“I wanted the bag to look full when we came in. Here,” she said, holding out the rags, “put these in your oodles of pockets, and we can use the bag?—”
“—for leaves,” Beatrix said, no longer laughing.
“Which our omnimancer so generously offered us.”
Beatrix, filling the bag in the basement a few minutes later while Ella acted as lookout on the ground floor, considered that Peter hadn’t, after all, put a limit on that offer. But he surely hadn’t expected they would take two hundred leaves, let alone the use each would be put to.
She cast a mournful glance at his remaining stock, piled in its magically preserved state in a corner of the basement. It already looked far smaller than it had at the end of summer. And she would need to steal many more before spring brought new life to the bare trees. She would have to take six hundred additional leaves just in the next week alone, in time for their check-in visits with Joan and the other two first-wave recruits—Dot was still out of town.
It would have been better—far, far better—if they could have waited until late March to launch Plan B. Or until they’d worked through their problems with knitting, at which point no leaves would be necessary at all.
But they couldn’t afford to wait. And she couldn’t afford the second thoughts she was having, which were almost certainly not really hers anyway. She would just have to think about something else.
CHAPTER 9
Shave-and-a-haircut.
Peter snapped out of his extended meditation on the defensive potential of runes, heart kicking up instinctively at the knock—but of course it wasn’t Beatrix. Beatrix was one floor down with Miss Knight, spellcasting.
Martinelli?
Whoever it was, Beatrix and Miss Knight would have to stop. They couldn’t risk a wizard slipping invisibly in. He ran to the stairwell and found them already at the bottom of it, clearly thinking along the same lines.
“Expecting someone?” Miss Knight said.
“No,” he said, reaching the landing. “But that doesn’t stop people from coming.”
He glanced through the peephole. Sure enough: Martinelli. He couldn’t help but smile as he opened the door. “Wemuststop meeting like this.”
“I was planning to drive to Baltimore, but then I thought, ‘Why visit a middling city when I can go to a completely insignificant town?’”
“Actually,” Beatrix said, “Ellicott Mills is the most significant small town in the country.”
“Oh?” Martinelli looked at her, cocking his head. “Why? You have the world’s largest ball of wax?”
“No.” Her lips quirked. “We have an omnimancer.”
Martinelli grinned back at her. “A very good point.”
“Miss Harper, this is Wizard Martinelli.” Peter gestured his direction, recollecting as he did that she probably recognized the man. Martinelli featured prominently in the memories he’d shared with her during a linked dream. But just to do the expected thing, he added, “Wizard Martinelli used to work for me.”
“With,” Martinelli said with mock outrage.“Withhim.”
“And Miss Harper picked up where you left off,” Peter said to him.
“Deputy director of omnimancing?” Martinelli suggested.
“I’m the omnimancer’s assistant.” Beatrix glanced at Peter with that wonderful crooked smile of hers, the one that made him feel as if they were both in on the same joke, before turning her attention back to their visitor. “Women aren’t allowed to be deputy directors, you know. Pandemonium would ensue.”
Martinelli chuckled at her wit, but Peter had to suppress a wince. “Assistant” was a grossly unfair title for her. If anything, he washerassistant. Measured by requests filled,she was more the town’s omnimancer than he was. And no one—no one not under a Vow—could ever know.
“Well, it’s very nice to meet you,” Martinelli said to Beatrix, adding, “And you, Miss …?”
Peter, recollecting that Beatrix and Martinelli were not the only ones in the room, hastened to say, “Miss Knight, Miss Harper’s friend.”
He expected a biting remark, perhaps something about how Ellicott Mills couldn’t survive the excitement oftwowizards in its borders at once, but Miss Knight simply nodded at Martinelli.
Then she turned to Beatrix and said, “We’d better get going, don’t you think?”
