“Girls?” Edwin said sharply.
“I know—not what you’d expect, is it? Girls. Four of them. Young and dressed to the nines in 1855, so of course we’d no idea if they’d even still be living today, but at least we knew we were looking for women. And the whole time the village was in hysterics about ghosts walking through the streets and appearing in their kitchens, because we couldn’t keep proper hold of the size—getting the eight of us working strictly in concert on the time parameters was bad enough, and something about doing magic in that place was like trying to keep hold of a bar of wet soap. Ghosts! Some of us had to stay nearly another week to deal with the cleanup.”
Another puzzle-piece spun and fitted into place. Triangulation, via ley lines, looking for the footprint of powerful objects, which had been resting in that church for—maybe even centuries. And which had created there a place of fossilised power, which took an echo illusion spell cast into the previous century and blew its spatial parameters as wide as an entire town.
Not ghosts in the active sense, then, but in the passive. Moving photographs of the true past, called briefly into being.
“And Reggie turned up investigating the reports of ghosts, and insisted on involving himself when he learned what the contract could do,” said Edwin slowly.
“We figured he might be useful.” Billy shrugged. “The fact that he was there at all meant he had a knack for keeping his ear to the ground.”
“And once he knew that you were looking for elderly women with an interest in old magics . . .”
“Yes—he ran off to wheedle the coin out of his aunt, and then was foolish enough to think that he could lie about it. He wanted to find the whole contract himself, use it himself. He thought that non-magicians could use it to turn themselves into something they’re not.”
“Can they?”
“No. Well. We’re not certain.”
He’d stopped trusting their intentions, Mrs. Sutton had said of Reggie. Was that it? Or had he truly been overtaken by personal ambition? Edwin wanted to believe the best of Reggie, but he clearly hadn’t known him at all.
He said, “It sounds like you’re not certain of a lot of things.”
“It’s a legend,” said Billy, “that just happens to be real. The Last Contract is three items, and it can be used to draw power from every magician in Britain, and those bloody women stumbled across this fact and found the items in the church. But they couldn’t work out the last step. They couldn’t make it work. So clearly they gave up.”
We didn’t know, Flora Sutton had said. When we did, we stopped.
Conscience, not lack of ability. Edwin burned suddenly to read more of her diaries. She, like Billy, possessed a we. Billy’s was whatever shadowy group of people Reggie had tangled himself up with and unwisely tried to hide things from; Billy was obviously being careful not to mention any names until he was sure he had Edwin on side.
Flora Sutton’s we was another puzzle again.
Those bloody women.
Edwin tried to lift the lens of what he now knew and peer backwards through it at the events of the last two weeks. All right. He was being, albeit clumsily, recruited to a group of people in search of a way to increase the amount of power at their command. They thought he’d be tempted.
And God, God, he was. The idea had buried itself beneath his skin like ink. To do it the right way, of course, with full knowledge and consent, but . . . to have more. To be able to combine his own techniques with a reservoir of power as deep as Charlie’s, to build his experiments and set them loose, to push the bounds of known magic and to create. To discover. To be fully the thing that he was, and not a few stitched-together scraps.
Edwin looked at Billy Byatt—cheerful, apologetic Billy, who’d always seemed the least awful and the weakest-willed of Bel and Charlie’s set, and who’d been simmering away with the same ink beneath his skin this whole time.
Edwin said, carefully, “Did you kill Reggie Gatling, Billy?”
“Me?” Billy made a face. “My dear chap. No.”
And nobody else had left Penhallick in the days that Edwin and Robin were gone, so he couldn’t have been their attacker at Sutton Cottage either.
“But you knew about it. You knew people were being killed.”
Billy’s mild eyes were wide with belief. “What’s that saying about omelettes and eggs? This is important. There’s something terrible coming, the Assembly thinks, and we’re going to need all the power we can get. We can’t suddenly increase the number of magicians in the country. But we can make some of us more useful.”
Useful. The word was a sting. The thought of Robin crowded into Edwin’s mind, where he’d been doing his best to keep it at bay. He was glad that Robin had bowed his way out of this dangerous mess. Even if the search for the contract had begun on the Assembly’s word, it had clearly become something else, steered by hands that weren’t squeamish about dirtying themselves. Not even the Assembly went around authorising murder.
“And there’ll be plenty of magic to go around, once we can discover how the contract works,” Billy went on. “It’s something extraordinary. Something new. Don’t you want to be part of it?”
That, too, had its own sting. It meant that Edwin, who’d always assumed he faded into the background when not being teased for general entertainment, had been observed and understood, at least on one level. It meant that this recruitment wasn’t as clumsy as it appeared.
“If your lot wanted me on side,” Edwin said, “why not just tell me all this at the start?”
“By the time I suggested you, we weren’t sure if Gatling had told you already. Thought you might be working with him. And then you show up all chummy with his replacement, some chap nobody’s ever heard of. I thought he was a pal that Gatling had pulled into it, who’d nabbed the job as an excuse to sniff around the office for wherever Gatling left the contract.”
“He’s not,” said Edwin. “Robin doesn’t matter in all of this.
He’s,” and it tasted hotter and more painful than the drugged tea, “a paperwork error.”
“We know that now,” said Billy. “Frightful muddle, but what can you do. Some unmagical higher-up got wind that someone had abandoned their post, and they shoved Sir Robert in to replace him. We wouldn’t have bothered with the curse if we’d known—that was to shake him up, make him happier to talk. Nobody expected him to have foresight. Or for you to drag him to Penhallick and not let him out from under your nose.” He tapped the side of his forehead, playful. “Had to get creative, to get close to him. Thank goodness for Bel and her games.”
That made no sense. Then it did. “You cast Dead Man’s Legs,” Edwin said. “In the lake. You were the only one who was close enough.”
A breezy nod. “Worth a try. Thought it might scare him back to the city.”
“He could have died,” Edwin snarled.
“You said it yourself, he doesn’t matter,” said Billy. “Why do you care?”
Edwin tried to wrench back the calm that he’d been using to navigate his way through this conversation, but he couldn’t. He’d slipped, his anger was out, and it wouldn’t pack itself back into his chest. He bit his cheek and looked at the carpet, hands tight on the arms of the chair.
“Oh,” said Billy, loaded with meaning. He was smirking when Edwin looked up. “I knew you leaned that way, but didn’t realise you moved that fast. You really are easy for anyone who’ll smile at you, aren’t you?”
“Go to hell,” said Edwin.