largesections of her green dress were gray with grime. Wisps of hair had escaped her bun. She looked as exhausted as he felt.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
While he had her off-balance with that obviously unexpected courtesy, he added, “Come with me to the brewing room so we can take inventory.”
