Now Edwin drank his soup without tasting it and watched Robin’s smile dimming and broadening as the ambience dictated. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly how to handle himself in company, even when the company was strange. Never mind his parents’ enemies, and never mind the Home Office—the Foreign Office should have snatched up the owner of that devastating smile and cultivated him like a hothouse plant.
For his part, Edwin was considering himself lucky to keep the food down. He always forgot, when he was in town. He always forgot how it felt to step past the Penhallick sign and have his magic shiver in confusion, and for his blood to tug at his veins. Penhallick House had been built on land handed over by the Crown a century ago to someone missing their Cornish roots, and handed over again—name and all—when it was bought by Edwin’s parents. Now it was his family’s land, young to magic, and every minute he spent here he could feel it trying to know him, trying to find power where so little power dwelled. There was an unsettling sense that the grounds themselves would rise up and buck him off like a skittish horse. It always felt identical to the message in his father’s eyes: coded on the best days, and blatant on the worst. I see what you are, and you are not enough.
“I thought it was that Gatling boy who had the liaison job,” said Walt. “Got sick of facing up to his own uselessness, did he?”
It took Edwin a moment to realise that his brother was speaking to him, and another to quell the stupid, juvenile flutter of panicked wariness. He should be past this cowardice. They were grown men. Walter Courcey was their father’s trusted lieutenant in business and a member of the Chief Minister’s advisory council; he had better things to do with his time now than think up creative new ways to torment his younger brother.
Edwin told himself this, silently and deliberately. It didn’t help. It didn’t change the fact that, dangerous curse or no, Edwin would have hesitated before coming to Penhallick at all if he’d known Walt would be here too.
“I don’t know,” Edwin said. “I haven’t seen Reggie for weeks.”
“A real blow for Sylvester Gatling, that was,” said Edwin’s father. The table fell quiet, faces turning respectfully. Clifford Courcey was not a large man, but he held himself with the aggressive self-assurance that Walt and Belinda had inherited. His unmagical business associates probably mistook it for the weight of money, but Edwin’s father had been born with the power that underlaid his poise. Earning his fortune had only gilded it.
He went on, “His only son too. Terrible thing, to see a branch of English magic dry up like that.”
“His daughters might make up for it in time,” offered Billy Byatt. “I heard the older one’s to be married.”
“No guarantee of the bloodline, all things told,” said Mr. Courcey darkly.
Heat climbed Edwin’s neck. He kept his mouth shut as a new course was laid on the table. Billy met Edwin’s eyes and quirked his lips in sympathy. Next to Edwin, he was the least powerful of the magicians in the room, and Edwin couldn’t help but read pitying fellow-feeling into the fact that Billy had always been the friendliest to him of Bel and Charlie’s set.
“Perhaps you can shed some light on the man’s whereabouts, Sir Robin,” said Walt. “Is Gatling a friend of yours? Sad to say, some people never quite get the knack of friendship, but you don’t strike me as that sort.”
His small smile invited Robin to play along with the jibe at Edwin’s expense. It was familiar enough to be exhausting. More than anything Walt liked to pause and admire the sites of his own previous victories, and by the time Walt left school he’d already torn up two of Edwin’s tentative friendships by the roots: one by simply presenting the choice of being tormented alongside Edwin or of escaping it, and the other—subtler—by poisoning them against him with half-truths. He’d left the earth salted in his wake; Edwin learned his lesson, and didn’t try to make any more connections that might prove tempting targets. It was fine. He’d always been most comfortable in his own company.
“I’m afraid not,” said Robin. Perfectly polite, but no longer warm. “I’ve never met Reggie Gatling.”
“Blyth,” said Walt, after a pause. “I don’t believe I know any Blyths. Is the magic on your mother’s side?”
“I, ah,” said Robin, and skewered Edwin with a wide-eyed and transparent request for help.
Edwin had been chewing over how much of this to tell. Belinda and Charlie’s set were heedless gossips—no worse than the average, but nothing told to them could ever be considered a secret. It would spill through their level of English magical society like tea across a page.
He’d introduced them to Robin as the new liaison and left it there, and Robin’s company manners were doing a good job of hiding his ignorance, but there was no hope that they’d get through an entire weekend without revealing its totality and depth. Not with the kind of entertainments that Belinda enjoyed.
“Robin doesn’t come from magic at all,” said Edwin. Best to have that part out quick and clean. “Someone in the Home Office assigned him to us by mistake. He’s only been unbusheled a few days.”
Cutlery paused. The quiet of the table thickened.
Walt was looking at Robin carefully. After a moment he smiled, calling up a chill of association that made Edwin want to hide his fingers in his lap. To an unbiased observer it was probably a normal smile, peacock-tinted by Walt’s guidelight, which glowed cosily in the glass jar that sat next to his water glass. Tonight the jars in front of each place setting were all from the same set, an abstract mosaic of greens and purples.
Robin’s empty jar seemed suddenly like a rather unfortunate metaphor.
“And you brought him here,” Walt said.
“As good an introduction as any, if he’s to do the job,” said Edwin. He forced himself to hold his brother’s gaze. Anything to do with the curse could wait until tomorrow, and Walt and their father planned to return to London then anyway.
“I suppose it is rather nice for you, Win, not being the one in the room with the least magic,” said Bel.
Trudie turned to Robin with the expectant air of a child whose nose was pressed between the bars of a zoo cage, hoping the elephant was going to do something diverting. “It must be absolutely fresh and strange and wild to you, then.”
“The game of Cupid was something of a surprise,” said Robin.
Both Trudie and Bel went off into gurgles of laughter.
“No wonder you dodged, you silly thing!” said Bel. “It’s a game of nerve. The imbuement on the arrows is for them to seek movement. They won’t hit you, if you freeze in time. If you flinch, you’re more likely to be scratched, and you take the punishment.”
“Like the instincts of hunting dogs,” said Robin blandly. “Just scratched?”
“Nobody’s died yet,” said Francis Miggs, and laughed as though he’d said something amusing. His elbow jogged Edwin’s as he reached for the sauceboat, and Edwin avoided his eye. Miggsy was easy to set off, once he’d had a few glasses, and his sense of humour had coarsened but not progressed in spirit since the schoolyard.
“It’s best played in couples,” said Bel.
“Quite so,” said Charlie. “Not the thing to entrust the safety of one’s wife to another chap’s spell, after all.”
“So one partner shoots, and one controls the . . .” Robin made a floating motion with his knife.
“The lady shoots,” said Charlie. “Can’t expect a female to handle a directed levitation, can you? That takes training. But some of them are a dab hand with a bow.” He beamed, wide and complacent, at Bel. She beamed back.
Robin asked a few questions about how the spell worked; Charlie demonstrated, wiping butter from his fingers before beginning the cradles. He explained what he was doing in a condescending tone, getting several of the technical details wrong. The spell worked anyway, sending Bel’s chair hovering a good three feet above the table while she clutched her wine-glass and sipped theatrically.
“Not at dinner, Charles,” said Edwin’s father, but he didn’t sound displeased.