Carry On Read online

  84

  LUCY

  I didn’t know that something was wrong; I’d never been pregnant before. And no one had ever been pregnant with you, Simon.

  The books say that you’ll feel butterfly wings and twitches. A quickening. I felt so much more.

  I felt you humming inside me. Busy and bright. I felt flushed from my belly to my fingertips.

  Davy never left my side. He cooked for me. He cast blessings over us both.

  And maybe you’ll think that kindness was just for the ritual’s sake. But I think he cared for me. I think he cared for you.…

  I think he wanted us both standing beside him in the bright future he was building. A new World of Mages.

  * * *

  Pregnant women are always tired.

  They can’t hold down their meals. They feel peaked and light-headed.

  One day I went out to feed our new chickens, and I realized I couldn’t get back to the house. I didn’t have enough energy to take another step.

  I dropped to my knees, then leaned slowly forward, trying to protect you. Then I felt my lights blinking out.

  Davy was inside, taking a nap. When he woke up, he found me there, red and thirsty. He carried me into the house, ranting about what could have happened and why I hadn’t cast for help. But my magic had gone thin—it’d been weeks since I cast a spell. When I’d tried lately, it felt like I was knocking on a hollow box. Everything that was there before just wasn’t anymore.

  Everyone’s magic goes a bit wonky when they’re pregnant.

  I felt better the next morning.

  And worse the next.

  The pulling in my stomach had gotten stronger, like a crank that kept tightening. I felt like I couldn’t stay in the cottage, but I couldn’t make it to the door.

  “He needs air,” I told Davy, and he didn’t argue.

  He took me out to the empty garden and lay with me in the grass. I needed to feel the ground beneath me, and the air, and the sun.

  “Better,” I told Davy, still feeling the crank turn.

  * * *

  When I was alone, I talked to you.

  I told you about your family. About your grandparents. The cottage. About Watford, where your father and I met.

  I named you.

  “Simon,” I said to Davy. We knew you were a boy then.

  “All right,” he said. “Why?”

  “It’s a good name, it’s a wise name.”

  “Is it a saviour’s name?”

  “If he’s the Great Mage, won’t his name automatically be a saviour’s name, whatever we choose?”

  “Good point,” he said. “Simon.”

  “Simon Snow.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His middle name. Simon Snow.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Because I like it. And because everyone should have a silly middle name.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Winifred.”

  We laughed until it was too much for me.

  * * *

  Everyone feels tired when they’re pregnant. Everyone feels sick. And strange.

  “How do you feel?” Davy would ask.

  “Good,” I’d say.

  “How’s our boy?”

  “Hungry.”

  I never told Davy the truth—what could he have done to help me? What would he have done if I’d said:

  “I feel like an empty hallway, Davy. Like a wind tunnel. Like there’s something inside of me, and it isn’t just eating me, it’s eating everything. But not ‘eating,’ that’s not the right word. Consuming, sucking, devouring. How long does it take for a star to collapse? How many trillions of years?”

  * * *

  Maybe I shouldn’t tell you all this. It wasn’t what I came back to tell you.

  I don’t want you to think that it was your fault.

  You’re the child we would have had anyway, Simon. You were ours, in every way. And none of it is your fault. We made you this powerful—like starting a fire in the middle of the forest. We made you this hungry.

  * * *

  In the end, I just wanted to see you.

  And I thought maybe—maybe when you were born, I’d get some of myself back.

  I should have asked Davy to get help when my labour came on. But we couldn’t risk someone finding out what we’d done.

  You came on the solstice. And you came so easily, I swear you didn’t want to cause me any more pain.

  Your father held you up to me and covered both our faces with kisses. He was the most powerful magician in the world before you, and he cast every safeguard he knew over our heads.

  I saw you.

  I held you.

  I wanted you.

  That’s what I came back to tell you. I loved you before I met you, and I loved you more the moment I held you. And I never meant to leave you so soon.

  I never would have left you.

  Simon, Simon.

  My rosebud boy.

  85

  PENELOPE

  We sit there, together, I’m not sure how long. All of us past the point of sorrow and exhaustion and relief.

  Then Simon takes off his suit jacket—it tears around the wings—and spreads it over the Mage’s torso. He starts crying again, and Baz pulls him into his arms. Simon lets him.

  “It’s okay,” Baz says. “It’s all okay now.” One arm is tight around Simon’s back, and the other is smoothing his hair out of his face. “You did it, didn’t you?” Baz whispers. “You defeated the Humdrum. You saved the day, you courageous fuck. You absolute nightmare.”

  “I gave him my magic, Baz. It’s all gone.”

  “Who needs magic,” Baz says. “I’m going to turn you into a vampire and make you live with me forever.”

  Simon’s shoulders are heaving.

  Baz keeps talking. “Think about it, Simon. Super strength. X-ray vision.”

  Simon lifts his head. “You don’t have X-ray vision.”

  Baz raises an eyebrow. His hair is in his face, and his hands are bleeding.

  “I killed him,” Simon says.

  “It’s going to be okay.” Baz wraps both arms around him. “It’s all right, love.”

  Everything is starting to make sense.

  EPILOGUE

  PENELOPE

  I sent a little bird to my mum. There were a bunch of them around—they’d come in through the broken windows and were fluttering around the Mage’s body.

  We were all pretty wrecked, Simon, Baz, and me. I fell asleep right there. Between two corpses, that’s how exhausted I was.

  Simon tried to help Ebb, but she was cold. Gone. He didn’t cast any spells on her—not even to cover her up—and I thought he must just be as exhausted as Baz and I were, out of magic for once in his life. I didn’t understand until much later that his magic was gone for good.

  Baz was exhausted and thirsty. All the blood everywhere—Ebb’s, I think—was making him mental. Finally he started feeding on the birds. Which was disturbing, but like, not half as disturbing as everything else that had happened, and neither Simon nor I tried to stop him.

  Mum showed up after a while—with Premal, of all people; he’d been helping her look for me. We were asleep by then, so Mum and Premal thought we were all dead. When I sat up, Mum was pale as a Visitor. I think it was like she’d walked into her greatest fear for me.

  Premal wept when he saw the Mage.

  Mum took one look at the Mage, cast a spell to preserve his body for the investigation, then never looked at him again.

  She called Dad and Dr. Wellbelove, and a few others from the Coven, then took Simon and Baz and me to their room in the tower. (Mum’s the reason I can get in; she broke the ward when Dad lived in Mummers House, and now all the female Bunces can enter.) Premal brought us tea and Hobnobs, and the three of us fell asleep again.

  When I woke up, I told Mum about Agatha. I thought she might still be out there in the snow.

  When Baz woke up, he called hi
s parents.

  When Simon woke up, he wouldn’t talk. Just drank all the tea we gave him and clung to Baz’s arm.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what history will say about us. Will they say that Simon killed the Mage? That I did?

  I hope that Baz gets credit for ending the war.

  The Old Families were still raring to go when Baz went home, even though the Mage was already dead and Simon was powerless—and nobody knew it yet, but the Humdrum was gone, too.

  Mum thought the Grimms and Pitches might take the opportunity to seize control of everything.

  But Baz went home, the Coven reconvened, there were new elections, and the war just never happened.

  Mum’s the headmistress now. Officially. The Coven appointed her.

  She tried to talk me into going back to Watford, to finish my diploma. And if Simon had wanted to go back, maybe I would have made the effort. But there were just too many bad memories there. Every time I try to cross the drawbridge, I get sick to my stomach. I don’t know how Baz manages it.

  Agatha says she’s never going back. “Over my dead body,” she says. “Which is how I would have ended up if I’d stayed there.”

  BAZ

  Today’s my leaving ceremony. I’m top of our class—there was no competition after Bunce dropped out—so I have to give a speech.

  I told Simon not to come. It’s a bit bleak, being surrounded by magicians all the time, when you can’t even feel magic.

  I didn’t want him to come to Watford and think about all the things he isn’t anymore. Not the Mage’s Heir. Not a mage at all.

  He’s still everything else he’s always been—brave, honest, inflammably handsome (even with that fucking tail)—but I don’t think he wants to hear all that.

  And I find it hard to say, honestly.

  It’s hard for us … to talk … sometimes. Lately. I don’t blame him. Life hasn’t exactly kept its promises to Simon Snow. Sometimes I think I should pick fights with him, just to restore his equilibrium.

  Anyway. I don’t think he’d want to be here.

  My mother gave the speech at her leavers day. It’s in the school archives—I found it, and I’m going to read from it today. It’s about magic, the gift of magic. And the responsibility.

  And it’s about Watford. Why my mother loved it. She made this list of everything she’d miss. Like, the sour cherry scones and Elocution lessons, and the clover out on the Great Lawn.

  I can’t say that I loved Watford like my mother did.

  This was always the place that was taken from her. And the place where she was taken from me. It was like going to school in occupied territory.

  Still—I knew I was coming back for my last term, even without Penny and Simon. I wasn’t going to be the first Pitch in recorded history to drop out of Watford.

  * * *

  The speeches are in the White Chapel. The stained glass has been repaired.

  My aunt Fiona’s sitting in the front row. She whoops when I’m introduced, and I can see my father wince.

  Fiona’s as cheerful lately as I’ve ever seen her. She didn’t know what to do with herself after the Mage died. I think she wanted to kill him again. (And again.) Then the Coven made her a vampire hunter, and everything turned around. She’s on some secret task force now and working undercover in Prague half the time. I’m moving into her flat when I leave school. My parents wanted me to go to Oxford with them—they’re living there, in our hunting lodge—but I couldn’t be that far from Simon. My father still isn’t ready to admit I have a boyfriend, and it would be too exhausting, living in a place where I have to pretend I’m not a vampire or hopelessly queer.

  By the end of my speech, Fiona’s weeping and honking her nose into a handkerchief. My father isn’t crying, but he’s too choked up to properly speak to me after the ceremony. Just keeps clapping me on the back and saying, “Good man.”

  “Come on, Basil,” Fiona says. “I’ll take you back to Chelsea and get you sozzled. Top shelf only.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “Leavers ball tonight. I told the headmistress I’d be there.”

  “Can’t pass up a chance to see yourself in a suit, can you.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Ah, well. I’ll get you sozzled tomorrow, then. I’ll come back for you at teatime. Watch out for numpties.”

  That’s Fiona’s standard farewell for me now. I hate it.

  * * *

  There are a few hours before the ball, so I take a quick walk in the hills behind the walls and gather a bouquet of yellow-eyed grass and irises, then head back across the drawbridge and into the now empty Chapel.

  I make my way down into the Catacombs without bothering to light a torch. It’s been years since I’ve got lost down here.

  I’m not in a hurry, so I stop to drain every rat I find on the way. This school is going to be infested when I leave.

  My mother’s tomb is inside Le Tombeau des Enfants. It’s a stone doorway in a tunnel lined with skulls, marked by a bronze placard.

  I would have been buried here with her, if I’d died that day. I mean, died properly.

  I sit by the door—there’s no handle or lock, it’s a piece of stone wedged into the wall—and set down the flowers.

  “Some of this will be familiar to you,” I say, getting out my speech. “But I’ve added a few flourishes of my own.”

  A rat watches me from the corner. I decide to ignore it.

  When I get to the end of the speech, my head falls back against the stone. “I know you can’t hear me,” I say after a minute or two. “I know you’re not here.…

  “You came back, and I missed you. And then I did the thing you wanted me to do, so you probably won’t ever come back again.”

  I close my eyes.

  “But—I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to carry on. As I am.

  “No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think there’s any scenario where you’d want me—where you’d allow me—to go on like this.

  “But I think it’s what you would do in my circumstances. It seems like you never gave up. Ever.”

  I exhale roughly and stand up.

  Then I turn towards the door and bow my head. I speak softly, so that none of the other bones can hear:

  “I know I usually come down here to tell you I’m sorry. But I think today I want to tell you that I’m going to be all right.

  “Don’t let me be one of the things that keeps you from peace, Mother. I’m all right.”

  I wait for a few moments, just … just in case. Then climb out of the Catacombs, brushing the dust from my trousers.

  * * *

  It’s an especially grim leavers ball. The few friends I have left at Watford are here with dates—or avoiding me. Dev and Niall haven’t quite forgiven me for befriending Simon. Dev said I wasted their entire childhood plotting against him.

  “Oh, what else were you going to do with your childhood?” I asked.

  Dev didn’t bother answering.

  I end up standing next to the punchbowl, talking to Headmistress Bunce about Latin prefixes. It’s a fascinating subject, but I don’t feel like I needed to put on a black tie for it.

  I think Professor Bunce is sad that Penelope’s not here. I consider consoling her with the fact that Penelope probably would’ve skipped the ball even if she’d stayed in school, but the headmistress is already wandering off to the other side of the courtyard to check her e-mail.

  “I was hoping there’d be sandwiches,” someone mumbles.

  I ignore him because I’m not at Watford to make friends or small talk, especially on my way out.

  “Or at least cake.”

  I turn around and see Simon Snow standing on the other side of the punch table. Wearing a suit and tie, with his hair properly parted and slicked to one side.

  He shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on me like that, but he smells different these days—like something sweet and brown. No more green fire and brimstone.r />
  “How’s the party?” he asks.

  “Funereal,” I say. “How’d you get here?”

  “Flew.”

  My jaw drops, and he laughs.

  “No,” he says. “Penny drove me. She let me off at the gates.”

  “Where’re your wings?”

  “Still there. Just invisible. Someone’s already tripped over my tail.”

  “I’ve told you to tuck it in.”

  “It makes my trousers fit funny.”

  I laugh.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” he says.

  “When will I ever laugh, then?”

  Snow rolls his eyes, then cuts them nervously to the side. Towards the White Chapel.

  “You don’t have to be here,” I say.

  “No,” he says quickly. “I do.” He clears his throat. “I don’t want you to leave without me.”

  * * *

  Simon Snow can’t dance.

  The tail isn’t helping. I take the end in my left hand and wrap it around my wrist, holding it against his lower back.

  “We don’t have to do this,” I’d said when we walked out to the stone patio where people were dancing. “No one has to know.”

  “Know what?” Snow asked softly. “That I’m obsessed with you? That horse left the barn a long time ago.”

  I press my left hand, still holding his tail, into his back and take his hand with my right. He lifts his left hand in the air, then drops it like he doesn’t know what to do with it.

  “Put it on my shoulder,” I say. He does. I raise an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t Wellbelove ever teach you to dance?”

  “She tried,” he says. “She said I was hopeless.”

  “From the mouths of babes,” I say.

  At least the song isn’t hopeless. It’s Nick Cave. “Into My Arms.” One of Fiona’s favourites. It’s so slow, we barely have to move.

  Snow’s wearing an expensive suit. Black trousers, black waistcoat and tie, and a rich velvet jacket—deep blue with black lapels. It must be Dr. Wellbelove’s. It’s snug at the shoulders, but I can’t see where Snow’s wings are hidden. Someone has spelled him neat and tidy.

  I stand with my own shoulders squared. Everyone is looking at us—

  Everyone dancing. Everyone standing around the courtyard, drinking punch. Coach Mac and the Minotaur and Miss Possibelf, all standing with their punch glasses stalled on the way to their lips.