Was the magiocracy aware she could do magic?
Beatrix slid back onto the rug, wrapping her arms around her legs and pressing her head to her knees. Did they figure it out when Peter couldn’t take a Vow? Did they assume she’d been casting spells for him for a while? What did thismean?
The more she thought about that last question, though, the calmer she got. The magiocracy had no intention of releasing Peter regardless. She was already facing life in prison on false charges. She couldn’t see how wizards knowing about her spellcasting appreciably worsened the situation she and Peter were already in.
A creak and a sudden dent in the couch gave evidence that Ella—still invisible—had just sat there. “I say this realizing that I’m the one who convinced you to go to the hospital in the first place, but we’re agreed that we’re not going back, right? Not ever?”
Beatrix sighed. She didn’t have Ella’s pre-transformation knack for knitting disguises, so she didn’t see an alternative but to trust that Joan, Dot, Marilyn and Gray were doing all they could for her sister. “Right,” she said heavily. “I agree.”
“Do you think you could undo the invisibility?” Ella gave a bitter huff of a laugh. “It was a relief at first not to see myself, but now I’m starting to get the creeps.”
Beatrix needed the better part of ten minutes to manage it. A definite improvement over the time it took to knit them invisible in the first place, but hardly promising. She groaned as she slumped on the couch next to Ella.
“So,” Ella said, glancing at her, “did you feel an overwhelming urge to kill the guy?” Her tone suggested mild curiosity. Her face betrayed how much the answer mattered to her.
Beatrix hesitated, casting her mind back to the minute or two (was that all it had been?) that they’d run for their lives. “No,” she said.
Ella nodded, her lips a thin line. “Very stressful moment, I’d say.”
“Yes,” Beatrix murmured.
“Perhaps knitting played no part in what I did. Perhaps it was just … me.”
“But it wasn’t like you at all.” Beatrix shook her head. “It probably takes more knitting to get to the point where it interacts with stress. I’ve only come back to it in the last few hours, after all.”
Ella stared at her hands. “Maybe.”
“Look, I’m seriously afraid,” Beatrix said. “You have to promise to do something if I start going crazy. I don’t know that I would step away from the cliff again—last time it felt sonecessarythat it’s a wonder I didn’t kill Garrett myself. It was like… like…”
“Like an insistent inner voice.”
“Yes.”
“The one that normally tells younotto do that questionable thing you’re thinking about doing.”
Beatrix gave a watery laugh. “Exactly.”
“And when you heard its advice,” Ella said, voice cracking, “you don’t even remember thinking, ‘Yes, I must,’ you just starteddoingit as if there obviously wasn’t anything else you could be doing.”
“Almost like a—” Beatrix stopped, staring at her in blank shock. The rest of the sentence came out in a rasp: “Like aVow.”
Ella’s mouth worked open and shut. She cleared her throat. “But I’m still under that Vow, surely? I’m stillme, even if I’ve transformed my body into my brother’s. And I haven’t felt any recent crazy urges or compulsions.”
“Since you changed yourself?”
“Right. Well, a little after that, really. I was so flush with triumph at doing it that I rushed right down to my father’s and didn’t think about the consequences—didn’t figure out that I was stuck—for about a week.”
Beatrix clutched her arm. “When did you change over?”
“March. March 15, to be exact—that date will be seared into my brain for the rest of my life.”
Beatrix jumped up and ran to the wall with the calendar. Monday, March 15. So close to her wedding that she could place it exactly amid everything else that had happened: It was three days after their run-in with Frederick Draden, the real Frederick Draden—and, more importantly…
“Eight days later, I burned the contract you signed. I was afraid the wizards would find it, and”—her voice caught—“I figured the Vow was probably a dud from the start because you didn’t take it with your real name.”
Ella shook her head, wide-eyed. “No, I’m pretty sure it worked. When you ordered me to tell you whether I was the spy, there was something about the way my answer slipped out that felt … involuntary.” She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Do you really think—could it really have been …?”
“We both Vowed to protect Lydia ‘to the utmost’ of our abilities. And in each of those situations, she faced a threat we were trying to stop, weren’t we?”
