Bare tree branches rose darkly above her, a more comforting sight than the house with its warmly lit windows behind. Beatrix stepped into the gazebo and collapsed on the bench, looking at the forest instead of the home the magiocracy had turned against her.
Peter, still invisible, cleared his throat. “Will you be all right?”
She nodded.
“You stripped the bespelled sheets off the beds?”
“Yes. I wore rubber gloves,” she added, anticipating his question.
“Good. Get rid of them—sheets and gloves. There’s no way to know what those spells were about.”
She nodded again, exhaustion gaining on her. She was very, very tired of all this.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, almost as if he were apologizing for something he’d done, and her throat closed up as she tried to tell him what his help meant.
More than anything now, it meant added guilt.
“Thank you,” she choked out at last, and he left. Necessary, she reminded herself. For Lydia. Any day could be the day, as this afternoon had so clearly shown.
She ought to go to bed. But now it had a tele-vision camera pointed at it. Free conversations in the house, let alone any female spellcasting, would be impossible. Even the bathrooms had audio recorders, for God’s sake. Magic experiments with Ella were over.
The back door creaked open and clicked shut. She turned to see Ella walking toward her, braid no longer coiled around her head but instead hanging down her back.
“Can we talk here?” Ella whispered.
Beatrix nodded. No bugs, and Peter had cast a sound-dampening spell on the gazebo before he’d left.
Ella looked at her. “Are you all right?”
She stopped trying to hold her head up and let it droop into her hands. “Ella, this is … this is just …”
“I know. I know.” In exactly the same tone, she added: “On the upside, all this recording equipment will begreatfor our future biographers.”
The laughter caught Beatrix sideways, forcing its way out.
“Or perhaps we’ll just confuse them.” Ella pitched her voice lower and mimed taking notes. “‘Subjects said nothingof substance. Unclear how they had wherewithal to run major organization.’”
Beatrix tried to get control of what threatened to become hysterical giggles.
“I propose a contest,” Ella said. “The person who manages to say the blandest thing each day wins.”
“Not”—Beatrix bent over, chest twitching with the effort to stop laughing like a crazy person—“not including Miss Massey, of course.”
“Of course.”
She sat up to find Ella wearing that grin, the one suggesting that life was a series of jokes, if you simply looked hard enough.
“Because that wouldn’t be a fair competition for the rest of us,” Ella said, and they both lost it.
It felt so good to laugh like this, helplessly and completely. How long had it been? Before the attempt on Lydia’s life? Before the Vows?
Beatrix sighed, the seriousness of the situation dampening the humor. “We’ll have to saysomesupposedly substantive things, you know, or they’ll realize something’s up.” Much like she was on the hook to sleep in her camera-monitored bed.
But Ella grinned, and her grin made the situation more bearable. “I fully intend to have fun making those things up.”
Ella was right—they would manage this. They knew where all the recording devices were, thanks to Peter. And nothing had happened to Lydia.
Yet.
