Assuming she had enough energy left to see it through. She’d cast fifteen spells already and was feeling close to drained. Hints of a headache played around her eyes and the base of her neck, the promise of pain to come.
The next assignment was a vitamin-heavy concoction that the manual noted was designed to stave off health ailments on ships and in other situations where food was scarce. “Expensive ingredients,” Blackwell had written in the margins of the book, and any question she might have had about whether he’d penned that today or twenty years earlier was erased by the next sentence: “Please get it right the first time.”
Tomorrow, then. She wasn’t taking a chance in this condition. But as she prepared ingredients for a chronic-cough syrup, one that blessedly needed just two spells to see it through, she tried to guess who had asked for the vitamin drink. No one had mentioned any such need during the onslaught nine days prior. Blackwell had written the brewon the list himself, squeezed between allergy relief for half-a-dozen suffering farmers and the cough syrup for fourteen-year-old Danny Taverson, so he obviously thought it was too important to wait until the first round of requests was filled.
She finished the syrup brewing without any evident mishap, squeaking by on her last spell with a three-moon measurement. Then she packed everything up, tucked her shoes and stockings in her bag for the walk home through the forest and rushed for the front door—just a bit too late. In walked Blackwell, his deep blue coat flaring dramatically around him.
“Done?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her heart beat so loudly she could hardly hear herself over it.
“Come with me, please.”
He led the way back to the brewing room, crossed “Remediate flood damage in courthouse basement” off the to-do list—so that was where he’d gone—and turned to inspect her work. “How was your spell strength?”
Not trusting her voice, she pointed to the instructions he’d left. She’d added notes about the spells for each brew. The best one—the first she’d made—would last seven moon cycles. It was downhill from there.
“That will do,” he said.
As he cast the incantation over each concoction that would show whether it had been made properly, she told herself she didn’t care about the results. In fact, she hoped she had done poorly. He’d ordered her to work to the best of her abilities, so she could do nothing less, but if her bestwasn’t good enough—if he needed to step in to do the work himself—maybe he wouldn’t have time to destroy. Maybe—maybe—he would let her go, the terms of the contract still binding but quiescent.
One by one, all her brews turned a dark green.
“Very good,” Blackwell said.
She didn’t know what was more distressing: that she’d succeeded, or that his words sent a thrill up her spine that felt almost like the rush of magic. Despite everything, a deep-seated part of her wanted to do this work and do it well.
He looked over her notes again, frowning. “Why didn’t you make the vitamin brew?”
“I didn’t want to ruin it.” She leaned against the wall to take some of the strain off her back and legs. “I’ll prepare it tomorrow morning when I’m not so drained.”
His gaze shifted from the paper to her. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she said, throwing the word at him like a knife. He didn’t get to do this to her and then inquire solicitously about her health.
“I’ll drive you home.”
“No!”
“Really—”
“I like the woods,” she put in quickly before he could turn it into an order, and tried to change the subject. “Who is the vitamin brew for?”
“Anna, Evan and Tommy Clark. The seven-year-old with the earache problem and her younger siblings.”
She frowned, wondering what the children had in common with famished sailors, and then the answer came toher like a wallop to the head. The Clarks didn’t have enough money for a doctor. They probably didn’t have enough for other necessities as well.
“You think they’re malnourished,” she said.
“Almost certainly.”
“Will this help?”
“It should.”
Her anger and fear ebbed slightly. An unusual sort of terrorist, Omnimancer Blackwell.
“Mrs. Clark didn’t ask for that, did she.” Beatrix looked him in the eye for the first time that day. “She couldn’t have known such a thing existed.”
