Carry On (3 page)

The World of Mages isn't actually a world. We don't have cities. Or even neighbourhoods. Magicians have always lived among mundanity. It's safer that way, according to Penelope's mum; it keeps us from drifting too far from the rest of the world.

The fairies did that, she says. Got tired of dealing with everybody else, wandered into the woods for a few centuries, then couldn't find their way back.

The only place magicians live together, unless they're related, is at Watford. There are a few magickal social clubs and parties, annual gatherings—that sort of thing. But Watford is the only place where we're together all the time. Which is why everyone's been pairing off like crazy in the last couple years. If you don't meet your spouse at Watford, Penny says, you could end up alone—or going on singles tours of Magickal Britain when you're 32.

I don't know what Penny's even worried about; she's had a boyfriend in America since our fourth year. (He was an exchange student at Watford.) Micah plays baseball, and he has a face so symmetrical, you could summon a demon on it. They video-chat when she's home, and when she's at school, he writes to her almost every day.

“Yes,” she tells me, “but he's
American.
They don't think about marriage the way we do. He might dump me for some pretty Normal he meets at Yale. Mum says that's where our magic is going—bleeding out through ill-considered American marriages.”

Penny quotes her mum as much as I quote Penny.

They're both being paranoid. Micah's a solid bloke. He'll marry Penelope—and then he'll want to take her home with him.
That's
what we should all be worried about.

Anyway …

Magic. I miss magic when I'm away.

When I'm by myself, magic is something personal. My burden, my secret.

But at Watford, magic is just the air that we breathe. It's what makes me a part of something bigger, not the thing that sets me apart.

No. 8—Ebb and the goats

I started helping out Ebb the goatherd during my second year at Watford. And for a while, hanging out with the goats was pretty much my favourite thing. (Which Baz had a field day with.) Ebb's the nicest person at Watford. Younger than the teachers. And surprisingly powerful for somebody who decided to spend her life taking care of goats.

“What does being powerful have to do with anything?” Ebb'll say. “People who're tall aren't forced to pay thrashcanball.”

“You mean basketball?” (Living at Watford means Ebb's a bit out of touch.)

“Same difference. I'm no soldier. Don't see why I should have to fight for a living just because I can throw a punch.”

The Mage says we're all soldiers, every one of us with an ounce of magic. That's what's dangerous about the old ways, he says—magicians just went about their merry way, doing whatever they felt like doing, treating magic like a toy or an entitlement, not something they had to protect.

Ebb doesn't use a dog with the goats. Just her staff. I've seen her turn the whole herd with a wave of her hand. She'd started teaching me—how to pull the goats back one by one; how to make them all feel at once like they'd gone too far. She even let me help with the birthing one spring.…

I don't have much time to spend with Ebb anymore.

But I leave her and the goats on my list of things to miss. Just so that I can stop for a minute to think about them.

No. 9—The Wavering Wood

I should take this one off the list.

Fuck the Wavering Wood.

No. 10—Agatha

Maybe I should take Agatha off my list, too.

I'm getting close to Watford now. I'll be at the station in a few minutes. Someone will have come down from the school to fetch me.…

I used to save Agatha for last. I'd go all summer without thinking about her, then wait until I was almost to Watford before I'd let her back into my head. That way I wouldn't spend the whole summer convincing myself that she was too good to be true.

But now … I don't know, maybe Agatha
is
too good to be true, at least for me.

Last term, just before Penny and I got snatched by the Humdrum, I saw Agatha with Baz in the Wavering Wood. I suppose I'd sensed before that there might be something between them, but I never believed she'd betray me like that—that she'd cross
that
line.

There was no time to talk to Agatha after I saw her with Baz—I was too busy getting kidnapped, then escaping. And then I couldn't talk to her over the summer, because I can't talk to anybody. And now, I don't know … I don't know what Agatha is to me.

I'm not even sure whether I've missed her.

 

3

SIMON

When I get to the station, there's no one to meet me. No one I know, anyway—there's a bored-looking taxi driver who's written
Snow
on a piece of cardboard.

“That's me,” I say. He looks dubious. I don't look much like a public school toff, especially when I'm not in uniform. My hair's too short—I shave it every year at the end of term—and my trainers are cheap, and I don't look
bored
enough; I can't keep my eyes still.

“That's me,” I say again. A bit thuggishly. “Do you want to see my ID?”

He sighs and drops the sign. “If you want to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere, mate, I'm not going to argue with you.”

I get in the back of the taxi and sling my bag down on the seat next to me. The driver starts the engine and turns on the radio. I close my eyes; I get sick in the back of cars on good days, and today isn't a good day—I'm nervous, and all I've had to eat is a chocolate bar and a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps.

Almost there now.

This is the last time I'll be doing this. Coming back to Watford in autumn. I'll still come back, but not like this, not like I'm coming home.

“Candle in the Wind” comes on the radio, and the driver sings along.

Candle in the wind
is a dangerous spell. The boys at school say you can use it to give yourself more, you know,
stamina.
But if you emphasize the wrong syllable, you'll end up starting a fire you can't put out. An actual fire. I'd never try it, even if I had call for it; I've never been good with double entendres.

The car hits a pothole, and I lurch forward, catching myself on the seat in front of me.

“Belt up,” the driver snaps.

I do, taking a look around. We're already out of the city and into the countryside. I swallow and stretch my shoulders back.

The taxi driver goes back to singing, louder now—
“never knowing who to turn to”
—like he's really getting into the song. I think about telling
him
to belt up.

We hit another pothole, and my head nearly bangs against the ceiling. We're on a dirt road. This isn't the usual way to Watford.

I glance up at the driver, in the mirror. There's something wrong—his skin is a deep green, and his lips are red as fresh meat.

Then I look at him, as he is, sitting in front of me. He's just a cabbie. Gnarled teeth, smashed nose. Singing Elton John.

Then back at the mirror: Green skin. Red lips. Handsome as a pop star.
Goblin.

I don't wait to see what he's up to. I hold my hand over my hip and start murmuring the incantation for the Sword of Mages. It's an invisible weapon—more than invisible, really; it's not even there until you say the magic words.

The goblin hears me casting, and our eyes meet in the mirror. He grins and reaches into his jacket.

If Baz were here, I'm sure he'd make a list of all the spells I could use in this moment. There's probably something in French that would do nicely. But as soon as my sword appears in my hand, I grit my teeth and slash it across the front seat, taking off the goblin's turning head—and the headrest, too.
Voilà.

He keeps driving for a second; then the steering wheel goes wild. Thank magic there's no barrier between us—I unbuckle my seat belt and dive over the seat (and the place where the goblin's head used to be) to grab the wheel. His foot must still be on the gas: We're already off the road and accelerating.

I try to steer us back, but I don't actually know how to drive. I jerk the wheel to the left, and the side of the taxi slams into a wooden fence. The airbag goes off in my face, and I go flying backwards, the car still smashing into something, probably more fence. I never thought I'd die like
this
.…

The taxi comes to a stop before I come up with a way to save myself.

I'm half on the floor, and I've hit my head on the window, then the seat. When I eventually tell Penny about all this, I'm skipping the part where I took off my safety belt.

I stretch my arm up over my head and pull the door handle. The door opens, and I fall out of the taxi onto my back in the grass. It looks like we've gone though the fence and spun out into a field. The engine is still running. I climb to my feet, groaning, then reach into the driver's window and turn it off.

It's a spectacle in there. Blood all over the airbag. And the body. And me.

I go through the goblin's jacket, but don't find anything besides a packet of gum and a carpet knife. This doesn't feel like the Humdrum's work—there's no itchy sign of him in the air. I take a deep breath to make sure.

Probably just another revenge run, then. The goblins have been after me ever since I helped the Coven drive them out of Essex. (They were gobbling up drunk people in club bathrooms, and the Mage was worried about losing regional slang.) I think the goblin who successfully offs me gets to be king.

This one won't be getting a crown. My blade's stuck in the seat next to him, so I yank it out and let it disappear back into my hip. Then I remember my bag and grab that, too, wiping blood on my grey trackie bottoms before I open the bag to fish out my wand. I can't just leave this mess here, and I don't think it's worth saving anything for evidence.

I hold my wand over the taxi and feel my magic scramble up to my skin. “Work with me here,” I whisper.
“Out, out, damned spot!”

I've seen Penelope use that spell to get rid of unspeakable things. But all it does for me is clean some blood off my trousers. I guess that's something.

The magic is building up in my arm—so thick, my fingers are shaking. “Come on,” I say, pointing.
“Take it away!”

Sparks fly out of my wand and fingertips.

“Fuck me, come
on
…” I shake out my wrist and point again. I notice the goblin's head lying in the grass near my feet, back to its true green again. Goblins are handsome devils. (But most devils are fairly fit.) “I suppose you ate the cabbie,” I say, kicking the head back towards the car. My arm feels like it's burning.

“Into thin air!”
I shout.

I feel a hot rush from the ground to my fingertips, and the taxi disappears. And the head disappears. And the fence disappears. And the road …

*   *   *

An hour later, sweaty and still covered in dried goblin blood and that dust that comes out of airbags, I finally see the school buildings up ahead of me. (It was only a patch of that dirt road that disappeared, and it wasn't much of a road to start with. I just had to make my way back to the main road, then follow it here.)

All the Normals think Watford is an ultraexclusive boarding school. Which I guess it is. The grounds are coated in glamours. Ebb told me once that we keep casting new spells on the school as we develop them. So there's layer upon layer of protection. If you're a Normal, all the magic burns your eyes.

I walk up to the tall iron gate—
THE WATFORD SCHOOL
is spelled out on the top—and rest my hand on the bars to let them feel my magic.

That used to be all it took. The gates would swing open for anyone who was a magician. There's even an inscription about it on the crossbar—
MAGIC SEPARATES US FROM THE WORLD; LET NOTHING SEPARATE US FROM EACH OTHER.

“It's a nice thought,” the Mage said when he appealed to the Coven for stiffer defences, “but let's not take security orders from a six-hundred-year-old gate. I don't expect people who come to my house to obey whatever's cross-stitched on the throw pillows.”

I was at that Coven meeting, with Penelope and Agatha. (The Mage had wanted us there to show what was at stake.
“The children! The future of our world!”
) I didn't listen to the whole debate. My mind wandered off, thinking about where the Mage really lived and whether I'd ever be invited there. It was hard to picture him with a house, let alone throw pillows. He has rooms at Watford, but he's gone for weeks at a time. When I was younger, I thought the Mage lived in the woods when he was away, eating nuts and berries and sleeping in badger dens.

Security at the Watford gate and along the outer wall has got stiffer every year.

One of the Mage's Men—Penelope's brother, Premal—is stationed just inside today. He's probably pissed off about the assignment. The rest of the Mage's team'll be up in his office, planning the next offensive, and Premal's down here, checking in first years. He steps in front of me.

“All right, Prem?”

“Looks like I should be asking
you
that question.…”

I look down at my bloody T-shirt. “Goblin,” I say.

Premal nods and points his wand at me, murmuring a cleaning spell. He's just as powerful as Penny. He can practically cast spells under his breath.

I hate it when people cast cleaning spells on me; it makes me feel like a child. “Thanks,” I say anyway, and start to walk past him.

Premal stops me with his arm. “Just a minute there,” he says, raising his wand up to my forehead. “Special measures today. The Mage says the Humdrum's walking around with your face.”