A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(40)

Robin touched the paper, gingerly, and felt something like a snap of static. The paper figure sprang upright on the table. Robin snatched his hand back. The paper man’s arm gave a flap in imitation.

“Sympathy,” said Edwin. “See?”

Robin, mostly to prove he’d understood the thing about distance, stood and walked steadily backwards across the floor. The figure jerkily copied his movements for the first two steps, then faltered, then rippled and fell to the table, lifeless. Robin waved from a distance and nothing happened.

“That’s rather weird,” Robin said. He couldn’t help thinking unsettlingly of the man with the fog mask and the glowing string, and the way Robin’s body had felt, entirely unresponsive to the demands of his mind.

“Hm,” said Edwin, looking at the limp paper figure.

“Hm?”

Edwin cradled up the indexing spell and summoned books from two different corners of the library. He directed Robin to look through some ghastly tome called A Comprehensive Survey of European Runic Evolution for any symbols that looked anything like the ones on his arm.

“I thought you’d been through this one already,” said Robin.

“William Morris,” said Edwin, distractedly, flicking through one of his new acquisitions.

“Pardon?”

“You’ve an eye for pattern.” Edwin paused, but didn’t look up. “You might catch something I missed.”

Robin sighed, found the sketch Edwin had made of the curse the previous day, and prepared himself to stare at inked symbols until his head ached. Meanwhile Edwin summoned one of the maids into the room and spent some time getting her to demonstrate what seemed to be a spell for removing stains from rugs, while he stared at her fingers and copied their motions.

Perhaps the strongest magician was the best choice, but Robin trusted the instinct that had led him to prefer Edwin when it came to his own safety. There was a deliberation to the way Edwin worked, an insistence on perfect angles, that reminded Robin of Penhallick House’s wallpapers: overcomplex from a distance, but rewarding closer inspection.

Once the maid was dismissed, Edwin went away to the window seat with another book and his imbued pen, which hovered and took notes as Edwin murmured snatches of incomprehensible words to it. The day was grey and dull, with a sodden heaviness to the clouds and the occasional distant rumble of a storm rolling around the vicinity. The light falling onto Edwin was not the golden Turner light that had first grabbed Robin’s attention.

It didn’t seem to matter. Robin still wanted to stare at him, framed as he was by the wood, one leg thrust out across the wide cushion of the seat, head bent over the open book.

This was becoming ridiculous.

Several chapters’ worth of meaningless symbols later, Robin found himself half wishing that the foresight would strike; it would at least provide an alternative to the endless movement of his eyes between page and sketch, with frequent detours to land on Edwin, who had once again taken to doing thoughtful laps of the library floor.

Robin’s vision on the lake the previous day had been an unsettling one: a stretch of flat, muddy land under an equally muddy dusk. Winter trees, motionless. Flashes of light and plumes of smoke in the distance. As with the other visions, there’d been no sound, but something about the scene had given Robin the sense that there would be little to hear. The landscape had felt eerily uninhabited, as though someone had tried to paint the Temptation in the Wilderness and forgotten to add the figure of Christ.

Ever since the first evening, the visions had come one at a time. That was something.

“Anything?” Edwin paused by the table.

Robin flicked back to where he’d used a paper scrap to mark a figure of runes that had some of the same curlicue flourishes joining one symbol to the next, though none of the individual runes looked even slightly like those on Robin’s arm. Robin had tried to read the dense text accompanying the figure. He’d given that up after the first paragraph, which held a grisly description of exactly how the depicted curse had been thought to boil a man’s blood within his veins.

“Possibly,” said Edwin, in an obvious effort at politeness.

“I’ll keep at it,” said Robin.

By the time one of the downstairs maids knocked to ask if they’d prefer to have sandwiches brought in, it was drizzling. Their lunch—in the dining hall, at the insistence of Robin, who was feeling restless again—was interrupted by Belinda’s cheerful and lightly rained-upon group, who descended on the piles of sandwiches and cold cuts without bothering to change out of their damp clothes. Trudie began an embellished, tinkling version of how she’d slipped on pebbles and nearly fell halfway down a hill.

“Plans for the afternoon, chaps?” asked Billy, beneath this recital. “And don’t say the library.”

Edwin said, loud enough to be heard by the whole table, “We were hoping to take the curse off Robin, actually.”

Trudie’s voice faltered as eyes swung their way. Billy’s eyebrows shot high. “Cracked it, have you?”

“I’ve an idea worth trying.” Edwin cleared his throat. “Charlie, we’d be glad if you did the honours.”

Charlie drew himself up like a pigeon chest-puffing out of a puddle. “Of course,” he said, through a mouthful of ham and cress. “Now, if you ask me, the best thing for a general reversal—” And he rambled on from there, insisted on seeing Robin’s arm again, and called upon Belinda to remember a time when he’d removed a dancing imbuement that someone’s drunken uncle had laid on the cutlery at their wedding dinner.