Other people included Edwin, who made himself scarce until dinner. Through the games of pool Robin kept turning his head whenever someone entered the room, not bothering to examine the niggle of hope that was quashed when the newcomer turned out to be one of the footmen bringing more drinks. Edwin had seemed frantic when Robin was in danger, angry that it had happened, and fascinated as ever by the curse and the visions. But he’d not sought out Robin’s company. Whether he was in the library or with his mother or elsewhere, he wanted to be there on his own.
Robin took his headache to bed early. The next morning he woke shaking, with his legs gone to wax and lake water in his mouth and his arms sore from where he’d tried to defend himself against the crushing blows of the swan’s wings, and his ears full of that terrible hiss and someone shouting and laughter carrying across the water— No. It was a dream. Not even a vision: a bog-standard nightmare. Robin’s legs were tangled in the bedclothes. He was dry and breathing and alive and . . . as safe as he could be, in a house full of careless magicians, with a curse that was getting stronger and more painful.
Robin politely turned down the invitation at breakfast to join the others on a morning walk and picnic. He lingered alone, dissecting a kidney omelette with his cutlery and drinking excellent coffee, until Edwin appeared.
Edwin was wearing a waistcoat in a dull shade of grey, and did not look as though he’d slept well. Unfortunately, it suited him. Robin was already restless; now his thumbs ached to be pressed to the circles beneath Edwin’s eyes, or run across the sharp cheekbones. He wanted to catalogue the changing agricultural shades in Edwin’s hair, to see what kinds of light would bring up the colours that lay between bright wheat and murky barley.
It was incredible what difference it had made, that moment of unspoken connection over the Roman tract. It shouldn’t have. Even aside from the mysterious tangle of curse and contract that hung urgently over them, Robin was hardly going to make any kind of overture without encouragement. And Edwin was still himself: cool, prickly, resentful of Robin’s presence in his life, thin and quiet and studious and carrying around an air of being invisibly shuttered. And quite clearly more intelligent than the rest of the house’s inhabitants put together, with bony, agile fingers that Robin could close his eyes and see hooking magic out of string.
“I want this curse off,” Robin said, too distracted by trying to banish the image to manage a more normal kind of good morning. “I want you to try. Today.”
A frown. “I haven’t done enough—”
“Keep at it. I’ll help. I’ll do whatever you say. I’d rather you attempt it and fail than twiddle our thumbs another week while it gets worse and worse. I dare say if it were left up to you, you’d never feel you’ve done enough research to even give it a try.”
Edwin’s blue, bruised gaze had nothing readable in it.
Robin said, with difficulty, “I’m—afraid of the pain. Is all.”
Edwin said, “I’d like some breakfast.”
He brushed very close to Robin on his way to the sideboard, close enough for Robin to smell his hair. It took Edwin until he’d swallowed his first mouthful of bacon and another of marmalade-laden toast, washed down with tea, to say, “You’re right.”
“Hm?” Robin was onto a fourth cup of coffee and wondering, as his pulse hammered gaily away beneath the skin of his neck, if that had been a wise decision.
“Perhaps I could read every book in the library and never stumble across the exact form of runes. It’s your arm. It’s your pain. I’m willing to give it a try, this afternoon.” Edwin inspected the crust of his toast. “By which I mean, I’ll ask Charlie to do it.”
“I’d rather it was you.”
The sheer surprise in Edwin’s lifted gaze was like a needle to the heart. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said, but mildly. “You want the person in the house with the most magic to do the actual spell. I’ll put it together for him. I’ll write it down; I’ll make sure he does it exactly.”
That launched a discussion—a miniature lecture, rather, but Robin didn’t mind—about the difference between runes and cradling notation, which took them through breakfast and into the library again, where Edwin slid behind the table with a near-audible sigh of relief. Robin sat down also, pulling a book towards himself at random to show willing.
Edwin said, “I meant to ask how you are. Any damage from—what happened yesterday?”
There were bruises blossoming beneath the scrapes on Robin’s arms. His head still ached. He still felt on edge, though that might have been the coffee.
Instead of any of that he found himself saying, “I’ve not often been the butt of the joke before.”
Edwin said, with an odd lightness that didn’t sting as much as it could have, “More used to being the bully than the bullied?”
“Well, I wasn’t one to step in and stop that sort of thing, when I saw it happening at school.” Robin shrugged. “I’m not proud of it. Tried to do better, when I—when I woke up to the fact that it wasn’t really funny, I suppose.” When he began to understand that what he was seeing at home, when his parents gathered well-dressed people into sparkling rooms and made pretty speeches about charity, was the adult version of the same game, only half of which was played to the victim’s face. The other half was the whispers; the casual venom. The two-facedness. The brutal construction of one’s reputation on the shreds of those you flattered with one hand and tore down with the other.
“Dead Man’s Legs is a good spell for bullies,” Edwin said. “Walt was very fond of it for a while, if I ever looked too keen to dodge out of whatever light humiliation he’d planned for that day.”
Robin tried to find a good response to that. Edwin had spoken matter-of-factly, but his shoulders had lifted: he was offering Robin a sliver of vulnerability. And after seeing the way Edwin was treated by everyone in his family but his mother, Robin couldn’t pretend to be surprised.
“Did you and your brother overlap at school, then?”
“For two years,” said Edwin. “And no amount of scolding about using magic when away from home ever stopped Walt. Most of his crowd were magicians, too, and he was good at finding corners.”
Robin remembered how that went. Every school had those corners, conveniently out of sight, and out of hearing range of the masters’ offices.
To steer them elsewhere, Robin asked more about learning magic. A great many questions had been building up in the aftermath of his initial shocks. Edwin’s shoulders relaxed as he explained the ways in which boy magicians learned cradling and its notations.
“There’s a curriculum, of sorts. But everything past the basics depends on one’s tutors. And how ruthless one’s parents are about lessons during holidays, if they send you to a normal school as well.”
“Your mother doesn’t strike me as ruthless,” said Robin, smiling.
A shadow crossed Edwin’s face. “She’s the reason I was allowed to spend my summers under tutorship. Father didn’t consider me worth the expense. I was never going to amount to much.”
Robin glanced around them, at this edifice to knowledge. “What about university?”
“There’s no university of English magic,” said Edwin. “You can study apprentice-style from other scholars, if you wish. But I enjoyed Oxford. For its own sake. And there’s been nobody doing really original magical work in this country since the turn of the century. Nobody making advances. Nobody who could have taught me more than I found out for myself.” He stirred the pages of a book with his fingers. A bitter smile touched his mouth. “I never had enough power that I had to be taught to control it.”
Control was a word that hung on Edwin like a half-fitted suit. In some places it clung to him; in others it gaped, in a way that made Robin want to hook his fingers into the loose seams and tug. He didn’t want Edwin to stop talking.
“There must be scholars in other countries?” he ventured.
“Yes, but it’s the same as any area of study. Often there’s no common language. I’ve enough French to struggle through a few arguments with members of their Académie, but that’s all. And correspondence is slow.”