A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(74)

Edwin swore full personal responsibility for the Blyths and their memories. Bel had never much cared for responsibility; she all but dusted off her hands, and resurrected her smile.

“I know you don’t spend much time with the family, Win,” she said in parting. “I suppose it’s easier for you, all things considered, to live like one of them”—she waved her hand—“but do remember, won’t you, that you’re one of us?”

“Yes, Bel,” said Edwin.

He wanted to shout that she knew nothing about his life, nothing about what he found easy and what was difficult. But Charlie was frowning and nodding behind her shoulder, and Edwin was not, in the end, at all brave. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he had yelled. Bel and Charlie had always had that perfect immunity, like a waterproofing charm cast at birth. Criticism slid off.

It was only when they wandered away, arm in arm, that Edwin realised they hadn’t asked him why he and Robin ended up staying the extra night at Sutton Cottage. Why Edwin’s face and arms now itched with shallow scabs.

Edwin had never really convinced himself that Charlie and Bel could be involved in this entire business of murder and contracts and curses and secrets. Now he rather thought it was impossible. If they knew what had happened, surely they’d at least bother with the pretence that they didn’t.

They didn’t know. And it simply didn’t occur to them to care.

Even so: Edwin wasn’t about to drop his guard entirely at Penhallick. Miggsy had more than enough nastiness running through him to be dangerous, Billy seemed easily led by stronger personalities, and Edwin didn’t think he’d ever seen a true emotion of Trudie Davenport’s. She performed as she breathed. She could be hiding almost anything.

He went to his mother’s rooms next, but her maid Annie told him she’d just fallen asleep and that she’d barely caught a wink the previous night. Edwin promised to return later, and let his feet take him to the library. He recognised that he was hiding. The last few days had represented the most time he’d spent constantly in the company of another person in years. Robin was surprisingly easy to be around, but even so, part of Edwin felt like the Gatlings’ oak-heart clock: run-down, out of power. Needing refreshment to be any good at all.

And this, the large lavish space with its silence and the soaring shelves of books—each one bearing his own hand’s symbols, his own catalogue painstakingly charmed into them—was the refreshment he needed. The usual itchy Penhallick sensation had been both stronger and less uncomfortable since he returned, like how he imagined it felt to don a pair of reading glasses and see words come into focus when one had been straining after them. He didn’t know what he’d expected. For Penhallick to be jealous, somehow? For it to have disavowed his blood? No—plenty of families had multiple properties.

He’d have to research it. Thoroughly. After all of this was over, of course.

One of the servants had delivered the pile of Flora Sutton’s books to the library. Edwin had taken her three most recent volumes of journals, and a handful of those books that seemed most likely to refer to rune-curses, foresight, or the technicalities of magic as contract law. So far he’d had no luck at all concentrating on the curse; now at least they had a clue to the larger picture.

Edwin fetched Tales of the Isles and opened it to “The Tale of the Three Families and the Last Contract,” locating the illustration. Three objects. Physical symbols of the contract between the magical families and the fae. Coin and cup and knife.

My part of it alone is hardly going to do them much good, Flora Sutton had said. Was that it? Three pieces, and all of them needed?

Which part had she hidden in the maze’s heart, then let Reggie carry away with him, to be hidden in turn?

Even if they learned that, it still wouldn’t tell them what the pieces were needed for. The terrible purpose that Mrs. Sutton was convinced the contract could be turned to, which would hurt every magician in Great Britain.

Edwin opened one journal, then closed it again. If the dead woman had been telling the truth about the scale of this, then surely it was too big for him. He was one barely powered magician with nothing but a tendency to let books replace people in his life. He didn’t know how to own an estate, or to unravel deadly mysteries, or to hold responsibility for the minds and well-being of perfectly nice unmagical people within his hands.

He scrubbed at his eyes. He touched one of the scratches on his hand.

He had to try anyway. If Edwin had turned and walked away from Robin on that first Monday, Reggie would still be dead, and Edwin wouldn’t have even the smallest scrap of a notion why. Robin would still be cursed.

And Edwin wouldn’t have spent a week being mocked and half-killed and overwhelmed and—looked at like a miracle, and kissed like an explosion.

Edwin dragged himself back to his purpose. He used the index-spell to summon Perhew’s Contractual Structures in the Common Magicks, stacked it atop one of the Sutton books, and took them both over to the window seat. Fat raindrops chased and swallowed one another down the leaded panes. Edwin removed his shoes and rubbed his feet on the embroidered cushioned seat, letting himself be distracted by colour: the dark navy of his socks against the red and amber-yellow and brighter blue that formed the pattern of stitching on the cushion. He wondered what it was that Robin saw, looking at things like that.

Edwin bit at the soft flesh of his inner cheek and opened the first book on his lap.