Robin jolted back to himself, half out of his chair and breathing like a man at the end of a ten-mile run. His glass of port had fallen to the ground; the rug had saved the glass, but the liquid had created a dark patch. His eyes smarted at the firelight for a few seconds before returning to normal.
He fumbled his cuff link off and his shirt to his elbow. The tattoo was unchanged. He’d half expected it to be moving, or changing colours. He didn’t know anything about any of this.
Edwin Courcey.
Robin shook his head as though he could rid it of the things he’d seen, not to mention the tendril of unexpected arousal that had curled itself around that delirious vision of Courcey: that canvas of sweat and abandon and bare collarbones. Robin rescued his port glass and stumbled over to the decanter to pour himself another. Until the triple-punch of today, he’d managed to get through twenty-five years of life without magic revealing itself to him. Anyone from that world was obviously expert at hiding their real selves when they wanted to, and the real Courcey had made it very clear that he saw Robin as an outsider and an inconvenience; possibly even a danger. Robin didn’t know him at all. He was Robin’s best hope of answers, but he couldn’t be trusted.
Robin drained the glass, hoping it would soothe the kicked-hard feeling of his brain. He would worry about that when he planned to worry about everything else. Tomorrow.
Edwin arrived at the liaison office the next morning and had to blink several times before he accepted that the scene in front of him was truly happening. The hem of Miss Morrissey’s skirt disappeared in a snowbank of paper strewn over the office floor. She was sitting on a wooden box; after a moment Edwin recognised it as one of the three sturdy drawers that had made up the filing cabinet, which was now a hollow frame. Here and there amongst the chaos of paper lay the late contents of the bookshelf. Edwin’s stomach squeezed at the sight of splayed pages and bent-back spines.
Sir Robert Blyth sat cross-legged on the desk. Around him was a battlefield of detritus that was probably the contents of the desk’s drawers, and yet more paper. He had a pile of envelopes in his lap and was reading something.
“What have you done?” Edwin demanded.
Blyth looked up. “Come in, close the door,” he said cheerfully. “Oh, wait, no—it doesn’t do that anymore.”
“What?”
“Close.”
Edwin’s fingers dipped through empty space. There was a scorched, splintered gap in the door where the knob had once been.
“Someone was in a temper,” said Miss Morrissey. “There’s no particular imbuement on the locks. A robust opening-spell would do it.”
Edwin hung his hat and coat on the stand in the outer office and waded into the battlefield. “My apologies,” he said stiffly. “I assumed . . .”
“That I tossed my own office?” said Blyth.
“It was like this when I let myself in, at eight o’clock,” said Miss Morrissey.
Edwin looked around again. Viewed with that eye, it was obvious. “Someone was looking for something.”
“Yes. Your friend Gatling has gotten himself muddled up in some sort of serious trouble,” said Blyth. Belatedly, Edwin realised that the cheer in Blyth’s voice was too high-pitched.
“What do you mean?” Edwin asked sharply. “What do you know about it?”
Blyth waited as Edwin picked his way into a patch of bare rug. Up close, Blyth didn’t look like a man who had slept well. Those mild hazel eyes had pinches of tension at their corners. There was a stubbornness to his mouth.
“I mean,” Blyth said, “that I was attacked last night by—magicians—who seemed to think that because I’d stepped into Gatling’s position that very morning, I’d have known to search his office for secret documents and would be happy to hand them over.”
“Documents?” Edwin found his hand drifting towards the pocket holding the small vial of lethe-mint he’d prepared that morning, and forced it back down by his side before the movement could become obvious.
Blyth unbuttoned one of his cuffs and pushed it up his arm. He proceeded to tell them a story that Edwin had to interrupt several times, including a forced pause where he scrambled for a piece of blank paper and set his pen to taking notes. Fog masks: that would be a simple illusion spell. Something that Reggie had hidden. And glowing shapes that became a tattoo. Blyth’s voice halted when he talked about that.
Edwin frowned and made Blyth repeat the words that had been exchanged between himself and his attackers. “Are you sure that they didn’t say anything else about where Reggie might be now?”
“No, I’m not sure,” said Blyth, looking at Edwin with dislike.
“Well, then—”
“I was distracted, due to being knocked out and tortured and tugged around on a piece of string.”
A small index card flicked out of the stacks of Edwin’s mind. There was a spell by the unfortunately fanciful name of the Goblin’s Bridle, which could be used to calm frightened horses and make them biddable. The idea of it being used on a person made him feel ill.
“It hurt. And then when you looked, later, it was on your arm? Anything else you can remember? How the cradling—oh, this is useless, as if you could tell.”
Another held gaze from Blyth, longer this time. That stubbornness had redoubled. “No. Nothing else.”
“I’m so sorry, Sir Robert,” said Miss Morrissey. “It does sound like you had an awful night.”
“Thank you.” The dislike melted away and Blyth smiled at her. “Didn’t you say something about Gatling behaving oddly, before he vanished?”
“Yes. Ever since he got back from that trip to the North York Moors.” She frowned. “It was some tiny mining town where the inhabitants were reporting ghosts walking through the streets.”
“Ghosts?” Blyth’s eyebrows shot up.
“He did say it’d all been a misunderstanding when he got back,” said Miss Morrissey. “Nothing magical involved. But he was vague about it. That was when he started acting all mysterious.”
“It was a fool’s errand in the first place,” snapped Edwin. “Visible ghosts? Nonsense. There’s no such thing.” But half of his annoyance was with himself. Nonsense or not, if he’d accepted the invitation to go along—if he’d even acted interested instead of telling Reggie not to waste his time—would Reggie have liked him more, trusted him more? Enough to confide in Edwin about this dangerous mess he’d become mixed up in?
“Well,” said Blyth firmly. “I’m as keen as anyone to find Gatling, because I’d like to shake five kinds of hell out of him. He told them this thing was in the office. He’s the one who sent them here. This is his fault.” An irritated wave of his arm.
Edwin reached for Blyth’s wrist, meaning to get a closer look; Blyth jerked it away, then firmed his lips, as if angry with himself for what had clearly been an instinctive reaction. He untucked his legs from their crossed position on the desk, letting them dangle like a barrier between the two of them, and shoved his arm defiantly forward. Blyth’s forearm was corded with muscle and dotted with freckles and moles. His skin was warm.
Edwin looked over the symbols of what Blyth had called the tattoo, and which began at the wrist and stopped an inch from the crook of Blyth’s elbow. They weren’t any alphabet that Edwin was familiar with, but the arrangement of them—each symbol linked to the next by a dark tendril, creating a sort of cyclical sentence—made his stomach sink. He only realised when Blyth’s fingers curled like dry leaves in a fire that he was tracing the symbols with his fingertip.
“It’s a rune-curse of some kind,” he said, releasing Blyth. “That’s all I can tell without further research.”
“A curse.” Blyth took a deep breath. “The bounder did say he was giving me something to mull over. Seemed to think it’d make me more pliable.” Fear flickered in his face. “Could it? Do that to me? Like—laudanum dropped into my drink?”
“Miss Morrissey?” inquired Edwin. “Can you make anything of it?”