A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(116)

Freedom. Safety. And a chance.

“It’s only one piece,” Edwin said. “One of three. It’s useless without the others.”

“You can’t be serious,” Robin said. “Edwin, you have him, you can—”

“What can I do?” Edwin said sharply. “Kill him?”

Robin blanched. Walt sucked in his breath. Then, unbelievably, shook it out in a laugh. “You wouldn’t,” Walt said.

“I could,” Edwin said. It would be easy. He could slow Walt’s heart, beat by beat until it stopped, and thereby lift the curse that had been Walt’s presence in the whole quarter-century of his life. But it would be deliberate, it would be cool-blooded and cruel, and Edwin had already identified his own uncrossable line. “I could. But I think I’m going to hold you to your word, instead.”

Mrs. Sutton had demanded it of Reggie, hadn’t she? He put blood into the swearing. Yes. There was more than one sort of blood-pledge in the world. This one was very old, and very exact, and could only be broken by death.

“No,” Walt began when he saw what Edwin was doing. Edwin raised his head and Walt stopped.

“My vote is for killing you, Courcey,” Robin snapped. “Whatever Edwin wants, we’re going to do it.”

It took nearly ten minutes. The cradle did not require a great deal of magic to build, as it was powered largely by the blood of the participants, but it was complex. Robin located the knife, which had spun beneath a chair when the ivy took hold of Walt. By then the spell was ready and waiting, glowing a deep orange in Edwin’s hands.

“I, Edwin John Courcey, am overseeing this oath,” said Edwin, and outlined the terms. That Walt would not cause—directly or indirectly—any harm, of any kind, to come to Robin, to Maud Blyth or any other member of Robin’s household, or to Edwin himself. That in exchange Walt would leave here with Flora Sutton’s coin, and that Robin would liaise with the Magical Assembly and give truthful report of the contents of his visions.

Edwin paused. “Do you consent to these terms?”

Robin shot him a look, eyes widening slightly. He’d heard the missing piece, then. Had Walt? Edwin raised his eyebrows in warning.

“I consent,” said Robin.

Walt, after another two heartbeats, voiced his grudging agreement. A cut on Walt’s hand as he spoke his full name; a cut on Robin’s. Blood from each of them dripped into the cradle, where it disappeared in flurries of white sparks, and that was that: Walter Clifford Courcey of Penhallick and Sir Robert Harold Blyth, fourth baronet of Thornley Hill, were bound in oath by blood. Robin gasped and clutched at his bleeding hand as the magic took.

“We’re done,” said Edwin. He touched one of the ivy loops. Usually he’d have been tense enough to snap, standing this close to Walt, but his fear had washed out of him. He’d never outgrow it entirely—he’d grown up with it woven into his nerves, a spell cast on a sapling—but he also didn’t think it would ever return to the same extent. “Thank you,” he said to Sutton Cottage. “Let him go.”

Walt’s nerves held old patterns too. He lifted a furious hand to Edwin as soon as the ivy released him, but it was the hand with the cut on it, and it spasmed into a useless fist. No harm.

“So you’ve found yourself some power after all,” Walt spat. He steadied himself on the back of an armchair—Edwin thought that was rather brave of him, all things considered—and massaged his wrist. “A power that you won’t have if you’re anywhere but this estate. Much good may it do you.”

“Walt, you still have what you want,” Edwin pointed out. “You have what you came here for in the first place.”

For a very long time, he thought, he would remember the look that came over Walt’s face when Walt realised that he had won this battle—for his cause, for his passion project—but had lost every scrap of his leverage over Robin, and also lost his ability to threaten Edwin. Ever again. It was a look that meant Walt was seeing something shatter, and what was shattering was the story. The story about the relationship between the Courcey brothers, a story that Walt had built and Edwin had always believed he had no choice but to inhabit. Now it was in pieces.

Edwin thought of the oak-heart: an explosion, and charred splinters on the floor. He put his shoulders back, met his brother’s eye, and did not smile.

“This is my brother, Walter Courcey,” said Edwin. “I am revoking his guest-right. He is not welcome on these lands, and I would like him to remove himself from my property. Now.”

Sutton was an estate that understood warding; more than that, it understood Edwin. And vice versa. Edwin felt it in the soles of his feet, in the whites of his eyes, as the boundary’s warding swept inwards across lawns and hills and ponds and paths, seeking, until it found the target of Edwin’s displeasure and took him in its grip.

Walt’s face went greenish and he stumbled for the door. Edwin felt his brother’s frantic footfalls as Walter shoved his way through the house and out onto the long drive, like fingers tapped on his own skin. He was aware of the servants exclaiming as Walt continued to run, away from the cottage and towards the boundary. He was aware of the golden net of strange, wild spellwork that ran through the roots of trees and spiderwebbed its way across autumn-sleepy rosebushes, through beds of peonies and primroses and asters and violets.