Carry On

by Rainbow Rowell

  Whether he’s been successful or not depends on who you ask.…

  The Humdrum’s still out there.

  But nobody’s died on school grounds since the Mage took over. And I’m still alive, so I guess I’m inclined to say he’s doing a good job.

  A few years ago, we had to write essays for Poli Sci about the Mage’s ascendancy. Baz’s practically called for revolt. (Which took bottle, I thought. Demanding that your headmaster step down in the text of a school assignment.)

  Baz has always played a strange game: publicly expressing his family’s politics—which are basically “Down with the Mage! Peacefully and legally!”—like he has nothing to hide, while his family leads an actual covert, dangerous war against us.

  If you ask the Pitches why they hate the Mage, they start talking about “the old ways” and “our magickal heritage” and “intellectual freedom.”

  But everyone knows they just want to be in charge again. They want Watford to go back to the way it used to be—a place for only the most rich and the most powerful.

  The Mage eliminated school fees when he took over, and threw out the oral presentations and power trials to get in. Literally anyone who can speak with magic can attend Watford now, no matter their strength or skill—even if they’re half troll on their mother’s side or more mermaid than mage. The school had to build another hall of residence, Fraternity House, just to make room for everybody.

  “Can’t be too picky with cannon fodder” is Baz’s take on the reforms.

  He just hates being treated like another student, instead of the heir apparent. If his mother were still headmistress, he’d probably get his own room and whatever else he wanted.…

  I shouldn’t think like that. It’s awful that his mum died. Just because I’ve never had parents doesn’t mean I can’t understand how much it would hurt to lose one.

  Baz doesn’t show up to Political Science, so I keep an eye on his best friend, Niall, instead. Niall doesn’t flinch when Baz’s name is called, but he looks over at me, like he’s trying to say he knows I’m onto them and that he gives exactly zero fucks.

  I corner Niall after our lesson: “Where is he?”

  “Your dick? Haven’t seen it. Have you asked Ebb?”

  (Honestly. I’m not sure why goatherds take such crap for being perverts. Cowboys seem to get off scot-free.)

  “Where’s Baz?” I say.

  Niall tries to get past me, but I’m impossible to get past if I make the effort. It’s not that I’m big—I’m just bold. And when people look at me, they tend to see everything I’ve killed before.

  Niall stops and hikes his bag up on his shoulder. He’s a pale, weedy boy with brown eyes that he spells a muddy blue. Waste of magic. He sneers: “What’s it to you, Snow?”

  “He’s my roommate.”

  “I’d think you’d be enjoying the solitude.”

  “I am.”

  “So?”

  I step out of Niall’s way. “If he’s planning something, I’ll find out,” I say. “I always do.”

  “So noted.”

  “I mean it!” I shout after him.

  “Your sincerity is also noted!”

  * * *

  By dinner, I’m so antsy that I’m tearing my Yorkshire pudding to shreds while I eat. (Yorkshire pudding. Roast beef. Gravy. It’s what we have for dinner every year on the first day of the term. I’ll never forget my first Watford dinner—my eyes nearly popped out when Cook Pritchard brought out the trays of roast beef. I didn’t care if magic was real at that moment. Because roast beef and Yorkshire pudding are fucking real as rain.)

  “He might just be on holiday or something,” Penny says.

  “Why would he still be on holiday?”

  “His family travels,” Agatha offers.

  Oh, really? I want to say. Is that what you talk about alone in the woods? Your shared love of travel? I rip off a chunk of bread and knock over my milk. Penny winces.

  “He wouldn’t miss school,” I say, picking up my glass. Penny spells the milk away. “He cares too much about school.”

  Nobody argues with me. Baz has always ranked first in our class. Penny used to give him a run for his money, but being my sidekick eventually affected her grades. “I’m not your sidekick,” she likes to say. “I’m your dread companion.”

  “Maybe,” she suggests now, “his family has decided to stop pretending that we’re all at peace. Eighth year is optional anyway. In the old days, lots of people left after seventh. Maybe the Pitches have decided to get serious.”

  “Go to the mattresses,” I say.

  “Exactly.”

  “Against the Mage and me? Or the Humdrum?”

  “I don’t know,” Penny says. “I always thought the Pitches would just sit back and watch both sides destroy each other.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know what I mean, Simon—the Old Families don’t want the Humdrum to win. But they don’t mind him beating the Mage down. They’ll wait to attack when they think the Mage is weak.”

  “When they think I’m weak.”

  “Same difference.”

  Agatha is staring over at the table where Baz usually sits. Niall and Dev, another of Baz’s friends—his cousin or something—are sitting next to each other, talking with their heads close.

  “I don’t think Baz dropped out,” she says.

  Penny, sitting across from us, leans into Agatha’s line of sight. “Do you know something? What did Baz tell you?”

  Agatha looks down at her plate. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  “He must have told you something,” Penny says. “You talked to him last.”

  I clench my teeth. “Penelope,” I say without unclenching them.

  “I don’t care if you two have agreed to move on.” She waves her hand at Agatha and me. “This is important. Agatha, you know Baz better than any of us. What did he tell you?”

  “She doesn’t know him better than I do,” I argue. “I live with him.”

  “Fine, Simon, what did he tell you?”

  “Nothing to make me think he’d drop out of school and miss a whole year of making me miserable!”

  “He doesn’t even have to be here to do that,” Agatha mutters.

  This pisses me off, even though I was thinking the same thing myself, just yesterday.

  “I’m done,” I say. “I’m going up to my room. To enjoy the solitude.”

  Penny sighs. “Calm down, Simon. Don’t punish us just because you’re feeling confused. We haven’t done anything.” She glances over at Agatha and tilts her head. “Well, I haven’t.…”

  Agatha stands up, too. “I’ve got homework.”

  We walk together to the door, then she turns off for the Cloisters.

  “Agatha!” I call out.

  But I don’t say it until she’s too far away to hear.

  * * *

  I have the room to myself, and I can’t even enjoy it, because Baz’s empty bed just seems sinister now.

  I summon the Sword of Mages and practise my form on his side of the room. He hates that.

  16

  SIMON

  Baz isn’t at breakfast the next morning. Or the next.

  He isn’t in class.

  The football team starts practising, and someone else takes his place.

  After a week, the teachers stop saying his name when they take attendance.

  I trail Niall and Dev for a few days, but they don’t seem to have Baz hidden away in a barn.…

  I know I should be happy about Baz being gone—it’s what I’ve always said I wanted, to be free of him—but it seems so … wrong. People don’t just disappear like this.

  Baz wouldn’t.

  Baz is … indelible. He’s a human grease stain. (Mostly human.)

  Three weeks into the term, I still find myself walking by the pitch, expecting to see him at football practice, and when I don’t, I take a hard turn out into the hills behind the school.

  I hear Ebb sho
ut at me before I see her. “Hiya, Simon—ahoy!”

  She’s sitting above me a ways in the grass, with a goat curled up in her lap.

  Ebb spends most of her time out in the hills when the weather is good. Sometimes she lets the goats roam the school grounds—she says they take care of weeds and predatory plants. The predatory plants at Watford will actually take you down if they get a chance; they’re magic. The goats aren’t, though. I asked Ebb once if the magic hurts the goats when they eat it. “They’re goats, Simon,” she said. “They can eat anything.”

  When I get closer, I see that Ebb’s eyes are red. She wipes them with the sleeve of her jumper. It’s an old Watford school jumper, faded from red to pink and stained brown around the neck and wrists.

  If it were anybody else, I’d worry. But Ebb is kind of a weeper. She’s like Eeyore if Eeyore hung out with goats all the time instead of letting Pooh and Piglet cheer him up.

  It gets on Penelope’s nerves, all the crying, but I don’t mind. The thing about Ebb is, she never tells anybody else to keep their chin up or look on the bright side. It’s very comforting.

  I flop down next to her in the grass and run my hand down the goat’s back.

  “What’re you doing up here?” Ebb asks. “Shouldn’t you be at football practice?”

  “I’m not on the team.”

  She scratches the goat behind its ears. “Since when do ya let that stop you?”

  “I…”

  Ebb sniffs.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Ach. Sure.” She shakes her head, and her hair flies out around her ears. It’s dirty and blond and always cut in a sharp line above her jaw and across her forehead. “Just the time of year,” she says.

  “Autumn?”

  “Back to school. Reminds me of my own school days. You can’t go back, Simon, you can never go back.…” She rubs her nose on her cuff again, then rubs her cuff into the goat’s fur.

  I don’t point out that Ebb’s never really left Watford. I don’t want to make fun of her—it seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. Spending your whole life here.

  “Not everyone came back,” I say.

  Her face falls. “Did we lose someone?”

  Ebb’s brother died when they were young. It’s one of the reasons she’s so melancholy; she never got over it. I don’t want to set her off again.…

  “No,” I say. “I mean—Baz. Basil didn’t come back.”

  “Ah,” she says. “Young Master Pitch. Surely he’ll be back. His mother did so value education.”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “Well, you know him best,” she says.

  “That’s what I said, too!”

  Ebb nods and pets the goat. “To think you used to be at each other’s throats.”

  “We’re still at each other’s throats.”

  She looks up at me doubtfully. She has narrow blue eyes, bright blue—brighter somehow because her face is so dirty.

  “Ebb,” I insist, “he tried to kill me.”

  “Not successfully.” She shrugs. “Not recently.”

  “He’s tried to kill me three times! That I know of! It doesn’t actually matter whether it worked.”

  “It matters a bit,” she says. “’Sides, how old was he the first time, eleven? Twelve? That hardly counts.”

  “It counts with me,” I say.

  “Does it.”

  I huff. “Yes. Ebb. It does. He hated me before he even met me.”

  “Exactly,” she says.

  “Exactly!”

  “I’m just saying—been a long time since I had to spell you two apart.”

  “Well, there’s no point in throwing down all the time,” I say. “Doesn’t get us anywhere. And it hurts. I suspect we’re saving up.”

  “For what?” she asks.

  “The end.”

  “The end of school?”

  “The end of the end,” I say. “The big fight.”

  “So you were saving it, and then he didn’t come back for it?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t lose hope,” Ebb says. “I think he’ll be back. His mother always valued a good education. I miss her this time a’year.…”

  She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. I sigh. Sometimes, with Ebb, you’re better off just enjoying the silence. And the goats.

  * * *

  Three weeks pass. Four, five, six.

  I stop looking for Baz anywhere where he’s supposed to be.

  Whenever I hear someone on the stairs outside our room now, I know it’s Penny. I even let her spend the night sometimes and sleep in his bed; there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger of Baz bursting in and lighting her on fire for it. (The Roommate’s Anathema doesn’t prevent you from hurting anyone else in your room.)

  I hassle Niall a few more times, but he doesn’t even hint that he knows where Baz is. If anything, it seems like Niall’s hoping that I’ll turn up some answers.

  I feel like I should talk to the Mage about it. About Baz. But I don’t want to talk to the Mage. I’m afraid he might still be planning to send me away.

  Penny says it’s pointless to avoid him. “It’s not like you’ll fall off the Mage’s radar.”

  But maybe I have.… And that bothers me, too.

  The Mage is always gone a lot, but he’s hardly been at Watford at all this term. And whenever he is here, he’s surrounded by his Men.

  Normally, he’d be checking on me. Calling me to his office. Giving me assignments, asking for help. Sometimes I think the Mage actually needs my help—he can trust me better than anyone—but sometimes I think he’s just testing me. To see what I’m made of. To keep me in order.

  I’m sitting in class one day when I see the Mage walking alone towards the Weeping Tower. As soon as class ends, I make for the Tower.

  It’s a tall, red brick building—one of the oldest at Watford, almost as old as the Chapel. It’s called the Weeping Tower because there are vines that grow in every summer and creep from the top down—and because the building has started to sag forward over the years, almost like it’s slumping in grief. Ebb says not to worry about it falling; the spells are still strong.

  The dining hall is on the ground floor of the Tower, the whole ground floor, and then above that are classrooms and meeting rooms and summoning chambers; the Mage’s office and sanctum are at the very top.

  He comes and goes as he needs to. The Mage has the whole magickal world to keep track of—in the UK, anyway—and hunting the Humdrum takes up a lot of his time.

  The Humdrum doesn’t just attack me. That isn’t even the worst of it. (If it were, the other magicians probably would have thrown me to him by now.)

  When the Humdrum first showed up, almost twenty years ago, holes began appearing in the magickal atmosphere. It seems like he (it?) can suck the magic out of a place, probably to use against us.

  If you go to one of these dead spots, it’s like stepping into a room without air. There’s just nothing there for you, no magic—even I run dry.

  Most magicians can’t take it. They’re so used to magic, to feeling magic, that they go spare without it. That’s how the monster got its name. One of the first magicians to encounter the holes said they were like an “insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.”

  The dead spots stay dead. You get your magic back if you leave, but the magic never comes back to that place.

  Magicians have had to leave their homes because the Humdrum has pulled the magic out from underneath them.

  It’d be a disaster if the Humdrum ever came to Watford.

  So far, he usually sends someone else—or something else, some dark creature—in after me.

  It’s easy for the Humdrum to find allies. Every dark creature in this world and its neighbours would love to see the mages fall. The vampires, the werewolves, the demons and banshees, the Manticorps, the goblins—they all resent us. We can control magic, and they can’t. Plus we keep them in check. If th
e dark things had their way, the Normal world would be chaos. They’d treat regular people like livestock. We—magicians—need the Normals to live their normal lives, relatively unaffected by magic. Our spells depend on them being able to speak freely.

  That explains why the dark creatures hate us.

  But I still don’t know why the Humdrum has targeted me, specifically. Because I’m the most powerful magician, I suppose. Because I’m the biggest threat.

  The Mage says that he himself followed my power like a beacon when it was time to bring me to Watford.

  Maybe that’s how the Humdrum finds me, too.

  I take a winding staircase to the top of the Weeping Tower, where it opens up into a round foyer. The school seal is laid out in marble tile on the floor and polished till it looks wet. And the domed ceiling has a mural of Merlin himself calling magic up through his hands into the sky, his mouth open. He kind of looks like the guy who hosts QI.

  There are two doors. The Mage’s office is behind the tall, arched door on the left. And his sanctum, his rooms, is behind the smaller door on the right.

  I knock on his office door first—no one answers. I consider knocking on the door to his rooms, but that feels too intimate. Maybe I’ll just leave him a note.

  I open the door to the Mage’s office—it’s warded, but the wards are set to welcome me—then I walk in slowly, just in case I’m disturbing him.…

  It’s dark. The curtains are drawn. The walls are normally lined with books, but a bunch have been taken down, and they’re piled in stacks around the desk.

  I don’t turn on the light. I wish I’d brought some paper or something—I don’t want to scrounge around the Mage’s desk. It’s not the sort of desk that has Post-it notes and a WHILE YOU WERE OUT pad.

  I pick up a heavy fountain pen. There’re a few sheets of paper on his desk, lists of dates, and I turn one over and write:

  Sir, I’d like to talk to you when you have a moment. About everything. About my roommate.

  And then I add:

  (T. Basilton Grimm-Pitch.)

  And then I wish I hadn’t, because of course the Mage knows who my roommate is, and now it sort of looks like I’ve signed it. So then I do sign it:

  Simon

  “Simon,” someone says, and I startle, dropping the pen.

  Miss Possibelf is standing in the doorway, but doesn’t step inside the office.