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“And?”

“And, well, wet sheets are awfully heavy, and you’ve said I’m not to use magic where anyone might see . . .”

A truly astonishing idea occurred to Kit.

“The garden, I take it?” he asked, dodging past her.

“Oh, don’t! I promised I wouldn’t let anyone back there.”

“You’re not letting me,” he said, striding toward the so-called garden, which was more of an outdoor workroom surrounded by a wall for privacy than anything green.

Two master level vampires were standing on the bare dirt, one with an apron tied high around his waist in a vain attempt to keep the water off his fine woolen breeches. The other had given up and was leaning against the courtyard wall, soaking wet. Both were attempting to pretend that the sheets spilling out of a large washtub and draped over a wooden frame had nothing to do with them.

Kit stopped and surveyed them without favor. “It’s good to know that, when she dies, she’ll go with fresh linen.”

“We knew it was you,” the soaked vamp said defensively.

“If it had been anyone else,” his companion began.

“A mage can curse her from across the street!” Kit snapped. “From down the street! All he needs is line of sight. And tell me, what are you fine gentlemen going to do then?”

“The Circle wouldn’t allow their men to run wild,” the wetter vamp said, although he had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

“The Circle hates the fact that the queen has a new advisor, one threatening to eclipse Master Dee!”

That old bastard of a wizard had been whispering in Her Majesty’s ear for half a century, casting her horoscopes and trying to influence her. And probably succeeding, at least in part, because he did have an oily charm. And because she viewed magic workers as not only helpful but essential and rarely made a move without being sure that it was astrologically auspicious.

This had been demonstrated when, in 1578, she fell ill while on a progress and the first person she called for was Dee. Three wax images of the queen and her closest advisors had been discovered in a dung heap in a Lincoln’s Inn Fields near London at about the same time that she took ill, and sympathetic magic was suspected. It was thought that the poppets had been left there to slowly melt in the heat of the dunghill, which would cause the queen to also deteriorate and, eventually, to die.

It was later determined that the source of the queen’s health was dental, a constant issue considering her abiding love of sweets. But at the mere implication that magic might be involved, Dee had been dispatched to perform a counter curse. The only time he had not been at her side was the period when he had journeyed abroad to persuade the Silver Circle to move their headquarters to England.

That had gotten them out of the persecution that magic workers were facing on the continent, which had been bolstered by their enemies in the dark. But it had brought them into conflict with the local covens. And while they had prevailed in the subsequent war, there were plenty of hostile combatants remaining.

As a result, the Circle did not trust coven witches, and that went double for Dee’s younger, prettier and far more honest replacement. There had been two unfortunate “accidents” recently, involving a spooked shire horse that had almost run Gillian down on her way to market, and an arrow that had struck a wall not an inch from her head. There may have been a third, when she became ill after eating, although that could be explained away as bad luck.

And, for that matter, so could the first two. Horses spooked easily and almost everyone was required by law to keep bows and arrows in their homes and to know how to use them. It wouldn’t be the first time that some idiot child had almost killed someone, by practicing in the wrong place.

But Kit didn’t like coincidences, and all of that had happened in the last month. The frequency of Gillian’s trysts with eternity were starting to make him itch. Hence the hapless brothers, who were supposed to be the best, yet had been turned into housemaids in less than a week!

Kit was about to give them the tongue lashing they deserved when he felt a tug on his breeches. He looked down to find a bonny lass with her mother’s bright red hair peering up at him from barely above knee height. Kit was not a giant of a man; the girl was simply small for her age. And had a poor view of the proceedings until he swept her into his arms.

“There, sweetling, you see them?” he asked, pointing out their sorry, sodden selves. “Would you be frightened by ones such as they?”

She laughed and hid her face in his neck.

“If you can’t even manage to intimidate a young child, how are you going to scare a party of war mages?” he asked them.

“Won’t be a party. Too obvious,” the apron wearing idiot said. “They’ll send an assassin, when they get tired of making it look like an accident—”

“If it isn’t an accident,” the other said, and then spoke no more when he saw Kit’s expression.

“I am grateful for your wisdom,” Kit remarked scathingly. “Except for the fact that you just let your charge answer the door!”

“We’ll go out front,” the soggy vamp said, and started that way.

“No, you’ll stay here and finish the damned linen! At least you can be good for something.”

“But you wanted—”