Carry On (17 page)

I just want to run him down and knock him over and figure it all out. What's wrong with him. Where he's been …

I wait in our room until dinner, but Baz doesn't come back. Then he ignores me in the dining hall.

He ignores Agatha, too. (She's staring at him as much as I am—but I don't think she's as worried that he might have come back to kill her.) She's sitting alone at a table, and I can't decide whether that makes me sad or angry. Whether Agatha herself makes me sad or angry. Or even what I'm supposed to be feeling about her. I can't
think
right now.

“I was thinking we could study in the library tonight,” Penny says at dinner, as if I'm not literally fuming.

“I'm gonna have to talk to him sometime,” I say.

“No, you aren't,” she says. “When do the two of you ever talk, anyway?”

“I'm gonna have to face him.”

She leans over her cottage pie. “That's what I'm worried about, Simon. You need to cool down first.”

“I'm cool.”

“Simon. You're never cool.”

“That hurts, Penny.”

“It shouldn't. It's one of the reasons I love you.”

“I just—I need to know where he's been.…”

“Well, he's not going to
tell
you.”

“Maybe he'll tell me something without meaning to, in the process of not telling me. What is he even
up
to? He looks like he's been in some American terror prison.”

“Maybe he's been sick.”

Curses, I never thought of that either. Every scenario I thought up had Baz hidden away, plotting somewhere. Maybe he was sick
and
plotting.…

“No matter what the truth is,” Penny says, “it won't help to pick a fight with him.”

“I won't.”

“Simon, you do. Every year. As soon as you see him. And I just think that maybe you
shouldn't
this time. Something's happening. Something bigger than Baz. The Mage has practically disappeared, and Premal has been on some secret assignment for weeks—my mum says he's stopped returning her texts.”

“Is she worried about him?”

“She's always worried about Premal.”

“Are you worried about him?”

Penny looks down. “Yeah.”

“I'm sorry—should we try to find him?”

She looks back up at me sternly. “Mum says no. She says we need to wait and pay attention. I think she and Dad are asking around, covertly, and she doesn't want us drawing a lot of attention to them. Which is why you need to cool down. Just—keep your eyes open. Observe. Don't knock over any furniture or kill anything.”

“You always say that,” I sigh. “But then when it's us or them, you want me to kill something.”

“I never want you to
kill,
Simon.”

“I never feel like I have a choice.”

“I know.” She smiles at me. Sadly. “Don't kill Baz tonight.”

“I won't.”

But I'm probably gonna have to kill him someday, and we both know it.

*   *   *

Penelope lets me go back to my room after dinner, and she doesn't try to follow—she's stuck with Trixie and her girlfriend now that Baz is back in town. “Gay people have an unfair advantage!” she complains.

“Only when it comes to visiting their roommates,” I say.

She's decent enough not to argue.

I'm nervous when I get to the top of the stairs. I still don't know what I'm going to say to him.
“Nothing,”
I hear Penny say in my head.
“Do your schoolwork, go to bed.”

As if it's ever that easy.

Sharing a room with the person you hate most is like sharing a room with a siren. (The kind on police cars, not the kind who try to entrap you when you cross the English Channel.) You can't ignore that person, and you never get used to them. It never stops being painful.

Baz and I have spent seven years grimacing and growling at each other. (Him grimacing, me growling.) We both stay away from our room as much as we can when we know the other is there, and when we can't avoid each other, we do our best not to make eye contact. I don't talk
to
him. I don't talk
in front
of him. I never let him see anything that he might take back to his bitch aunt, Fiona.

I try not to call women bitches, but Baz's aunt Fiona once spelled my feet into the dirt. I know it was her; I heard her say,
“
Stand your ground!
”

And twice I've caught her trying to sneak into the Mage's office.
“It's my sister's office,”
she said.
“I just like to visit it sometimes.”

She might have been telling the truth. Or she might have been trying to depose the Mage.

And that's the problem with all the Pitches and their allies—it's impossible to tell when they're up to something and when they're just being people.

There've been years when I thought maybe I could figure out their plan if I just paid enough attention to Baz. (Fifth year.) And years when I decided that living with him was painful enough, that I couldn't keep tabs on him, as well. (Last year.)

In the early days, there wasn't any strategy or decision. Just the two of us scuffling in the halls and kicking the shit out of each other two or three times a year.

I used to beg the Mage for a new roommate, but that's not how it works. The Crucible cast Baz and me together on the very first day of school.

All the first years are cast that way. The Mage builds a fire in the courtyard, the upper years help, and the littluns stand in a circle around it. The Mage sets the Crucible—it's an actual crucible, maybe the oldest thing at Watford—in the middle of the fire and says the incantation; then everyone waits for the iron inside to melt.

It's the strangest feeling when the magic starts to work on you. I was worried that it
wouldn't
work on me—because I was an outsider. All the other kids started moving towards each other, and I still didn't feel anything. I thought about faking it, but I didn't want to get caught and booted out.

And then I
did
feel the magic, like a hook in my stomach.

I stumbled forward and looked around, and Baz was walking towards me. Looking so cool. Like he was coming my way because he wanted to, not because there was a mystical magnet in his gut.

The magic doesn't stop until you and your new roommate shake hands—I held my hand out to Baz immediately. But he just stood there for as long as he could stand it. I don't know how he resisted the pull; I felt like my intestines were going to burst out and wrap around him.

“Snow,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, waggling my hand. “Here.”

“The Mage's Heir.”

I nodded, but I didn't even know what that meant back then. The Mage made me his heir so I'd have a place at Watford. That's also why I have his sword. It's a historic weapon—it used to be given to the Mage's Heir, back when the title of Mage was passed through families instead of appointed by the Coven.

The Mage gave me a wand, too—bone with wooden handle, it was his father's—so I'd have my own magickal instrument. You have to have magic in you, and a way to get it out of you; that's the basic requirement for Watford and the basic requirement to be a magician. Every magician inherits some family artefact. Baz has a wand, like me; all the Pitches are wandworkers. But Penny has a ring. And Gareth has a belt buckle. (It's really inconvenient—he has to thrust his pelvis forward whenever he wants to cast a spell. He seems to think it's cheeky, but no one else does.)

Penelope thinks my hand-me-down wand is part of the reason my spellwork is such shit—my wand isn't bound to me by blood. It doesn't know what to do with me. After seven years in the World of Mages, I still reach for my sword first; I know it'll come when I call. My wand comes, but then, half the time, it plays dead.

The first time I asked the Mage for a new roommate was a few months after Baz and I started living together. The Mage wouldn't hear of it—though he knew who Baz was, and knew better than I did that the Pitches are snakes and traitors.

“Being matched with your roommate is a sacred tradition at Watford,” he said. His voice was gentle but firm. “The Crucible cast you together, Simon. You're to watch out for each other, to know each other as well as brothers.”

“Yeah, but, sir…” I was sitting in that giant leather chair up in his office, the one with three horns attached to the top. “The Crucible must have made a mistake. My roommate's a complete wanker. He might even be evil. Last week, someone spelled my laptop closed, and I
know
it was him. He was practically cackling.”

The Mage just sat on his desk, stroking his beard. “The Crucible cast you together, Simon. You're meant to watch out for him.”

He kept giving me the same answer until I gave up asking. He even said no the time there was
proof
that Baz had tried to feed me to a chimera.

Baz
admitted
it, then argued that the fact that he'd failed was punishment enough. And the Mage agreed with him!

Sometimes the Mage doesn't make any sense to me.…

It was only in the last few years that I realized the Mage makes me stay with Baz to keep Baz under his thumb. Which means, I hope—I
think
—that the Mage trusts me. He thinks I'm up for the job.

I decide to take a shower and shave while Baz is still gone. I only nick myself twice, which is better than usual. When I get out, wearing flannel pyjama bottoms and a towel around my neck, Baz is by his bed, unpacking his schoolbag.

His head whips up, and his face is all twisted. He looks like I've already laid into him.

“What are you doing?” he snarls through his teeth.

“Taking a shower. What's your problem?”

“You,” he says, throwing his bag down. “Always you.”

“Hello, Baz. Welcome back.”

He looks away from me. “Where's your necklace?” His voice is low.

“My what?”

I can't see his whole face, but it looks like his jaw is working.

“Your cross.”

My hand flies to my throat and then to the cuts on my chin. My cross. I took it off weeks ago.

I hurry over to my bed and dig it out, but I don't put it on. Instead I walk around Baz and stand in his space until he has to look at me. He does. His teeth are clenched, and his head is tipped back and to the side, like he's just
waiting
for me to make the first move.

I hold the cross out with both hands. I want him to acknowledge what it is, what it means. Then I lift it up over my head and let it settle gently around my neck. My eyes are locked on Baz's, and he doesn't look away, though his nostrils flare.

When the cross is around my neck again, his eyelids dip, and he squares his shoulders.

“Where have you been?” I ask.

His eyes flick back up to mine. “None. Of your.
Business.
”

I feel my magic surge and try to shove it down. “You look like shit, you know.”

He looks even worse now that I can see him up close. There's a grey film over him—even over his eyes, which are always grey.

Baz's eyes are usually the kind of grey that happens when you mix dark blue and dark green together. Deep-water grey. Today they're the colour of wet pavement.

He huffs a laugh. “Thank you, Snow. You're looking rough and weedy yourself.”

I am, and it's his fault. How was I supposed to eat and sleep, knowing he was out there, plotting against me? And now he's here, and if he's not going to tell me anything useful, I might as well throttle him for putting me through it.

Or … I could do my homework.

I'll just do my homework.

I try. I sit at my desk, and Baz sits on his bed. And eventually he leaves without saying anything, and I know that he's going down to the Catacombs to hunt rats. Or to the Wood to hunt squirrels.

And I know that once he killed and drained a merwolf, but I don't know why—its body washed up onto the edge of the moat. (I hate the merwolves almost as much as Baz does. They're not intelligent, I don't think, but they're still evil.)

I go to bed after Baz leaves, but I don't go to sleep. He's only been back a day, and I already feel like I need to know where he is at every moment. It's fifth year all over again.

When he finally does come back to our room, smelling like dust and decay, I close my eyes.

That's when I remember about his mum.

 

32

BAZ

I almost went up to the Mage's office tonight.

Just to get my aunt Fiona off my back as soon as possible.

She lectured me all the way to Watford. She thinks the Mage is going to make another move soon. She thinks he's looking for something specific. Apparently, he's been visiting—raiding—all the Old Families' homes for the last two months. Just rolls up in his Range Rover (1981, Warwick green—lovely) and drinks their tea while his merry Men go through their libraries with finding spells.

“The Mage says one of us is working with the Humdrum,” Fiona said, “that there's nothing to hide so long as we have nothing to hide.”

She didn't have to tell me that there's plenty to hide at our place. We're not working with the Humdrum—why would any magician work with the Humdrum?—but our house is full of banned books and dark objects. Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it's been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can't even
find
fairies anymore.) (And it isn't because we ate them all.)

Fiona doesn't live with us. She has a flat in London and dates Normals. Journalists and drummers.
“I'm not a race traitor,”
she'll say.
“I'd never
marry
one.”
I think she dates them because they don't seem real. I think it's all because of my mother.