“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.”