Carry On (41 page)

“Lucy disappeared?” I say.

“Worse,” Mum says. “She ran away. From magic. Can you
imagine
?”

“Yes,” I say, then, “no.”

My mother brushes nonexistent crumbs from her hands. “Get changed, darling—the guests will be here any minute.”

I start to walk out of the kitchen, and Mum hands me a stack of hand-embroidered napkins to give to Helen on my way through the dining room. I hand them to Helen without saying anything. I'm too busy thinking.…

“I knew Lucy Salisbury,” Helen says. “We went to school together.”

It's quite like Helen to wait until my mother isn't in the room to speak to me. My mother prefers a more formal relationship, but Helen has always treated me like family. (Not close family, more like a niece; I think she prefers Simon.)

“Lucy was a few years older,” Helen says. “All the girls in my year went mad when we heard she'd run away. We thought it was so romantic. And terrifying!”

“Did she really run away?”

“That's what we heard. Met a man and took off—for California.”

“California!”

“I used to think of her,” Helen says, “with that long, blond hair, lying out on the sand.”

*   *   *

I climb into bed without changing into my party clothes and pull out the stolen photo, holding it up above me.

Lucy Salisbury ran away from magic.

She was dating the most powerful living Mage, the guy who was about to take over the world—and she just ran away.

Professor Bunce said Lucy was a powerful magician in her own right. She could have been the First Lady of magic. Or maybe she could have ruled beside the Mage.
And she walked away.

Was
there a baby? Did she take the baby with her?

Maybe she's raising him in the Normal world. Maybe that's the gift Lucy Salisbury gave herself and her child—not to have to grow up with all this shit. Not to have the Mage as his dad, and a world at war for its inheritance.

That kid got off.

And Simon got stuck with it instead.

 

69

LUCY

I was happy.

I loved him.

And he was always more good than bad.

He's still more good than bad, I think. It just goes to show how much of both a person can hold.

We were together by the time we left Watford. Davy had a cottage he'd inherited from his grandmother, and I followed him there. I lied to my parents—they never liked Davy.

He spent most his time reading in those days, and writing letters and pamphlets that he'd send to magickal scholars.

He never felt like seeing friends or just going out. I remember we went to London once to have dinner with Mitali and Martin, to meet their little boy—I wore a long peasant skirt, and I'd spelled flowers into my hair, and I was so happy to see them. To see Mitali.

At first it was good. We were drinking red wine, and I was curled up in a big Papasan chair. And Davy started talking to Mitali about the Coven—she was campaigning for a seat.

“You won't change anything,” he said. “Nothing will change.”

“I know you think so,” she said. “I've read your papers.”

“Have you?” That perked him up. He leaned forward in his chair, dangling his wineglass between his knees. “Then you know that the only answer is revolution.”

“I know that things will only get better if good people fight for what's important.”

“And you think the Coven cares about ‘good people' and ‘what's important'? You think Natasha Grimm-Pitch cares about your idealism?”

“No,” Mitali said. “But if I'm on the Coven, I'll have as many votes as she does.”

Davy laughed. “The names on the Coven haven't changed in two hundred years. Only the faces. They might as well carve ‘Pitch' onto the headmaster's chair at Watford. All they care about, all any of them care about, is protecting their own power.”

Mitali wasn't cowed. In her wide-legged jeans and her wine-coloured velvet jacket, her hair falling to her shoulder blades in messy dark curls,
she's
the one who looked like a radical. “They're protecting all our power,” she said. “The whole World of Mages.”

“Are they?” Davy said. “Ask Natasha Grimm-Pitch about suicide rates among low-magicians. Ask your Coven what they're doing to fight pixie sticks and every other magickal disease that doesn't affect their own sons and daughters.”

“How is a revolution going to help the pixies?” Mitali huffed. “How is throwing aside centuries of tradition and institutional knowledge going to help any of us?”

“We'll build better traditions!” Davy shouted. I don't think he realized he was shouting.

“We'll write new rules in blood?”

“If need be! Yes! Yes, Mitali—does that frighten you?”

We left shortly after that. I said I had a headache.

Davy was still flushed from the wine, but he wouldn't let me drive. He didn't notice me casting
Stay the course
on him from the passenger seat.

*   *   *

We never went back to London after that.

We rarely left the cottage. We didn't have a phone, or a television. I bought chickens from the farmer down the road and spelled them not to wander away. I wrote long letters to my mother. All fiction. Davy stayed inside most days with his books.

I called them
his
books, but they were all stolen from Watford. He'd go back and take more whenever he needed them. He was so powerful, he could make himself nearly invisible.

Sometimes Davy would go away for a few days to meet with other magickal activists. But he always came back more dispirited than when he'd left.

He gave up on a revolution. No one read his papers.

He gave up on everything except the Greatest Mage. I think Davy must have been the greatest Greatest Mage scholar in the history of magic. He knew every prophecy by heart. He wrote them on the stone walls of our cottage, and diagrammed their sentences.

When I brought him his meals, he might ask for my opinion. What did I think
this
metaphor meant? Had I ever considered
that
interpretation?

I remember a morning when I interrupted him to bring him eggs and oatmeal. Crowley, we ate so much oatmeal—which I was also feeding to the chickens.

You can extend food with magic, you can make food out of pillows and candles. You can call birds down from the sky and deer in from the fields. But sometimes, there's nothing.

Sometimes, there was just nothing.

“Lucy,” he said. His eyes were lit from inside. He'd been up all night.

“Good morning, Davy. Eat something.”

“Lucy, I think I cracked it.” He wrapped his arm around my hips and pulled me closer to his chair—and I loved him then.

“What if the oracles kept having the same visions because they weren't prophecies at all? What if they were instructions?
Lucy—
what if they're meant to guide us to change, not foretell it? Here we are, just waiting to be saved, but the prophecies tell us how to save ourselves!”

“How?”

“With the Greatest Mage.”

*   *   *

He left again. He came back with more books.

He came back with pots of oil and blood that wasn't red. I'm not sure when he slept—not with me.

I went for long walks in the fields. I thought about writing letters to Mitali, but I knew she'd fly here on a broom if I told her the truth, and I wasn't ready to go.

I never wanted to leave Davy.

So much of this is his fault—I
want
you to be angry with him. But I never asked to leave. I never asked him to let me go.

I thought … I thought that whatever was coming would be better if I was there with him. I thought it helped him to be tied to me. Like a kite with a string. I thought that as long as I was there, he'd never get carried away completely.

*   *   *

He killed both my chickens.

*   *   *

He crawled into our bed one night, smelling of mud and burnt plastic, and lifted my hair to kiss the back of my neck. “Lucy.”

I rolled over to see him. He was smiling. He looked young, like someone had wiped the bitterness from his face with a warm cloth.

“I've got it,” he said, kissing my cheeks, then my forehead. “The Great Mage, Lucy. We can bring him.”

I laughed—I was so happy just to see him happy. I was so happy to have his attention. “How, Davy?”

“Just like this.”

I shook my head. I didn't understand.

He pushed me onto my back, kissing along my neck. “The two of us. We'll make him.”

He kept kissing my neck down into my nightshirt.

“Are you talking about a baby, Davy?”

He pulled his head up and grinned. “Who better than us?” he said. “To raise our saviour?”

BOOK FOUR

 

70

NICODEMUS

She won't talk to me. Hasn't since. Because it's against the rules.

She wasn't so concerned with the rules when we were kids. Made our own rules, didn't we. We was so brute, who was gonna stop us?

I'll never forget the time Ebeneza spelled the drawbridge down so the three of us could go into town and get pissed. The look on the headmistress's face when she caught her own sister sneaking back in legless! (Fiona never could hold her cider.) Mistress Pitch was steaming—standing on the Lawn in her dressing gown and nine months up the duff.

Ebb lost her wand—her staff—for a week because she was the one who snuck us out. Then the next night, Ebb spelled the bridge down with
my
wand. (We could always use each other's pieces.) Gutty as fuck, she was.

Course we got caught again.

Getting away with it wasn't the point.

The point was that we were young and free and full of magic. What was Mistress Pitch going to do? Toss out her own sister and the two strongest magicians at Watford?

They weren't going to toss out Ebeneza; they were too worried she'd go rogue on them. Too worried she'd realize she could do more with all that magic than stick the desks to the ceilings—or call every shaggy dog in the county to Watford, like she was the Pied Piper.

I realized. What Ebb could do. What I could do.

*   *   *

I get to our street and cut down the alley, then let myself into the back garden. The gate creaks. I'm a few minutes early—Ebb'll be inside still. I make my way over to the willow tree and sit down on Mum's bench.

Wish I could have a fag.

Gave 'em up when I crossed over—almost twenty years ago. But that Pitch brat blew smoke in my face, and now I've got a taste for it again.

Fi and I used to roll our own, on menthol papers.

Ebeneza wouldn't have any of it. Said tobacco gunked up her magic.

“Your sister's trynta stay pure,” Fiona would tease. “Like an athlete. Like Princess Di.”

We used to give Ebb hell over being a virgin. Hell, she's probably still a virgin. (Does feeling up other girls even count?)

The back door opens, and I look up. But it ain't Ebb. Just somebody—no one I recognize—stepping out for a smoke. I close my eyes and inhale. This vampire nose is good for something.

Ebb'll come out soon, and she'll walk out into the garden and lean against the gate. And she won't talk to me. That's the agreement. That's the rule.

She'll just talk.

She'll tell the wind how she's doing. She'll catch the Christmas moon up on all the family goings-on. Sometimes she might do magic—not for me. Just for the sake of it. Anything alive comes out to say hello to Ebb, even in the dead of winter. Last year, a deer pranced up the alley, caszh as anything, and rested its head in Ebeneza's hands. I knifed and drained it as soon as Ebb went back in. I think she knew that I would—maybe it was a gift. Maybe she was trying to keep
me
pure for a day.

Anyway, I had to haul the deer's body a mile before I found a bin big enough for it.

Ebb'll come out soon. And she'll talk. And I'll listen. I don't talk at all—don't think Ebb would want that. It would be too much like a conversation. Too close to breaking the rules.

Plus, what would I say? I've got nothing to report that she wants to hear. No news that won't turn her stomach. All Ebeneza really wants to know is that I'm still here. Such as I am.

Mostly my sister talks about the school. The grounds. The goats. The kids. That dryad she's been mooning over since sixth year. She doesn't talk about the Mage. Ebb's never been one for politics. I expect she stays out of his way—though she told me once that they got into a royal dust-up when one of his merwolves ate one of her goats.

I've never seen the merwolves, only heard about them from Ebb. It's the only animal I've ever known her not to like. She says they try to throw themselves up on the drawbridge. That the bridge shakes while the children and goats are crossing it. One of the wolves actually made it out once—dragged itself around the Lawn, snarling, until Ebb came and cast it back into the water.
“I spell them to sleep now when the bridge is down,”
she told me.
“They sink to the bottom of the moat.”