Carry On

I think when I showed up at Watford, people had sort of given up on the old prophecies. Or wondered if the Greatest Mage had come and gone without anybody ever noticing.

I don’t think anybody expected the Chosen One to come from the Normal world—from mundanity.

A mage has never been born to Normals.

But I must have been, because magicians don’t give up their kids. There’s no such thing as magickal orphans, Pe

The Mage didn’t tell me all that, when he first came to get me. I didn’t know that I was the first Normal to get magic, or the most powerful magician anyone had heard of. Or that plenty of magicians—especially the Mage’s enemies—thought he was making me up, some sort of political sleight of hand. A Trojan 11-year-old with baggy jeans and a shaved head.

When I first got to Watford, some of the Old Families wanted me to make the rounds, to meet everyone who mattered, so they could check me out in person. Kick my tyres. But the Mage wasn’t having any of it. He says most magicians are so caught up in their own petty plots and power struggles that they lose sight of the big picture. “I won’t see you become anyone’s pawn, Simon.”

I’m glad now that he was so protective. It’d be nice to know more magicians and to feel more a part of a community, but I’ve made my own friends—and I made them when we were young, when none of them were overly fussed about my Great Destiny.

If anything, my celebrity status has been a liability for making friends at Watford. Everybody knows that things tend to explode around me. (Though no people have exploded yet—that’s something.)

I ignore the staring from the other tables and help Penelope get our tea.

Even though we go to an exclusive boarding school—with its own cathedral and moat—nobody’s spoiled at Watford. We do our own cleaning and, after our fourth year, our own laundry. We’re allowed to use magic for chores, but I usually don’t. Cook Pritchard does the cooking, with a few helpers, and we all take turns serving at mealtimes. On weekends, it’s help yourself.

Penelope gets us a plate of cheese sandwiches and a mountain of warm scones, and I tear through half a block of butter. (I eat my scones with big slabs of it, so the butter melts on the outside but keeps a cold bite in the middle.) Pe

“Tell me about your summer,” I say between swallows.

“It was good,” she says. “Really good.”

“Yeah?” Crumbs fly out of my mouth.

“My dad and I went to Chicago. He did some research at a lab there, and Micah and I helped.” She loosens up as soon as she mentions her boyfriend’s name. “Micah’s Spanish is amazing. He taught me so many new spells—I think if I study the language more, I’ll be able to cast them like a native.”

“How is he?”

Penelope blushes and takes a bite of sandwich so she doesn’t have to answer right away. It’s only been a few months since I saw her last, but she looks different. More grown up.

Girls don’t have to wear skirts at Watford, but both Penelope and Agatha like to. Pe

Pe

But still … she’s changed this summer. She’s starting to look like a woman in little girl’s clothes.

“Micah’s good,” she says finally, pushing her dark hair behind her ears. “It’s the most time we’ve spent together since he was here.”

“So the thrill isn’t gone?”

She laughs. “No. If anything, it felt … real. For the first time.”

I don’t know what to say, so I try to smile at her.

“Ugh,” she says, “close your mouth.”

I do.

“But what about you?” Pe

“What happened when?”

“This summer.”

I shrug. “Nothing happened.”

She sits back, sighing. “Simon, it’s not my fault that I went to America. I tried to stay.”

“No,” I say. “I mean there’s nothing to tell. You left. Everyone left. I went back in care. Liverpool, this time.”

“You mean, the Mage just … sent you away? After everything?” Penelope looks confused. I don’t blame her.

I’d just escaped a kidnapping, and the first thing the Mage did was send me packing.

I thought, when Pe

The Humdrum has been attacking Watford as long as I’ve been here. He sends dark creatures. He hides from us. He leaves a trail of dead spots in the magickal atmosphere. And finally, we had a lead.

I wanted to find him. I wanted to punish him. I wanted to end this, once and for all, fighting at the Mage’s side.

Penelope clears her throat. I must look as lost as I feel. “Have you talked to Agatha?” she asks.

“Agatha?” I butter another scone. They’ve cooled off, and the butter doesn’t melt. Pe

It’s a waste of magic. She’s constantly wasting magic on me. The butter melts into the now-steaming scone, and I bounce it from hand to hand. “You know Agatha’s not allowed to talk to me over the summer.”

“I thought maybe she’d find a way this time,” Penelope says. “Special measures, to try to explain herself.”

I give up on the too-hot scone and drop it on my plate. “She wouldn’t disobey the Mage. Or her parents.”

Pe

Pe

Normally I’m the one kicking things, but I’ve been kicking walls—and anyone who looked at me wrong—all summer. I shrug. “Go back to school, I guess.”

*   *   *

Penelope’s avoiding her room.

She says Trixie’s girlfriend came back early, too, and they don’t have any personal boundaries. “Did I tell you Trixie got her ears pierced this summer? She wears big noisy bells right in the pointy parts.”

Sometimes I think Pe

“Easy for you to say,” she says, all stretched out on Baz’s bed again. “You don’t live with a pixie.”

“I live with a vampire!” I argue.

“Unconfirmed.”

“Are you saying you don’t think Baz is a vampire?”

“I know he’s a vampire,” she says. “But it’s still unconfirmed. We’ve never actually seen him drink blood.”

I’m sitting on the window ledge and leaning out a bit over the moat, holding on to the latch of the swung-open pane. I scoff: “We’ve seen him covered in blood. We’ve found piles of shrivelled-up rats with fang marks down in the Catacombs.… I’ve told you that his cheeks get really full when he has a nightmare? Like his mouth is filling up with extra teeth?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” Pe

“I live with him! I have to keep my wits about me.”

She rolls her eyes. “Baz’ll never hurt you in your room.”

She’s right. He can’t. Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.