A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding, #1)

by Freya Marske

Robin shifted in his seat and tried not to feel trapped. It really was a cramped office, and dark to boot. The sole window lurked awkwardly near the ceiling as though to say it was there on sufferance and didn’t intend to provide anything so pleasant as a view.

He had no idea about any of it. It would probably all work out, somehow, but in the meantime every conversation about the future felt like Robin’s brain was being kicked, and he hated it.

“And people talk of country dirt as clean dirt as though that makes it any easier to remove from your trouser cuffs.”

Never mind his parents’ enemies, and never mind the Home Office—the Foreign Office should have snatched up the owner of that devastating smile and cultivated him like a hothouse plant.

Charlie and Bel kept Robin involved in lively conversation after that. Charlie always liked people more once he’d explained something badly to them, and Bel just liked things that were Edwin’s.

“I can warm you up,” said Edwin. Robin stared at him. Edwin felt his face fill with mortified colour. His voice cracked as he said, “I meant—I can do a drying spell.” “Oh,” said Robin, with a hint of crack himself. “Yes! Much obliged. If you would.”

Robin managed to hold his tongue on something truly unwise like You look like a Turner painting and I want to learn your textures with my fingertips. You are the most fascinating thing in this beautiful house. I’d like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.

Edwin was shaking. “You can do this,” Robin said. “I know you can.” “You don’t know anything,” Edwin whispered, but it sounded like thank you.

Much as he would have simultaneously loved and hated to believe his father was not his father—and there had been times in his childhood when the sheer prospect of being only half-related to Walt by birth would have made him forgive his mother any amount of straying from the marriage bed—there was too much resemblance to hope for that.

“Edwin,” said Robin. He had that storm-soaked look on his face again, the one that meant he was coming to the end of his store of credulity for one day. “Tell me what’s going on.” “Oh, nothing of consequence,” said Edwin. “I’ve merely inherited one of the oldest magical estates in Cambridgeshire.”

It was an impossible question, coming at the end of an impossible day, and Edwin’s emotions crowded him like birds trapped in a cage, beating and beating against his usual inability to express them.

Edwin was so angry it filled his skull like hot water. He couldn’t breathe past it.

“You’re far too dressed for this,” Robin said after a particularly savage stint of kissing. “You cannot imagine how little I care.”

The smile that tugged at his mouth was the same one he’d worn when Robin had admitted to being fascinated with his hands: faintly incredulous, but mostly pleased. It wasn’t an expression of regret. It did make Robin want to drag him back to the bed, pin him down, and murmur praise into his skin until it inked itself there like the opposite of a curse.

Robin had never in his life come across any fellow who had an objection to having his prick sucked, and felt a moment of indignant wounded pride; he’d seldom made that offer before. But he was hardly going to push any kind of activity on someone unwilling, and Edwin was eyeing Robin’s cock—it throbbed in anticipation—with the sort of intensity he’d previously applied only to books, so what was Robin going to do, refuse him?

The look on his face struck Robin like the withdrawal of a knife so sharp that the entry had gone unnoticed.

“I don’t want to intrude.” “You’re not. You can’t. It’s extremely irritating.” Edwin stepped close, very close indeed. “What’s irritating?” Edwin said, “Every time you touch me it’s exactly what I want.”

“I wonder,” Edwin murmured. “Yes,” Robin agreed instantly. “What? Yes.”

Edwin looked surprised. Robin remembered Edwin declining to be sucked, but no refusal was forthcoming here; Edwin’s lips parted and his cock jerked. Robin eyed the length of it in new assessment. Yes. Yes, Edwin could.

“Anything,” Robin gasped, “fuck, anything, Edwin, please.” “You shouldn’t.” Edwin sounded wrecked. “I could take so many things from you, with a contract like that.” “I really fucking wish you would,” said Robin.

Robin had never tried to deliberately clear his mind. He had the absurd image of taking a broom to waves on a seashore, trying to sweep the water back out across the stones.

Edwin’s thoughts were working again. He had the grinding, half-painful half-wonderful sense that meant facts and precedents and logic were slowly finding one another in his mind, sliding into place, presenting a solution. Things said, over the past few days, unnoticed. Unconnected; now connecting. He was afraid to breathe in case he disturbed it.

That would be no sort of future at all: Robin always doubting, and Edwin always afraid. Their bodies could fit against one another like lock into key, they could throw themselves daily into impossible pleasure, and still it would be a house with foundations of mist.

It didn’t take long to become so accustomed to something that you could describe the exact shape of its absence.

Perhaps he and Edwin Courcey could never be anything more than uneasy curios to each other, but Edwin was still the member of the magical world that Robin trusted the most, and in the space of two weeks Robin had tumbled into something that he wasn’t prepared to give up without a fight. And he was good at fighting.

“We haven’t had much luck at unearthing them. We don’t know how many men—er, or women—are involved.” “They’re men.” “Why do you say that?” “Because if even a single woman was involved, they wouldn’t have decided that a man who’d been working there one day was a more likely source of information than a woman who’d been there for years.”

“And we are but feeble women,” said Miss Morrissey. “Woe.” “Your sister is a magician,” Robin said, pointing out what seemed the largest hole in this story. “Woe,” said Mrs. Kaur firmly, and Robin recalled what Miss Morrissey had said about the assumptions made by men.

Despair soaked Edwin like spilled wine. He tried to burn the feel of Robin’s mouth into his skin along with the scratches and bruises, wanting almost to cry at the idea that he would wake up having forgotten how it felt to be . . . smiled at, yes, and touched in ways that he craved, and thought to be fascinating.

Robin’s two contributions to the adventure thus far had been baroneting Edwin’s suite number out of the concierge, and managing not to step through the subtle shimmer of the spell and plant his fist in Billy Byatt’s freckled face.

All three of them—Robin, Edwin, and Walter—seemed just as startled as one another to have found themselves in this situation, even though there was nothing remarkable about any of it. Apart from the corpse in the next room, Robin reminded himself with a mental kick.

“Put out your hands and keep them apart, Courcey,” Robin said. “I think I can push faster than you can twiddle.”

Usually he’d have been tense enough to snap, standing this close to Walt, but his fear had washed out of him. He’d never outgrow it entirely—he’d grown up with it woven into his nerves, a spell cast on a sapling—but he also didn’t think it would ever return to the same extent.

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.

“Of course I’m on your side. You complicated my life,” Robin said warmly. “You woke me up. You’re incredibly brave. You’re not kind, but you care, deeply. And I think you know how much I want you, in whatever way I can have you.”

Edwin swallowed again. His eyes tightened and Robin thought about the way Edwin had acted when they’d been intimate before now; the way he’d been generous with his actions, with bestowing pleasure, but kept his own pleasure in reserve. Or rushed it to completion before it could be properly observed. The care, the hunger, the drawing-back, the fear—how hadn’t Robin seen it? You could still hurt me. Edwin, who’d learned to hide the things he wanted so completely that he almost didn’t let himself want them at all.