Edwin said, “I’d like some breakfast.”
He brushed very close to Robin on his way to the sideboard, close enough for Robin to smell his hair. It took Edwin until he’d swallowed his first mouthful of bacon and another of marmalade-laden toast, washed down with tea, to say, “You’re right.”
“Hm?” Robin was onto a fourth cup of coffee and wondering, as his pulse hammered gaily away beneath the skin of his neck, if that had been a wise decision.
“Perhaps I could read every book in the library and never stumble across the exact form of runes. It’s your arm. It’s your pain. I’m willing to give it a try, this afternoon.” Edwin inspected the crust of his toast. “By which I mean, I’ll ask Charlie to do it.”
“I’d rather it was you.”
The sheer surprise in Edwin’s lifted gaze was like a needle to the heart. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said, but mildly. “You want the person in the house with the most magic to do the actual spell. I’ll put it together for him. I’ll write it down; I’ll make sure he does it exactly.”
That launched a discussion—a miniature lecture, rather, but Robin didn’t mind—about the difference between runes and cradling notation, which took them through breakfast and into the library again, where Edwin slid behind the table with a near-audible sigh of relief. Robin sat down also, pulling a book towards himself at random to show willing.
Edwin said, “I meant to ask how you are. Any damage from—what happened yesterday?”
There were bruises blossoming beneath the scrapes on Robin’s arms. His head still ached. He still felt on edge, though that might have been the coffee.
Instead of any of that he found himself saying, “I’ve not often been the butt of the joke before.”
Edwin said, with an odd lightness that didn’t sting as much as it could have, “More used to being the bully than the bullied?”
“Well, I wasn’t one to step in and stop that sort of thing, when I saw it happening at school.” Robin shrugged. “I’m not proud of it. Tried to do better, when I—when I woke up to the fact that it wasn’t really funny, I suppose.” When he began to understand that what he was seeing at home, when his parents gathered well-dressed people into sparkling rooms and made pretty speeches about charity, was the adult version of the same game, only half of which was played to the victim’s face. The other half was the whispers; the casual venom. The two-facedness. The brutal construction of one’s reputation on the shreds of those you flattered with one hand and tore down with the other.
“Dead Man’s Legs is a good spell for bullies,” Edwin said. “Walt was very fond of it for a while, if I ever looked too keen to dodge out of whatever light humiliation he’d planned for that day.”
Robin tried to find a good response to that. Edwin had spoken matter-of-factly, but his shoulders had lifted: he was offering Robin a sliver of vulnerability. And after seeing the way Edwin was treated by everyone in his family but his mother, Robin couldn’t pretend to be surprised.
“Did you and your brother overlap at school, then?”
“For two years,” said Edwin. “And no amount of scolding about using magic when away from home ever stopped Walt. Most of his crowd were magicians, too, and he was good at finding corners.”
Robin remembered how that went. Every school had those corners, conveniently out of sight, and out of hearing range of the masters’ offices.
To steer them elsewhere, Robin asked more about learning magic. A great many questions had been building up in the aftermath of his initial shocks. Edwin’s shoulders relaxed as he explained the ways in which boy magicians learned cradling and its notations.
“There’s a curriculum, of sorts. But everything past the basics depends on one’s tutors. And how ruthless one’s parents are about lessons during holidays, if they send you to a normal school as well.”
“Your mother doesn’t strike me as ruthless,” said Robin, smiling.
A shadow crossed Edwin’s face. “She’s the reason I was allowed to spend my summers under tutorship. Father didn’t consider me worth the expense. I was never going to amount to much.”
Robin glanced around them, at this edifice to knowledge. “What about university?”
“There’s no university of English magic,” said Edwin. “You can study apprentice-style from other scholars, if you wish. But I enjoyed Oxford. For its own sake. And there’s been nobody doing really original magical work in this country since the turn of the century. Nobody making advances. Nobody who could have taught me more than I found out for myself.” He stirred the pages of a book with his fingers. A bitter smile touched his mouth. “I never had enough power that I had to be taught to control it.”