Edwin sank further into the chair, mind racing. There had been a coin; there may well yet be a cup and a knife, unless those two had been altered—split—in some way as well. If Billy and his allies, whomever they were, didn’t know if the rings being magically inert was an inherent property . . . was that enough to suggest that they didn’t have the other two parts? If they couldn’t compare?
Too many hints. Not enough clear facts.
“What do these things do?” Edwin allowed himself to sound as bewildered as he was. “Why all the fuss? All I’ve managed to glean is that you need all of them together, and that they”—he corrected himself, careful—“that Reggie’s great-aunt seemed to think they were dangerous.”
Billy’s eyebrows climbed. He wiped a smear of butter from his lip. “I thought you’d worked out that much. All our talk at dinner about not being able to draw on another person’s power—that’s what it does. The contract in its full form. Don’t you see?” He leaned forward, eager. “One doesn’t need to define the individual if the contract includes all of us.”
All of us. Every living magician in Great Britain. Flora Sutton’s words were the final piece; Edwin’s mind shook itself like a tablecloth and laid the solution out, flat and clear and horrifying. If every British magician truly was descended from the Three Families, then it defined them all on the bloodline level; even more horribly, it negated the need to rely on an individual’s consent, if you constructed the spell properly. A contract was consent, even if it was given on your behalf by your ancestors. Edwin’s parents had made pledge with Penhallick, and all three of their children had become part of that pledge without spilling a single drop of their own blood.
The Last Contract defined the terms for an exchange of power from one being to another, defined its participants, and formalised their consent. Theoretically, if used as a component in a spell meticulously constructed, it could draw every last drop of power from every magician thus defined. And place it at a single person’s command.
“But you couldn’t wield that much,” Edwin said. “Nobody could.”
“We can’t know the limits until it’s tried,” said Billy. “Some of the people I’m working with have been trying to crack the secret of power transfer for decades, and the contract is the answer. It’s what we’ve always needed, Wi—Edwin. It’s an equaliser. If magic can be shared, then even half-pint magicians like you can do the great spells of power.”
“Or someone like you,” said Edwin as several more pieces fell near-audibly into place, “who didn’t have quite enough magic for his sweetheart’s family.”
Billy flushed. “It’s a worthy goal. Try and tell me otherwise.”
“You’re recruiting me,” Edwin realised. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why . . .” He waved his freed wrist, indicating both Billy’s gesture of half-hearted trust and the sheer fact that he’d been put to sleep and contained in his own rooms instead of taken somewhere else and . . . killed. Or wiped clean.
“You’ve been useful. I told them you would be. You’re sharp, you’re single-minded—it took Gatling weeks to get half as far as you did, and it was mostly luck that his own aunt was involved.”
“How did Reggie get mixed up in this in the first place?” If this was truly a recruitment attempt, then Edwin was seizing the chance to go fishing for answers. “I knew he was hiding something, ever since—that trip he took to Yorkshire. That had something to do with the contract? Not ghosts at all?”
“Oh, the bloody ghosts.” Billy chuckled. “That’s why he went there in the first place. Stuck his nose into every corner and was loud and cheerful about it, like some irritating chimaera made up of you and Sir Robert combined.”
“Real ghosts?” Edwin’s mind refused to move past this point.
“Of course not.” Billy brightened. “I suppose you’d find it interesting, if anyone would. It was an echo spell. We’d found out where it looked like the pieces of the contract were—don’t ask me how, that part was terrifically dull—and that led us to a tiny, ancient church in some mining town in the Moors. Secret hiding places in the crypt and all. But it was empty.” He paused, eyes skimming Edwin hopefully, as if for some sign that this was helping to make his case. “It took eight of us, in the end, to coordinate the echo spell reaching far enough back, and covering—God, decades, it was frightful. Took most of a week to pinpoint the right time. Even the strongest of us were shattered by the time we finally saw the girls taking the contract from the crypt.”