A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(39)

Edwin said, “I meant to ask how you are. Any damage from—what happened yesterday?”

There were bruises blossoming beneath the scrapes on Robin’s arms. His head still ached. He still felt on edge, though that might have been the coffee.

Instead of any of that he found himself saying, “I’ve not often been the butt of the joke before.”

Edwin said, with an odd lightness that didn’t sting as much as it could have, “More used to being the bully than the bullied?”

“Well, I wasn’t one to step in and stop that sort of thing, when I saw it happening at school.” Robin shrugged. “I’m not proud of it. Tried to do better, when I—when I woke up to the fact that it wasn’t really funny, I suppose.” When he began to understand that what he was seeing at home, when his parents gathered well-dressed people into sparkling rooms and made pretty speeches about charity, was the adult version of the same game, only half of which was played to the victim’s face. The other half was the whispers; the casual venom. The two-facedness. The brutal construction of one’s reputation on the shreds of those you flattered with one hand and tore down with the other.

“Dead Man’s Legs is a good spell for bullies,” Edwin said. “Walt was very fond of it for a while, if I ever looked too keen to dodge out of whatever light humiliation he’d planned for that day.”

Robin tried to find a good response to that. Edwin had spoken matter-of-factly, but his shoulders had lifted: he was offering Robin a sliver of vulnerability. And after seeing the way Edwin was treated by everyone in his family but his mother, Robin couldn’t pretend to be surprised.

“Did you and your brother overlap at school, then?”

“For two years,” said Edwin. “And no amount of scolding about using magic when away from home ever stopped Walt. Most of his crowd were magicians, too, and he was good at finding corners.”

Robin remembered how that went. Every school had those corners, conveniently out of sight, and out of hearing range of the masters’ offices.

To steer them elsewhere, Robin asked more about learning magic. A great many questions had been building up in the aftermath of his initial shocks. Edwin’s shoulders relaxed as he explained the ways in which boy magicians learned cradling and its notations.

“There’s a curriculum, of sorts. But everything past the basics depends on one’s tutors. And how ruthless one’s parents are about lessons during holidays, if they send you to a normal school as well.”

“Your mother doesn’t strike me as ruthless,” said Robin, smiling.

A shadow crossed Edwin’s face. “She’s the reason I was allowed to spend my summers under tutorship. Father didn’t consider me worth the expense. I was never going to amount to much.”

Robin glanced around them, at this edifice to knowledge. “What about university?”

“There’s no university of English magic,” said Edwin. “You can study apprentice-style from other scholars, if you wish. But I enjoyed Oxford. For its own sake. And there’s been nobody doing really original magical work in this country since the turn of the century. Nobody making advances. Nobody who could have taught me more than I found out for myself.” He stirred the pages of a book with his fingers. A bitter smile touched his mouth. “I never had enough power that I had to be taught to control it.”

Control was a word that hung on Edwin like a half-fitted suit. In some places it clung to him; in others it gaped, in a way that made Robin want to hook his fingers into the loose seams and tug. He didn’t want Edwin to stop talking.

“There must be scholars in other countries?” he ventured.

“Yes, but it’s the same as any area of study. Often there’s no common language. I’ve enough French to struggle through a few arguments with members of their Académie, but that’s all. And correspondence is slow.”

Robin had a brief vision of wax-sealed letters floating across the ocean like so many gulls. He supposed that rainstorms could be a problem.

“What about your pen?” he asked. “Couldn’t someone in France do a spell so that it wrote down—whatever they wanted you to know? Or could you have a set of them, one each, where one of them copies what the other is writing?”

Edwin stared at him. Then rubbed a hand over his face. Robin expected one of those university-tutor sighs; it took him a moment to realise that Edwin was laughing, in a small silent way.

“Of course,” said Edwin. “Trust you, Sir Robin Blyth, to accidentally stumble onto one of the central problems of magical progress. No, I’m not joking. It was a good idea. Here. The problem is distance.” He set his hands on the table, shoulder-width apart. “How much do you know about natural sciences?”

“Er,” said Robin.

“Gravity? Sir Isaac Newton?”

“The apple chap?”

Edwin visibly shredded his planned explanation into shorter words. “Forces act strongly if two things are close together. Much less so if they’re far apart. And magic is the same. You can imbue an object and let it be—there are plenty of magical objects—but you can’t change its properties, or directly control it. You need to be close, for that. Not even Charlie could have cast that sympathy with the map from anywhere but right next to the lake.” He picked up a piece of scrap paper and tore it into the rough shape of a person, then cradled up a spell that he smeared over the paper figure. “Touch it.”