A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(41)

Edwin sat quiet in his seat dabbing crusts through a smear of yellow pickle until the appearance of warm treacle tart and clotted cream distracted Charlie into a sticky silence.

“Something like that” was all Edwin said then.

“Well!” Trudie clapped her hands to summon the room’s attention. “It’s not a game of charades, but it’s not something you see every day, is it?”

So they all ended up in the library after all. Robin’s lunch sat uneasily in his stomach. He did want the thing off, he did want Edwin to try now.

“One of these days a brainy type like Win here is going to work out how to let one magician draw on another’s power,” said Billy. His affable, freckled face smiled up at Robin from where he was sitting backwards on a chair. “And then our Charlie won’t be so much in demand.”

Charlie snorted. “You mean I’d merely be in demand as some sort of—cart horse, or motor-engine. Someone else holding the reins? Rather not. You have the power you have, and that’s an end to it.”

“Is this another of those central problems?” Robin asked Edwin, who nodded.

“Theoretically, it should be possible,” Edwin said. “But it’s never worked in practice. Not in the entire history of magic.”

Robin struggled to recall the explanation Edwin had given that very first day in the Whitehall office. At least he had the excuse of lifelong ignorance. “It isn’t just a matter of contracts?”

“Should be, shouldn’t it?” said Billy. He gave Robin an appraising look, as though he’d unexpectedly done a trick. “You’re settling into this like a natural, Sir Robin. Honestly, a commendable lack of gibbering.”

“Win’s probably been lecturing the poor boy for days,” said Belinda. “Some of it’s bound to have sunk in.”

Edwin looked steadily at Robin. “Yes. Contracts. But how do you define a person, with the precision needed? How do you define their magic? Either it would be so complex it would take ten magicians a year to build the spell, or it’s something so simple we’ll never think of it. It’s impossible. We work around it.” He tapped his fingers on the table and glanced at Charlie. “We make do.”

“We rely on the brainy types,” said Miggsy. He said it much less pleasantly than Billy had. “Are you sure this is going to work? There are plenty of curses that last until death, you know.”

Robin’s throat tightened. Edwin’s glance to him was shuttered, as Edwin’s company-glances were, but Robin could have sworn that what the shutters had closed on was guilt. So Edwin was withholding some information.

“I’m not a child,” said Robin. “You don’t have to protect me.”

Instead of answering, Edwin frowned at Miggsy and said, “And there are plenty of curses that do not, and each of those had a first time when someone cracked their removal. Should we give up without even trying?”

Miggsy raised his hands in mocking surrender. Trudie gave a stifled giggle. The eager attention of their eyes reminded Robin of laughter on the lake, and suddenly he felt more exposed, more vulnerable, and more angry. He wasn’t anyone’s to put on display. Not anymore.

“I’d prefer it if it was just Edwin and Charlie,” he said. “If you fellows wouldn’t mind?”

Trudie had the nerve to pout. None of them argued, though Belinda lingered near the door as though she were thinking of doing so.

“Go on, darling,” said Charlie. “A man doesn’t care for a female to see him in pain, does he? You wouldn’t sit around gawping at him having his tooth pulled.”

“Thank you,” said Edwin dryly as his sister left the library. He handed Charlie a piece of paper half-covered with the symbols of cradling notation. “Shall we get on? It’s built on a reversal framework, but you won’t be applying it to the curse itself. I’ve defined the three stages. The first is an exact copy, ink onto paper—you shouldn’t have any trouble with that. Then a deep sympathy, like the one you used on the map of the lake. I’ve had to guess at the defining terms for the curse, but it should hold. And then this one, with the reversal folded into it.”

Charlie skimmed his eyes down the paper. “I’ve not seen that one before. That clause—is it dissolution?”

“It’s a domestic spell.” The corner of Edwin’s mouth curled: a small piece of pride. “Your maids likely use it to lift stains from your tablecloths. You lift the ink away, once the sympathy’s applied, and we hope to blazes the curse comes away with it. You see?”

“I say, that’s rather neat,” said Charlie. “So it starts . . .?”

“Don’t just waft your finger like that. Here.”

It took another ten minutes while Edwin frowned and adjusted Charlie’s fingers in the same way that Scholz adjusted a man’s stance in the boxing ring. Charlie, in the absence of his wife and friends, took the corrections more amiably than Robin had expected.

Robin, hating the constant winding of his nerves with the delay and not at all keen on the image of tooth-pulling that Charlie had dropped into his head, sketched the eerie landscape of his last vision on the back of some more of Edwin’s notes.

Finally Edwin pronounced himself satisfied. Robin rolled up his sleeve for what he hoped was going to be the last time.