The Morrissey sisters left together. They didn’t show any sign of expecting Robin to leave with them, which was as well. Robin had no intention of going anywhere.
Edwin tidied the broken crockery and swept up the ashes, and Robin dragged Billy’s corpse into a corner, where at least they wouldn’t have to trip over him on the way through the parlour. Edwin didn’t have a trunk large enough to bundle him into, unfortunately.
“I’ll ring down for some extra blankets to drape over him, in case any of the Cavendish servants manage to blunder in,” said Edwin. “And some dinner. Billy ate all my bread.” He leaned against the frame connecting parlour to entrance hall, creating a striking and exhausted geometry of his own angles against those of his setting. His eyes made circuits then landed, skittish, on Robin’s face. “How long were you lurking by the window, then? How much did you hear?”
“Something about the contract allowing magicians to take power from other magicians.” Robin came and stood close enough to touch, but didn’t. “A lot of nonsense about how they expected you to cave if they dangled the idea in front of you, as though you weren’t twice the man Billy Byatt is. As though you were nothing without enough magic to fell a bull.”
“It could have worked.” Edwin reached out a deliberate hand and touched Robin’s wrist with one finger. Robin, slow and daring, tangled their fingers together. Edwin let him do it. “A month ago it might have worked.”
“You’re hardly nothing,” said Robin. “You made me see the future.”
“I think we’ve established that wasn’t me,” said Edwin. “We don’t know if it was even—them. I think it was latent. Triggered.”
Robin smiled at him. “I wasn’t talking about the visions.”
The vulnerable line of Edwin’s mouth wavered in confusion, then deepened at one side. His grip on Robin’s hand tightened.
“Robin,” he began, and was interrupted by the rap of knuckles on the door. They dropped hands at once. Whoever was on the other side didn’t wait for a reply before trying the door handle.
“That’s efficient,” said Robin. “Hold on, you didn’t ring yet—oh.”
Walter Courcey stood in the doorway, coat folded over his arm. Recognition took Robin an awkward moment; he’d only seen the eldest Courcey sibling at the start of all this, at that single dinner before Walter and Clifford Courcey took themselves back to London. All three of them—Robin, Edwin, and Walter—seemed just as startled as one another to have found themselves in this situation, even though there was nothing remarkable about any of it.
Apart from the corpse in the next room, Robin reminded himself with a mental kick.
He mustered his best manners, the ones that could deflect awkwardness like a neat clip to the off-stump.
“Evening, Courcey. You’ll be here to see Edwin, then,” he said. “We were thinking of dining at my club, would you care to—”
“I don’t think that’s why he’s here, Robin,” said Edwin in a voice Robin hadn’t heard before.
And then Robin, too, saw the glint of metal: the two rings, side by side on Walter’s smallest finger, merry and silver against the black of his coat.
Walter closed the door behind him. His nonplussed expression was different to Edwin’s. Not as closed-down; not the desperate, iced-over defences of someone who’d learned early that there was no protecting yourself from some things. Walter’s expression was a calculation.
“Byatt didn’t mention that he’d dragged the foreseer along,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m very pleased to meet you again, Blyth. I’m sorry it couldn’t be under better circumstances.”
“What would better be, exactly?” said Robin through his teeth.
“To begin with,” said Walter, lifting the hand with the rings on it, “there wouldn’t be a missing piece to this, and I wouldn’t have had to come knocking on the door of my brother’s ridiculous insistence on living apart from his family.”
He stepped towards them. Robin sensed Edwin’s minute flinching-back, and decided not to complicate things; he took a few steps back into the parlour, pulling Edwin with him, rather than make Walter have to physically shove past them.
“What do you mean, a missing piece?” Edwin sounded bloodless and dull.
“An object of power wants to be whole,” said Walter. “Not that I should have to explain this to you. Brought together, the simplest of rectifications should have transformed it back into the coin. The rings failed to transform. The old bitch kept part of it back.”
A sneer carved itself around Walter’s nose. At the sight of it Robin knew, though wasn’t sure how he knew, that it was Walter in front of whom Flora Sutton killed herself to frustrate his efforts; Walter who would have tortured information out of her otherwise.
Walter who pushed his own brother into the maze and left him there to die.
“There’s nothing else,” said Edwin, but with a thread of uncertainty. How would they know, after all? Edwin had taken one ring and gone off in search of its twin. Who was to say that there wasn’t a third?
“I—” said Walter, and at that moment caught sight of Billy’s body. His eyes widened. It took him a moment to speak. “Well, well. So you’re not entirely the limp piece of cabbage you seem to be, Win. Or was this your handiwork, Sir Robert?”
“Byatt tried to be clever,” said Robin. “It didn’t suit him.”
A smile that rose no higher than the mouth appeared and then disappeared on Walter’s face. Where Billy had been tense enough to snap, Walter’s posture was entirely relaxed. This was the poise of a man who knew himself to be the biggest threat in the room, and knew his own capabilities; who’d left his inhibitions behind long ago, buried them beneath the floorboards as a boy. Or perhaps never had any to begin with.
“Then let’s not mess about with cleverness,” he said. “Tell me where the rest of the coin is, Edwin, or I’ll break every finger on both your hands.”
Edwin’s shoulders had curled in as if to make himself smaller. At the threat his hands clenched together. Walter’s smile, as he watched his brother’s reaction, was much more genuine now.
“I told you, you have all of it,” Edwin said.
“Stop it,” said Robin, stepping half in front of Edwin. “There’s no need for any of this.”
“I am practical, Sir Robert,” said Walter. “Direct action produces results.”
“That’s rot,” said Robin. “I think you just enjoy fear, and you know you’ve managed to tangle Edwin up so much that all you have to do is tug on his edges and he’ll produce it for you.”
Walter’s nostrils flared. “I am also not a fool. And neither, it seems, was Mrs. Sutton. This section of the contract is still missing a piece. Enough of this faffing about.” He raised his hands, casual as a master swordsman would raise a blade. Behind his shoulder, Robin sensed Edwin go still. “Blyth. As you seem so keen to deflect me from my brother, you’re more than welcome to take the punishment in his place.”
“Go fuck yourself, Courcey.”
A thin smile in response, and Walter began. He cradled with none of Edwin’s painstaking care and none of Charlie’s casual sloppiness. His fingers moved quick and sharp, and the spell was a dart, far too fast to defend against. It felt like a sharpened stick jabbed sickeningly through Robin’s front, stirring his guts in an agonising roil. When he collapsed and spat bile onto Edwin’s floor he was surprised not to see blood.
Part of him managed to think, with a red-tinged dispassion: It’s not nearly as bad as the curse was by the end.
“Stop,” yelled Edwin. “Walt. Stop. Stop.”
The tide went out on Robin’s crippling nausea. He pushed himself to knees, then feet. He knew how to get up again. He could do that.
“I don’t know where it is,” said Edwin, “but I know where Flora Sutton would have kept it, if she didn’t hide it in the maze with the other pieces.”
“And if it was in the maze?” said Walter.