Carry On

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.