“Fossicking,” said Walter.
“Yes,” said Edwin. He sat at the desk and located in a drawer some pencils and a pile of writing paper. A floral scent wafted into the air as he lifted the paper onto the desk. Attar of roses. Flora Sutton had sat at this desk and written a letter to her great-nephew after he’d left her estate with two rings in his pocket. After she’d trusted to family and a secret-bind to keep the contract safe, when she knew danger would be closing in on her soon. She’d trusted in the wrong things.
Edwin wrote down a line of notation, tapped the pencil against his chin, put it down to move his fingers and remind himself how the blazes one defined silver in a cradle, and wrote another line.
“Fossicking?” Robin asked.
“If you can define something, you can find it,” Edwin said. “There’s a story about a magician who took himself to California, convinced he’d be able to make his fortune using it to find gold. It does work, but only if you’re very close already, and only if the amount of gold is large enough.”
“Did he make his fortune?”
“Killed in a fight over land boundaries. Or fell down a pit. Or did in fact strike it rich, and then changed his name and married an heiress in Boston. It’s a rather apocryphal story.” Edwin frowned at his work.
“We’re not here to be lectured,” said Walt.
Edwin defined the diameter of the fossicking spell to just beyond the walls of the study—they could always expand it to search the whole house later, if they felt like spending hours checking the teaspoons and candlesticks—and pushed the completed spell across the desk to Walt, who skimmed it and gave another nod, then pulled Edwin’s cradling string from a pocket of his waistcoat and tossed it across the desk.
“Go on,” said Walt. He still intended to keep his hands free and his own power untouched.
Building the spell here in the heart of Sutton was easy, easy. It was that extra inch of space, that friendliness to the air, the sense of molecules bending themselves to comply. The spell was one of those that was more palpable than visible, a cool throb between Edwin’s palms like water lifted from a lake and made spherical enough to dash in someone’s face—another favourite trick of magical children during careless summers.
Tossed wide, the spell splashed through him, then tossed itself back in pinprick form.
“Anything?” said Walt.
“Something.” Edwin stood and followed the pinpricks, which became sharper and sharper without ever registering as pain. By the pricking of my thumbs, he thought, and narrowly avoided laughing.
His thumbs tugged him first to the silver pen-stand on the desk and then to one of the drawers, where he unearthed a handsome letter opener that looked part of a set with the stand. He turned a slow circle in the centre of the room. Robin politely crammed himself beside the desk to give him space. There was only one more signal, one insistent tug, and it came from the bookshelf, where there was nothing visibly metallic at all.
Edwin exhaled. He hadn’t been sure. But he’d seen the intense kinship in Flora Sutton’s eyes, beneath a personality stronger than his would ever be. He’d felt the brand of her hands on his cheeks, and even now her house breathed around him. She’d hidden her magical ability from the world, she’d hidden the beauty of what she could do by warding away any magician who came close to her lands, and she’d hidden her part of the contract in the centre of a labyrinth. And kept part of it back from even her own great-nephew.
She hadn’t trusted a single one of them. Her mind had been a hedge of its own, thick with suspicion, comfortable in dark corners. She wouldn’t be the sort to toss something in with her jewellery-box, or hide it plain sight on someone’s finger. It took Reggie to think of that.
Edwin stepped closer to the bookshelf, eyes skipping along the spines of the top row, and then stopped.
What are you doing? he asked himself, furious. Flora Sutton died to keep this hidden, and you’ve led Walt right back to it.
It was like being mesmerised by one of Belinda’s damned arrows. It was like breaking out of that same mesmerism. Thoughts flooded him from every direction, his mind making a frantic grab for information that it could turn into the right answer, the right choice.
He thought: I don’t have to tell Walt anything.
He thought: Walt will tear this house apart if he thinks there’s the slightest chance it could be hidden in the walls. Mine to tend and mine to mend. Did I mean that pledge or not?
He thought: Every living magician in Britain.
He thought: I showed him that damned truth-spell myself, and any minute now he’s going to remember it exists.
Edwin forced the churning flood to settle, and pulled his decision clear.
“This is it,” he said.
The book was a thick dictionary of spells from the previous century, rough at the edges, soft over the spine with age. Opened at the midpoint, the book fell open like a muscle relaxing. Two hemicircles of space had been carved, one in each side; the angling of the pages made them uneven, with papery sloping sides. It was obvious that when the book was closed, this empty space was a single sphere too perfect to be anything but a spell-made hiding place for the final piece.
It was another ring. This one had a place where the flat band poked out on either side, as though someone had sketched a setting for a gem and never bothered to fill it. Placed between the other two with their triangular notches, together they would be a single ring—flat, thick. Whole.
Edwin went to touch it, felt the tension of Walt behind him, and smoothed his finger over a random entry in the text instead. Mingling, see also Commingling. A framework for charms with the basic intent of combining two substances.
Walt reached over his shoulder and picked up the ring like a penny on the street. “Let’s have some proper light.” He led them back out to the parlour, where it was brighter, even though the rain had followed them from London, then slid the other two rings from his finger and arranged them on a wooden display plinth that held a ceramic vase. The rings formed a perfect stack as Walt placed them atop one another. He glanced at Edwin and then at Robin: You’re not what I’d have preferred as an audience, the look said, but you’ll do.
The spell Walt cast was not a mingling, or even a commingling. It was, as he’d said, a rectification. The sort of spell that would repair a dropped plate, if you cared enough for the plate to put the energy into making it whole again.
Edwin found he was holding his breath.
There was no flash of light. Nothing impressive. The seams between the rings became fainter and vanished, and then the stack of them simply collapsed, in a puddling-out of the silver, and then there were no rings at all: just the coin, stamped with the crude outline of a crown.
“It’s real,” Robin said. It was exactly what Edwin had been thinking, right down to the edge of bafflement.
“You thought it was just a story?” said Walt. He plucked up the coin and slipped it into a small velvet pouch he’d pulled from somewhere, and thence into his inner pocket. Only the light of triumph at the corners of his eyes spoke to his satisfaction at what he’d just steered into completion.
Edwin thought of Robin in the Penhallick library, a week and a hundred years ago. Magic is just a story.
“A lot of stories aren’t true,” said Edwin. “And plenty of them aren’t an object you can touch.”
“And yet even the untrue ones are powerful,” said Walt.