“Then we’re stuck,” Martinelli said hollowly.
Beatrix had been giving it a lot of thought since the previous afternoon. “I think the trick is to invisibly fly in over the head of someone going into the checkpoint, wait through the rigmarole, and fly out the other side when the guards open it up.”
Martinelli shook his head. “They check for invisibility, and there isn’t a flying spell that actually works.”
“I’m not going to use a spell,” she said.
Martinelli gapedduring Beatrix’s entire explanation of “knitting”—how powerful it was, how she suspected that most if not all women could do it if taught—and Peter’s own mouth fell open when she noted that it was undetectable magic. He’d had no idea.
“And you’re OK?” he murmured. “It’s not making you feel…”
He trailed off, not sure how to put it with Martinelli standing there.
“Yes, I’m all right.” She hesitated. “I was mistaken. The knitting wasn’t to blame—it was the Vows.”
He didn’t know why that hadn’t once occurred to him. It made a terrible sort of sense.
“So … so let me get this straight,” Martinelli said. “You can do magic without any sort of fuel.”
“Here, hold my hands,” she said to Martinelli. “No leaves, right?”
“Yep.”
“OK, wait a minute. Or possibly a few minutes—I’m getting better at shedding invisibility, but I could still use a lot more practice.”
Roughly forty seconds later, Beatrix snapped into focus in a light blue shirt, gray trousers and white duster. Her hair was pulled back in a neat queue. A wizard’s outfit from head to toe.
She made it look like a revolutionary statement. Like the future.
It was also unexpectedly, undeniably sexy. He kissed her, the blood in his veins zipping south as she pressed against him.
Martinelli cleared his throat. They pulled back, Beatrix’s cheeks as pink as his felt.
“Sorry to interrupt, kids,” Martinelli said, “but this is important: Donotlet those wizards find out. I mean—you don’t want them to know about the regular magic, either, butespeciallynot this stuff.”
Peter’s heart gave a nasty twist as he remembered the terrible bit of news he hadn’t yet passed on to her. “Morse suspects you use magic. If he discovers you do, he’ll …” He swallowed. “He’ll kill you.”
She sighed—a weary verbal shrug. He thought she wasn’t giving it the proper weight, filing it too low on her already-long list of disasters, but then she said, “I’m almost certain he already knows.”
He reflexively tightened his arms around her—as if that would protect her. As if he hadn’t been the one to put her in mortal danger in the first place.
“Look, we’ll all have to go into hiding when we get out,” Martinelli said. “But let’s, you know, getout, OK?”
Beatrix nodded. “Fair warning: Coming up with new knitting is a lot slower than repeating something I’ve already managed.”
An image of Morse catching up to them while they were working on their escape burst into his head. “We have to do more to protect ourselves here.”
“The shield spell is a good start,” Martinelli said.
“It’s also a problem. They’re going to search the place. They’ll get here eventually, and if they find a barrier in their way, they’ll know why. Then we’re sitting ducks.”
Martinelli groaned. “We can’t take it down.What’s to stop them just teleporting in if thereisn’ta barrier?”
Peter looked around the room, frowning. What they needed was something that could hide them. Like a fake wall. Or …
“Beatrix,” he said, “do you think you could make a false ceiling?”
It took almost ninety minutes. The whole time, he was tensed for discovery. But what she ultimately knitted was even better than he’d hoped: a hiding spot seven feet off thefloor of the bathroom, big enough for them all to lie down or sit up in. To anyone inside it, the magic was translucent. Anybody outside saw only thin air.
