“It doesn’t look easy to cheat,” Robin said admiringly. The maze was, indeed, dense and leafy and half as high again as either of them. Robin trailed his fingers along the outer hedge. “It looks square, from here—how far back do you think it goes? I’m going to try and walk around.”
His footsteps crunched away as Edwin cradled the same detection charm he’d used at the estate boundary, and crouched down. Given what Mrs. Sutton had said, he assumed he’d have a stronger sense of the spell the closer he was to the roots, though this kind of charm couldn’t hold a candle to a nice thorough spell notation.
Again he felt a warming tug of his hands. He hooked one portion of the string with an index finger and changed the angle, concentrating hard on the idea of visibility. His magic moved sluggishly, then more smoothly. If he knelt right down and peered underneath the lowest portion of the hedge, like someone seeking a dropped coin beneath a low sofa, he could see a faint pink pattern cobwebbing the trunk of the plant.
The gravel crunched again with footsteps and a shadow fell over Edwin’s hands. He shook the spell clear and began to straighten up.
“Honestly, all this has done is given me twenty more questions for the lady her—”
The blow came like a pendulum, sideways and fast. It knocked Edwin down when he was halfway to standing. He managed to catch himself on his hands, but struck the side of his forehead unpleasantly hard on the ground.
His head spun. His heart was thundering. His cheek was pressed into the gravel; there was dirt on his lip. He was staring at a pair of black shoes, well polished, soiled with dirt. For a long moment the surprise of the attack alone froze Edwin to the spot, lying sprawled on his stomach over his awkwardly bent arms, and then pain blossomed simultaneously in his scratched palms and the side of his head.
He heard, dimly, a shout of alarm that might have been his name. It was enough for him to force himself to move, first pushing himself to his knees and then all the way to his feet.
Edwin’s attacker was a tall man who looked to have been dipped in shadow: all black, from shoes to gloves. Above the shadow was the fog. Robin hadn’t managed to convey the sheer oddness of the fog mask, the way it made one’s eyes ache with the effort to focus on something that couldn’t be seen.
The man’s attention was no longer on Edwin. He had set one foot inside the entrance to the maze, and was now struggling to free it. One of the plants had sent out a thick thorny tendril, which was wrapped around his ankle and climbing.
“Hey there! Edwin!” came another shout from Robin. “What’s going on?”
The fog mask turned in Robin’s direction, then back to Edwin.
Edwin had no idea what to do. Hit the man? He’d never thrown a punch. Try to help the maze and hold him in place? His hands were shaking and scraped and he felt as though he’d cracked like an egg, when he hit the ground, letting all of his energy spill out.
Robin was running towards them now, closing the distance fast. The man in black made the decision for all of them. In a single violent movement he wrenched his foot free of the grasping plant, stumbled forward, and grabbed hold of Edwin’s clothes. Before Edwin could do anything more than freeze in further alarm, the man yanked Edwin sideways and hurled him through the wide entrance and into the maze itself.
Edwin stumbled, tripped, and once again sprawled on the ground. His breath coughed out of him. This was ridiculous. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen.
Robin skidded to a halt in the maze entrance, gaze swinging between Edwin himself and where Edwin’s attacker was clearly escaping the scene. Something was wrong with Edwin’s sense of scale, because the hedge seemed to be growing, the entrance shrinking. No: it was shrinking. The hedge was bulging, expanding like boiling milk into the gap.
“Follow him!” Edwin wheezed. “Don’t you want—” to find out what’s happening, to shake some information out of him—but it turned into a coughing fit, which ended unpleasantly in retching. The warding-wrongness was still grumbling away in his gut.
Then something like rough wire wrapped itself around his right wrist, and pulled.
Edwin heard himself grunt as his arm straightened at an uncomfortable angle, and he tried to tense his arm and pull back. He couldn’t gather the nerve to look at it. He kept looking at Robin instead, hoping to glare the man into sense. The rising drawbridge of the hedge’s defences was still in motion, the gap ever narrowing, but no tendrils touched Robin.
It had the inevitability of watching a tall object begin to topple. Robin hovered, a look of naked indecision and concern on his face that all at once firmed into determination.
“Don’t,” Edwin said, or tried to say. It came out as another cough.
The hedge was almost closed off now. If Edwin had two free hands, or any presence of mind, or more than a few bare fucking teaspoons’ worth of magic, he’d have thrust something, anything, through the gap. Something to throw Robin backwards for long enough to keep him where he still had a chance of being safe and useful.
But because Edwin was who he was, and because Robin Blyth was who he was, that didn’t happen.
Robin leapt forward, landing at Edwin’s side, and wrenched his arm clear of the hedge just as it writhed itself into a green wall with no gap in it at all. No way out.
Robin, breathing hard, knelt by Edwin’s side. “Are you—”
“You complete and utter idiot,” said Edwin.
Edwin looked a fright: scratched and covered in dirt, and struggling to kneel. Robin’s stomach had lurched horribly when the man in the fog mask had flung Edwin through the maze entrance. There had been something so awfully relaxed about the motion, as though he was used to moving inconvenient people, and be damned to the damage he might cause along the way.
But Edwin was alive enough to be spitting prickly insults, and to be fighting back against the equally prickly tendril of hedge that was now looped twice around his wrist. Robin grasped it a few inches from the first loop and tried to snap it, but it had the stubbornness of young things, and simply bent and wriggled. Robin would have swapped half his meagre inheritance in that moment for a good sharp penknife. He gave up on wrestling and simply used his teeth: unpleasant, but effective.
When he finally bit through the green twig, the plant punished him with a recoil that split the soft inside of his upper lip. At least the coils around Edwin’s arm were loose and dead now, easily shaken off.
Robin helped Edwin to his feet. He wasn’t expecting effusive thanks, but he’d have appreciated something more than a snappish, “You should have followed him!”
“A magician?” Robin snapped back. “What makes you think I’d have any more luck than you, against him?”
“Then you should have gone and told Mrs. Sutton. She’d have been able to get me out.”
“And I’m sure you’d have been fine in the meantime!” Robin punctuated this by swatting hard at another tendril that was making a play for Edwin’s collar. The tendril dodged with the patient, sluggish non-fear of summer midges, and crowded immediately back again.
Edwin dodged as well, a few seconds too late. He looked ashy, the bones of his face chiselled. Most of Robin’s annoyance evaporated.
“Edwin, you look ill.”
“It’s the secondary warding, I think,” said Edwin. “I felt it even at the entrance. No magicians in the maze. She did tell us.”
“You hardly threw yourself in here on purpose.”
Edwin managed to summon one of his superior-knowledge looks. “Imbuement isn’t sentience, I told you that the first—oh, blast this plant!” He stomped hurriedly on a few more tendrils, which were making a play for his ankles.