Edwin dropped his hands. His next inhalation was like the breath taken to save oneself from drowning.
Robin flicked at his lighter the four times it took to produce a flame. He held it up in mute invitation. Edwin dragged the flame in front of him by grabbing at Robin’s wrist. The holly shivered and growled around them. Just as slowly, though much less hesitantly, Edwin cradled a second spell.
“Magnification,” Edwin murmured. “Like the snowflake.”
“Very good, don’t care,” said Robin. Edwin could explain the damn spell clause by clause later, when they were out.
“Hold it steady,” said Edwin. “This might hurt a bit—sorry.”
It did hurt. A bit. Robin’s standards for pain had changed somewhat over the past few days. The flame balanced on the lighter grew and grew, and Robin’s forehead broke out into first sweat and then the unpleasant sear of standing too close to naked fire.
Robin held on until Edwin gasped, “Throw it.”
The dry yard of hedge went up with a sound like sucking air and breaking rocks.
Robin jammed his handkerchief over his nose and mouth and tried to peer through the shimmer and smoke. On either side of the dried patch the still-green holly had drawn back, as though from someone coughing on the Underground, and there were two thin gaps.
“There!” He was prepared to do more grabbing and pulling, but Edwin didn’t hesitate. One after another they leapt and scrambled around the side of the burning holly. The heat of the flames was uncomfortable, the smoke a dirty sting in Robin’s eyes, but he moved fast and was through, stumbling into an open space, before he knew whether he’d been burned.
They were in a wide square of gravel, surrounded by hedge on every side. Dead centre stood a marble statue of a woman: neoclassical, taller than life, the falls of stone fabric looking almost soft, her hands held close to her body and cupped together. Between those hands was a dark hole, as though one could reach into her body. A space for secrets kept safe.
Edwin was coughing. Now, with effortful breaths, he managed to stop.
“Out of the frying pan . . .” He gestured.
Robin’s objection that they had, if anything, gotten out of the fire, died on his tongue. The square of gravel was shrinking. The dry holly was already burning itself into glowing twigs and embers, but it was still too high and dense to shove through. And the gaps were gone. All of the non-charred holly was squeezing in: warily, gradually, as if they’d put it on its guard.
They’d reached the centre and now there was nowhere to go.
“I’ll try a ward.” Edwin screwed his eyes shut and worked painstakingly through the spell. He winced and started over twice, and held the final position for a long, long few seconds, during which Robin tried to convince himself that he could see coloured light, or anything at all, sparking into being in the cradle. But he couldn’t.
Edwin’s exhalation was one of defeat. “No, that’s it. The drying spell took most of my magic. Anything large enough to be useful now is going to take more than I have left.” He shook his hands out as though loosening the string that wasn’t there. “Any other bright ideas, Sir Robin?”
Perhaps he was going for sarcasm. It sounded like a plea.
“Get behind me” was the sum total of the ideas Robin had left. “It’s after you, not me.”
“It’s going to go through you,” said Edwin. “And—it doesn’t have to. You could simply get out of its way.”
Robin glared his utter contempt for this idea. “I thought you said it wouldn’t want to put a guest in serious danger? How about you tell it not to hurt me, and then get behind me.”
Edwin’s voice was nearly shrill. “This isn’t my land!”
“We don’t need all of it to be yours!” said Robin, teetering on the edge of hysteria. “These few square yards would do nicely!”
Edwin opened his mouth, no doubt to spill out a lecture as to why Robin was making an ignorant suggestion that was in no way going to save them from imminent, creeping horror. Instead he made a short, breathless, seasick sound.
“Oh, and why not,” he said.
With his dirtied clothes torn and hair swept everywhere, Edwin looked positively wild. He kicked at the gravel until he hit finer dirt and then knelt down to touch the bared patch.
Robin realised that he was pressing himself back against the statue. The air above the scorched holly had begun to look thick, somehow, and the air around them was very cold, as though something made of ice was breathing damply. Robin’s skin crawled and his neck muscles locked up with a dreadful, instinctive refusal to turn his head to either side, for fear of what he might see.
“Not to rush you . . .”
“Blood, need blood,” muttered Edwin, a man actively bleeding in at least three separate places.
“Try your right cheek—yes, there.”
Edwin swiped at his cheek and shoved his hand down into the dirt, braced on hands and knees. “The words,” he said blankly.
“Edwin.”
“I’ve never done this before!” Edwin snarled.
“You’ve read it.” Robin tried to shove his surety out through his voice. “You’ve read everything. You know this.”
“I—yes. Yes.” A breath, a pause, almost impossibly long, scraping like a bow against Robin’s screaming nerves. Then Edwin spoke in a tumbling rush. “I, Edwin John Courcey, claim the witnessed inheritance of the magicians of Britain, and I make blood-pledge for myself and my heirs with”—another incredulous, bitten-back sound—“as much of this land as will have me, even if it’s only these few fucking square yards. Mine to tend and mine to mend, and mine the—the pull and the natural right.” He turned his head to look at Robin. He looked ghostly, ghastly. “This man is a guest. He has no magic. He means you no harm.”
Everything was getting darker, as though storm clouds were mustering. There was a yawning chill like the drawing-back of waves preparing to crash against rocks. The only sound was the crack-click rustle of the holly, shoving past the charred corpse of its brethren, crowding them in.
Fighting the drag of his terror, Robin shoved off the statue and grimly prepared to put himself between Edwin and the worst of it.
Edwin bowed his head over his hand. He said, in a voice that had nothing left in it but desperation, “Please.”
The world shook like a tapped glass of water, and then— Went still.
Robin had squeezed his eyes shut, braced. He cracked them open. The grey, bright daylight was back. The holly hedge had retreated on all sides by a few feet. A snatch of birdsong in the middle distance came like a shock, obscenely normal.
Edwin stood. He looked like a wrung rag, and swayed on his feet. Something was strange about his eyes, about the colour of his face, but Robin couldn’t have said what. He reached out one hand, absent, as though to keep his balance.
The hedge curled gently away from Edwin’s fingers. Robin’s skin shivered with an indefinable change in the pressure of the air. The sense of something impossibly large, inhaling. Robin didn’t want to run from it, this time. He didn’t know what he wanted.
“Let’s get out,” Edwin rasped. “Please.”
Robin didn’t know if Edwin was talking to him or to the maze, but he stepped in and let Edwin grab at his arm for support. Edwin’s hand was a filthy mix of dust and blood.
Just as the maze had been guiding them to the centre, now it seemed equally willing to aid their exit. The plants leaned away rather than leaning in, benignly opening up the path. The terror had washed out like the tide. Robin kept both of them moving until they were stepping back out into the open garden, the gravel louder under their feet, the sudden expanse of middle horizon a palpable relief.
Edwin disentangled himself and walked stiffly to the nearest patch of lawn, which was dotted with oak trees. Robin followed and chose one to lean against. He hurt in too many places to count.