“Well—it’s been almost a month and a half, counting all the time you were in a coma,” she said, murmuring in his ear. “And spells do go awry sometimes. Especially in a stressful situation. I’m sure it’s just?—”
“No, it didn’t work atall.” He withdrew his hand from his pocket, still holding the intact leaves. “Even with a screw-up, I should have feltsomething.”
“Try again.”
He did. He tried the same spell, he tried three different spells, he tried with different leaves. No reaction.
He was too rattled to say anything more. Beatrix, arm around him, led him back to the car.
All the happiness and laughter that had been in her eyes a few minutes earlier had fled. “Peter, do you think …?”
He had no idea. But if the weapon had stripped him of his magical abilities, a world of trouble awaited them.
An hour later,they stood in an empty bedroom in Peter’s house with Lydia and Rosemarie, the latter slowly walking around, scrutinizing every inch for suggestions of invisibility. There was nowhere to sit, but then, that made it easier to ensure there was no one and nothing watching them.
“All right,” Rosemarie said.
Peter turned off the light and they repeated the restaurant procedure, the zip and zing of her magic making her shiver. What if he could never do this again? She’d missed spellcasting—the wonder and awe of it—in the six weeks she’d abstained, and she’d only been doing it for a few months. How much worse would it be for a man whose lifesince the age of thirteen, whose whole identity, was wrapped up with magic?
He turned the light back on, expression tense. She slipped a hand into his and realized his whole arm was trembling.
“What’s happened?” Lydia said.
“I—” He swallowed. “I seem to have lost my ability to spellcast.”
Lydia and Rosemarie stared at him with identical expressions of shock. Lydia was the first to respond, and all she said was, “What?”
It was clear that he couldn’t bear to talk about it. So Beatrix told them how they’d run into the vice president’s son and what happened after that.
“Your two weeks aren’t up until Sunday,” Rosemarie said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think it’s possible you haven’t recovered enough to have the strength for it?”
“No. That’s not it.” Peter closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. “The doctor knew full well Ishouldbe able to spellcast—that’s why he warned me so thoroughly to wait, for fear it would set my health back. When I broke my leg at fifteen, when I was laid up with influenza at nineteen, when I had severe food poisoning in my twenties—all of those times, I could cast.”
“Hillier, the doctor—he said he knew of no wizard who’d ever been unable to use magic after an illness or accident.” Beatrix stepped closer to him, shoulder to shoulder. “But there’s no other wizard who had the life force pulled from him by a weapon, let alone survived it.”
Lydia gazed at them. “You mean …”
“I think it took whatever it is I had that allows a wizard to manipulate the world.” Peter sighed. “Permanently, I fear.”
A moment of silence followed. “Not good,” Rosemarie said finally, in a grim understatement.
Now they had no legal way to use magic to protect their conversations, safeguard their events, keep tabs on hostile spellcasting. If a wizard attacked Peter, he’d have no effective defense. And this new limitation was utterly life-changing for him—his education and career were built on the assumption that he could cast.
“We’ll make this work,” Lydia said. “We’ve managed without magic for the last six weeks.”
“Not well.” Rosemarie looked at Beatrix. “What we need is a way of using magic that no one will be able to see.”
Her heart couldn’t take much more from this day. “No.No.”
“Beatrix, youtoldme your method is undetectable. It doesn’t rely on leaves or spellwords.” Rosemarie frowned. “Why don’t you want to do it?”
Peter was looking at her, too, waiting for her answer.
She’d had so much on her mind the last two weeks that she’d given no thought to that powerful, insidious form of magic and its consequences. Now there was no way around it. She had to tell them. She had to tell Peter.
She looked down at his hand clasped in hers. What would he think of her?
“It’s not safe,” she said.
