A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(110)

Then Walt had paid for a room at the Cavendish and sealed Robin inside it with a charm, done the same to Edwin in his bedroom, and probably slept the peaceful sleep of the undeserving on Edwin’s sofa.

Edwin had barely slept a wink. He was exhausted this morning, feeling as grey and washed-out as the world outside, trying to make his thoughts arrange themselves into a plan. Part of him was entirely unconvinced they’d find anything in the study at all. And the larger question was whether Edwin had done the right thing; whether he should have simply kept on insisting his ignorance rather than reaching desperately for a possibility and hoisting it like a white flag.

He closed his eyes against the memory of Robin falling to his knees and retching. No. He was always going to give Walt something, because Walt didn’t stop until he had the result he wanted.

Edwin should have been surprised when his door opened to reveal Walt with the rings on his finger. He hadn’t been, somehow. All the pieces put together felt like a logical progression, a statement argued perfectly from precedent. If asked to imagine a person capable of what had been done in the name of the Last Contract, and who valued magical power above all things . . . the shape of it would have been, indeed, very like Edwin’s elder brother.

“The curse on Robin,” Edwin said, breaking the silence in the compartment for the first time. “What was it? Where did it come from? I didn’t recognise it at all.”

“And yet you managed to lift it, nuisance that you are,” said Walt. “It wasn’t my invention. I’ve no hand for runes. A neat little thing, though, wouldn’t you say? Pain at diminishing intervals, with a tracking clause layered in.”

“Neat,” said Robin, drenched in sarcasm. “Indeed.”

“Whose invention, then?” Edwin batted aside the small glow of satisfaction. He’d been right about the tracking.

Walt’s eyes glinted. “Our leader,” he said. “Of a sort. Don’t think you’ll get any more than that.”

Walt would only deign to follow a man who outstripped him in pure power, and there weren’t a great many of those. Edwin thought wistfully of the truth-spell he’d managed the previous day. But Walt had watched him dress, watched him pack; he had no string to hand, and even if he did, he’d hardly be able to build something that complex without Walt noticing and stopping him. Walt wasn’t Billy.

Edwin’s heart gave a queer hiccup as though an echo-spell were trying to take place within his ribs, showing him a past that might have been. Edwin hadn’t been recruited early to this conspiracy, despite being cleverer and more desperate and far more primed to swallow the hook of promised power than Reggie Gatling. Now he knew why. Walt wasn’t Billy. Billy was the one who had, belatedly, suggested Edwin as suitable.

It would never, not in the full length of his effortless life, have occurred to Walt that his younger brother might be worth anything at all.

Perhaps Edwin should be glad of that, bitter pill that it was. If these people had come to him before the murders, before anything had gone wrong—if they’d sold the quest for the Last Contract to him in the right intellectual light, it could have been so easy for Edwin to become what Reggie became.

Would he have clung, pathetically grateful, to the chance to finally be on Walt’s side, and thereby break their old and exhausting pattern of hurt and response?

Would he have stood by and watched a curse of pain laid on Sir Robert Blyth and told himself, dispassionate, that it was a means to a worthwhile end?

Edwin didn’t know. He felt dunked in cool and unclean water.

“I have a question,” said Robin to Walt. “Did you tell Billy Byatt to kill me? Once you realised at dinner, the first night, that I didn’t know anything about the contract?” He’d donned the mild, pleasant expression that Edwin could now recognise as Robin’s version of armour.

Walt raised his eyebrows. “Kill you at Penhallick?”

“Of course not,” said Edwin.

“What?” said Robin.

“Guest-right,” said Edwin. “Having a guest die on pledged land makes the land . . . unsettled. And Walt visits Penhallick a lot oftener than I do.”

“Easy enough to wait until you got back to London,” said Walt. “And thank goodness we kept you alive, hm? Foresight’s a rare thing for us to have stumbled across.” He was eyeing Robin with satisfaction, as Bel eyed people and objects she wished to collect, though without even a spark of Bel’s tempering merriment.

Edwin pressed his leg against Robin’s, as much of a warning and comforting touch as he would allow himself. Simply existing in the same space as Robin felt like holding a flame close to a fuse. Apart from the moment of relief in the aftermath of Billy’s death, they’d not been given time to settle anything; the fight that they’d parted with still hung over them, fragile as glass. And Edwin was a ghastly bubble of fear that Walt, too, would see what Billy had seen. Would realise that he didn’t need truth-spells or curses or anything of the sort to make Edwin do whatever he wanted, so long as Robin was there to be hurt.

The rest of the journey was quiet.

The closest stop to Sutton Cottage was in a large enough town that they easily found a hackney coach to take them to the estate itself. The driver was eager to tell them how they’d all wondered if the house was going to close to tourists after the old lady had passed, not that anyone ever saw her, famous recluse she’d been, God rest her soul, and had they been there before? They had? What did they think of the hedge maze?