A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(34)
The lake was edged with boggy reeds and stretches of coarse sand, with seven small rowboats scattered around its shore like compass points. The day still looked bright and idyllic, but a cool wind had picked up.
Robin had his hands thrust into his pockets as he and Edwin followed the others down the path to the lake. He cast a glance at Edwin and said, as though it had been on his mind, “You really don’t like this place. The outdoors bits of it, at least.”
“No,” said Edwin shortly. He certainly didn’t like boating, and yet here he was. After what had happened yesterday with the arrow, he didn’t trust his sister to safely involve someone unmagical in her games.
“I never know how to feel about Thornley Hill, myself,” said Robin. “Haven’t been back for years, and we only ever had a few winters there when I was a boy.”
“My family’s blood-pledge to this land is almost younger than I am. My parents did the dedication ceremony when they bought it, because that’s what one does. But power fills the gaps in this as well. And I haven’t enough, and the land knows. I didn’t know any better until I went away to school and suddenly it was different, suddenly it was . . .” Like he could take a full breath for the first time. Like the incredible loudness of a perpetual noise ceasing. “It’s better in the city. More distractions.” Edwin closed his mouth. He’d said more, and more easily, than he’d intended.
“Chin up,” said Robin, clapping Edwin’s shoulder in a rah-the-Blues kind of way. “I suppose we city fellows must grin and bear these things from time to time.”
He demonstrated the grin in question, sunny as the sky. Edwin felt a prickle of pleasure at the sight, and hastily quashed it. He wasn’t searching for kinship. He wasn’t looking to have things in common with Sir Robert Blyth, who was pleasant and hearty and probably born with an oar in one hand and a cricket bat in the other.
But you have a taste in common, a treacherous voice in him murmured. You know you do.
Edwin dragged his eyes down to his own feet, cursing his complexion as it heated. He’d honestly forgotten that he’d brought any Roman tracts to Penhallick from the city.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, any more than it mattered that Robin’s hair shone like polished wood in the sunlight, or that he’d rolled his sleeves up past his elbows again and Edwin wanted to trace the veins and tendons of those well-cut rower’s forearms with his own fingertips, learn their textures, make a small sensory memory for himself to pull out on quiet nights in front of the fire. He’d felt like that a good handful of times at school—at university—and for the most part he’d known to avoid those boys and those men. Even when it was mutual, attraction didn’t conjure respect from nowhere. Where contempt existed, attraction could even deepen it.
No, Edwin’s body couldn’t be trusted to make decisions.
They joined everyone else at the side of the lake. Bel had explained the basics over lunch—or rather, she’d begun to explain and then Charlie had taken over, with a touch to her wrist and one of those benignly bestowed smiles that said he didn’t want to tax the little woman’s intelligence. Each of them would have their own small boat. Bel and Charlie had drawn up a large map of the lake and divided it into squares, each one representing a section of the water about six feet in each dimension. Many of those squares had been set with charms, either friendly or not-so-friendly—“Nothing irreversible!” tinkled Bel. Some of them held floating lilies that would unfold, at a light tap, to reveal prizes. A few of the lilies would be decoys; there was no way to tell without rowing out to them and trying your luck.
One of the groundskeepers had rowed out and planted the lilies in the lake, held in place with hanging weights. Charlie had cast each trap-charm, folded them small and embedded them into the map, then overlaid a thorough sympathy that flung the spells invisibly out to haunt their positions in the lake like ghosts.
It was a fiddly, pretty piece of magic. All the prettiness of it was probably Bel’s. The bulk of the magic, of course, had been Charlie’s. The two of them had taken a sip of lethe-mint nicely calculated to cover the time they’d spent preparing the map, so that they could play alongside everyone else. A friend of Edwin’s mother had been known to do that in order to attend the same play every night of the week, or read her favourite mystery novel ten times over. It probably did the mind no favours to use it in that cavalier fashion, but nobody writing in English had ever studied these substances with the proper rigour, to Edwin’s irritation.
Edwin took the blue boat, next along the lake’s circumference from the red one Robin had claimed. He wrangled an oar to shove himself off, immediately won himself a splinter, and winced. By the time he managed to get the boat pointing towards the centre of the lake, Robin was already heading towards the nearest lily with a smoothness that Edwin would never be able to mimic.
Robin hadn’t gone far, however, before he jerked and began to laugh. And laugh, and laugh, doubling over in the boat. Laughter was coming from some of the other boats as well, and shouts of advice or mockery. The warmth of Robin’s laughter was beginning to take on the helpless edge of hysteria by the time the momentum of his boat drifted him out of the square and he was able to calm down.
“All right?” Edwin called.
“Tip-top!” Robin returned with a hint of wheeze.