She shuddered, hoping it wasn’t true. And yet she also didn’t want to believe that Ella—who once dreamed of building towering skyscrapers—had all along been biding her time for an opportunity to destroy.
“Down here,” she murmured to Rosemarie as they reached the slope to the small clearing where the nightmare had started.
She looked around and saw … nothing. The transmitter wasn’t there. Lydia had not gone to the wrong spot.
“Oh, no,” she said under her breath. “Oh, God. Oh,no.”
Rosemarie walked into the clearing, stopped and put her hand on what looked like thin air. Good heavens, was it there? Rosemarie turned, nodded once, held up a finger—wait—and glanced around.
“All clear,” she said. “I think this is it.”
Beatrix rushed after her and felt stone, the lip of the top section, theEarrune. She palmed leaves she’d taken from Peter’s ruined coat and cast the revealing spell, just to be sure. The relief she felt as the transmitter flickered into view shot through her like an electric shock.
“It looks like a birdbath,” Rosemarie said, shaking her head.
It did, in fact. What it most certainly did not look like was a weapon of mass death.
“Better go back up the slope,” she whispered. “Get to a safe distance.”
As Rosemarie retraced her steps, Beatrix moved as far from Project 96 as the clearing allowed and took aim.“Fordest,” she said—meaning it with all her heart.
It hit, sizzled for a while as it ate through the protection spell there, and then—with a tremendous crack and a lowboom—the transmitter shattered into hundreds of pieces. She cast one more spell at the shards to make them small enough to be unrecognizable before kicking the rubble into the undergrowth.
She’d fulfilled her promise to Peter. She wished with the bitter wisdom of hindsight that she’d destroyed the weapon long before.
Rosemarie took one look at her as she crested the slope and enveloped her in a hug as unexpected as it was needed.
“I’m so proud of you, my girl,” Rosemarie said, voice gruff. “I know I’ve been hard on you of late, but I’ve always been very proud of you.”
“Oh,” Beatrix murmured, shocked.
“Heaven knows I’m no good at this sort of thing.” Rosemarie grimaced. “Well—I was trying to get you to spend more time with your sister, that’s what.”
Beatrix sighed. That made sense, looking back. So many of the critical things Rosemarie had said to her recently were designed to keep her in the house—with Lydia—rather than going off with Ella.
She should have listened.
“Lydia’s doing this for you, you know,” Rosemarie said.
“Doing what?”
“The League. All of it. Once she was old enough to understand the sacrifices you were making for her, she asked me how she could repay you. She realized that if she got a job after graduation, saved up and sentyouto college, it would take a very long while. And even then, you’d have few options when you graduated. She was … oh, thirteen or thereabouts, and she declared, ‘This is all wrong.’ So she decided to try to change it—for you.”
Beatrix found herself at a complete loss for words. She’d thought Lydia had started off on this path to get more rights for women in general. She’d seen the League as something that separated them: Lydia enjoyed this work and she did not, Lydia was inspiring and she was not, Lydia soughtpower in the organization and she would not. How she’dresentedLydia for assuming she’d do League grunt work year after year—and how confused and hurt her sister must have been as they grew ever farther apart.
“Why didn’t shetellme?” Beatrix asked.
“She knew you would say she didn’t need to pay you back. But she intends to see this through.”
She leaned into Rosemarie. Thank God she hadn’t known this while she’d thought Lydia’s life was in danger. She remembered something Ella had said to her—what she’d said in their first real conversation:Here, sis, have my life savings so I can attend college vicariously through you—no pressure.Ella had meant it as a joke. But she’d been closer to the truth than either of them realized, if Lydia had felt the weight of that decision long before she went to Hazelhurst.
“Well, then,” Rosemarie said, voice once again brisk, but eyes moist. “Shall we see what’s come of the omnimancer’s house? I’d be shocked if it hasn’t had some uninvited guests.”
She was right. The front door was ajar, the lock broken, as if to suggest a garden variety break-in. Drawers stood open and papers lay on the floor in the receiving room. The vials in the brewing room had been pulled out and put back none too carefully, broken glass glinting all over the floor. Someone or multiple someones had been here. The magiocracy, Beatrix assumed, wanted to know if Peter had anything to do with the explosion they had not set off themselves.
There was nothing connected with that to find here. What set Beatrix running for his bedroom in panic was therealization that the wizards might have discovered the contracts instead.
He’d used no magic to hide them—they’d both thought that safest. Neither of them had counted on an intruder willing to pull the place apart.
