“All right.” Beatrix shucked off her wizard’s coat. “Can you do your trick in reverse—make the skirt look longer? I’ve been wanting to hem all my dresses so they don’t drag in the snow and mud, but Rosemarie won’t have it.”
Ella frowned and shook a finger at her.“Beatrix!”she intoned, a pitch-perfect Rosemarie imitation. “Ankles!Thinkwhat people will say.”
“We must adhere to all the reasonable expectations of society in the interest of abolishing the unreasonable ones,” Beatrix added, her own impersonation not nearly as good, but Ella laughed all the same.
“OK,” Ella said, “first imagine your dress is alive and can be talked into a different shape …”
Joan gavethem a wide smile as she let them into her apartment. That seemed a good sign. They talked of nothing for a few minutes, and then Beatrix asked for hairpins and they trooped off to her bathroom.
The air in the middle of the room turned white when Ella cast the spell-detector. There was a tense second before Joan said, “Mine. I’ve been careful about where to cast, just as you said.”
Beatrix let out a breath. “Everything OK?”
Joan nodded. “Recruited two people, neither in the League. And they’ve each recruited their two already.”
“All under Vows?”
“Yes.”
The tightness in Beatrix’s chest eased. But then Joan said, “You did bring more leaves? I’m just about out, and I promised I’d pass replacements down the line as soon as I got them.”
Beatrix tensed up all over again. “How are you out already?”
“You weren’t supposed to teach the recruits all the spells we showed you, remember—not until spring, anyway,” Ella said, shaking her head.
“I know, I know,” Joan said in an appeasing tone. “And I didn’t. Just detection, soundproofing, levitation and theVow, that’s all. But my recruits needed more tries to get the hang of it. Eleven leaves weren’t enough, they just weren’t. So I let them use more and gave them extra to hand down for the next two sets of recruits.”
Beatrix sighed. She should have accounted for that, especially because she’d let the first four recruits cast so many more spells. But eleven leaves per person was already a stretch. Even if she had the money to buy them from Baltimore’s wizarding supply shop, she couldn’t—she wasn’t a wizard. And knitting remained a solution beyond their grasp, hard even for Ella to make work in place of normal spells, her bursts of innovation notwithstanding.
“How many leaves did you hand out per person?” Beatrix asked.
“Twenty.”
Twenty. Ella gave Beatrix anow whatlook. They’d calculated that they might—might—be able to pilfer two thousand leaves over several months without Peter noticing, and they’d thought that could carry them to spring. Now they would need nearly twice as many.
It was hard to believe he wouldn’t notice that.
Lydia Harper stoodon his doorstep. Alone.
“Are you all right?” Peter asked. “Shouldn’t you have someone with you?”
“Rosemarie’s just down the street. I convinced her that no harm would come to me if I popped up here for a few minutes.”
The ironic humor Beatrix would have infused those words with was nowhere to be seen. This Miss Harper was serious, always serious. But then, it took an unusual sort of person to see anything funny in the Harpers’ lives.
“Won’t you come in?” he said, and checked the house as quickly as possible, deeply curious why she was there.
She got right to the point when he returned to the receiving room. “I have a favor to ask you.” She sighed. “I have nothing but favors to ask of you, I realize.”
“Only because wizards have targeted you,” he said, settling in the chair behind his desk. “I doubt very much that you would be asking a wizard for help otherwise.”
She leaned forward in her seat. “You shouldn’t feel you have to say yes.”
“Ask and we’ll see.”
For a few seconds, she said nothing. Then: “I’d like you to check on the League leaders I rely on most to make sure they haven’t been co-opted by the magiocracy.”
Oh. He grimaced before he could stop himself.
