She nodded. She looked as if she wanted to say something but was having trouble finding the words. Or the courage.
“Ah.” Miss Dane, framed in the doorway. “I wondered how you were going to deal with that. What about the rest of us—what will happen to our hair?”
He cleared his throat. “If you’re casting a handful of protection spells a day, you shouldn’t have more than a few silver hairs each week. Just keep an eye out.”
He glanced at Miss Harper, but the moment was gone. She twisted her hair up and secured it, not looking at him.
Miss Knight, squeezing around Miss Dane, raised her eyebrows at him. “You’d better give Beatrix permissionto speak freely to us or she’ll be in danger of choking to death.”
He was getting tired of Miss Knight, who looked at him so mistrustfully. Miss Knight, who could have no opinion of him that was not influenced by Miss Harper. “She’s in no danger as long as you don’t ask her several dozen questions in a row,” he said, crossing his arms.
“What are you trying to hide?”
“Eighty percent of wizardry is classified. What am Inottrying to hide?”
She frowned. “I want to see the contracts underlying your Vows to each other. I want to see them tonight.”
“Ella—” Miss Harper said.
“You’ve had her under a Vow for five weeks, haven’t you?Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted, bewildered. Was it that obvious? Had he been making her ill?
“Five weeks ago,” Miss Knight said to the women like a prosecutor making a pronouncement to a jury, “I found Beatrix sobbing in the forest. When I asked what hadhappened, she choked over her words—choked—and eventually managed to convey that he’d done something. But she wouldn’t say what. Only that he was awful.”
The room went unnaturally silent.
“What’s in that Vow?” Miss Knight said after a moment. “What are you making her do?”
“Nothing,” he stuttered. He’d pictured her cursing him, never crying. She’d been sosteely. “I’m not making her do anything except brew and keep this secret.”
He glanced at Miss Harper. She looked back at him, expression resigned.You’re going to ask me to confirm that lie by omission, it said, clear as day.You’re going to ask and I can’t possibly say otherwise.
“You have my express permission to tell these women everything,” he said.
Her eyes went wide.
“Everything,” he repeated, glad she’d sealed her confederates’ lips as tightly as he’d sealed hers.
“Well?” Miss Knight asked.
Miss Harper hesitated.
“Beatrix,” her friend said, taking her hand and pulling her toward the door, as if his nearness was silencing her. “What happened?”
“He could have explained what he wanted,” she said, slowly, “but then Icould have informed on him and gotten him sent to jail for years. He ... he didn’t trust me enough to ask. So he kept leaving temptations in my path until I broke the magic-use law and gave him leverage.”
That was a very generous description of what had occurred.
“Oh,Beatrix,” Miss Dane said, her tone outraged.
Peter glared at his former teacher—something he never would have dared to do at thirteen. “You’re telling me ifyoucame across a classified document entitled ‘Instances of Magical Ability in the Female Population,’ you wouldn’t have read it?”
“Speaking of which,” Lydia Harper put in, “how is it that Beatrix, Rosemarie, Ella and Megallcan use magic when girls never managed so much as an inch of levitation in all the years they were allowed in the entrance exams?”
“Magical aptitude manifests later for girls than for boys. It turns out that almost all women are capable of spellcasting, though not to the extent that wizards are,” he said. “The National Institute for Magical Research discovered this almost ninety years ago, and it’s been top secret ever since.”
The trio clustered around his assistant reacted with exactly as much indignation as he would have, had the shoe been on the other foot.
