fight it alone. (The Mage isn’t powerful enough to fight a chimera alone.)
“Do it, Snow!” Baz shouted at me. “Do it. Fucking unleash. Now.”
“I can’t,” I tried to tell him. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“It bloody well does.”
“I can’t just turn it on,” I said.
“Try.”
“I can’t, damn it.” I was waving my sword around—I was pretty good with a sword already at 15—but the chimera wasn’t corporeal. (Which is my rough luck, pretty much always. As soon as you start carrying a sword, all your enemies turn out mist and gossamer.)
“Close your eyes and light a match,” Baz told me. We were both trying to hide behind a rock. Baz was casting spells one after another; he was practically singing them.
“What?”
“That’s what my mother used to say,” he said. “Light a match inside your heart, then blow on the tinder.”
It’s always fire with Baz. I can’t believe he hasn’t incinerated me yet. Or burned me at the stake.
He used to like to threaten me with a Viking’s funeral, back when we were third years. “Do you know what that is, Snow? A flaming pyre, set adrift on the sea. We could do yours in Blackpool, so all your chavvy Normal friends can come.”
“Sod off,” I’d say, and try to ignore him.
I’ve never even had any Normal friends, chavvy or otherwise.
Everyone in the Normal world steers clear of me if they can. Penelope says they sense my power and instinctively shy away. Like dogs who won’t make eye contact with their masters. (Not that I’m anyone’s master—that’s not what I mean.)
Anyway, it works the opposite with magicians. They love the smell of magic; I have to try hard to make them hate me.
Unless they’re Baz. He’s immune. Maybe he’s built up a tolerance to my magic, having shared a room with me every term for seven years.
That night that we were fighting the chimera, Baz kept yelling at me until I went off.
We both woke up a few hours later in a blackened pit. The boulder we’d been hiding behind was dust, and the chimera was vapour. Or maybe it was just gone.
Baz was sure I’d singed off his eyebrows, but he looked fine to me—not a hair out of place.
Typical.
2
SIMON
I don’t let myself think about Watford over the summers.
After my first year there, when I was 11—I spent the whole summer thinking about it. Thinking about everyone I’d met at school—Penelope, Agatha, the Mage. About the towers and the grounds. The teas. The puddings. The magic. The fact that I was magic.
I made myself sick thinking about the Watford School of Magicks—daydreaming about it—until it started to feel like nothing more than a daydream. Just another fantasy to make the time pass.
Like when I used to dream about becoming a footballer someday—or that my parents, my real parents, were going to come back for me.…
My dad would be a footballer. And my mum would be some posh model type. And they’d explain how they’d had to give me up because they were too young for a baby, and because his career was on the line. “But we always missed you, Simon,” they’d say. “We’ve been looking for you.” And then they’d take me away to live in their mansion.
Footballer mansion … Magickal boarding school …
They both seem like crap in the light of day. (Especially when you wake up in a room with seven other discards.)
That first summer, I’d beaten the memory of Watford to a bloody pulp by the time my bus fare and papers showed up in the autumn, along with a note from the Mage himself.…
Real. It was all real.
So, the next summer, after my second year at Watford, I didn’t let myself think about magic at all. For months. I just shut myself off from it. I didn’t miss it, I didn’t wish for it.
I decided to let the World of Mages come back to me like a big surprise present come September, if it was going to. (And it did come back. It always has, so far.)
The Mage used to say that maybe someday he’d let me spend summers at Watford—or maybe even spend them with him, wherever he goes all summer.
But then he decided I was better off spending part of every year with the Normals. To stay close to the language and to keep my wits about me: “Let hardship sharpen your blade, Simon.”
I thought he meant my actual blade, the Sword of Mages. Eventually I figured out that he meant me.