It didn’t seem to matter. Robin still wanted to stare at him, framed as he was by the wood, one leg thrust out across the wide cushion of the seat, head bent over the open book.
This was becoming ridiculous.
Several chapters’ worth of meaningless symbols later, Robin found himself half wishing that the foresight would strike; it would at least provide an alternative to the endless movement of his eyes between page and sketch, with frequent detours to land on Edwin, who had once again taken to doing thoughtful laps of the library floor.
Robin’s vision on the lake the previous day had been an unsettling one: a stretch of flat, muddy land under an equally muddy dusk. Winter trees, motionless. Flashes of light and plumes of smoke in the distance. As with the other visions, there’d been no sound, but something about the scene had given Robin the sense that there would be little to hear. The landscape had felt eerily uninhabited, as though someone had tried to paint the Temptation in the Wilderness and forgotten to add the figure of Christ.
Ever since the first evening, the visions had come one at a time. That was something.
“Anything?” Edwin paused by the table.
Robin flicked back to where he’d used a paper scrap to mark a figure of runes that had some of the same curlicue flourishes joining one symbol to the next, though none of the individual runes looked even slightly like those on Robin’s arm. Robin had tried to read the dense text accompanying the figure. He’d given that up after the first paragraph, which held a grisly description of exactly how the depicted curse had been thought to boil a man’s blood within his veins.
“Possibly,” said Edwin, in an obvious effort at politeness.
“I’ll keep at it,” said Robin.
By the time one of the downstairs maids knocked to ask if they’d prefer to have sandwiches brought in, it was drizzling. Their lunch—in the dining hall, at the insistence of Robin, who was feeling restless again—was interrupted by Belinda’s cheerful and lightly rained-upon group, who descended on the piles of sandwiches and cold cuts without bothering to change out of their damp clothes. Trudie began an embellished, tinkling version of how she’d slipped on pebbles and nearly fell halfway down a hill.
“Plans for the afternoon, chaps?” asked Billy, beneath this recital. “And don’t say the library.”
Edwin said, loud enough to be heard by the whole table, “We were hoping to take the curse off Robin, actually.”
Trudie’s voice faltered as eyes swung their way. Billy’s eyebrows shot high. “Cracked it, have you?”
“I’ve an idea worth trying.” Edwin cleared his throat. “Charlie, we’d be glad if you did the honours.”
Charlie drew himself up like a pigeon chest-puffing out of a puddle. “Of course,” he said, through a mouthful of ham and cress. “Now, if you ask me, the best thing for a general reversal—” And he rambled on from there, insisted on seeing Robin’s arm again, and called upon Belinda to remember a time when he’d removed a dancing imbuement that someone’s drunken uncle had laid on the cutlery at their wedding dinner.
Edwin sat quiet in his seat dabbing crusts through a smear of yellow pickle until the appearance of warm treacle tart and clotted cream distracted Charlie into a sticky silence.
“Something like that” was all Edwin said then.
“Well!” Trudie clapped her hands to summon the room’s attention. “It’s not a game of charades, but it’s not something you see every day, is it?”
So they all ended up in the library after all. Robin’s lunch sat uneasily in his stomach. He did want the thing off, he did want Edwin to try now.
“One of these days a brainy type like Win here is going to work out how to let one magician draw on another’s power,” said Billy. His affable, freckled face smiled up at Robin from where he was sitting backwards on a chair. “And then our Charlie won’t be so much in demand.”
Charlie snorted. “You mean I’d merely be in demand as some sort of—cart horse, or motor-engine. Someone else holding the reins? Rather not. You have the power you have, and that’s an end to it.”
“Is this another of those central problems?” Robin asked Edwin, who nodded.
“Theoretically, it should be possible,” Edwin said. “But it’s never worked in practice. Not in the entire history of magic.”
Robin struggled to recall the explanation Edwin had given that very first day in the Whitehall office. At least he had the excuse of lifelong ignorance. “It isn’t just a matter of contracts?”