Magic zipped from his fingers in the familiar way that if he lived to be one hundred he would still never tire of. He moved to the peach he’d encircled with the invisible spell and tried to step on it. Steel-hard magic stood between him and the fruit. That wasn’t unexpected, sinceforþringanwas a known protection spell. The real test was whether this pairing would do any better thanbeorgan, the gold standard for defense—the spell he’d used on the room itself.
He aimed at the peach a second time and cast the strongest explosive spell he knew. The protective enchantment darkened under the strain, black tendrils zigzagging from the point of contact, and disintegrated after two minutes, four seconds with an echoing boom of failure. He let up just in time to avoid splattered peach.Beorganwould have held for roughly three minutes if cast well.Beorganwas an effective shield against the force of fifty tons of TNT.
The weapon he’d hidden in the forest could generate an explosion equal to ten thousand tons.
“Bewerian feorhbealu,” he said, trying the next combination on his list.
Beatrix listenedto the muffled sounds coming from somewhere above as she chopped her way through a sleeping-aid brew. What was he doing? Setting off cherry bombs? Whatever it was, it seemed unlikely to be about omnimancing—nothing on the to-do list taped to the cabinet required explosions—and she thought back to Garrett’s question. Too bad she couldn’t pass this bit of intelligence on to him, though she was nearly as angry with the Army’s “problem solver” as she was with Blackwell.
Thanks to Garrett’s unexpected visit, they would have to conduct League business outside the house. Rosemarie declared the college the only safe alternative. Beatrix had no logical reason to disagree, but the thought of regularly going on campus filled her with something like dread.
Everything about Hazelhurst appealed to her—the architecture, the portraits of suffragists on the walls, the labs stocked with equipment, the hallways alive with the muffled sounds of lectures. She hated to leave, so she hated nearly as much to go in the first place.
Brew finished, she stoppered the bottle and set it aside for Blackwell to check. The instructions he’d left on the table ordered her to leave that final spell to him so he couldconfirm she’d handled the preparations correctly. Even so, he’d pushed her onto a tightrope without much of a net.
“Rihtwon’t tell me whether you managed spells of sufficient strength, so use the incantometer to measure as you go,” he’d written in the smooth script that identified him as one of Rosemarie’s former students. “Remember—anyone drinking a brew after the spells wear out could get food poisoning.”
No pressure.
She turned to look at the to-do list, one hundred ninety items long the last time she’d counted, and noticed that he’d begun writing new requests at the bottom. On some of the completed ones, meanwhile, he’d added notations to indicate they weren’t really done: “Next batch Oct. 5.” An omnimancer—a good one, anyway—was clearly on a tread-wheel that never let up.
Why in God’s name had Blackwell come home to take this job, for no pay, in order to fob it off on her at his own expense? The easy answer was insanity, but she felt confident he wasn’t crazy. Perhaps he was being paid by the Canadians—or the Germans or Japanese—to throw a wrench into a sensitive project by bowing out, and he needed a semi-plausible place to retreat to. Perhaps he had passed information to them. Perhaps he was putting the entire country in danger.
Assuming there even was a project. Garrett could be lying. But the thought of it bit at her and whispered ugly things to her subconscious. Last night she’d dreamt of a desert rocked by an explosion so massive it lit up the sky.Listening to Blackwell setting off blasts now was not making her any less uneasy.
She couldn’t think about that at the moment, any of it. If she didn’t focus, people could get hurt. She sliced, mashed and mixed with fevered concentration, cast spells of acceptable if not impressive strength that left her feeling winded, and decanted the results.
Then, slipping off her heels, she crept from the brewing room in stocking feet and up the rickety staircase, determined to find out for what purpose Blackwell had coerced her into doing his work for him.
She followed the off-and-on noises to the attic and hovered near the closed door at the top of the staircase. Odd that he hadn’t taken the precaution of soundproofing it, as he had with the receiving room the day the general visited. Though on second thought, she supposed he would have no reason to fear she could tell anyone about his activities.
It was a barrier she intended to test at every opportunity.
Behind the door came the clang of two metallic objects colliding and a sound like french fries in oil. This continued for a while—a minute, two, three?—before the explosion she’d heard over and over downstairs. Following it was a stretch of something close to silence, perhaps a rustling of papers. Then Blackwell cast a spell, followed by another, both too muffled to be understandable, and—clang—the process repeated itself.
She had to make out those spells. She pressed her ear against the door. After a moment, he murmured a jumble ofOld English syllables, followed by a much clearer word:“Fordayst.”
Collision, french fries, boom.
She held her breath, straining to hear the entire string this time. Something something beeloo? She had to teach herself more Old English. But the spell after the pause was unmistakable.“Fordayst.”
Collision, fries, boom. Even faster this time.
“Dest na”—wait, she knew that phrase, “do not”—and another unintelligible word or two. Then, once more:“Fordayst.”
She didn’t stay to hear the inevitable rest. She tiptoed back downstairs, found the hefty, extra-classified volume that claimed to be the repository of all spells and flipped to F.
It took a minute because she wasn’t sure how the word was spelled or whether she’d heard the infinitive. Finally she found it—fordest, blast those tricky long vowels—under the second-person present indicative offordon.
“To undo, bring to naught, ruin, destroy; abolish; kill,” the dictionary declared. “Powerful explosive spell. Restricted use only.”
Oh God.
She tried to start on the next brew, but her hands trembled. Finally she retreated to the kitchen and ate the lunch she’d packed, trying—failing—to think of a harmless reason her employer would cast a restricted spell known for ruination and destruction.
It sounded like he was practicing, or seeing how well the spell worked against various defenses—the better to use it at some later date.
Food helped stem the shakiness. She refocused on brewing, with great effort, and worked her way through two more assignments before she had to stop to rest. Blackwell’s boots on the stairs gave her a nasty turn—she didn’t want to see him, she really, really didn’t want to see him—but to her relief he headed out, the front door opening and closing with a soft click. Four o’clock. One more brew should round out the day, and perhaps she could leave before he returned.
