A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(33)

“That’s right. You were going to show me the rest of it.”

Edwin glanced at the books as if tempted to continue the tutorial. “We have more useful things to be doing. I don’t want to find out how much worse that curse of yours is going to get if we can’t remove it, and I can’t imagine you’re keen on it either.”

Robin swallowed and his mood soured as another squeeze of fear was wrung from him like lemon juice. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the half hour. “No.”

“Curses laid in the air that appear on the skin fall under a certain category of rune-magic,” said Edwin. Now it was his turn to show Robin a page of his book, though God only knew what he expected Robin to glean from it. “Though I still can’t find a single reference to foresight being induced. I think you should keep your head down about that. It doesn’t much matter if we tell the others about the curse, but true foresight is too rare. You’d have half the Magical Assembly on your doorstep as soon as we got back to town if there was a murmur it might be that.” A humourless smile. “And I don’t think any of Bel’s friends know how to murmur anything.”

Robin thought he was doing very well indeed dealing with a houseful of magicians at leisure. He shuddered at the idea of being dragged off by—political ones.

“I can keep my mouth shut,” he said.

“Leave this with me,” Edwin instructed, hefting the Tales.

Robin sighed and abandoned the most interesting book in the place to join a whole pile of very dull-looking ones. For a while longer he wandered both levels of the library and browsed in the unmagical style, pulling things from the shelves and enjoying the incomprehensible novelty of their titles. His stomach was beginning to rumble in real demand for lunch, and the sun through the window was making his legs itch with longing to be properly stretched. At a normal house party he’d have suggested a game of cricket, but perhaps magicians didn’t care for anything so mundane. Or perhaps they played with a ball that would dodge the bat and try to slam itself against your pads.

If there was no real sport to be played, then messing around in boats like Charlie had mentioned didn’t sound too bad, after a morning spent indoors. Even a bracing lake swim would be something.

His attention elsewhere, Robin fumbled the precarious row of books he’d idly drawn halfway out from the shelf, creating a pointless pattern of indented spines. Several of them fell to the floor and Robin hurried to pick them up.

“Wait, bring them over here,” Edwin said. “Did you damage the covers?”

Robin tried for an apologetic grimace as he carried the books to the table. The pages of one looked strangely jagged and uneven, and Robin’s stomach lurched in disproportionate panic, but he realised that in fact a much smaller book had been tucked into the large one and was now slipping free.

He pulled it clear. It was a thin bound pamphlet. The cover was purple.

His fingers released it as though burned, and he let it fall to the table. Then he realised that this action was the most revealing thing he could have done.

Robin looked up. Edwin didn’t look horrified, or embarrassed, or even faintly curious. Edwin’s expression held a wary nothingness. He studied Robin’s face and Robin saw the moment when he made a decision based on what he saw there.

He’d wondered if Edwin might try to bluff it out. Instead Edwin said carefully, “I’d forgotten I’d brought any of those here. You’d better hold on to it, in case someone else stumbles across it.”

“Yes, I imagine there’s practically a queue of people panting to get their hands on . . .” Robin flicked back to the frontispiece of the larger book and read aloud. “A Treatise on the Major Variants of Temporal Clauses in Thaumokinetics.”

“Indeed. Light reading,” said Edwin dryly.

Robin’s laughter startled out too quickly for him to snatch it back. That small smile flickered on Edwin’s face again. Robin opened the purple book to see its own title, which was set above the smaller-type words BY A ROMAN.

“Exploits of a Cabin Boy. I think I remember this one. Heavy on the, ah, whippings.”

“I—” said Edwin, and there was a sharp, casual rap from the library’s open door.

“Look at you fellows, startling like someone’s set off a lightning charm,” said Billy Byatt. “Stir yourselves and wash up for lunch: Bel’s orders. What’s so bally important that you’ve spent the whole morning cooped up with books, anyhow?”

“Government work,” said Edwin. “Research. I’m sure you’d find it dull.”

“No doubt,” said Billy cheerfully. “Chop-chop!” and was gone again.

Robin slid the Roman tract back into the treatise, and together they returned the mistreated books to the shelf before they left the library. The atmosphere between them had become both lighter and more weighty, somehow. What Hawthorn had implied about Edwin, the purple tract had confirmed. And it would have been far more than that, for Edwin. It would have been tantamount to realisation—a first dawning glimpse of the fact that Robin, too, was a man who sought the company of other men, or at least was familiar with one of the more popular writers of homosexual erotica distributed through an otherwise reputable shop on Charing Cross Road.

Robin thought about the string that Edwin used in his spells: how a particular cradle might have five or six or eight lines of the pattern joining one hand to another. Binding them close. Robin and Edwin had already shared a handful of secrets, and now they shared another, and this awareness of their common nature—in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with magic—hung delicate and unspoken between them as they left the room.