But the facts of existence for men of their inclination were a sore old enough to have turned to callus. Robin threw Edwin a final smile, and let himself across the corridor. No point in dwelling.
It wasn’t until he was lying in his own bed, beneath the identical wallpaper, that he wondered if Edwin had simply wanted him out of the room. Edwin Courcey seemed to grow more layers as Robin unpeeled them; Robin didn’t know what to do with Edwin’s swings between cool reserve and that naked, affection-starved need. The way he reacted when Robin touched him. The quiet, desperate sounds he’d made as he fucked into Robin, as though he would never be sated.
Robin shifted in the bed, enjoying the ache of awareness in his backside as he enjoyed the ache of his shoulders after a long session in the boxing ring. He felt sated, certainly. Aglow with it, wanting to linger in the memory like a warm bath. He was still tired and scared and cursed, still caught up in a plot that refused to reveal itself fully, but part of him was insisting that he felt happier than he had in years.
You really must have been in desperate need of a good fuck, he told himself, feeling his mouth curve. The words landed in his mind like bad notes on a piano. Apparently Robin recognised lies even when he was telling them to himself.
Because it wasn’t the physical act alone. It was the way he felt watching Edwin read; it was the feeling he had every time his eyes sought Edwin in a room and landed on any angle of the man’s face, any movement of those delicate fingers: There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.
Only the impossible was safe. This was merely implausible, and that made it dangerous. But Robin could die tomorrow, or next week; the curse could writhe up his neck and burn his mind out with pain, or someone with fog for a face could take his arm on a busy street and decide to finish the job. He felt greedy for more nights like this, as many of them as he could cram into his existence.
And unlike shadowy attackers and mysterious tattooed runes, the way he felt about Edwin was a danger Robin was able to do something about. He could already feel the jubilant, contrary, Blythian urge rising within him: to rush headlong, as Edwin put it. To grin right into danger’s face and see what would happen next.
One of the downstairs maids was making up the fire and opening the curtains in the library when Robin entered it the next morning. It was early enough that the morning light was dim and watery, the house’s corridors cold and filled with deep grey shadows. Robin had been awake for at least an hour, unable to convince his body not to lie in tense anticipation of the curse striking again, and the thought had tumbled heedless and whole into his mind: this wasn’t a danger he had no choice but to mope around and brace against. He was going to be more than a curse-marked deadweight that Edwin was dragging around the country. He was going to punch back.
Flames began to lick in the fireplace. Robin cleared his throat and the maid straightened at once from the grate, her hand disappearing into a pocket of her apron as she did so. Robin wondered if he’d find string in there, if he told her to turn it out; he wondered if there were punishments meted out by the housekeeper for needing string to manage domestic spells, if the scorn for such a crutch stretched across class boundaries in the magical world. There was so much he didn’t know.
“Sir.” She bobbed a curtsey. “Can I help you, sir? Anything you need?”
“No,” said Robin.
Perhaps she was too well trained to look surprised, now she was over her initial startlement. Perhaps the downstairs staff of Penhallick House merely assumed that Mr. Edwin’s strange unmagical friend from London was just as prone to haunting the library at odd hours. Either way, the maid nodded, cast a critical eye over the room as though marking dust to be attended to later, and slipped out of the double doors, leaving Robin alone.
The slim catalogue was where Edwin had left it on one of the tables. A section of it was, thankfully, alphabetical. Robin flicked to the F section. Foresight: Π61.
No neat indexing charm for Robin, but Edwin had a tendency to leave his books lying around if he thought he might want to refer back to them, and there was a clear edict against the servants clearing them away. It took no more than ten minutes of digging through the active piles and checking the marks on the bookplates for Robin to find a couple of candidates, and he settled down grimly to do what he should have been doing all along: working out how to get himself out of the mess, instead of letting Edwin do the work for him while he took the opportunity to escape his responsibilities in the city.
Edwin had all the experience, all the intelligence, all the knowledge of magic. But Robin had one thing that Edwin lacked: the very dubious gift that magic had bestowed on him in the first place.
Robin could see the future.
Edwin had asked, Could you bring one on, do you think? and he wouldn’t have asked idly. He didn’t do anything idly.
Edwin had left scraps of paper as bookmarks. One marked a mention of those people in the history of English magic known to have possessed true foresight. Another noted that it was thought to be present in the magical population all over the world, and most of the reports of deliberate wielding came from the greater Asian continent, with one or two possibly originating in South America.
The book prefaced these reports, in a stuffy tone that Robin’s Cambridge-educated mind had no trouble translating into the wheezing voice of a Pembroke don, as unreliable, and no such possibility had yet been conclusively proved by civilised minds.
Perhaps Edwin had a point about the complacency of English magic. For the first time in his life Robin wished heartily for the existence of thorough research.
It was thought—the book grudgingly went on, once it considered the reader duly caveat-ed—that some possessors of foresight were able to wield it at will, and nudge it to focus on a particular person or subject or event. However, this caused the foresight to become less of a window onto the certain future, and more about possibility.
At this point the text devolved into words of a length and pompous complexity that made Robin’s mind try to shy away and think about cricket, an automatic reflex left over from university. He managed to digest the sentence: Reports exist of consciously directed foresight becoming temporally unmoored.
Whatever that meant. Robin thought of the painted boats afloat on the lake. He flicked through the rest of the books, but none were any more forthcoming on the subject of foresight’s deliberate use.
It was lighter in the room by now, though still well before the usual breakfast hour. Robin settled himself in the window seat, feeling oddly intimate as he did it, remembering the feel of Edwin’s ankle beneath his hand and the trickle of raindrops on the window. The morning chill was trying to creep in through the glass and the heat of the fire had barely spread. Robin rubbed his hands together and tucked up his knees.
Edwin had suggested that he start where the visions always start. Robin didn’t fancy holding his breath again, but he could concentrate on the palette of sensations that came before. The taste. The heat. The prickle of light.
Robin had never tried to deliberately clear his mind. He had the absurd image of taking a broom to waves on a seashore, trying to sweep the water back out across the stones. Might as well stand there like Canute and order it.
No. Concentrate.
The future. What kind of future was left to them? Either this curse comes off me or it doesn’t, Robin thought. There are people after this contract. Edwin’s involved now, and they know it.
What is going to happen?