Edwin panted with the effort of staying afloat. He felt like he had grown extra limbs solely so that they could ache. His trousers were fighting him. Robin was spitting out water.
It took Charlie and Billy together to haul Robin into Billy’s boat, and Edwin swam after them towards the lake’s edge, abandoning his own; someone could charm it in later. Robin managed to step ashore on his own legs, but they wobbled and sat him down hard on the sand. Edwin, trailing filthy weeds, went and sat next to him while Charlie helped Bel and Trudie pull up their boats. Edwin’s neck throbbed nastily where the swan had kicked it. Robin’s bared forearms sported more than a few red grazes.
“Got another of those drying thingums up your sleeve?” said Robin hopefully.
“No,” said Edwin, low and short with frustration. “What the devil happened? Why didn’t you swim clear?” A thought hit him. “It was the curse. Or a vision.”
“Neither, this time,” said Robin. “I couldn’t move my legs. They felt like they’d been turned to lumps of lead.”
The spell casually dubbed Dead Man’s Legs was a favourite of most boys when they learned it. The idea of it being used on someone trying to stay afloat in water was horrifying.
The others were all on the sand now, murmuring concern. For the most part.
“Well, Sir Robin can’t say we’re not providing adequate amusements,” said Miggsy.
“Amusements,” Edwin started, hearing it come out halfway to swan-hiss, and then Robin grunted and ducked his head and Billy said, sharp, “What’s the matter? Did one of those beastly birds get a good bite in?”
Even by the time the words had left Billy’s mouth, nobody could have mistaken Robin’s pain for anything but a bone-shaking agony. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes were screwed shut as he clutched his arm close to his body. Edwin put his hand on Robin’s sodden, shivering shoulder, and forced it to stay there. He felt flayed by his own helplessness.
It took many endless heartbeats before Robin’s eyes opened and the white claw of his hand uncurled. Edwin lifted his own hand free.
“I thought I was getting used to it,” Robin gasped. “It appears—the opposite, in fact.”
“What on Earth, Bel?” said Trudie. She’d taken a few steps back, as though Robin’s suffering might be catching.
“Don’t look at me,” said Bel. Her pale blue eyes were momentarily as cold as their colour, fear and anger lifting the veil of vivacity. “It’s a game. We’d never put something truly painful on the map.”
“No, just something thoughtless and dangerous,” snapped Edwin, climbing to his feet. “Attracting swans, Bel, really? And Dead Man’s Legs on top of it?”
Bel glared. “What do you mean, on top?”
“Don’t speak to your sister like that, Edwin,” said Charlie.
“Sir Robin,” said Billy. “What is the matter?”
Robin’s eyes, lucid and bright with something that was close to trust, turned to Edwin. Edwin knew how to lie, but he was no good at doing it on short notice.
“Robin’s been cursed,” he said. “Show them. We might as well see if anyone’s got any bright ideas.”
There was a murmuring somewhere between scandalised and concerned as Robin extended his arm, baring the rune-curse to the sky. Edwin summoned his wits and gave a deeply edited version of how it had been laid in the first place, eliding most of the details, suggesting it was a case of mistaken identity—and watched, too tired and cold to dredge up much in the way of hope, as the men frowned down at the runes and took it in turn to shrug their ignorance.
“In any case,” Robin said, “Edwin’s going to find a way to get it off, soon.”
A pathetic trickle of pleasure found its way into Edwin’s chest at that blithe vote of confidence.
“I did wonder why you’d shut yourselves up in that stuffy library,” said Trudie.
“Yes,” said Charlie. He set a hand under Robin’s arm and helped him up. “Let’s get you dried off, old man, and we’ll find something to do that doesn’t involve swans or books.”
Edwin waited until everyone began to move back in the direction of the house, then went and stopped his sister, keeping her in place until the others were out of earshot.
“Bel,” he said. “You felt it, didn’t you, when Robin went under?”
“Felt what?”
Sandpaper, Edwin wanted to scream. How aren’t you pulped by it, why aren’t you shaking, your magic is five times mine and you felt nothing?
“A guest of ours almost died on our territory,” he said, terse. “You’re a Courcey, Bel. Our parents pledged blood to this land. It was telling us, so we could prevent it.”
Bel’s hair was still a half-tangled mess, and her frightened irritation was already sinking beneath the surface of her usual unconcern. A memory stirred in Edwin of a much smaller Belinda, glancing with this exact look between Edwin and Walt, and making the decision to retreat. To ignore. To sing more loudly to herself, when Walt laughed and Edwin cried; to leave her younger brother as the sacrificial barrier between herself and the source of her fear. She sought protection. It was who she was.
“It was barely a sting,” she said now. “Nothing to make a fuss over. You know I’d never mean a guest harm, Win.”
Do I? Edwin bit back. I don’t know that at all.
Bel headed for the house and Edwin watched her go. He didn’t want to believe her capable of it. So: suppose she and Charlie hadn’t decided to cast two dangerous spells on one square of the lake, where any one of the players could have been the first to trigger them. Perhaps one of the others had taken the opportunity to scare the non-magician; Edwin wouldn’t put it past any of them, as a prank. But Robin had been targeted already, in the city, by someone wanting to scare him into cooperation. How many frights made a pattern? How many coincidences made a plot?
Edwin rubbed his aching neck, then knelt and tangled his fingers through a tuft of grass. He closed his eyes and concentrated, straining, trying for the first time in his life to call out to his mother’s blood, his father’s blood, spilled in this dirt before Edwin was alive. With the abrasive surge of guest-in-danger gone, all he could feel was the same old itch of disappointment. Not Courcey enough. Not anything enough.
He looked down. The edge of a grass blade had sliced the pad of his forefinger open, forming a red line thin as thread.
“All right,” Edwin said, soft. “All right. I’m keeping him safe. I’m trying.”
Robin dreamed of the swans.
He spent the afternoon after the boating game playing pool and talking sports with Belinda and Charlie and their friends. He drank a few more gin cocktails than was his custom. He almost managed to pretend that he was in his club, or at a party with his own friends, except for the occasional jolt when someone used magic. Even Belinda and Trudie could light a cigarette from their fingers, though their cradles were looser and less complex than any of the men’s.
Belinda’s set of magicians had the uninhibited manners of the freshly moneyed, and treated Robin’s title as though it were an amusing hat he’d donned for the occasion. Robin might have found them refreshing if he wasn’t fighting a headache and a tendency for his swan-pummelled ribs to catch at his lungs halfway through a breath. And if it wasn’t for the undercurrent of casual, unthinking malice to the conversation whenever it turned to other people: gossip with a sort of aniseed edge to it.