A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(104)

“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.

Billy had better luck collecting himself. His pleasant expression drew together like curtains. “All right. You two had your adventure—very brave and clever, running around solving riddles. But we have the rings now. And we’re going to find the other pieces of the contract, and I think your knack for the fiddly theoretical bits of magic would be an asset to us. It’s as simple as that. Come on board, and you’ll have the power you’ve always wanted.”

Edwin wasn’t brave. He wasn’t. He was tempted and tense and he was terrified of pain. But he’d found a line in himself, right where Billy’s casual shrugs met the memory of Robin gasping on the lakeshore, and he wasn’t going to cross it. It was a relief to know that the line was there. He would take the consequences.

He said, “Or . . .?”

Billy stared at him for a long moment. The curtain by the cracked-open window moved gently in a draught, and the noise of the late London evening filtered into the silence.

“Honestly?” said Billy.

“Honestly. I won’t lift a damn finger for you.”

“Damn,” said Billy with a sigh, and started to build a spell. “Now you’ve left me looking a right idiot, Win. I did tell them I’d be able to talk you round.”

The spell taking shape was one to burn away memories, a soft and cheerful yellow like filtered sunlight. Lethe-mint was preferable to these spells for a reason: they were difficult and relied on absolute precision of clauses, and the potential for adverse consequences was high. There were maybe three magicians in London to whom Edwin would have entrusted his mind with this sort of spell, and Billy Byatt had neither the skill nor the power to appear on that list.

Despair soaked Edwin like spilled wine. He tried to burn the feel of Robin’s mouth into his skin along with the scratches and bruises, wanting almost to cry at the idea that he would wake up having forgotten how it felt to be . . . smiled at, yes, and touched in ways that he craved, and thought to be fascinating. He had been easy. Robin had walked into the maze of him and solved him with no string required at all, and Edwin had been stupid enough to let that slip out of his hands.

“All right,” said Robin’s voice, terse and clear. “Stop.”

The jerking-round of Billy’s head was the only clue that Edwin hadn’t hallucinated a speaking illusion of Robin Blyth through the force of his longing.

If it was an illusion, it was the strangest Edwin had ever seen. Emerging from the fading shimmer of a curtain-spell was a small group of people. It was Robin, along with an unfamiliar woman shaking the last sparks of the spell’s banishment from her fingertips, and Adelaide Morrissey. Who was standing with her feet planted and a longbow in her hands, an arrow drawn back flush with her cheek, for all the world as though Edwin’s parlour were an archery range.

The arrow was pointed at Billy.

Billy said, “What the devil . . .”

“Hullo, Byatt. This is, as someone once told me, a game of nerve,” said Robin. “I suggest you don’t move.”





It turned out that having a truly strong magician on one’s side made a lot of difference, when it came to quietly opening the locked door of a hotel suite and quietly tiptoeing, disguised behind a spell, through an entrance hall and into the parlour that Robin had seen in his vision.