A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(28)

“You can’t be expected to put up with Bel’s set, Mother,” said Edwin. “Don’t think anything of it. I’ll dine with you while I’m here, shall I? We can make a picnic of it.”

“No! No, darling, I can’t think of imposing such tedium on you.”

“And if I said I preferred it?”

Her eyes were Bel’s eyes, a paler blue than his own. There was nothing in them but love, and yet Edwin felt like a paper-cut the whisper of her disappointment. “Edwin, darling. You mustn’t let them tease you.”

“Blyth. Robin,” said Edwin. “I’d like a moment alone with my mother.”

Robin stood at once. “I’ll wait outside,” he said. “After all, I left my guidelight outside my room, despite Edwin’s warning me not to.” He winked at Edwin as he left.

“What a nice young man.” Edwin’s mother patted the folds of her shawl. “I’m so pleased to see you bringing a friend here, darling.”

“He’s not a friend.” Edwin sat at her feet, as he hadn’t done for months. The first touch of her hand on his hair made him want to cry, but instead he took another deep breath of her perfume. “Can I give you a secret, Mother?”

“You know how I love secrets,” she murmured.

Edwin looked into the fire and let his mother card her frail and swollen fingers through his hair, and told her the uneasy story of Robin Blyth, baronet and civil servant, new to magic and already marked by it in baffling circumstances. It felt better to have told someone. It felt right, normal, for it to just be the two of them, Edwin and his mother, holding things close against the world.

“Poor boy,” she said. “And what a bother for you! You could hardly do otherwise, of course. Best to have this dealt with. I suppose you’ll give him lethe-mint, when it’s sorted out?”

“Of course,” said Edwin.

“It may take more than the mint, if it’s been a week. I’m sure you know what’s best, my dear. And you can always ask Charles to do the spell itself.”

Edwin breathed in. Out. “Of course,” he said again.

He would happily have fallen asleep there, but he had a guest. He bid his mother good night and let himself out. Robin was inspecting the coloured panes of the closest window, darkened though it was by night. Edwin would suffer through a conversation about Tiffany glass if necessary.

But then Robin turned and Edwin saw the question hovering on the man’s lips.

Edwin said, “It’s a form of rheumatism. It gives her pain, and it saps at her strength.” Broad; inarguable. That was as much as a stranger needed to know. The fits of melancholy had been mild, by all accounts, before the rheumatism got its claws into her. Now there were weeks when she refused to change from her nightgown, or to have the curtains drawn, or to raise her voice to dictate a letter. Edwin had done the imbuement on her pens himself. They were sensitive to even a whisper.

Edwin wrote to her more often, not less, when the gaps between her letters yawned wide. It never seemed to drag her out of it more quickly. He wrote nonetheless.

They had just turned into the south corridor when Blyth halted and swayed on his feet, eyes wide. He did not clutch at his arm, or curl around it as he had in the train and as Edwin had half feared he would during dinner. Instead he simply stood, slumped against the wall and staring at nothing, the colour gone from his face just as it had done in Hawthorn’s house. He was breathing, but shallowly. Edwin felt, for a long few heartbeats of startling terror, entirely useless.

And then it was over, whatever it was. Robin blinked and was behind his own eyes again.

Edwin guided them both down the corridor and into the closest of the willow rooms, which was Robin’s. The guidelight still shone motionless outside the door as though set in a bracket.

“All right,” said Edwin when the door closed. He was fed up and worried in equal measure. “Tell me what’s going on. Should I send for a doctor?”

Robin sat on the edge of the bed. “No. I’m not ill. At least, not in the normal sense.”

“Do you have fits?” Edwin demanded, not bothering with delicacy. “Do you hear voices? Whatever it is, I’m hardly about to have you kicked out of my family’s house in the middle of the night. Tell me.”

Robin’s voice shook. “I see things. Not just see—I’m plunged into them, I suppose. It feels like being transported somewhere else, in a rather horrid way. It started the night I was attacked.”

“What sort of things?” Edwin asked, sharp. He was already trying to cross-reference immersive visions with any kind of curse he’d ever read about, and failing.

“This time it was a hedge maze,” said Robin. “Large. Well-trimmed. The kind of thing you can find on the grounds of houses all over the country, I dare say. I saw the maze, and the sky, and—something moving, just on the edge of it all.”

“This time. The others were different?”

“Yes. Different each time.” Colour washed Robin’s cheeks. “All just brief glimpses of places, or people. And no, I don’t hear voices. There’s never any sound.”

“Tell me what you’ve seen.”

Robin’s voice gained an edge. “I’ll paint them for you, if you insist, but perhaps it can wait until tomorrow?”