Carry On

  “Because you both seemed miserable!”

  “That wasn’t any of your business!”

  “Of course it was!” she said. “You’re my friends.”

  I rolled my eyes at her, very obviously, but she kept going.

  “This isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said briskly. “I heard Simon isn’t coming to your house for Christmas. And he can’t come to my house because my mum’s pissed off at the Mage, but I thought maybe you and I could still get together and make biscuits and exchange gifts.”

  We always do this, every year, the three of us. “Without Simon?”

  “Right, like I said, my mum’s got a bee in her bonnet about Simon.”

  “But we never hang out without Simon,” I said.

  “Only because he’s always around,” Penny said. “Just because you guys broke up doesn’t mean we’re not still friends, you and me.”

  “We’re friends?”

  “Nicks and Slick, I hope so,” Penny said. “I only have three friends. If we’re not friends, I’m down to two.”

  * * *

  “What’re you girls doing?” Penny’s mum comes into the kitchen, carrying her laptop, like she can’t put it down long enough to make herself a cup of tea. Her hair is pulled up in a messy dark bun, and she’s wearing the same cardigan and joggers she was wearing when I got here yesterday. My mother wouldn’t leave her bedroom looking like that.

  Professor Bunce teaches History of the Middle Ages at a Normal university, and she’s a magickal historian. She’s published a whole shelf full of mage books, but she doesn’t make any money doing it. There aren’t enough magicians to support magickal arts and sciences as careers. My father does well as a magickal physician because he’s one of a few with the right training, and everyone needs a doctor. Penny’s dad used to teach linguistics at a local university, but now he works full-time for the Coven, researching the Humdrum. He even has his own staff of investigators who work in the lab with him upstairs. I’ve been here almost two days, and I haven’t seen him yet.

  “He only comes out for tea and sandwiches,” Penny said when I asked her about it. She has a few younger siblings, too; I recognize them from Watford. There’s one camped out in the living room right now, watching three months’ worth of Eastenders—and at least one more upstairs attached to the Internet. They’re all frightfully independent. I don’t even think they have mealtimes. They just wander in and out of the kitchen for bowls of cereal and cheese toasties.

  “We’re making gingerbread,” Penny says in answer to her mother. “For Simon.”

  “Let it rest, Penelope,” her mum says, setting her laptop on the island and checking out our biscuits. “You’ll see Simon in a week or two—I’m sure he’ll still recognize you. Oh, Agatha, honestly, do the gingerbread girls have to be wearing pink?”

  “I like pink,” I say.

  “It’s good to see you girls spending time together,” she says. “It’s good to have a life that passes the Bechdel test.”

  “Because our house is just teeming with your women friends,” Penny mutters.

  “I don’t have friends,” her mum says. “I have colleagues. And children.” She picks up one of my pink gingerbread girls and takes a bite.

  “Well, I’m not avoiding other girls,” Penny says. “I’m avoiding other people.”

  “And I have plenty of girlfriends,” I say. “I wish I could go to school with them.” Not for the first time today, I think that I’m wasting a day with my real friends, my Normal friends, just to make nice with Penelope.

  “Well, you’ll get to be with them next year, at uni,” her mum says to me. “What are you going to study, Agatha?”

  I shrug. I don’t know yet. I shouldn’t have to know—I’m only 18. I’m not destined for anything. And my parents don’t treat me like I have to rise to greatness. If Penny doesn’t cure cancer and find the fairies, I think her mum will be vaguely disappointed.

  Professor Bunce frowns. “Hmm. I’m sure you’ll sort it out.” The kettle clicks, and she pours her tea. “You girls want a fresh cup?” Penny holds hers out, and her mum takes mine, too. “I had girlfriends when I was your age; I had a best friend, Lucy.…” She laughs, like she’s remembering something. “We were thick as thieves.”

  “Are you still friends?” I ask.

  She sets our mugs down and looks up at me, like she’s only been half paying attention to our conversation until now. “I would be,” she said, “if she turned up. She left for America a few years after school. We didn’t really see each other after Watford, anyway.”

  “Why not?” Penny asks.

  “I didn’t like her boyfriend,” her mum says.

  “Why?” Penny says. God, Penny’s parents must have heard that question a hundred thousand times by now.

  “I thought he was too controlling.”

  “Is that why she left for America?”

  “I think she left when they broke up.” Professor Bunce looks like she’s deciding what to say next. “Actually … Lucy was dating the Mage.”

  “The Mage had a girlfriend?” Penny asks.

  “Well, we didn’t call him the Mage then,” her mum says. “We called him Davy.”

  “The Mage had a girlfriend,” Penny says again, goggling. “And a name. Mum, I didn’t know you went to school with the Mage!”

  Professor Bunce takes a gulp of tea and shrugs.

  “What was he like?” Penny asks.

  “The same as he is now,” her mum says. “But younger.”

  “Was he handsome?” I ask.

  She makes a face. “I don’t know—do you think he’s handsome now?”

  “Ugh, no,” Penny says, at the same time as I say, “Yes.”

  “He was handsome,” Professor Bunce admits, “and charismatic in his way. He had Lucy wrapped around his little finger. She thought he was a visionary.”

  “Mum, you have to admit,” Penny says, “he really was a visionary.”

  Professor Bunce makes a face again. “He always had to have everything his way, even back then. Everything was black-and-white with Davy, always. And if Lucy didn’t agree—well, Lucy always agreed. She lost herself in him.”

  “Davy,” Penelope says. “So weird.”

  “What was Lucy like?” I ask.

  Penny’s mum smiles. “Brilliant. She was powerful.” Her eyes light up at that word. “And strong. She played rugby, I remember, with the boys. I had to mend her collarbone once out on the field—it was mad. She was a country girl, with broad shoulders and yellow hair, and she had the bluest eyes—”

  Penny’s dad wanders into the kitchen.

  “Dad!” Penny says. “Now can we talk?”

  The other Professor Bunce fumbles towards the kettle and turns it on. Penny’s mum turns it off and takes it to the sink to add water, and he kisses her forehead. “Cheers, love.”

  “Dad,” Penny says.

  “Yeah…” He’s rummaging in the fridge. He’s a smallish man, shorter than Penny’s mum. With sandy blond-grey hair and a big squishy nose. He’s got unfashionable, round, wire-rimmed glasses tucked up on his head. Everyone in Penny’s family wears unfashionable glasses.

  The gossip about Penny’s dad is that he’s not even half as powerful as her mum; my mum says he only got into Watford because his father used to teach there. Penny’s mum is such a power snob, it’s hard to imagine her married to a dud.

  “Dad, remember? I needed to talk to you.”

  He’s stacking food in his arms: Two yoghurts. An orange. A packet of prawn crackers. He grabs a gingerbread girl and notices me. “Oh, hello, Agatha.”

  “Hello, Professor Bunce.”

  “Martin,” he says, already leaving. “Call me Martin.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah, come on up, Penny—bring my tea, would you?”

  She waits for his tea, then snatches a couple more gingerbread people—they’re eating them faster than I can decorate them—and follows him upstairs.
br />   “Why did they break up?” I ask Professor Bunce after Penny and her dad have cleared out.

  She’s staring at her laptop, holding her tea, forgotten, halfway up to her mouth. “Hmmm?”

  “Lucy and Davy,” I say.

  “Oh. I don’t know,” she says. “We’d lost touch by then. I imagine she finally realized he was a git and had to cross the ocean to get away from him. Can you imagine having the Mage for an ex? He’s everywhere.”

  “How did you find out that she left?”

  Professor Bunce looks sad. “Her mother told me.”

  “I wonder why the Mage has never dated anyone else.…”

  “Who knows,” she says, shaking it off and looking back at her computer. “Maybe he has secret Normal girlfriends.”

  “Or maybe he really loved Lucy,” I say, “and never got over her.”

  “Maybe,” Professor Bunce says. She’s not paying attention. She types for a few seconds, then looks up at me. “You just reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years. Wait here.” She walks out of the kitchen, and I figure she probably won’t be back. The Bunces do that sometimes.

  But she does come back, holding out a photograph. “Martin took this.”

  It’s three Watford students, two girls and a boy, sitting in the grass—by the football pitch, I think. The girls are wearing trousers. (Mum says nobody wore school skirts in the ’90s.) One of them is pretty obviously Penelope’s mum. With her hair down and wild, she looks a lot like Penny. Same wide forehead. Same smirk. (I wish Penny were down here, so I could tease her about that.) And the boy is obviously the Mage—different with his hair longer and loose, and with no silly moustache. (The Mage has the worst moustache.)

  But the girl in the middle is a stranger.

  She’s lovely.

  Shoulder-length yellow-blond hair, curly and thick. With rosy cheeks, and eyes so big and blue, you can see the colour in the photo. She’s smiling warmly, holding Penelope’s mum’s hand, and leaning into the boy, who has his arm around her.

  The Mage really was dead handsome. Better looking than either of the girls. And he looks softer here than I’ve ever seen him, smiling out one side of his mouth, with an almost sheepish look in his eyes.

  “Lucy and I never really fought,” Professor Bunce says. “I’d fight, and Lucy would just try to change the subject. It was never a fight at the end, either. I think she stopped talking to me because she got tired of defending Davy to me. He was so intense by the time we left school—radicalized, ready to charge the palace and set up a guillotine.”

  I realize that Professor Bunce is talking to herself now, and to the photo, more than she is to me.

  “And he never shut up,” she says, setting the photo on the counter. “I still don’t know how she could stand him.”

  She looks up at me and narrows her eyes. “Agatha, I know I’m being indiscreet—but nothing we say in this kitchen leaves the kitchen, understood?”

  “Oh, of course,” I say. “And don’t worry about it—my mother complains about the Mage, too.”

  “She does?”

  “He never comes to her parties, and when he does, he’s wearing his uniform, and it’s usually caked with mud, and then he leaves early. It gives her a migraine.”

  Professor Bunce laughs.

  Her mobile rings. She takes it out of her pocket. “This is Mitali.” She looks back at her computer and clicks at the touchpad. “Let me check.” She picks up the laptop, balancing it against her stomach, propping the phone between her ear and shoulder, and walks out of the room.

  She leaves the photo on the counter. After a moment, I pick it up.

  I look at the three of them again. They look so happy—it’s hard to believe none of them are on speaking terms now.

  I look at Lucy, at the colour in her cheeks and her blue-sky eyes, and slip the photo into my pocket.

  58

  LUCY

  I wish you could have known him when he was young.

  He was handsome, of course. He’s still handsome. Now he’s handsome in a way that everyone sees.…

  Then it was just me.

  I did feel sorry for him; I guess that’s how it started. He was always talking, and no one was ever listening.

  I liked to listen. I liked his ideas—he was right about so many things. He still is.

  “How goes the Revolution, Davy?”

  “Don’t tease, Lucy. I don’t like teasing.”

  “I know. But I do.”

  He was sitting alone under the yew tree, so I sat down next to him. When we first started talking, I’d meet him here so that no one would see us together—so no one would see me with daft old Davy.

  Now I liked to meet him under the yew tree because it was almost like being alone together.

  “You’ve been quiet lately,” I said.

  “There’s nothing more to say. Nobody’s listening.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I brought my grievances before the Coven,” he said. “They laughed at me.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t laugh, Davy—”

  “You don’t have to laugh out loud to mock someone. They treated me like a child.”

  “Well, you are a child. We both are.”

  He looked directly into my eyes. There’s something about Davy’s eyes. They’re half magic. I could never look away.

  “No, Lucy. We’re not.”

  * * *

  After that meeting with the Coven, Davy was always in the library, or bent over a book in the dining hall, dripping gravy over some four-hundred-year-old text.

  Sometimes I’d sit with him, and sometimes he’d talk to me.

  “Lucy, did you know that Watford used to have its own oracle? That’s the room at the top of the Chapel with the window that looks out over the school walls. The oracles worked there. They were as important as the headmasters.”

  “When did that end?”

  “Nineteen fourteen. It was an austerity measure. The idea was that oracles would donate their services as needed after that.”

  “I don’t know any oracles,” I said.

  “Well, it was the Watford oracle who trained other oracles. It’s a dead profession now. The library still has a whole wing for their prophecies—”

  “Since when do you care about crystal balls and tarot cards?”

  “I don’t care about children playing with tools they don’t understand, but this…” His eyes glittered. “Did you know that the potato famine was prophesied?”

  “I did not.”

  “And the Holocaust.”

  “Really? When?”

  “In 1511. And did you know that there’s only one vision that every oracle has had since the beginning of Watford?”

  “I didn’t even know there were oracles thirty seconds ago.”

  “That there’s a great Mage coming.”

  “Like the children’s song,” I said. “And one will come to end us, / and one will bring his fall, / let the greatest power of powers reign, / may it save us all.”

  “Yes.”

  “My grandmother used to talk about the Greatest Mage.”

  “There are dozens of prophecies,” Davy said. “All about one mage, the Chosen One.”

  “How do you know they’re all about the same person?” I ask. “And how do you know he—or she—hasn’t come and gone already.”

  “Do you really think we’d miss someone who saved our whole people? Someone who fixed our world?”

  “Does it say what they’ll fix?”

  “It says there will be a threat, that we’ll be dark and divided—that magic itself will be in danger, and that there will be a mage who has power no one else has ever dreamt of, a magician who draws his power from the centre of the earth. ‘He walks like an ordinary man, but his power is like no other.’ One of the oracles describes him as ‘a vessel’—large and strong enough to hold all of magic itself.”

  Davy was getting more and more excited as he talked. His eyes were
shining, and his words were tripping over each other. He gestured towards the stack of books as if their very presence made the prophecies irrefutable.

  I felt my chin pull back. “You don’t…”

  “What?” Davy asked.

  “Well, you don’t think…”

  “What, Lucy? What don’t I think?”

  “Well … that you’re the Greatest Mage?…”

  He scoffed. “Me? No. Don’t be a fool. I’m more powerful than any of these cretins”—he glanced around the library—“but I have the sort of power you can imagine.”

  I tried to laugh. “Right. So…”

  “So?”

  “So why is this so important to you?”

  “Because the Greatest Mage of all is coming, Lucy. And he’s coming at the hour of our greatest need. When the mages are ‘scrabbling with clawed hands at each others’ throats’—when ‘the head of our great beast has lost its way.’ That’s soon. That’s now. We should all care about this! We should be getting ready!”

  59

  PENELOPE

  I like my dad’s lab. In the attic. No one’s allowed to clean up here, not even his assistants. It’s a complete mess, but Dad knows where everything is, so if you move a book from one pile to the next, he goes a little mental.

  One whole wall is a map of Great Britain—the holes in the magickal atmosphere haven’t spread across the water yet, but they’ve grown over the years. Dad uses pins and string to map the perimeter of each hole, then uses different colours of string to show how the holes have grown. Little flags record the date of measurement. A few of the big holes have merged over the years—there’s almost no magic left in Cheshire anymore.

  Dad’s assistants are out on a surveying mission now. He’s just hired someone new, a magickal anthropologist, to study the effects of the voids on magickal creatures. He’d like to study how the holes affect Normals, but he can’t get the funding.

  I walk over to the map. There are two holes in London—a big one in Kensington and a smaller one in Trafalgar Square. I hate to think about what would happen if the Humdrum attacked near our house in Hounslow. Plenty of magickal families have had to move, and sometimes it weakens them. Your magic settles in a place. It supports you.