“And I’ve only a few drops,” said Edwin. “Perhaps a teaspoon.” It didn’t hurt as much as he expected. He wondered what would have happened if he had as much magic as he’d always wanted. For all he knew he might have grabbed the wheel from Robin and crashed them into a ditch.
Mrs. Sutton summoned a second pair of spectacles from a table across the room. The magic was fast and neat and casual; moreover, she did it with one hand, and with a gesture that Edwin had never seen in his life. He burned to ask her to repeat it, but she was already donning the glasses, which somehow had the effect of doubling her gaze’s intensity.
She reached out an imperious hand. Edwin thought stupidly about calling cards. Then he shifted closer and laid his hand in hers. His arm thrummed with tension, ready to draw back.
“Oh,” she said, after what seemed like an age. A small smile broke her face for the first time. “You’ve an affinity like mine, Mr. Courcey. I expect you’ve a thumb green enough to raise oaks.”
“I—wouldn’t say that, no,” said Edwin.
Now her hands, paper-dry and cool, landed on Edwin’s cheeks. He forced himself to sit still. Up close, he could see the cloudiness of her eyes in detail, the yellow tinge of the whites.
“There are more kinds of power than the men of this country have bothered to know,” she said kindly. Her hands dropped. Edwin’s breath gusted out. “You asked about the warding around the estate? I grew it with the trees themselves. I had to help their growth along as a secondary factor, of course, but I made the contract with the first seedlings and it held when I took cuttings. In combination with this being Sutton land, it was enough.”
Half of that made no sense at all, drawing on impossible and irrational assumptions, but the other half was pinging off bits and pieces from Edwin’s own reading, including Kinoshita.
“Wait, wait,” he said, fumbling after the mental shape of it. “You imbued the living plants? And you’ve never had to re-do it? How is that possible?”
“I believe I just told you,” she said, schoolmarmish. “Start when life starts. Beginnings and endings are powerful. Liminal states. You can create profound change if you slip in through the gaps.”
“Spin it from twigs,” Robin said, suddenly. “Like the saying? Like an orchard?”
It shocked a laugh from Mrs. Sutton, just as sudden. “I suppose I did. And the maze as well, and there’s far more than warding in that. I wouldn’t want to be the magician who set foot in there. The visitors love it, of course. Someone wrote a lovely article about my gardens for Country Life magazine last year.”
“All that to keep magic-users off your estate,” said Edwin. He thought about the kinds of people who tucked themselves away from other magicians. He knew why Hawthorn did it—or, at least, he knew as much as anyone, and more than most. You did it because magic had hurt you, or someone of yours, beyond the bounds of what you could bear to be reminded of.
Or because you were keeping a danger at bay.
“All that to keep my part of the contract away from dangerous hands,” said Mrs. Sutton. “The maze is where I kept it.”
“How mythological of you,” said Robin. “Building a labyrinth to keep something enclosed.”
A tissue-crumple of dimples. “I rather thought so.”
Robin gave Edwin a look that might have been a question. Edwin had no answers for him, but a moment later he rather wished he’d said something anyway.
“I’m having visions,” Robin told Mrs. Sutton. “I think I might have had one of your maze.”
“Visions? Come here, boy. What manner of visions?”
“Foresight,” said Edwin. “Or at least it would seem so.” He didn’t trust this woman, but it was Robin’s curse, Robin’s business, and Edwin could hardly blame him for grabbing at the slimmest chance of help now that Edwin had failed to provide any. So Edwin explained that part of the story, including what Hawthorn had said and what little he’d managed to work out from his own research. He let Robin describe the visions—and the pain, which made Mrs. Sutton wince. Good, Edwin thought, fierce.
Robin weathered the direct stare through the second pair of glasses, first at his face and then at the bared curse.
“Hmm,” was Mrs. Sutton’s verdict, a full minute later. “You boys will take tea with me in an hour. Go for a walk—go and see the grounds, while you’re here. I will need to read a few things.”
Edwin cast a longing glance at the bookshelves and nearly asked to stay in the room and help. But he did want to inspect the maze, to see if he could glean anything more about this idea of twinning spells to plants as they grew.
“Mr. Courcey,” said Mrs. Sutton when they were almost out of the room. Edwin turned. She was sitting very straight, very proud. For an agonising moment she reminded Edwin of his own mother. “I’ll be interested to hear what you think of my plants. And don’t go into the maze, for heaven’s sake. I won’t have anyone else’s death on my conscience today.”
Edwin wondered if this was a joke. It didn’t appear so.
The grounds were even more obnoxiously lovely than they’d seemed from the car. Robin and Edwin didn’t encounter anyone else as they made their way towards the hedge maze in what must have looked like a comfortable, leisurely stroll. It didn’t feel comfortable. There was too much that could have been said; Edwin had no idea where to begin, and when he didn’t know what to say, he said nothing. Cowardly, he was hoping that Robin would take the plunge.
Robin had slung his linen jacket over one shoulder. He seemed very interested in the rose garden and the pretty wilderness that followed it, dotted with autumn colour and early berries and even some flower beds in bloom.
“What do you think?” Robin said eventually, nodding around them.
Edwin’s voice came out thistle-spiked. “I think if my name were Flora, I’d have avoided anything this obvious.”
Robin stopped. He was a few steps ahead, beneath a trellis archway of greenery. “This has rather shaken you up, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, don’t,” snapped Edwin, throat scratched with guilt. “Don’t go being nice, how can you constantly be like this, when it’s your arm and your visions and someone else’s bloody mess—and I made it worse—and Reggie might be dead, and here we are dancing like sodding debutantes around the fact that you might be next, and who knows what—”
“Edwin. Shut up,” Robin suggested.
Edwin did, gratefully. He snagged two fingers through a gap in the trellis, sagging the weight of his arm there, trying to formulate an apology. Robin put his hand between Edwin’s shoulder blades, patted twice, then let it stay.
“I hope that wasn’t you trying to be comforting,” Robin said after a moment. “Because you’re dashed miserable at it, if so.”
Edwin made a small, pained noise that was trying to be a laugh, and let himself lean back into Robin’s palm. As a rule, he did not enjoy physical contact. It usually seemed an intrusion, or mistimed, or compounding whatever distress or insult or small condescension the touch had been meant to mitigate. He was still full of an off-balance ambivalence, a tingling awareness of Flora Sutton’s fingers on his cheeks.
It seemed completely bizarre that Robin could reach out and touch Edwin like this, a casual hand on his back, and it could be perfect. Just as the touch on his arm last night, over tea, had also been perfect. Exactly what he needed in that moment and had been unaware of needing.
Edwin pressed his lips together and made a memory of it: a small thing to store and bring out later, when Robin was safely back out of his life. Then he moved away.
“Come on,” he said. “I do want to look at this maze.”
Not that he could make more than a stab at knowing anything about the plants themselves—yew? was that what one made mazes from?—but he halted near the maze entrance and didn’t mind the immediate wrench of wrongness in his stomach. It was something to be studied, and that meant he could endure it.