It was done. It was off. It was— An Indian woman, neatly dressed in shirtwaist and skirt with a blue tie at her neck, seated behind a desk in an office. She was arranging a pile of paper and speaking to someone, while the typewriter on her desk flung its keys up and down without a finger applied to it. She looked up and her face broke into a smile. When she stopped speaking, the typewriter paused too. Her face had the faintest echo of familiarity, as though she were a sketch copied many times over from a well-known original. She began to stand up.
“—bin? Robin?” It was Maud, voice high with panic.
The breakfast room swam back into focus. Everyone was staring at him.
“Yes. Sorry.” Robin’s heart was surging into a race. His gaze found Edwin, whose hand was tight around a forgotten muffin, horrified. Edwin had seen this happen far too many times to mistake it.
“No,” Edwin said, as though he could erase the last minute through sheer force of words.
Robin scrambled at his sleeve, yanking it up, not caring when he caught his cuff in the butter dish. The skin was still bare of marks. The curse hadn’t managed to come crawling back. “How is that possible?” he demanded of Edwin. “The foresight and the curse, they’re connected, you said—”
“Foresight?” said Belinda, and the word was echoed off-kilter by at least two others on the table. Every pair of eyes was already on Robin, but he felt the keenness of them redouble.
“I didn’t say,” Edwin said, very thin. “I hypothesised.”
“Mercy,” said Trudie. “Just think, a foreseer, at one of our house parties!”
“No wonder you’ve been keeping him all to yourself, Win.” Charlie sounded bluff, but there was an annoyed edge to it.
Edwin’s face closed off entirely. He was still looking only at Robin. “It seemed logical that the foresight was part of the curse. I suppose it is possible that a latent gift was merely . . . uncovered . . . by your first contact with magic. Unpleasant though it was.”
“Unbusheled,” Robin said dumbly.
“That’s not what—” Edwin snapped. “I—there’s no precedent, I didn’t know—”
“But you did know he had it,” trilled Belinda. She waved her fork at her brother. “You’ve always been like this, you know. Can’t bear to share anything interesting. It’s one of your least attractive qualities. Remember that time Mother found the hoard of stones in your bedroom after we’d been to the seaside? And that time you threw yourself on the floor and wailed because Father wouldn’t let you keep that watch you’d put in your pocket when Grandpapa died? He was six,” she told the table at large. “Thought he was going to study it.”
Edwin was more porcelain than ever. Robin had the warring desires to defend him and for Edwin to have the guts to defend himself, for once.
“Makes sense,” said Miggsy. “Been wondering why you decided this one was worth leaving with his memories after all. But if it’s for study.”
“Shut up,” said Edwin. His lips were white.
“Win,” said Belinda.
Robin had picked up his knife again. It took real effort to unclench his fingers and set it back down on the table. It was a surprise, and yet not a surprise. It wasn’t just Maud who’d been intended for the lethe-mint. Everyone in this room, everyone in this house, down—he was quite sure—to Edwin’s frail and charming mother, had assumed that as soon as Edwin took the curse off Robin, he’d be subjected to exactly the same thing.
“It’s a game, you see,” said Trudie. “One of us invites someone unmagical and we show them a good time. Show them everything they’re missing, in their own world. And then at the end of it we give them lemonade and send them home. Let them think they’ve overindulged. It’s less fun if the unbusheling’s happened before they arrive, but . . .” She gave an elegant shrug, but her eyes were as they’d always been: pinned to Robin, cool and expectant. Trudie had been robbed of her fun, Robin realised, by Robin’s own phlegmatic acceptance of magic and Maud’s rescue from the mint. She was going to watch them react if she had to wield the prod herself, and revealing the game was now the easiest way to do it.
“Lemonade.” Maud’s voice was quiet and tight. It was how she’d talked in company when their parents were alive, and it sent another skewer of anger through Robin’s heart. “Oh. I see.”
“I thought you protected guests,” Robin found himself saying. “Blood-pledge, and all that. Doesn’t seem to sit right with the idea of bringing people onto your precious land and then toying with them.”