A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(68)

“Ah,” said Edwin. “Whereas I am neither blind nor an idiot.”

It took Robin a second to recognise how neatly Edwin had bounced the compliment back at him. He grinned, shoulders relaxing as the tension between them mellowed.

Robin took his own turn at the basin, shivering as the water slid over his skin. Edwin found a pile of blankets in the large chest at the foot of the bed, then crouched by the fire. His hands looked hesitant, forming the cradles without string, but it seemed he’d barely begun the spell when the fire gave a small leap in the grate and began to burn more fiercely. He added a couple of logs and brushed his hands off as he stood.

“I’ve been thinking,” Edwin said.

“How very out of character.”

Another tugging smile. “Someone knew we were here. They knew how to find us; or you, rather. I’m not under any illusions that I was meant to escape that maze intact, and they may not have been counting on your attempt at heroics. They wanted you alone.”

Both of them slid under the blankets, sitting up, the spare ones wrapped around their shoulders. This was Edwin’s room, but he didn’t suggest by so much as a sidelong glance that Robin should leave. Robin hadn’t shared covers since boyhood, excluding a few nights when Maud had been particularly in need of whispered nonsense to distract her from where she was chafing against their parents’ plans for her future.

Robin had known Edwin a week, even if it felt longer. It was an odd, off-balance kind of domesticity to be discussing the events of the day in bed.

The events of the day, which had involved death and neardeath. Nothing about this wasn’t odd.

“Or they wanted us distracted, so they could go and demand information about the contract from Mrs. Sutton, now we’d led them to her,” Robin said. “In which case they succeeded.”

“Either way, they found us. You.”

Edwin’s raised eyebrows finally dragged Robin to the logical conclusion. “Everyone at dinner last night heard us plan to come here.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t make sense. If one of Belinda’s guests wanted to get me alone, they’ve had ample opportunity.”

“And if they wanted to hurt you,” said Edwin bleakly, “they could have cast the Pied Piper and Dead Man’s Legs on the same square of the lake.”

Robin blanched at the coolness with which Edwin seemed to accept that his sister and brother-in-law might be involved in this malicious plot. And yet—Charlie tried to remove the curse, Robin’s brain whispered, with equal coolness. And what happened then?

“The problem is,” Edwin went on, “the man who attacked us today managed to get past the estate warding.”

Robin felt stupid. It had been a long day, and he was sore. But Edwin’s had been just as long and he was much less physically fit; he’d sustained the same amount of damage, and here he was with his brain racing capably around like a cat after mice.

“I—didn’t think of that,” Robin said. “You think he wasn’t a magician?”

“It’s possible to cast an illusion mask on someone else, I suppose. I didn’t think of that. I assumed . . .” Edwin frowned, tilting his head back to rest against the wall. The lines scored across his throat by the thorned vines were disconcerting. He could have been a decapitated saint in a devotional, the carmine line of the wound painted in to hint at the manner of martyrdom. “I wondered if the curse could have a tracking clause,” he finished.

Robin looked at his arm. By now the runes had begun to creep up his shoulder. He had nearly a full sleeve’s worth of intricate black pattern.

“That might overcome a warding,” said Edwin, having switched easily into lecturing mode despite sitting with blankets pooled in his lap. “It’s a matter of one sort of spell having priority over another.”

“If they cast a spell to follow me, they could follow it even if the boundary spell was telling them not to?”

Edwin nodded.

“Then they didn’t need advance notice of where we were going,” said Robin, with relief. While he might not trust any of the members of Belinda’s party, he didn’t want to believe any of them capable of murder.

It did leave them without any more clues as to who was responsible, though. What clues had been in this house had died with Flora Sutton.

Robin thought suddenly of the vision he’d had of an old woman—a different old woman—black-clad and bright-eyed, being attacked in a small space. Something about the defiant edge to her smile had been the same as Mrs. Sutton’s.

“About Mrs. Sutton,” he said, tentative. “Did you have the feeling she didn’t give up whatever that chap wanted from her?”

“Yes,” said Edwin. “Or else she gave the answer he didn’t want, and then took herself out of the picture.”

That was a kind of courage that Robin wouldn’t have ascribed to many people. Certainly not to himself. When he’d punched the men in illusion masks, that first evening in the London streets, he’d been more surprised and affronted than anything else. Now, after six days of pain and confusion, he wondered if he’d still do the same thing. And if that wasn’t exactly what the curse’s pain and visions had been intended to inflict.

As much as Robin had wanted to shake the secrets out of Flora Sutton’s skirts—to know why he’d been cursed, and what Reggie Gatling might have died for—he’d seen the fear on her face, when she talked about the contract and what it could lead to.