“Married a few hours and jilted already,” said Edwin. “Robin. Fight for your honour.”
“I haven’t any,” said Robin amiably. “I let my sister run off and be ruined, remember? And I plan to be a thoroughly unfaithful husband.”
“Very well,” said Jack. “As my wedding gift to you, Robin, I will not steal your wife. In the society papers or anywhere else.”
“Much obliged,” said Robin.
“There is a real gift as well,” Jack said, because it was ridiculous to feel outdone by a snowflake. “Beehives, and two swarms of bees, for Thornley Hill. They should be delivered next week.”
“How do you deliver bees?” asked Violet with interest.
“With great care, and something to do with smoke,” said Alan. “Apparently.”
“It’s part of making bargain with the land,” said Jack. “Even for unmagical people. You talk to them. Announce things—births. Weddings.”
Robin didn’t laugh. He nodded seriously and looked at Edwin. “A bargain. Then let’s do it properly. I think I remember how it works.”
Robin climbed to his feet and went to the still-hovering snowflake, and touched it more deliberately than Maud had. His fingertip came away dotted red with blood.
And then Sir Robin Blyth, unmagical as he was, knelt down and swore the traditional blood-oath to, he said, as much of the land as would have him.
“And, er, this is my household,” he added awkwardly. “If you don’t know that already. And my sister, and—my terrible black-sheep cousin, I suppose,” with a grin for Jack. “And the people we love. There.”
Jack shared a look with Alan. They agreed silently that this was far too much sincerity to be committed in public, but also that they wouldn’t say a thing to ruin it.
“You too, Addy,” said Edwin.
“I will if you will,” she said, giving him a hand up. Edwin blinked but didn’t protest. And they, too, shed their blood and put it into the wet earth and made a promise. To tend and to mend.
And then all three of them flinched a little, as if something had struck them.
“Robin?” said Maud at once.
“I don’t know,” said Robin. He looked at Edwin, who was frowning at his bleeding finger.
“I think it took,” he said. “I think—”
“Yes, I think it did,” said Adelaide, her voice strange. “Ah. Edwin?”
A pale light was flickering on her fingers: small but there. It vanished. Then, as Adelaide narrowed her eyes, it appeared again, brighter than before.
Silence.
“Bloody hell,” said Alan.
“Indeed,” said Jack dryly. “That changes things.”
Adelaide dropped the light and put a hand to her shocked mouth. Maud lifted and stared at her own hands, her eyes also huge and considering. Edwin’s face was a crowded portrait of ten questions being asked at once. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. No doubt the questions were fighting for preeminence.
Before any of them could win, Robin put his hands on either side of Edwin’s neck.
“Edwin,” he said, in his most baronet tones. “Today, I want to enjoy some uncomplicated time out here with my family, and then go back to the house and be a good host. You can plan the complete reinvention of British magic—again—tomorrow.”
After a short age, Edwin nodded.
“The country wedding of Sir Robert Blyth and Miss Adelaide Morrissey was a quiet, intimate affair,” said Alan. He moved closer to Jack and plucked Jack’s stick from his grasp. “No immortal fae in attendance, no healthy screaming from the bride’s infant niece when asked if anyone had grounds to object, and no earth-shattering revelations about magic whatsoever.”
“Your tongue for fiction is as smooth as ever, Cesare.”
Alan’s gaze caught on his and darkened, but he didn’t pick up the easy bait. Instead, he continued running his hand consideringly up and down Jack’s stick, caressing the golden-brown gloss of the wood in a tight, encircling grip.
Heat pooled lazily in Jack’s belly. Alan didn’t look away.
“I’ll thank you to stop that filthy behaviour at once, Mr. Ross,” said Violet, flopping down next to him. She used a shocked and quavery voice. “There are unmarried ladies present.”
Alan went slightly red and fumbled the stick.
Jack laughed. He leaned back until his own hand was off the blanket, fingers buried in the wet grass. This wasn’t his land. And yet all of this land was his, in a way, as it was every magician’s. He relaxed into the faint, far-off throb of magic flowing, renewing itself as it went: paths lying full like floods, indeed, and no longer weak but there for the taking, as they all taught themselves how.
And somewhere far away on the ley lines was Cheetham Hall, and the sleeping ghost of Elsie—to whom Jack had told the story of the equinox and George’s death, as she’d asked. And then let her rest.
Adelaide had now dragged Edwin back down to the blanket and sat with her head leaned on his shoulder, the two of them carrying on a conversation with Maud that sounded suspiciously like they were getting a head start on the reinvention of magic regardless.
Robin hadn’t noticed yet. He was distracted by Violet, who was performing for Alan an unfortunately dead-on impression of the elderly vicar who’d performed the wedding ceremony. Alan, Jack’s stick loose in his hand, had a wicked gleam in his eyes that said he was considering joining in—perhaps to play the part of Lady Dufay, who’d sat with Lady Cheetham beside Jack and Alan and muttered critical commentary throughout the whole thing.
Family.
Jack didn’t have Robin’s optimism. He wouldn’t call this collection of beloved and fascinating chaos uncomplicated, nor did it stand much chance of ever being so. But—as Edwin liked to say, it was the way of magic. Broken items wanted to be whole. Sets yearned to be complete.
Twilight fell, and magic spread. Jack could feel it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Even more than the other two in the series, I think this book deserves some quick historical notes. Nobody with a speaking role on-page is a real historical figure, but Randall Kenyon is a fictionalised version of Fabian Ware, the editor in chief of the Morning Post in 1909. The Post was indeed owned by the Countess Bathurst, and they did indeed try to raise money for an airship to be used for national defence.
Pretty much everything around the People’s Budget except for the exact aristocrats debating it is also accurate. People have been trying to drag a functioning welfare state into existence for a very long time, and other people have been throwing tantrums about it for just as long.
In building the life and background of Alan and his family, I drew heavily from the book Round About a Pound a Week, a piece of astonishingly detailed and practical sociological research into the lives of working-class Edwardian London families, published by Maud Pember Reeves and the Fabian Society’s Women’s Group in 1913.
I have to extend some thanks to the Italian island-palace of Isola Bella, whose garden terraces, sea grotto, peacocks, and golden pheasants I shamelessly stole for the Cheetham estate’s landscaping project. And speaking of which: mild apologies to the locale of Cheetham, which I ennobled and dragged from Manchester to Essex.