“I’m not going to tell your secrets to anyone, you know,” Robin said. “And Maudie won’t either, not if I ask her to promise me. I’ll put in for a transfer out of the office, like I originally planned to. Whoever’s after the contract should have realised by now that I haven’t any idea what Gatling did with it. I’ll vanish back into my old life and actually look after my family, instead of running away.”
“I don’t know if you’ll be able to vanish that easily,” Edwin said. “As far as we can tell, you’re still a foreseer. And now the cat’s out of the bag in that regard.”
He tried to imagine what it would have been like if they had taken Robin’s memory, and Robin had kept on having the visions anyway. He’d have thought he was going mad.
“Still a fascinating object,” Robin said, resigned.
“I’m saying my world might find you again, regardless.”
“Then I’ll deal with it.”
Edwin wanted to snap at him, to demand that Robin accept his help, that Robin—go along with it. Come and be studied. Come and be stroked. Edwin set his jaw and managed to erect his usual coldness. “You’re right. It is for the best.”
Robin reached out a hand to Edwin’s arm, but Edwin was raw with the effort of holding himself calm. He didn’t think, he just flinched away.
“Don’t. Don’t touch me. Please.”
There was a long, long pause. All the tension that had begun to ebb came rushing back again, as though the room were a cradler’s string in hands suddenly yanked apart. A lump of misery bobbed into Edwin’s throat.
“Exactly what you want,” Robin said, as though solving a riddle. “But not what you want to want?”
It was just true enough that Edwin didn’t know how to explain the ways in which it was false. Robin looked . . . sad. Not even angry. Edwin wanted to build a spell that would dissolve everything, take it down to atoms and essential forces, so he wouldn’t have to look at that expression anymore.
Robin asked, “Do you even like me at all?”
“Y—yes. Yes.”
He almost didn’t get it out past the sudden echo of memory. He and Hawthorn had bickered, but they’d had very few real fights. Edwin wanted any conflict to end as soon as possible; Jack seemed to want to live in a house built of low-grade needling and casual mockery. They had fought at the end, short and sharp like a fist to the ribs. It had nothing to do with wanting to stay. They both knew how unsuited they were, beyond the fact that Edwin had little enough power that Jack could pretend to have escaped the magical world entirely, and Jack was trustworthy in his own abrasive way, and sometimes would look at Edwin almost as though he were handsome, and sometimes would insult Edwin’s siblings with breathtaking, gleeful carelessness.
Even so, pulling apart had been like extricating one’s clothes from a blackberry bush. Edwin had been off-balance with hurt. He’d said those words, or some very like them. Do you even like me at all?
Jack had laughed that cruel laugh of his. If I ever did, I can’t remember why. And he’d said other things too. He had a devastating eye for weakness, Jack Alston did, and during their ill-advised months together Edwin had come undone under his capable hands and shown him nearly everything there was to see.
Robin was nothing like that. Robin was kind and Robin loved fiercely, but Robin, too, had already seen too much of Edwin. Edwin couldn’t rip off the last layer. That was all there was left of him. There’d be nothing left but blood.
He said, again, “Yes.” It was the very least he owed to Robin, and all he could afford to give.
Robin gave a shaky laugh. “Well, you’ve an odd way of showing it. Do you have any idea how ghastly I felt, sitting there at the breakfast table with you making me feel like—like a study specimen? Like all these books, I suppose.” He gave a twitch of his hand. “A way for you to compensate.”
Edwin couldn’t call that a lie; couldn’t even call it unfair. It wasn’t.
“And do you know the worst of it?” Robin went on, inexorable. “I almost want you too much to care. I told myself I wouldn’t be anyone else’s to be used, and yet here I am, hovering at your side like some damn—” He broke off, staring right at Edwin as though trying to translate the runes of Edwin’s face into plain English.
“Robin,” said Edwin.
Robin said, very quiet, “Tell me to stay, stay for you, and I will.”
Edwin wanted to say it, wanted it more than anything, but for the fact that Robin would so clearly have despised the both of them for it in the end. How could a future be built on that? What was Edwin going to do—bind Robin’s hands with a Goblin’s Bridle? Even with or without all the magic in the world, you couldn’t charm a person to stay. Not for long. Not truly. Not and keep yourself safe.
And there was nothing at all safe about Robin. Edwin wanted to take his clothes off and beg to be touched, and held, and whispered to. He might as well have handed Robin a knife and tilted back his throat.
That would be no sort of future at all: Robin always doubting, and Edwin always afraid. Their bodies could fit against one another like lock into key, they could throw themselves daily into impossible pleasure, and still it would be a house with foundations of mist.
So Edwin, again, said nothing.
“Right,” said Robin, “that’s what I thought,” and picked up his bags and left.
Len Geiger had already asked twice if there was anything he could help Edwin find, which was a new record. Asking once was generally a polite hint that he was hoping to close the bookshop and get home to his family. Asking twice, when it was barely past noon, might have meant that he was afraid for Edwin’s health or sanity.
There was nothing wrong with Edwin’s health. The scratches were healing, and he’d dropped by Whistlethropp’s shop that morning and picked up a lotion to hasten the process. Similarly, his mind was working as well as it ever had. And that was that. Body and mind: perfectly hale. There was nothing else about him, no other component to feel bruised beyond easy repair, and so rationality dictated that he could not feel that way.
Edwin sighed and closed the book he’d been leafing through without seeing the words. He added it to the pile he’d been amassing: everything he could find that referred to casting spells on living plants, a few entirely unmagical titles on horticulture—the part of Geiger’s shop not located behind the mirror made up the bulk of the man’s sales, after all—and a few others that had shown up in the bibliography of the Kinoshita translation. It made quite a pile. Edwin arranged for them to be sent to Sutton Cottage; part of him itched to begin reading immediately, but he’d already sent a message promising to return to Sutton the following week and sit down properly with the senior house staff and groundskeepers. It looked as though he was going to be spending a lot more time in the country.
It was Thursday. Edwin had returned to London the previous day, leaving shortly after Robin and Maud. There’d seemed no reason to stay. Being alone with Bel’s friends had been abruptly as unbearable as it usually was; there was nobody to insulate him from them at the dining table, and nobody to come and find him, to coax conversation and smiles from him, if he decided to spend all his time in the library.
It didn’t take long to become so accustomed to something that you could describe the exact shape of its absence.
From the bookshop, Edwin walked to Whitehall with his attention on the small sensations of the city, which he’d missed. The presence of real noise, human and mechanical. The constant movement. Glass and metal and stone, and splashes of nature kept within gardens and parks, and the turning colours of the trees in their framing rows. The air had the thick clamminess that signalled fog would climb the streets from the river that night.
The external typist’s room in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints was empty. A rustling noise punctuated by singing, in no language Edwin knew, came from behind the door standing narrowly ajar.