Текст книги "Carry On"

Автор книги: Rainbow Rowell

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

30

BAZ

Snow stands again when I walk into our Greek classroom. I take my seat without looking his way. “Enough, Snow, I’m not the Queen.”

He doesn’t reply—he must still be working up to a bluster.

Snow blusters like no one else. But! I! I mean! Um! It’s just! It’s no wonder he can never spit out a spell.

The Minotaur folds his arms and snorts when he sees me. “Mr. Pitch,” he says. “I see you’ve decided to join us.”

“I have, sir.”

“We’ll have to discuss your plans to catch up.”

“Of course, sir. Though I think you’ll find I’m still quite ahead of the class; my mother always insisted on summer work in Greek and Latin.” It’s good to mention my mother with the older teachers. They all still remember her—I can see their heads start to dip into a bow.

The Minotaur worked on the grounds when my mother was headmistress; creatures weren’t allowed on staff then. I dare him to hold that against me.

I dare them fucking all.

“We shall see,” he says, narrowing his cow eyes.

I’m not lying. Greek won’t be a problem for me—and I’ll be fine in Latin, Magic Words and Elocution. Political Science could be a bear, depending on how much they’ve covered. Same for History and Astrology.

I’m going to have to break my back to get to first again, and I can’t imagine Coach Mac will let me back on the football team.…

They might all cut me some slack if I told them I’d been kidnapped.

I am never telling anyone I was kidnapped.

Kidnapped. And by fucking numpties, no less.

Numpties are like trolls, but even more hideous. They’re big and stupid, and they’re always cold. They go around wrapped in blankets and dressing gowns if they have them, and if they don’t, they cover themselves in leaves and mud and old newspapers. They usually live under bridges. Because they like to live under bridges. And they’re just smart enough to hit you over the head with a club and drag you back to their hovel, if there’s something in it for them.

Aunt Fiona was appalled when she found me in the numpty den. She berated me all the way home, and all the way back to Watford. She made me sit in the back seat of her MG. (A ’67. Glorious.) “The front seat is for people who’ve never been kidnapped by bloody numpties. Jesus Christ, Baz.” (Aunt Fiona likes to swear like a Normal. She thinks she’s punk.)

I could tell she was half disgusted with me, half relieved that I was still alive.

I’d been stuck under that bridge for six weeks, in a coffin—and I don’t even think the numpties were trying to torture me. I think they thought that was humane treatment for a vampire. So to speak. They even brought me blood. (I decided not to think about where they got it.) They did not bring food. Most people don’t realize that vampires need both. Most people know fuck-all about vampires.…

I know fuck-all about vampires. It’s not like I got an instruction pamphlet when I was bitten.

The numpties kept me in the coffin for six weeks, and every day or so, they threw in some blood. (In a thirty-two-ounce plastic cup with a bendy straw.) I can go without food longer than regular people, but I was pretty ruined by the time Fiona got there.

Fortunately, my aunt is an utter badass. She laid waste to the numpties before she found my coffin; then she bombarded me with healing magic. “Early to bed and early to rise!” she kept whispering. And “Get well soon!”

(It reminded me of the day I was Turned—Fiona and my father both hitting me with healing magic that mended the bite marks and bruises but didn’t touch the changes already churning inside me.)

I was still weak when Fiona helped me out of the coffin.

“All right?” she asked.

“Hungry. Thirsty.”

She kicked a dead numpty—they look like giant stones when they die, great heaps of mud and grey matter—“Can you drink one of these?”

I sneered. “No.” Numpty blood is swampy and brackish, definitely nonpotable. Which is probably why someone sent them after me.

“I’ll take you to McDonald’s,” she said.

“Take me to school.”

Fiona bought me three Big Macs, and I swallowed the first one in two bites—it came right back up. She pulled the car over to let me heave at the side of the road. “You’re a wreck, Basil. I’m taking you home.”

“It’s September, take me to school.”

“It’s October, I’m taking you home to rest.”

“It’s October? Take me to school, Fiona. Now.” I wiped my mouth on my shirt. I was still in my tennis whites—the numpties had nabbed me outside the club; my clothes were stained in every way imaginable and newly vomited on.

Fiona shook her head. “School doesn’t matter now, boyo. We’re in the middle of a war.”

“We’re always in the middle of a war. Take me back to Watford—I’ll be damned if Penelope Bunce finishes our last year at the top of the class.”

“Baz, everything is different now. You’ve been kidnapped. And held for ransom.”

I leaned on her car. “Is that why the numpties didn’t kill me? Because you paid the ransom?”

“Fuck no, Pitches have never paid ransoms, and we’re not starting now.”

“I’m the only living heir!”

“That’s just what your father said. He wanted to pay up. I told him I knew my sister had scraped bottom when she married a Grimm, but I wasn’t letting him have any more of our pride. No offence, Basil.” She handed me another Big Mac—“Try again. Slower.”

I took a bite. “Why’d they kidnap me?” I asked through three layers of bun and two all-beef patties.

“They said they wanted money. Then they wanted wands.”

“What would numpties want with wands?”

“They wouldn’t! The question is who hired them. Or who won them over … I don’t know how you get a numpty to do your bidding; maybe you just bring them hot water bottles. They kept calling us from your mobile, until it died. Your dad thinks they took you, and then tried to figure out later what to do with you. But it all smells like the Mage to me. It’s not enough that he’s laid us low; he wants everything that’s ever made us powerful.”

“You think the Mage had me kidnapped? The headmaster of my school?”

“I think the Mage is capable of anything,” she said. “Don’t you?”

I did think so. But Fiona blames everything on the Mage. So it’s hard to take her seriously, even after she’s just murdered someone to save your life.

Mostly, at that moment, I was thinking about lying down.

“Oh,” Fiona said. “Here.” She fished my wand—polished ivory with a leather hilt—out of her giant handbag and stuck it in my shorts pocket. I pulled it out. “So,” she said. “Obviously, you are not going back to that school, right into that bastard’s clutches.”

“I am so.”

“Basilton.” Full name, all three syllables.

“He’s not going to bother me at school,” I argued, “not with everyone watching.”

“Baz, we have to get serious. He’s attacked our family again, directly.”

“I am serious. I’m more valuable as a spy than a soldier, anyway—that’s what the Families have always said.”

“That’s what we said when you were a child. You’re a man now.”

“I’m a student,” I said. “What do you think my mother would say if she knew you were pulling me out of school?”

Fiona huffed and shook her head. We were still standing at the side of the road. She opened the car door for me. “Get in, you manipulative cur.”

“Only if you take me back to Watford.”

“I’m taking you home first. Your father and Daphne want to see you.”

“And then to Watford.”

She pulled me towards the car. “Jesus. Yes. If you still want to go.”

Of course I still wanted to go to Watford …

 … once I’d seen my father. Once my stepmother had wept over me. Once I’d slept for twelve hours under a new barrage of healing spells.

I stayed in bed a fortnight.

They all tried to talk me into staying longer.

Even Vera, my old nanny was brought in to apply some guilt. (Vera’s a Normal. She rationalizes all our strangeness by pretending we’re in the Mafia. Father spells her innocent whenever it gets to be too much for her.)

But after two weeks, I got up out of bed, packed my bags, and went and sat in the front seat of Fiona’s car.

“I’ll steal it if I have to!” I shouted up the drive. “Or I’ll steal a bus!”

There was no way that I wasn’t going back to school—this is my last year. Last year in the tower. Last year on the pitch. Last year to torment Snow before our antagonism turns into something more permanent and less entertaining.

My last year at Watford, the last place I saw my mother …

I was damn well going back.

Aunt Fiona stomped out in her heavy black Doc Martens boots (clichéd) and opened my door. “Back seat,” she said. “Front seat’s for people who haven’t been kidnapped by fucking numpties.”

*   *   *

I can feel Snow staring at me all through Greek—actually feel it. He’s so worked up, his magic is leaking out all over the place.

Sometimes when he gets like this, I’m tempted to pull him aside. “Deep breaths now, Snow. Let it go. Some of it. Before you start another fire. Whatever it is you’re worried about, this won’t help.”

I never do, though. Pull him aside. Or talk him down. Instead I just poke him until he goes off.

That’s what Snow does best. He doesn’t plan or strike—he just goes off, and when he does, he takes down everything in his path.

He’s half a fucking numpty himself. The Mage gives him mittens and blankets, and Snow goes off in whatever direction the Mage points him in. I’ve seen it. I’ve probably seen it more than anyone but Bunce.…

The way Snow starts to blur and shimmer. Like a jet engine. The way sparks pop and flare in his aura. The light reflects in his hair, and his pupils contract until his eyes are thick blue. He’s usually holding his sword, so that’s where the flame starts—whipping around his hands and wrists, licking up the blade. It makes him mental. His brain blinks out, I think, about the time he starts swinging. Eventually the power pours off him in waves. Flattening, blackening waves. It’s more power than the rest of us ever have access to. More power than we can imagine. Spilling out of him like he’s a cup left under a waterfall.

I’ve seen it happen close up, standing right at his side. If Snow knows you’re there, he shields you. I don’t know how he does it, I don’t even know why. It’s just like him, really, to use what little control he has to protect other people.

The Minotaur is droning now. Conjugating verbs I’ve known since I was 11.

I can feel Snow’s eyes on the back of my head. I can smell his magic. Smoky. Sticky. Like green wood in a campfire. The people sitting around us are getting stupid and drunk from it. I watch Bunce try to shake it off—she’s glaring at him. He’s glaring at me.

I turn my head just enough to let him see my lip curl.

31

SIMON

I go back to our room as soon as lessons are over for the day, but Baz isn’t there. His clothes are in his wardrobe. His bed is made. His bottles and tubes are back on the bathroom counter.

I open the windows even though it’s freezing out; I’ve been overheating all day. Penelope practically had to hold me down at breakfast. I wanted to rush over to Baz and demand to know where he’d been. I wanted—I think I just wanted to make sure it was really him. I mean … It’s obviously him.

Baz is back.

Baz is alive. Or as alive as he gets.

He looked awful today, even paler than usual. He’s thinner than usual, too, and there’s something off about the way he’s moving—a drag. Like he’s got stones of different weights tied to each limb.

I just want to run him down and knock him over and figure it all out. What’s wrong with him. Where he’s been …

I wait in our room until dinner, but Baz doesn’t come back. Then he ignores me in the dining hall.

He ignores Agatha, too. (She’s staring at him as much as I am—but I don’t think she’s as worried that he might have come back to kill her.) She’s sitting alone at a table, and I can’t decide whether that makes me sad or angry. Whether Agatha herself makes me sad or angry. Or even what I’m supposed to be feeling about her. I can’t think right now.

“I was thinking we could study in the library tonight,” Penny says at dinner, as if I’m not literally fuming.

“I’m gonna have to talk to him sometime,” I say.

“No, you aren’t,” she says. “When do the two of you ever talk, anyway?”

“I’m gonna have to face him.”

She leans over her cottage pie. “That’s what I’m worried about, Simon. You need to cool down first.”

“I’m cool.”

“Simon. You’re never cool.”

“That hurts, Penny.”

“It shouldn’t. It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

“I just—I need to know where he’s been.…”

“Well, he’s not going to tell you.”

“Maybe he’ll tell me something without meaning to, in the process of not telling me. What is he even up to? He looks like he’s been in some American terror prison.”

“Maybe he’s been sick.”

Curses, I never thought of that either. Every scenario I thought up had Baz hidden away, plotting somewhere. Maybe he was sick and plotting.…

“No matter what the truth is,” Penny says, “it won’t help to pick a fight with him.”

“I won’t.”

“Simon, you do. Every year. As soon as you see him. And I just think that maybe you shouldn’t this time. Something’s happening. Something bigger than Baz. The Mage has practically disappeared, and Premal has been on some secret assignment for weeks—my mum says he’s stopped returning her texts.”

“Is she worried about him?”

“She’s always worried about Premal.”

“Are you worried about him?”

Penny looks down. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry—should we try to find him?”

She looks back up at me sternly. “Mum says no. She says we need to wait and pay attention. I think she and Dad are asking around, covertly, and she doesn’t want us drawing a lot of attention to them. Which is why you need to cool down. Just—keep your eyes open. Observe. Don’t knock over any furniture or kill anything.”

“You always say that,” I sigh. “But then when it’s us or them, you want me to kill something.”

“I never want you to kill, Simon.”

“I never feel like I have a choice.”

“I know.” She smiles at me. Sadly. “Don’t kill Baz tonight.”

“I won’t.”

But I’m probably gonna have to kill him someday, and we both know it.

*   *   *

Penelope lets me go back to my room after dinner, and she doesn’t try to follow—she’s stuck with Trixie and her girlfriend now that Baz is back in town. “Gay people have an unfair advantage!” she complains.

“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.”

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.