Freya Marske

Red White & Royal Blue meets Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in debut author Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light, featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies. Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He’s struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known. Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it—not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else. Robin’s predecessor has disappeared, and the mystery of what happened to him reveals unsettling truths about the very oldest stories they’ve been told about the land they live on and what binds it. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles—and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.

A Marvellous Light

betty

He was quietly, startlingly charmed for all his curt, practical manner, Courcey had chosen such a pretty kind of magic to show Robin

“Crackpots and far too much paper," said Blyth. He directed the smile at Miss Morrissey, but he'd started it-perhaps by mistake-when he was looking at Edwin, and it was like being caught in the last rays of sunset. 

Robert Blyth was not exactly imaginary-no, he was too solid, too broad-shouldered, his voice too loud and too warm: the voice of someone who'd never had cause to make himself smaller. But the urge Edwin had to creep closer to that warmth, to imagine that it might be for him, somehow ... that was illusion. Robert, Robin, was exactly the kind of person that Edwin had learned to dislike, and who had never needed instruction to dislike him right back.

Robin realised he was staring, but he couldn’t stop. Edwin’s colourless self had taken up the white-gold of the sunlight and he looked close to ethereal, like a fairy from the book. A witch with his familiar. Robin’s first impression was still correct. Edwin was not handsome. But from this angle, with that smile like a secret caged in glass he had…something. A delicate, turbulent, Turner sketch attractiveness that hit Robin like a clean hook to the jaw.

‘You've been nothing but... precise’ That was it, the word that fit Edwin better than controlled. He was thoughtful, dedicated and precise, and Robin found it unspeakably comforting. His usual love of spontaneity was taking a serious battering, here and now, when it was his own well-being at stake. 

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’ Those were not things one blurted out to a friend. They were their own cradles of magic, an expression of the desire to transform one thing into another. And what if the magic went away? 

Robin took a long sip of tea, instead, and smiled at Edwin through the steam. “I’m not going anywhere” he said

As a rule, he did not enjoy physical contact. It usually seemed an intrusion, or mistimed, or compounding whatever distress or insult or small condescension the touch had been meant to mitigate. He was still full of an off-balance ambivalence, a tingling awareness of Flora Sutton’s fingers on his cheeks.

It seemed completely bizarre that Robin could reach out and touch Edwin like this, a casual hand on his back, and it could be perfect. Just as the touch on his arm last night, over tea, had also been perfect. Exactly what he needed in that moment and had been unaware of needing.

"Are you all right?" Robin asked. "I don't know what I am," said Edwin. "But yes. I'm all right." In the spirit of enquiry, he sat back on his heels and tried to identify what he was feeling,. Somewhat to his shock, he decided it was joy.

Marz

I’d like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.

The attack came while Robin was thinking about roast beef.

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