“Very well,” said Walter. “Then that’s where we’ll go.”
Rain stroked the train windows and melted the view into a blur of greens, browns, and greys. It was a cold and miserable September Saturday in comparison to the previous one, when Robin and Edwin had taken almost exactly this journey to Cambridgeshire.
There were several glaring distances between the circumstances, of course. Not least of which was the presence of Edwin’s brother, wrapped in a red muffler and with his hands visible on his knees.
The previous night had been tense and unbalancing. Walt hadn’t trusted them out of his sight—Edwin had a feeling that it was only Walt’s practicality, and the prospect of falling asleep within an enclosed space that also contained Robin’s fists, that had stopped him rushing out and demanding they arrange an overnight coach. Instead Walt had overseen Robin sending a message to the Blyth townhouse that he wouldn’t be home for a day or so, and requesting a bag of his belongings be sent back with the messenger. After all, Robin had pointed out in flinty tones, he would hardly be paying a visit to a friend without at least a change of clothes.
Then Walt had paid for a room at the Cavendish and sealed Robin inside it with a charm, done the same to Edwin in his bedroom, and probably slept the peaceful sleep of the undeserving on Edwin’s sofa.
Edwin had barely slept a wink. He was exhausted this morning, feeling as grey and washed-out as the world outside, trying to make his thoughts arrange themselves into a plan. Part of him was entirely unconvinced they’d find anything in the study at all. And the larger question was whether Edwin had done the right thing; whether he should have simply kept on insisting his ignorance rather than reaching desperately for a possibility and hoisting it like a white flag.
He closed his eyes against the memory of Robin falling to his knees and retching. No. He was always going to give Walt something, because Walt didn’t stop until he had the result he wanted.
Edwin should have been surprised when his door opened to reveal Walt with the rings on his finger. He hadn’t been, somehow. All the pieces put together felt like a logical progression, a statement argued perfectly from precedent. If asked to imagine a person capable of what had been done in the name of the Last Contract, and who valued magical power above all things . . . the shape of it would have been, indeed, very like Edwin’s elder brother.
“The curse on Robin,” Edwin said, breaking the silence in the compartment for the first time. “What was it? Where did it come from? I didn’t recognise it at all.”
“And yet you managed to lift it, nuisance that you are,” said Walt. “It wasn’t my invention. I’ve no hand for runes. A neat little thing, though, wouldn’t you say? Pain at diminishing intervals, with a tracking clause layered in.”
“Neat,” said Robin, drenched in sarcasm. “Indeed.”
“Whose invention, then?” Edwin batted aside the small glow of satisfaction. He’d been right about the tracking.
Walt’s eyes glinted. “Our leader,” he said. “Of a sort. Don’t think you’ll get any more than that.”
Walt would only deign to follow a man who outstripped him in pure power, and there weren’t a great many of those. Edwin thought wistfully of the truth-spell he’d managed the previous day. But Walt had watched him dress, watched him pack; he had no string to hand, and even if he did, he’d hardly be able to build something that complex without Walt noticing and stopping him. Walt wasn’t Billy.
Edwin’s heart gave a queer hiccup as though an echo-spell were trying to take place within his ribs, showing him a past that might have been. Edwin hadn’t been recruited early to this conspiracy, despite being cleverer and more desperate and far more primed to swallow the hook of promised power than Reggie Gatling. Now he knew why. Walt wasn’t Billy. Billy was the one who had, belatedly, suggested Edwin as suitable.
It would never, not in the full length of his effortless life, have occurred to Walt that his younger brother might be worth anything at all.
Perhaps Edwin should be glad of that, bitter pill that it was. If these people had come to him before the murders, before anything had gone wrong—if they’d sold the quest for the Last Contract to him in the right intellectual light, it could have been so easy for Edwin to become what Reggie became.
Would he have clung, pathetically grateful, to the chance to finally be on Walt’s side, and thereby break their old and exhausting pattern of hurt and response?