“Disinclined.”
She had paused a moment as dignity wrestled with pedantry. “Unable.”
“It is simply a matter of mathematics.”
“ ‘Simply mathematics’ is an oxymoron.”
Daniel had stared into the middle distance with a mildly perplexed frown, as if trying to calculate how someone might not enjoy maths. “But you do know the incantation?”
“Of course.” Alice’s reply had been so defensive, she’d managed to fit a whole rampart, catapult, and cauldron of boiling oil into two words. “I wrote my third-year essay on Beryl Black. My analysis of her error in sharing the incantation with her book club, and the schism that followed when they split into pirates and witches, won me an award.”
“Hm. Did you include Jemming’s theory of Willful Contradiction?”
“Naturally.”
“My dismantling of that theory, and therealforces behind the pirates choosing to use the magic for flight and the witches for telekinesis, won me an award for my third-year essay.”
They’d stared at each other without blinking. Anyone walking between them at that moment would have suffered third-degree burns.
“We’re about to hit a flock of birds,” Alice had commented mildly.
Daniel had reached out and turned the wheel without looking.
“I graduated with honors,” he’d said.
“I graduated with honors and my portrait hung in the student hall.”
“Would I recognize it, or were you in disguise?”
At that, the strangest sensation had rippled through her throat. For one wild, disturbing moment, Alice had thought she might actually laugh. Lifting her chin disdainfully, she’d turned to glare out the window.
“I do know the incantation,” she’d said, returning to their previous point of conversation, “but I cannot seem to get it from my brain into action. There is just too much—” Too muchfeelinginvolved. Too much energy infused with air, ocean, and feral power. She could barely breathe contemplating it; actually performing it left her a jittering wreck within minutes. Even when she applied the most basicaereoincantation to a mere teaspoon, she ended up dizzy, nauseated, and struggling to assure herself she was not a small piece of tableware. Making a house goaereomight just crush her mind.
But how could one explain that, especially to one’s prime rival, without sounding peculiar? So she’d walked away, made tea instead.
Tea she now wished she had not drunk as the house lurched again, wind screaming through a gap in the window frame, tiles clattering overhead as they broke away and tumbled down the roof. From the water closet, Snodgrass wept. Daniel turned a page in his book.
Alice supposed she ought to study the mission dossier. She’d already memorized its essential elements: her name was to be Alice Blakeney, also known as Atrocious Alice. Daniel was hereafter Blakeney the Bad. (The steward’s assistant had tried calling him Dreadful Dan, and Daniel had justlookedat him until the poor boy nearly dropped his clipboard.) They’d received their party invitation from Frederick Bassingthwaite’s butler, an undercover A.U.N.T. agent, on the premise of having recently returned from Amsterdam and being in need of new friends to visit, entertain, and hopefully one day assassinate. Married three years, they enjoyed such hobbies as—
Alice winced. Under no circumstances was she going to say her hobby was tilting at windmills. Once the storm had passed, she would have to discuss a more literate backstory with Daniel.
Suddenly the cottage dropped what felt like a thousand feet in one second. Snodgrass wailed. Alice clutched the edge of the sofa in a manner that was not at all due to fear—her hand simply felt most comfortable gripping the upholstery until turning (hopefully not appropriately) ghost white.
“It’s fine,” Daniel said from the wheel.
“I know, turbulence,” Alice managed to answer through clenched teeth.
“Actually, that was a pirate flying past a little too close.” He stood with the kind of casual, unhurried movement that sets off alarm bells in an observant watcher’s mind; laying his book on the chair, he set both hands to the wheel.
“Miss Dearlove,” he said lightly. “Would you be so kind as to brace for—”
Crash!
The house shook violently. Suitcases tumbled across the floor; the kettle fell. From the water closet came a splashing sound, and Snodgrass screamed.
“—impact,” Daniel concluded.
Alice clambered from the sofa, and while the house tipped from side to side like a seesaw being operated by viciously competitive toddlers, she stumbled across to the flight window. Daniel glanced at her as she lurched against the wall.
