Edwin collapsed and buried his head in the pillow. “I’m sorry.”
A hand ruffled his hair, and he nearly swatted Robin for the sheer indignity of it, but he owed Robin whatever Robin thought was fair, for—for biting him. Dear God.
“You can tell me if this is against some kind of magician etiquette,” said Robin, “but what happened with the light?”
Edwin turned his head. “The light?”
“When you, er.” Robin made an unfortunate gesture. “The guidelight went very bright, and then went out like a candle. And then recovered itself. Does that happen every time?”
Edwin bit his tongue against admitting that he hadn’t noticed, or rather, that he’d thought he’d imagined it. That it was some new effect on his nerves of having been brought to a more satisfying and overwhelming completion than he’d experienced in years. He had enough energy to glare at the guidelight, but not nearly enough to launch into an explanation of his vast and ludicrous ignorance on the usual sequelae when one was having fantastic sex in a magical estate that one was wearing like an ill-fitting new suit. One thread of his mind managed to wonder if Sutton Cottage had ever done that for Flora and Gerald Sutton, before abandoning that line of thought in a recoil of horror.
“Not in my experience.”
“Ah,” said Robin. His cheerfulness had taken on a smug edge. Edwin’s first and uncharitable instinct was to shove back against it, to deflate it, somehow.
He rolled onto his back, the air of the room abruptly cool on the damp patches of his inner thighs. The glow of desire was ebbing and on its shoreline he felt uncertain, anxious; he’d forgotten what you did, in the aftermath, with someone that you liked. And who seemed, strange as the concept was, to like you in return.
Robin was grinning. Edwin tried to meet it with a smile of his own, and didn’t manage to look away from Robin’s mouth, and the thought struck him like the fall of an icicle into a snowbank: Lethe-mint. You’re helping him get free of the magical world, and then you’re going to help him forget it. Don’t get entangled. Pull the threads clear.
A louder and more selfish thought clamoured: If he’s going to forget anyway, that makes it even safer, doesn’t it?
It only occurred to Robin to think about his vision after the fact. At no point in the proceedings had he gathered enough concentration to plan more than the next glorious moment, let alone to try and match what they were doing to the vision of Edwin he’d had on that very first night, in his sitting room in London.
At the time he’d thought it ludicrous. Unthinkable, that the prickly porcelain figure of Edwin could be unwrapped and enticed into this kind of exchange. Even that very morning, if pressed, Robin might have said Edwin was likely to be cool in bed: welcoming enough, but passive, with his responses kept tightly under a lid. Robin had had partners like that before. The men who were struggling with themselves about their preferences, or even those who seemed to think it would be somehow uncouth, not the done thing, to show simple pleasure.
Cool fish that he was, Edwin had run scorching hot, and Robin was going to be bringing himself off for weeks at the memory of Edwin’s fierce concentration, his hand firm on Robin’s cock. The sound Edwin had made into Robin’s shoulder at the moment of climax, like his soul was being ripped from him.
The heat of his abandon was cooling now. Edwin rolled off his side of the bed and walked to the washstand in the corner. He kept his back to Robin, and something about the hunch of his shoulders hinted at embarrassment. Perhaps even regret.
“Edwin?”
“What?” Edwin asked, a little stiff. At least he turned.
“I’m wondering what sort of blind idiot I was, not to find you attractive when we first met,” said Robin.
Colour touched Edwin’s cheeks. The smile that tugged at his mouth was the same one he’d worn when Robin had admitted to being fascinated with his hands: faintly incredulous, but mostly pleased. It wasn’t an expression of regret. It did make Robin want to drag him back to the bed, pin him down, and murmur praise into his skin until it inked itself there like the opposite of a curse.
“Ah,” said Edwin. “Whereas I am neither blind nor an idiot.”
It took Robin a second to recognise how neatly Edwin had bounced the compliment back at him. He grinned, shoulders relaxing as the tension between them mellowed.
Robin took his own turn at the basin, shivering as the water slid over his skin. Edwin found a pile of blankets in the large chest at the foot of the bed, then crouched by the fire. His hands looked hesitant, forming the cradles without string, but it seemed he’d barely begun the spell when the fire gave a small leap in the grate and began to burn more fiercely. He added a couple of logs and brushed his hands off as he stood.
“I’ve been thinking,” Edwin said.
“How very out of character.”
Another tugging smile. “Someone knew we were here. They knew how to find us; or you, rather. I’m not under any illusions that I was meant to escape that maze intact, and they may not have been counting on your attempt at heroics. They wanted you alone.”
Both of them slid under the blankets, sitting up, the spare ones wrapped around their shoulders. This was Edwin’s room, but he didn’t suggest by so much as a sidelong glance that Robin should leave. Robin hadn’t shared covers since boyhood, excluding a few nights when Maud had been particularly in need of whispered nonsense to distract her from where she was chafing against their parents’ plans for her future.
Robin had known Edwin a week, even if it felt longer. It was an odd, off-balance kind of domesticity to be discussing the events of the day in bed.
The events of the day, which had involved death and neardeath. Nothing about this wasn’t odd.
“Or they wanted us distracted, so they could go and demand information about the contract from Mrs. Sutton, now we’d led them to her,” Robin said. “In which case they succeeded.”
“Either way, they found us. You.”
Edwin’s raised eyebrows finally dragged Robin to the logical conclusion. “Everyone at dinner last night heard us plan to come here.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make sense. If one of Belinda’s guests wanted to get me alone, they’ve had ample opportunity.”
“And if they wanted to hurt you,” said Edwin bleakly, “they could have cast the Pied Piper and Dead Man’s Legs on the same square of the lake.”
Robin blanched at the coolness with which Edwin seemed to accept that his sister and brother-in-law might be involved in this malicious plot. And yet—Charlie tried to remove the curse, Robin’s brain whispered, with equal coolness. And what happened then?
“The problem is,” Edwin went on, “the man who attacked us today managed to get past the estate warding.”
Robin felt stupid. It had been a long day, and he was sore. But Edwin’s had been just as long and he was much less physically fit; he’d sustained the same amount of damage, and here he was with his brain racing capably around like a cat after mice.
“I—didn’t think of that,” Robin said. “You think he wasn’t a magician?”
“It’s possible to cast an illusion mask on someone else, I suppose. I didn’t think of that. I assumed . . .” Edwin frowned, tilting his head back to rest against the wall. The lines scored across his throat by the thorned vines were disconcerting. He could have been a decapitated saint in a devotional, the carmine line of the wound painted in to hint at the manner of martyrdom. “I wondered if the curse could have a tracking clause,” he finished.
Robin looked at his arm. By now the runes had begun to creep up his shoulder. He had nearly a full sleeve’s worth of intricate black pattern.
“That might overcome a warding,” said Edwin, having switched easily into lecturing mode despite sitting with blankets pooled in his lap. “It’s a matter of one sort of spell having priority over another.”
“If they cast a spell to follow me, they could follow it even if the boundary spell was telling them not to?”