A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(64)
“Mr. Courcey?” Mrs. Greengage was holding herself straight, not providing much clue as to whether she would prefer to welcome the estate’s unexpected new owner or kick him out on his ear.
Edwin nodded. “We’ll stay. Thank you.”
“And we apologise for the bother of it, on top of all the shocks you’ve had today,” said Robin, in tones far warmer than Edwin had managed. “Do let us know if there’s somewhere we’ll be out of your way.”
They were tidied out of the way into a small sitting room, cold from having its curtains drawn, presumably to prevent the fading of several tapestries and large watercolours that Robin inspected immediately.
Edwin sat on a sofa and let his head rest in his hands. Robin should have been the one to have an estate crash into his grasp. He needed money; Edwin didn’t. He knew how to be nice to people, to make them feel appreciated. Edwin was lucky to remember to nod at acquaintances in the street.
Dinner was quiet, the meal obviously prepared in a heroic effort to cater to young male palates from a kitchen stocked mostly by the tastes of an old woman. Afterwards, they were shown up to rooms that had the musty and faintly surprised air of places where the dustcovers had only just been whisked off the furniture.
Edwin poured water from ewer to basin and splashed some onto his face, pushed back his hair, and stared blankly at the thin face in the dresser’s mirror, scored with red marks. The darker red of the jacquard silk dressing gown did his pallor no favours at all. His clothes had been taken away to be cleaned and mended; they’d not changed for dinner, having nothing suitable to change into. The gown still smelled faintly of mothballs. In its pocket Edwin had stowed a new loop of string, which he’d begged from the housekeeper. He dipped his fingertips in and touched it for comfort.
The guidelight had split into two when Edwin first entered the bedroom. Half had remained in the bracket in the hall, but the rest had followed him inside and found its place in an old-fashioned guidekeeper, a cylinder of amber glass with a bronze handle so that one could move it around the room by hand. The light was strong enough that there was barely a need to do so. When Edwin’s hand came near the keeper, the light flickered and brightened further, and a warm sensation spread up Edwin’s arm. It was a cousin to the sandpaper rasp that had heralded Robin’s danger in the lake, and also to the everyday itch of existing on Penhallick lands. At the same time it was nothing like either of them. It felt, too much, like power.
When he turned his gaze from the mirror to the windows, the curtain-ties unhooked themselves and the curtains gave a twitch towards their centre as if to ask: This? Is this what you want?
Edwin closed his eyes. If he told himself that the coaxing glow of magic was no more than something to be studied, he might be able to keep the enormity of the situation at bay. He knew a little about how estates could be, if they’d been inhabited for generations by an unbroken line of magicians. Stopped clocks were only the least of it. When he’d visited Cheetham Hall as a child, Jack and Elsie had competed in the ballroom to see who could flatter the floorboards into tilting beneath the other’s foot. Elsie would win far more often than not, and Jack would lie back on the floor and shout with begrudging laughter, curling his fingers wickedly until the rug twitched from beneath Edwin’s spectator feet and sent him sprawling as well. Jack Alston, a dark, wild boy with all the power of his inheritance at his command, and a family who loved him without question.
Edwin had learned to want him, then, and also to fold his resentment in that want like a glass shard in layers of tissue.
A knock came on the door, followed by Robin’s voice pitched low. “Edwin?”
“Come in.”
Robin’s hair was wet through, his own scrapes standing out stark on his freshly washed face, within which the hazel of his eyes shone like the surface of a lake. The dressing gown that had been found for him was dark green, quilted fabric tied with a black cord. He’d pushed up one sleeve, baring the curse to the air. He was rubbing over it with one thumb, hard enough to crease the skin.
Edwin nodded at it. “Is it . . .?”
“Just once, a few minutes ago,” said Robin. “I’m counting my stars that it didn’t go off when we were in the maze. So it really could have been worse.”
He’d said that when they first emerged. Just before—before.
“Yes,” Edwin said softly. “It could have been.”
“So are you glad I plunged in after you now?”
It was an impossible question, coming at the end of an impossible day, and Edwin’s emotions crowded him like birds trapped in a cage, beating and beating against his usual inability to express them. Strangest of all was the fact that for once he didn’t feel afraid. Perhaps his fear, like his magic, had a finite volume, and he’d drained it all in the maze. They’d both almost died. And even if they’d been half the world away, with no blood-pledge to hold Edwin responsible for keeping Robin alive, he’d still find the idea of Robin coming to further harm—unacceptable.
“No, I’m not glad,” he snapped, a wild and unstoppable lie. “I knew you would be nothing but trouble.”
Robin was smiling, because Robin didn’t know what was good for him. That was how he ended up like this, with the scratches on his face and his hands, and—and Edwin couldn’t stop himself from reaching out and tracing the worst of the scabbed red lines, half-flattered and half-guilty and all-over angry with the world for putting him here, now, richer than he’d been at the start of the day by one of the oldest magical properties in England and by this, Robin Blyth lifting his palms willingly to Edwin’s inspection, displaying the evidence that they’d both bled out of desperation today. Edwin was so angry it filled his skull like hot water. He couldn’t breathe past it.