“The place that charges as much for a hairstyling as you pay me in a week? What do you think?”
“I was thinking you might have been there when you were rich and I was poor,” he snapped.
She had the grace to blush. “No.”
“Well—they use spells to color hair. But while they have the expertise to get exactly the desired shade, I don’t. I can probably turn yours brown, but it won’t be the right one.”
She shrugged. “As long as it’s not a lot lighter, no one will notice. Brown is brown is brown.”
“Wizard Garrett will notice.”
She said nothing for a moment, her face unreadable. Trying to think of a way around that problem?
But then she murmured, “It may have been someone in his unit who tried to kill Lydia. I can’t see him anymore.”
That was the outcome he’d wanted for weeks. But it was hard to savor the victory when he considered that Garrett might have been stringing her along as part of a plot against her sister.
“Thank you for not saying, ‘I told you so.’” She looked more weary than upset. “Will you cast that spell on my hair, or should I?”
“Let me show you something first.” He almost put out a hand to help her up but caught himself just in time. “Come to the bathroom.”
He got there first and flipped on the light. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the mirror.
Her lips formed anohbut no sound came out. Her hair shone.
“I thought you should see the full effect before it’s gone,” he said. “It suits you. I’m sorry we have to cover it up.”
She stood, unmoving, for an extended moment. Then she seemed to come back to herself. “It certainly is more arresting than brown. But as I don’t want tobearrested ...”
“Right. Hold still, and I’ll do my best.” He dug into a pocket for a leaf and pressed it to the back of her head.
She flinched.
Perhaps she really wasafraid of him. Or perhaps it was simple loathing.“Feaxbrun,” he said, bone-deep despair setting in.
A truly awful sludge-brown tendrilled its way outward from where the leaf had been, covering perhaps a fifth of her hair with a color that madehimflinch. “Oh no” slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it.
She angled her head to see what he’d done and stared at the mirror in open-mouthed shock. She started to shake.
“I’m sosorry,” he said.
Laughter burst out of her. “I—I take it back.Thisbrown”—she paused to let more laughter out—“this brown stands alone.”
“Maybe it won’t look quite so horrible when it’s not strand-by-strand with silver.”
“Omnimancer,” she said, calmer now, “do you think I give two figs about the color of my hair?”
That was just one of the things he liked about her. He pressed another leaf to a still-silver area and murmured the spell again. This time the color that burst out was the brown of coffee with a smidgeon of creamer not fully stirred in, rich and dark and varied.
He heard her breath catch in her throat. He dove into his pocket for more leaves.“Feaxbrun,” he said, her remembered laughter in his ears, and the sludge was gone, replaced with the color he’d seen nearly every day for six weeks.“Feaxbrun,” he said, thinking of her expression when he’d told her he wanted her to brew, and half her hair was the right shade.
“Feaxbrun”—Miss Harper practically dancing into his house with the primer in her arms.
“Feax brun”—Beatrix. Beatrix, smart, capable, driven.
She touched her hair. It gleamed auburn here and there where the light hit it just so. “How did you do that?” she whispered.
“I thought of you.” He sighed, wondering if that sounded like an admission of how he felt. “So much of magic is intent.”
