“Ella,” she said, seriously concerned.
“It’s just … embarrassing. That’s all.” She pulled a face, looking more like her normal self. “The summer I turned eighteen, a wizard asked me to marry him—and I accepted.”
Beatrix knew she was gaping. She tried to get her expression under control.
“He was handsome and a few years older than I was, and I thought, because I’d spent a couple years in school with him and our paths intersected occasionally afterward, that I knew him.” Ella shook her head. “But I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“I actually got to know him and called off the engagement. Oh, howastonishedhe was. No one hadeverspoken to him that way. His father was an important man! I would be sorry, oh yes, I would come begging him to take me back.”
Ella said this in her usual puckish way, and Beatrix laughed.
“Then my father threatened to disown me if I didn’t,” Ella said. “And that’s when I left home.”
It wasn’t funny anymore. Beatrix caught her hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry.”
Ella shrugged, looking away. “It was a relief to go. Anyway, you had your own problems at eighteen.”
That was true. But losing both parents as a teenager and having the family finances handed to her in tatters had to be balanced against years of love and support before that.
“Well, less talking, more magicking,” Ella said, never one to wallow. “Let’s not waste this amazing opportunity.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t it help to talk about?—”
“Nope. Water under the bridge. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I say we pick a spell and stick with it as long as we’re here.Reallyfocus. What should it be?”
That wasn’t a hard choice. “Spell detection. If we can sense spells without casting one …”
Ella nodded because the appeal was obvious. For Plan B. For protecting Lydia from a wizard under an invisibility spell. For simply coping with life in their house.
Ella pulled a gnarled crabapple out of her pocket, used a leaf to turn it invisible and tossed it across the room. “First one to figure out where it is wins.”
An hour in, Beatrix decided to call it. “I have no idea where the thing is, and I’m a minute away from seeing crabapples everywhere I look.”
Ella, sitting on the floor a few feet away, flopped onto her back with a groan. “I suppose we’d have to stop soon anyway, or our oh-so-kind host would get suspicious.”
Beatrix handled the twinge this brought on by dipping into an interior pocket where her leaves were hidden, one that magically didn’t bulge despite its contents, and aiming protection spells at the ceiling, each wall and an expired beetle in a corner. At least now they hadn’t told Peter an absolute lie.
“I still say we just need more practice.” Ella scrambled to her feet. “You know, Icouldtry in my room. Only an audio recorder in there, after all.”
“That we know of!”
“Well, in the forest, then. We could practice in the clearing, as long as it’s not visually obvious magic. No leaves, no spellwords—who’s to know?”
Beatrix shook her head. “Any wizard who wonders why we’re standing there silently for long stretches and thinks to cast the spell-detector after we leave, that’s who.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ella sighed. “You know, the magiocracy’s really putting a crimp in our efforts to get rid of them. I’m beginning to think they don’t want us to succeed.”
Her expression of wounded indignation was so funny, Beatrix couldn’t help but laugh.
“We’ll think of something,” Ella said, lips upturned but eyes dark and serious. “We always do. Speaking of which …”
She picked up her school bag, opened it and pulled out one cleaning rag after another, like a comic magician, which just set Beatrix off again.
“Well? What do you think?” Ella said, showing off her now-empty bag.
“Planning to dust in here?”
