A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding, #1)

by Freya Marske

For the bar at the end of the universe and everyone the devil met there.

Robin emitted the wheezy opinion that every single one of their mothers had conceived them in congress with pox-ridden barnyard beasts.

“We are man’s marvellous light / We hold the gifts of the dawn / From those now passed and gone / And carry them into the night.”

And that, of course, was when the swans appeared.

frantic for it to be over and wanting it to stretch out forever.

Is this about—did I hear you had an argument with a hedge?”

I am nothing like you, and yet I feel more myself with you.

We didn’t know, Flora Sutton had said. When we did, we stopped. Conscience, not lack of ability.

It was perfectly, exactly Walt: a whiplash of hurt both casual and precise, delivered for no other purpose than because he’d glimpsed a piece of unmarked skin and wanted to raise a welt.

Robin wanted to make a leather-bound book of his belief and hand it to Edwin, make him read it over and over until Edwin could look in a mirror and see something of what Robin saw.

Edwin hadn’t realised how rigidly his mind had grown around certain structures until he’d begun, painstakingly, to deconstruct them.