A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(30)

That was what you saw looking straight ahead. Looking up, all you saw was books. Robin remembered, belatedly, Edwin saying that they had one of the largest private collections in the country.

Hawthorn had called Edwin a librarian and clearly meant it as an insult. But Robin felt like he was viewing a page from a book on exotic creatures, demonstrating how the patterns of their hides allowed them to blend into their surroundings. Edwin stood near the centre of the library floor, shirtsleeves rolled to mid-forearm, one hand turning the page of a thick book splayed open on a table while the other scratched at the back of his neck. Looking at him, Robin realised that before this moment he’d never seen Edwin Courcey look even the slightest bit comfortable.

Robin let the heavy door swing noiselessly shut behind him, and cleared his throat. Edwin’s head rose.

“There you are,” said Edwin, as though Robin were a tardy schoolboy. “When you said paint, were you joking around?”

“Good morning to you too,” said Robin. “What paint?”

“Last night, you said you could paint your visions.”

Robin had been joking, more or less. He was a mediocre artist at best. But he thought about trying to cram words around what he’d seen, with Edwin’s impatient eyes needling him, and suddenly the alternative didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

“I can try drawing one of them,” he said. “If you’ve pencils?”

A nod. “I do. Now, come here and roll up your sleeve.”

So it was Edwin who wielded the pencils first, while Robin held out his bared right forearm and Edwin copied down the runes of the curse with painstaking care. Neither of them commented on the fact that it reached fully to Robin’s elbow now. Curled up in the corner of Robin’s soul, like a summer-basking snake, was the fear that had opened its eyes when Hawthorn first said, It’ll keep getting worse. Every time the pain claimed him that fear shed its skin and grew larger.

Edwin took the piece of paper with him halfway up the ladder leading to the balcony. He shouldn’t have blended in, Robin thought, watching him. There was no sense to it. Edwin wore a white shirt and a waistcoat backed in ivory satin, his long legs clad in cloud-grey flannel that looked soft to the touch. He was overdressed for this country party; Charlie had worn a sports jacket at breakfast. Edwin was a slip of a figure, insubstantial and underpigmented against the richness of the shelves and books.

Edwin said, “Hm. Zeta twenty-nine four,” and the ladder flew sideways on its runners as though pushed by an enthusiastic hand, carrying Edwin to the corner of the library.

Robin pulled a piece of paper in front of him and began to draw the vision that he remembered most clearly. The glass floor, with its dark geometric lines. The view upwards; the many pairs of feet crossing to and fro.

All right, it wasn’t the one he remembered most clearly. But he was hardly going to draw that one.

He was absorbed enough in his task that he didn’t look up when Edwin dropped a small pile of books onto one end of the table. He did look up when Edwin said, sharply, “When were you at the Barrel?”

“Beg pardon?” said Robin.

Edwin slid the paper out from Robin’s hands. “That’s the view from the ground floor of the Barrel. The building that houses the Magical Assembly,” he added, in light of what was probably a blank expression on Robin’s face. “We call it the Barrel, because—but you must have been there.”

“Me, I’m an accident of paperwork,” said Robin. “Remember? I haven’t been anywhere except where you’ve been dragging me. This was in the first lot of my visions.”

Edwin frowned down at the paper. He traced one of the dark lines with a finger. “A real place you’ve never been. That rules out waking dreams. You could be seeing through someone else’s eyes, in that moment, but why a curse—”

“That’s not it,” said Robin. “The first time it was—lots, at once, and all different. And . . .” He swallowed, and told Edwin about the vision he’d had of Lord Hawthorn on the boat, while standing in the doorway of Hawthorn’s room.

“Did he look older? Younger?”

“Not visibly.”

“Past, present, future,” said Edwin. He didn’t seem to be talking to Robin anymore. He dug in a pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out his string, looping it rapidly around his hands. “Not the present. Perhaps one of the others.”

“That’s possible? Seeing the future?”

Edwin’s mouth thinned. “No. Yes. Foresight’s not even proper magic, nobody knows where it comes from, and it’s too rare for there to be any hope of studying it properly. Half the confirmed cases in history weren’t even in magicians. There’s one in India at the moment, and one in Germany, and I haven’t the foggiest about any others. People with it get . . . snapped up. They’re useful.” He shot Robin an uneasy look. His thumbs were moving in a graceful dance. “I’ve never heard of it being induced. If someone knew how to induce it, through a curse or by any other means, they’d make a fortune.”

“And wouldn’t go around bestowing it willy-nilly on people they’re trying to threaten, one assumes,” said Robin.

The cradle formed between Edwin’s hands wasn’t glowing, but the air caught within the string shimmered like the space above a hot pan. “Pi sixty-seven, pi sixty-one, kappa fourteen two, beta zero one seven through nine.” Edwin clapped his hands, crushing the string between them, then made a flicking motion.