Because it wasn’t the physical act alone. It was the way he felt watching Edwin read; it was the feeling he had every time his eyes sought Edwin in a room and landed on any angle of the man’s face, any movement of those delicate fingers: There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.
Only the impossible was safe. This was merely implausible, and that made it dangerous. But Robin could die tomorrow, or next week; the curse could writhe up his neck and burn his mind out with pain, or someone with fog for a face could take his arm on a busy street and decide to finish the job. He felt greedy for more nights like this, as many of them as he could cram into his existence.
And unlike shadowy attackers and mysterious tattooed runes, the way he felt about Edwin was a danger Robin was able to do something about. He could already feel the jubilant, contrary, Blythian urge rising within him: to rush headlong, as Edwin put it. To grin right into danger’s face and see what would happen next.
One of the downstairs maids was making up the fire and opening the curtains in the library when Robin entered it the next morning. It was early enough that the morning light was dim and watery, the house’s corridors cold and filled with deep grey shadows. Robin had been awake for at least an hour, unable to convince his body not to lie in tense anticipation of the curse striking again, and the thought had tumbled heedless and whole into his mind: this wasn’t a danger he had no choice but to mope around and brace against. He was going to be more than a curse-marked deadweight that Edwin was dragging around the country. He was going to punch back.
Flames began to lick in the fireplace. Robin cleared his throat and the maid straightened at once from the grate, her hand disappearing into a pocket of her apron as she did so. Robin wondered if he’d find string in there, if he told her to turn it out; he wondered if there were punishments meted out by the housekeeper for needing string to manage domestic spells, if the scorn for such a crutch stretched across class boundaries in the magical world. There was so much he didn’t know.
“Sir.” She bobbed a curtsey. “Can I help you, sir? Anything you need?”
“No,” said Robin.
Perhaps she was too well trained to look surprised, now she was over her initial startlement. Perhaps the downstairs staff of Penhallick House merely assumed that Mr. Edwin’s strange unmagical friend from London was just as prone to haunting the library at odd hours. Either way, the maid nodded, cast a critical eye over the room as though marking dust to be attended to later, and slipped out of the double doors, leaving Robin alone.
The slim catalogue was where Edwin had left it on one of the tables. A section of it was, thankfully, alphabetical. Robin flicked to the F section. Foresight: Π61.
No neat indexing charm for Robin, but Edwin had a tendency to leave his books lying around if he thought he might want to refer back to them, and there was a clear edict against the servants clearing them away. It took no more than ten minutes of digging through the active piles and checking the marks on the bookplates for Robin to find a couple of candidates, and he settled down grimly to do what he should have been doing all along: working out how to get himself out of the mess, instead of letting Edwin do the work for him while he took the opportunity to escape his responsibilities in the city.
Edwin had all the experience, all the intelligence, all the knowledge of magic. But Robin had one thing that Edwin lacked: the very dubious gift that magic had bestowed on him in the first place.
Robin could see the future.
Edwin had asked, Could you bring one on, do you think? and he wouldn’t have asked idly. He didn’t do anything idly.
Edwin had left scraps of paper as bookmarks. One marked a mention of those people in the history of English magic known to have possessed true foresight. Another noted that it was thought to be present in the magical population all over the world, and most of the reports of deliberate wielding came from the greater Asian continent, with one or two possibly originating in South America.
The book prefaced these reports, in a stuffy tone that Robin’s Cambridge-educated mind had no trouble translating into the wheezing voice of a Pembroke don, as unreliable, and no such possibility had yet been conclusively proved by civilised minds.
Perhaps Edwin had a point about the complacency of English magic. For the first time in his life Robin wished heartily for the existence of thorough research.
It was thought—the book grudgingly went on, once it considered the reader duly caveat-ed—that some possessors of foresight were able to wield it at will, and nudge it to focus on a particular person or subject or event. However, this caused the foresight to become less of a window onto the certain future, and more about possibility.