Carry On Read Free Page A

Mage what I should wear after Watford, he’d probably kit me out like a superhero.…
    I’m not asking anybody what I should wear when I leave. I’m 18. I’ll dress myself.
    Or Penny will help.
    No. 5—My room
    I should say “our room,” but I don’t miss the sharing-with-Baz part of it.
    You get your room and your roommate assignment at Watford as a first year, and then you never move. You never have to pack up your things or take down your posters.
    Sharing a room with someone who wants to kill me, who’s wanted to kill me since we were 11, has been … Well, it’s been rubbish, hasn’t it?
    But maybe the Crucible felt bad about casting Baz and me together (not literally; I don’t think the Crucible’s sentient) because we’ve got the best room at Watford.
    We live in Mummers House, on the edge of school grounds. It’s a four-and-a-half-storey building, stone, and our room is at the very top, in a sort of turret that looks out over the moat. The turret’s too small for more than one room, but it’s bigger than the other student rooms. And it used to be staff accommodation, so we have our own en suite.
    Baz is actually a fairly decent person to share a bathroom with. He’s in there all morning, but he’s clean; and he doesn’t like me to touch his stuff, so he keeps it all out of the way. Penelope says our bathroom smells like cedar and bergamot, and that’s got to be Baz because it definitely isn’t me.
    I’d tell you how Penny manages to get into our room—girls are banned from the boys’ houses and vice versa—but I still don’t know. I think it might be her ring. I saw her use it once to unseal a cave, so anything’s possible.
    No. 6—The Mage
    I put the Mage on this list when I was 11, too. And there’ve been plenty of times when I thought I should take him off.
    Like in our sixth year, when he practically ignored me. Every time I tried to talk to him, he told me he was in the middle of something important.
    He still tells me that sometimes. I get it. He’s the headmaster. And he’s more than that—he’s the head of the Coven, so technically, he’s in charge of the whole World of Mages. And it’s not like he’s my dad. He’s not my anything.…
    But he’s the closest thing I’ve got to anything.
    The Mage is the one who first came to me in the Normal world and explained to me (or tried to explain to me) who I am. He still looks out for me, sometimes when I don’t even realize it. And when he does have time for me, to really talk to me, that’s when I feel the most grounded. I fight better when he’s around. I think better. It’s like, when he’s there, I almost buy into what he’s always told me—that I’m the most powerful magician the World of Mages has ever known.
    And that all that power is a good thing, or at least that it will be someday. That I’ll get my shit together eventually and solve more problems than I cause.
    The Mage is also the only one who’s allowed to contact me over the summer.
    And he always remembers my birthday in June.
    No. 7—Magic
    Not my magic, necessarily. That’s always with me and, honestly, not something I can take much comfort in.
    What I miss, when I’m away from Watford, is just being around magic. Casual, ambient magic. People casting spells in the hallway and during lessons. Somebody sending a plate of sausages down the dinner table like it’s bouncing on wires.
    The World of Mages isn’t actually a world. We don’t have cities. Or even neighbourhoods. Magicians have always lived among mundanity. It’s safer that way, according to Penelope’s mum; it keeps us from drifting too far from the rest of the world.
    The fairies did that, she says. Got tired of dealing with everybody else, wandered into the woods for a few centuries, then couldn’t