Adelaide pulled out of Edwin’s arms, smoothed her hair, gave Robin a shaky smile, and went to collect her wine.
Lady Cheetham looked taken aback but recovered with aplomb. “And my truth is that I have never had as lovely a group of houseguests as this one, despite the circumstances.” She poured and lifted her own cup, lively and mischievous as if decades had dropped from her age. Alan thought of Jack’s comment about her loneliness. “Cheers.”
The wine slid over Alan’s tongue, whispering sweetness and a sensation of walking out into the garden and inhaling hard. The sweetness was restless. It flowed down through him, warming him, and Alan felt a knot of muscle between his shoulder blades soften like wax around a wick.
“Is it working on you, Master Perturbator?” asked Jack.
“Something is working.” Alan smiled. “Is it supposed to feel even better than this?” He’d expected everything to be fuzzy, for his thoughts to slow, but he felt as sharp as ever. The room’s colours were brighter. All the tiredness and tension of the day was sloughing from him. “Race you up to that bloody oak tree,” he suggested, grinning a challenge at Jack, and Jack put back his head and laughed. A long, true, rich laugh—different from the short barks of amusement Alan associated with him. It seemed infectious, because Maud started laughing as well.
Alan had only taken half his glass to begin with. Now he swallowed the other half and tried to be porous, as he had with Violet’s illusions. Let it sink in. Let the magic work. It felt a lot easier when he was relaxed and neither wary nor trying too hard. He wondered if it was the effect, perturbed or not, of the mouthful he’d already had.
He tried this theory out on Edwin, who had an arm stretched along the top of Robin’s chair now, and colour in his cheeks. Robin had hold of Edwin’s other hand and was tracing a finger over its palm as if indulging in a new kind of future-telling.
“That makes sense,” Edwin said. “Here, hold still.”
He took his hand back, cradled without string, and batted the ice-spell at Alan, who caught it as if it were a snowball. The cold smarted in his hand, but he didn’t care. It was like a delicious plunge into a cool bath on a hot day.
“Piss off,” said Alan, laughing.
Maud was still laughing too. Violet had made an ark’s worth of tiny, beautiful illusions shaped like exotic animals and was marching them over Maud’s knees. Lady Dufay seemed to be telling an involved story to Lady Cheetham, barely stopping to breathe, and Lady Cheetham was shaking with quiet laugher as she listened. Adelaide was curled up in a corner of a chaise, taking pins from her dense pile of black hair and running her fingers dreamily through it, looking entirely content with her own company. Alan thought about what she’d said about marriage: that it would give her the things she wanted, without the things she didn’t want.
And Jack—Jack was still looking at Alan, and the look was as good as a finger crooked in command. Alan’s body, cracked open by the wine, filled up with yearning. He wanted to feel Jack’s hand gripping tight in his hair, or simply brushing fingers back and forth against his scalp. This must be how cats felt. No wonder they rubbed themselves against your legs. Alan would do that too: he would sink to the floor, right here.
No. He looked away and deliberately let him himself rise above the wine’s effect. He wasn’t that shameless, and he laughed at himself for having the thought. Everything seemed worth laughing at.
Lady Cheetham tapped her empty glass against the dark bottle until she had everyone’s attention.
“And now, I think,” she said, “a game of Lady Macbeth.”
Edwin groaned. “I hated that game. The twins always won.”
“I’m sure we’d be delighted to play,” said Robin. “What are we playing, exactly?”
“Lady Macbeth,” said Maud. “Sounds very dramatic!”
“It’s named for a chicken,” said Jack. “It’s a scavenger hunt.”
They explained amidst general giggling. Lady Macbeth had been the champion layer of the kitchen gardens when Jack and Elsie were very young. Their nanny at the time, needing ever more elaborate and exhausting games to tire out her charges, had taken a few fallen tail feathers of the hen and hidden them, and set the twins to compete in finding them.
By the time Edwin had been invited to play as a visitor, the game had become a cutthroat family tradition involving a list of possible things to be found. Lady Cheetham did a spell that inked a copy of this evening’s list in tiny text on the backs of everyone’s hands. Alan squinted at it. Something red. Something completely useless. And so forth.
Points would be awarded by the mistress of ceremonies for creative or humorous interpretations of prompts. Finding one of the three white feathers, which could be anywhere in the Hall （“Or the grounds,” Lady Cheetham said, “within the radius that your guidelights will stick with you”） was worth a full hundred points.
“Elsie would wait until you were heading back and then trip you with a charm and steal from you,” said Edwin, but he was smiling.
“No rules against it,” said Jack. A suggestion of a smile was on his face too—the first time Alan had seen one when his late sister was the topic of discussion. “Very few rules at all, in fact. Teams, Polly?”
“Choose your partners,” she said magnanimously. “I’ve made sure you won’t need magic to find the feathers.”
The Blyths chose their partners predictably. Alan, teetering on the verge of more laughter, tried to convince himself that he would be less likely to make rash decisions like shoving Lord Hawthorn into the pantry and demanding to be ravished if he appealed to Adelaide to be his partner instead. But in the time he hesitated, she had already managed to pair herself off with Lady Dufay, and—
“I believe that makes you mine, Cesare.”
Jack’s hand appeared outstretched in his vision.
Alan tossed out the last of his reservations and let Jack pull him to his feet. The heat of Jack’s grip sang on his skin, and he looked Jack balefully in the face.
“When will the wine wear off? How long will I feel like this?”
“Long enough for us to win,” said Jack. “Come on. The others are ahead of us already. We can have that race to the Lady’s Oak after all—let’s see if the lights will go that far.”
“How’s your leg today?” Alan asked innocently.
“We’ll find out,” said Jack, and grinned.
He still had hold of Alan’s hand and used it to drag Alan with him out the door. As soon as they left the room, the glowing balls of their guidelights appeared above their shoulders. Handy for explorations in the dark.
A quarter of an hour later, Alan couldn’t tell if the primrose wine was still working on him at all. It didn’t matter a jot. It was a warm night, and a fat half-moon beamed down from behind clouds when they were outdoors. He was breathless with running and laughter, and still felt like he could keep going until the sun rose. And between him and Jack that simmering thing was coming to a rolling boil, sending off hot flicks of sensation every time their eyes met, every time Jack’s laughter poured itself into Alan’s blood, with every small argument that felt like teeth scraping gloriously across skin.