“My sister’s in class, but one of our boarders was here,” she said as he canceled the invisibility spell in her kitchen. “I asked her to run an errand for me.”
He had no idea she’d taken on boarders. He supposed she had no choice if she wanted to pay for college. But his twinge of sympathy was muted by the thought that she had a big house that could be rented out and a large yard that could be gardened, whereas his grandmother’s second-floor apartment had one bedroom and no land at all.
He glanced around, struck by how familiar her kitchen seemed—exactly as he’d remembered it, in fact, except now faded by austerity. Not as bad as his grandmother’s home had been, but the signs were there. Walls in need of new paint. Several cracked-and-mended tiles on the kitchen floor. Appliances twenty years out of date. He followed her into the hall and saw the same furniture in the sitting room that had been there when he was a boy, with nothing done since to spruce it up.
“This is the most likely place for a spell,” she said, gesturing to the sitting room, “but it could have been cast anywhere. He was left alone for a while, unfortunately.”
He forced himself to stop looking at the signs of her fall from affluence. “I’d better check outside, then. My telephone was tapped at the junction box, so yours might be, too.”
She stared at him. Quickly, before she could ask questions, he added, “When did he show up?”
“While most of us were still at church. But why?—”
“Did he jump out of here? Teleport, I mean,” he said, thinking the slang word might confuse her.
“Yes—outside, in the front yard. Omnimancer?—”
“He cast three spells in Ellicott Mills Sunday morning. Two during church and one about a half-hour after.”
That got her attention. “How do you know?”
“Magic,” he said, trying for deadpan but not quite managing. His lips quirked of their own accord.
She started to laugh. In one second flat she choked it off, expression turned somber. He could catch her train of thought as easily as if she’d handed him a ticket: She didn’twant to let herself enjoy his company for even one unguarded moment.
His voice sounded wrong in his ears as he said “stay here”—and he realized too late what those words would do. She was stuck in place, eyes wide and accusing. “Please,” he snapped, undoing the effect of his order, and stalked out.
Her junction box was unmolested. He retrieved his stones from the ground around it, slipped back into the house and set them in each corner of the sitting room as she watched from the hallway.
“Demarcation,” he explained, sensing her bottled-up question. “The spell needs limits to work.”
The room lit up with his incantation. He took a step backward into the hallway so he could get the full view of the room.
“What are we looking for?” she asked, frowning.
“White areas, breaks in the red—like that,” he said, gesturing to where he’d been standing when he cast. “That was my spell, and I don’t see anything else. But we’d better check under the furniture.”
“Wait, teach me the spell. We could go faster if we split up the house.”
He translated this asI don’t want to be in the same room with you,and in that they were in complete agreement. Her mere presence excoriated him.
“All right.” He fished four more stones from a pocket and dropped them into her hands, along with a handful of leaves. “The incantation islang read leoht.”
She repeated it three times, fixing her pronunciation before he could correct her. Apt pupil.
Eyes on the stones, she said: “May I have your permission to tell my sister and her vice president in the League that you checked the house and found no sign of magical interference, should that fortuitously prove to be the case?”
He hesitated. He wanted to say no, but he didn’t know how far his Vow would reach—and he was loath to find out, because then she would know exactly how far she could push.
“All right,” he said. “But don’t tell anyone else.”
“And may I also have your permission to use this spell in the future as long as there’s no danger of anyone seeing me cast it?”
“Miss Harper?—”
“Please,” she said, face tight with a tension he felt in his own muscles, deep into his very bones. He understood what it meant to oppose Washington. He seemed to understandher, in fact, with some instinct that was as unwanted as it was unsettling.
“Yes,” he muttered, turning away.
