CHAPTER 19
By the time they got back to the house after the real meeting to put on the fake one for the cameras’ benefit, Beatrix’s stomach was kinked in stressful knots.
She should have felt better as the performance unfolded like a masterful bit of bureaucratic theater—a conversation about a possible march in a totally different location on the wrong day. She certainly admired how well Rosemarie, directing this, pulled it off. But she felt anxious all the same. And she could see from the strain on her sister’s face that Lydia—unlike Ella—was not having fun playacting.
“Are you all right?” she said quietly to Lydia as the “meeting” broke up.
Lydia gave a wan smile that spoke volumes.
She needed to get her out of this house. What had come of all her good intentions on that score? At the very least,she needed to take Lydia on a walk the moment everyone cleared out. She put her arm around her sister. “Would you like to?—”
“Oh, Beatrix!” Dot hobbled over, grimacing. “These shoes my mother gave me for Christmas don’t seem to have been designed by someone who has ever seen a human foot. Would you mind driving me back to campus? I can’t face the walk.”
She dropped Dot off at her dorm and circled back. Inside the now-quiet house, Rosemarie was washing the dishes, the odd-woman-out tenant Miss Massey was in her room and Ella was in hers, bent over her students’ homework, but Lydia was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s my sister?” she asked Rosemarie, trying not to sound as worried as she felt. Lydia was not supposed to be alone. Those were the rules to protect her.
Rosemarie turned off the water and dried her hands. “Oh, running an errand.” She punctuated that with a meaningful look and walked to the sitting room, which did not have a tele-vision camera.
Once there, she extracted a note from her pocket that said, in Lydia’s handwriting:Going with OB to his house—be back later.
Is something wrong?Beatrix wrote below it, wondering what could have happened. Her charms were quiet. Nothing had disrupted either meeting.
Not that I know of, Rosemarie wrote in her lovely, flowing cursive, then handed the note over and left.
Beatrix sat down, unsettled. For months now, she’d been hooked into Peter’s life so fully, knowing most everything he was doing and thinking, that this unexpected meeting with Lydia felt … odd. Uncomfortable.
Misguided jealousy? She didn’t think so. She rubbed her stomach, which had yet to unkink. What would they want to meet about without everyone else?
She leapt to her feet in horror. Without thinking, without finding Ella first, she ran headlong out the back door and into the forest.
The knockon the door sounded like Beatrix’s, but rushed. Desperate. She’d felt trouble through their connection, then—he wondered if she already suspected what that trouble was.
He didn’t want her here. He wasn’t ready for this. But he left Lydia in the kitchen with her head in her hands and opened the door.
He looked at Beatrix, her face revealing nothing, and wondered if she’d given him so much as a passing thought while betraying his trust and endangering him.
“May—” Her voice cracked and her shoulders sagged. “May I come in, Omnimancer?”
He stepped back to make way, closed the door and pointed to the receiving room, not trusting himself to talk. He took far longer to check the house than he needed, knowing he had to get his emotions under control. But whenhe finally stepped into the receiving room with her sister trailing behind him, one look at her brought it all back like a maelstrom.
Why?he wanted to scream.Why would you do this to me?
He cast the spell to check this final room and saw the evidence of the Vows that bound them lighting up as bright as always. She reached out a hand and put her fingers right through it, wishing no doubt that she could sever their connection so easily. He finished his task and leaned against the desk, crossing his arms to keep them from trembling.
Beatrix, sitting nearby, looked not at him but at the two boxes on the desk—boxes full of leaves she’d surely taken from him.
“What have you done, Bee?” Her sister sounded so young—all her steely confidence gone. “Oh God, what have youdone?”
Beatrix turned to her sister and immediately glanced away. “I?—”
“No,” he said. “Beatrix Jane Harper—” He stopped, feeling sick, and tried again. “Beatrix Jane Harper …” Good God, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to call on her Vow to make her tell the truth, even though that was clearly the only way they would get it.
Now she looked at him, eyes dry but full of a despair that stabbed at him in a way tears wouldn’t have. “Go on. It’s the only way you’ll believe what I say, isn’t it?”
“Beatrix Jane Harper,” he said, choking up, forcing himself to keep talking, “tell us what you have done involving magic and League leaders—and anyone else. Tellus truthfully—what, how and when, or it will harm Lydia Josephine Harper, her efforts with the League, the League itself and me. Assuming,” he added bitterly, “that it’s possible to harm us more than you’ve already done.”
She winced and looked as if she wanted to say something about that, but then the story poured out of her like water from an opened hydrant—rapid, overwhelming. How she and Miss Knight (of course Miss Knight, GoddamnMiss Knight) had taught the four women spellcasting shortly before Christmas. How they in turn had each taught two other women, and those women had each taught two more, and so on to roughly two hundred fifty, where the number now stood, last she’d checked. How it would quickly grow to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands—women who’d all agreed to come to Washington when she said so to expose the magiocracy in a massive lie and trigger a sea change. How careful they had tried to be to avoid problems with recruits. How they’d hit a snag nonetheless and had disguised themselves as wizards to convince the would-be informer that this was all a magiocracy plan to defuse League members’ “fear of magic” so they would stop pushing for political change. How they’d stolen leaves from him. How they’d bought leaves from the magical supply shop. How they’d just distributed the purchase to get recruits through winter.
