A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(15)

“Well,” said Blyth firmly. “I’m as keen as anyone to find Gatling, because I’d like to shake five kinds of hell out of him. He told them this thing was in the office. He’s the one who sent them here. This is his fault.” An irritated wave of his arm.

Edwin reached for Blyth’s wrist, meaning to get a closer look; Blyth jerked it away, then firmed his lips, as if angry with himself for what had clearly been an instinctive reaction. He untucked his legs from their crossed position on the desk, letting them dangle like a barrier between the two of them, and shoved his arm defiantly forward. Blyth’s forearm was corded with muscle and dotted with freckles and moles. His skin was warm.

Edwin looked over the symbols of what Blyth had called the tattoo, and which began at the wrist and stopped an inch from the crook of Blyth’s elbow. They weren’t any alphabet that Edwin was familiar with, but the arrangement of them—each symbol linked to the next by a dark tendril, creating a sort of cyclical sentence—made his stomach sink. He only realised when Blyth’s fingers curled like dry leaves in a fire that he was tracing the symbols with his fingertip.

“It’s a rune-curse of some kind,” he said, releasing Blyth. “That’s all I can tell without further research.”

“A curse.” Blyth took a deep breath. “The bounder did say he was giving me something to mull over. Seemed to think it’d make me more pliable.” Fear flickered in his face. “Could it? Do that to me? Like—laudanum dropped into my drink?”

“Miss Morrissey?” inquired Edwin. “Can you make anything of it?”

She peered at the curse in turn, coming close enough that Edwin could smell the floral-chemical scent of her hair, pinned up in its usual nest of luxuriant black. “Alas,” she said. “I haven’t a clue. And I’m hardly the best person you could be asking.”

No. A continuance of the sinking sensation in Edwin’s stomach signaled exactly whom he should be asking, and the very idea made him want to take a train to Dover and fling himself over the cliffs.

“Something hidden in the office,” Edwin said instead, looking at the chaos around them.

“I’d assumed they’d have tossed the office first thing, if they knew it was here,” said Blyth. “But no, they had to wait until I arrived.”

“There are ways to look for magical items without resorting to this kind of petulance,” said Edwin, bending to pick up the most egregiously wronged book within arm’s reach. He smoothed the bent pages and set it on the desk.

“That’s what confused me,” said Miss Morrissey. “They could have searched the office five times for something that holds power, and we’d have never known.”

“No, he said a contract.” Blyth cast a meaningful glance around the mounds of paper. “I do remember that, because you’d been going on about how all of magic is—oh, blast. Is it not a piece of paper then?”

“If he meant a spell, he’d have said a spell,” said Edwin, but he wasn’t sure. He thought longingly of the sixteenth-century French magician who’d claimed to have found a method for reliving a person’s memories alongside them. Having to rely on the firsthand account of an unmagical amateur who’d only stumbled into his unbusheling the previous day was galling.

“I haven’t found anything with the slightest whiff of a legal flavour to it. Before you stormed in I was opening his letters. Not that it’s helped much.” Blyth sifted through a slim pile of unopened envelopes. “And these ones don’t look awfully promising either. Three within the fortnight from someone who signs himself the Grimm of Gloucester—”

“Crackpot of the first order,” said Miss Morrissey, and Edwin nodded in agreement. The Grimm had been writing his lurid, unreadably rambling letters to this office for decades now.

“And here’s one from a Mrs. Flora Sutton, in an envelope that—ugh—smells like it’s been doused in attar of roses. Was the chap having an affair with a dashing widow, do we think? Or perhaps . . . not even a widow?”

“She’d hardly have written to him at the office, if so,” Edwin snapped. “Don’t be foolish.”

Blyth raised his eyebrows. “Calm down, old man. Only joking.”

Only joking. The words reminded Edwin unpleasantly of the fellows who tended to be friends with his brother Walt: bullishly immune to sarcasm, and smirkingly aware of their power. Most of their jokes weren’t the slightest bit funny.

Showing any kind of reaction just provided more ammunition. Edwin knew that. Still, he found himself glaring.

“You’ve been cursed, and you think this is a time to make jokes?”

Blyth shoved his sleeve down again. “I’ve been cursed, so I’ll make all the jokes I please.”

Edwin thought again, with a startling pinprick of guilt, of the small bottle of lethe-mint in his pocket. Like laudanum dropped into my drink. Blyth had come uncomfortably close there.

But dammit, Edwin couldn’t let Blyth go stumbling back to his life under the power of an unidentified curse. Knowing or unknowing. Edwin didn’t believe in that kind of cruelty. No matter what kind of person he was, Blyth deserved to be disentangled fully.

Which meant that Edwin wasn’t going to go charging off to the Minister to demand a new Home Office counterpart. He was stuck with this one, at least until he could learn enough about that curse to remove it.