Carry On Read online

  “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.”
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  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.

  Father says Fiona thought my mother hung the moon. (To hear my father talk about her, my mother may have actually hung the moon. Or maybe it was hung for her pleasure.)

  Fiona was apprenticing with an herbalist in Beijing when my mother died. She came home for the funeral and never went back. She stayed with my dad until he got remarried, then moved to London. Now my aunt lives on family money and magic, and lives to avenge her sister.

  It’s a bad fit.

  Fiona is smart—and powerful—but my mother was the chess player in the family. My mother was groomed for greatness. (That’s what everyone says.)

  Fiona is vindictive. She’s impatient. And sometimes she just wants to rage against the machine—even if she’s not exactly sure where the machine is or how to properly rage at it.

  Her grand plan for uncovering the Mage’s plot is to send me sneaking up to his office. She’s obsessed with the Mage’s office; it was my mother’s office, and I think Fiona thinks she can steal it back from him.

  “Sneak into his office and do what?” I asked her.

  “Look around.”

  “What do you expect me to find?”

  “Well, I don’t know, do I? He must be leaving a trail somewhere. Check his computer.”

  “He’s never even there to use his computer,” I said. “He probably keeps everything on his phone.”

  “Then steal his phone.”

  “You steal his phone,” I said. “I’ve got homework.”

  She said she’d be meeting soon with the Old Families—a consortium made up of everyone who got left behind in the Mage’s revolution.

  (My father goes to these meetings, too, but his heart’s not in it. He’d rather talk about magickal livestock and archival seed stock. The Grimms are farmers. My mother must have been sick in love to marry him.)

  After my mother died, anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Mage’s military coup was quickly forced off the Coven. No one from the Old Families has had a seat for the last decade—even though most of the Mage’s reforms are aimed at us:

  Banned books, banned phrases. Rules about when we can meet and where. Taxes to cover all the Mage’s initiatives; most notably to pay for every faun bastard and centaur cousin, and every pathetic excuse for a magician in the Realm to attend Watford. The World of Mages never had taxes before. Taxes were for Normals; we had standards instead.

  You can’t blame the Old Families for striking back at the Mage however we can.

  Anyway, I told Fiona that I’d do it. That I’d go up to the Mage’s office and look around, even if it was pointless.

  “Take something,” she said, gripping her steering wheel.

  I was in the back seat, so I could see only a slice of her face in the rearview mirror. “Take what?”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Take something.”

  “I’m not a thief,” I said.

  “It’s not thieving—that office is hers, it’s yours. Take something for me.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I almost always go along with Fiona in the end. The way she misses my mother keeps her alive for me.

  * * *

  But tonight I’m too tired to do Fiona’s bidding.

  And too jumpy. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being followed—that whoever it was who paid the numpties to take me will try again.

  By the time I’m done in the Catacombs, it feels like I’m dragging my own corpse up the tower steps to our room.

  Snow’s asleep when I come in.

  Normally I shower in the mornings, and he showers at night.

  We’ve got the dance all worked out, after so many years. Moving around the room without touching or talking or looking at each other. (Or at least not looking at each other while the other is paying attention.)

  But there are cobwebs in my hair tonight, and I was so thirsty that I got blood under my nails when I fed.

  That hasn’t happened since I was 14, not since I was just getting the hang of this. I can usually drain a polo pony without staining my lips.

  I move around the room quietly. As much as I enjoy disturbing Snow, tonight I just need to clean off and get some sleep.

  I never should’ve tried to make it through a full day of classes. My leg’s gone numb, and my head is killing me. Maybe it’s good that Coach Mac won’t take me back on the team, if I can’t even manage seven hours in a desk. (He looked sad when I showed up at practice. And suspicious. He said I was on probation.)

  I take a quick, quiet shower, and when I climb into bed, I feel every bone in my body groan happily.

  Crowley, I missed this bed. Even though it’s dusty and lumpy, with goose quills that sneak through the ticking and poke you.

  My bedroom at home is enormous. All the furniture at home is hundreds of years old, and I’m not allowed to hang anything up or move anything around because it’s all registered with the National Trust. Every few years or so, the local paper comes in and does an article.

  My bed there is heavy and draped, and if you look close, you’ll find forty-two gargoyles carved into the trim. There used to be a step stool at the head because the bed was too tall for me to climb into by myself.

  This bed, at Watford, is more mine than that one ever was.

  I roll over onto my side, facing Snow. He’s sleeping, so it doesn’t matter if I stare at him. Which I do. Even though I know it doesn’t do me any good.

  Snow sleeps in a knot: his legs pulled up and his fists drawn in, shoulders hunched high, head tucked low, and his hair a crush of curls on the pillowcase. What little moonlight there is
catches on his tawny skin.

  There was no light with the numpties. Just one endless night of pain and noise and blood.

  I’m at least half dead, I think. I mean, just normally, when I’m walking around and feeling good—I’m at least half gone.

  When I was in that coffin, I pushed myself closer.

  I let myself slip away.…

  Just to stay sane. Just to get through it.

  And when I felt myself slipping too far, I held on to the one thing I’m always sure of—

  Blue eyes.

  Bronze curls.

  The fact that Simon Snow is the most powerful magician alive. That nothing can hurt him, not even me.

  That Simon Snow is alive.

  And I’m hopelessly in love with him.

  33

  BAZ

  The operative word there is “hopeless.”

  That was evident the moment I realized I’d be the one who was most miserable if I ever succeeded in doing Snow in.

  It dawned on me during our fifth year. When Snow followed me around like a dog tied to my ankle. When he wouldn’t give me a single moment of solace to sort through my feelings—or try to wank them away. (Which I eventually tried that summer. To no avail.)

  I wish I’d never figured it out. That I love him.

  It’s only ever been a torment.

  Sharing a room with the person you want most is like sharing a room with an open fire.

  He’s constantly drawing you in. And you’re constantly stepping too close. And you know it’s not good—that there is no good—that there’s absolutely nothing that can ever come of it.

  But you do it anyway.

  And then …

  Well. Then you burn.

  Snow says I’m obsessed with fire. I’d argue that’s an inevitable side effect of being flammable.

  I mean, I guess everyone’s flammable, ultimately—but vampires are oily rags. We’re flash paper.

  The cruel joke of it is that I come from a long line of fire magicians—two long lines, the Grimms and the Pitches. I’m brilliant with fire. As long as I don’t get too close.