Control was a word that hung on Edwin like a half-fitted suit. In some places it clung to him; in others it gaped, in a way that made Robin want to hook his fingers into the loose seams and tug. He didn’t want Edwin to stop talking.
“There must be scholars in other countries?” he ventured.
“Yes, but it’s the same as any area of study. Often there’s no common language. I’ve enough French to struggle through a few arguments with members of their Académie, but that’s all. And correspondence is slow.”
Robin had a brief vision of wax-sealed letters floating across the ocean like so many gulls. He supposed that rainstorms could be a problem.
“What about your pen?” he asked. “Couldn’t someone in France do a spell so that it wrote down—whatever they wanted you to know? Or could you have a set of them, one each, where one of them copies what the other is writing?”
Edwin stared at him. Then rubbed a hand over his face. Robin expected one of those university-tutor sighs; it took him a moment to realise that Edwin was laughing, in a small silent way.
“Of course,” said Edwin. “Trust you, Sir Robin Blyth, to accidentally stumble onto one of the central problems of magical progress. No, I’m not joking. It was a good idea. Here. The problem is distance.” He set his hands on the table, shoulder-width apart. “How much do you know about natural sciences?”
“Er,” said Robin.
“Gravity? Sir Isaac Newton?”
“The apple chap?”
Edwin visibly shredded his planned explanation into shorter words. “Forces act strongly if two things are close together. Much less so if they’re far apart. And magic is the same. You can imbue an object and let it be—there are plenty of magical objects—but you can’t change its properties, or directly control it. You need to be close, for that. Not even Charlie could have cast that sympathy with the map from anywhere but right next to the lake.” He picked up a piece of scrap paper and tore it into the rough shape of a person, then cradled up a spell that he smeared over the paper figure. “Touch it.”
Robin touched the paper, gingerly, and felt something like a snap of static. The paper figure sprang upright on the table. Robin snatched his hand back. The paper man’s arm gave a flap in imitation.
“Sympathy,” said Edwin. “See?”
Robin, mostly to prove he’d understood the thing about distance, stood and walked steadily backwards across the floor. The figure jerkily copied his movements for the first two steps, then faltered, then rippled and fell to the table, lifeless. Robin waved from a distance and nothing happened.
“That’s rather weird,” Robin said. He couldn’t help thinking unsettlingly of the man with the fog mask and the glowing string, and the way Robin’s body had felt, entirely unresponsive to the demands of his mind.
“Hm,” said Edwin, looking at the limp paper figure.
“Hm?”
Edwin cradled up the indexing spell and summoned books from two different corners of the library. He directed Robin to look through some ghastly tome called A Comprehensive Survey of European Runic Evolution for any symbols that looked anything like the ones on his arm.
“I thought you’d been through this one already,” said Robin.
“William Morris,” said Edwin, distractedly, flicking through one of his new acquisitions.
“Pardon?”
“You’ve an eye for pattern.” Edwin paused, but didn’t look up. “You might catch something I missed.”
Robin sighed, found the sketch Edwin had made of the curse the previous day, and prepared himself to stare at inked symbols until his head ached. Meanwhile Edwin summoned one of the maids into the room and spent some time getting her to demonstrate what seemed to be a spell for removing stains from rugs, while he stared at her fingers and copied their motions.
Perhaps the strongest magician was the best choice, but Robin trusted the instinct that had led him to prefer Edwin when it came to his own safety. There was a deliberation to the way Edwin worked, an insistence on perfect angles, that reminded Robin of Penhallick House’s wallpapers: overcomplex from a distance, but rewarding closer inspection.
Once the maid was dismissed, Edwin went away to the window seat with another book and his imbued pen, which hovered and took notes as Edwin murmured snatches of incomprehensible words to it. The day was grey and dull, with a sodden heaviness to the clouds and the occasional distant rumble of a storm rolling around the vicinity. The light falling onto Edwin was not the golden Turner light that had first grabbed Robin’s attention.