Simon Snow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosebudboy) wrote2022-11-12 12:09 am
rosebudboy) wrote2022-11-12 12:09 am
Canon Info
Selections from Carry On
Or it could be a bonety hunter who knows about one of the prices on my head.… (“It’s bounty hunter,” I said to Penelope the first time we fought one. “No—bonety hunter,” she replied. “Short for ‘bone-teeth’; that’s what they get to keep if they catch you.”)
I could cast a Hurry up on the train, but that’s a chancy spell at the best of times, and my first few spells of the school year are always especially dicey. I’m supposed to practise during the summer—small, predictable spells when no one’s looking. Like turning on night-lights. Or changing apples to oranges.
Nobody knows why my magic is the way it is. Why it goes off like a bomb instead of flowing through me like a fucking stream or however it works for everybody else.
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.)
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.
After everything that happened last year, I couldn’t believe the Mage would even pay attention to something like the end of term. Who interrupts a war to send the kids home for summer holidays?
Besides, I’m not a kid anymore. Legally, I could have left care at 16. I could’ve got my own flat somewhere. Maybe in London. (I could afford it. I have an entire bag of leprechaun’s gold—a big, duffel-sized bag, and it only disappears if you try to give it to other magicians.)
But the Mage sent me off to a new children’s home, just like he always does.
No. 4—My school uniform
I put this on the list when I was 11. You have to understand, when I got my first uniform, it was the first time I’d ever had clothes that fit me properly, the first time I’d ever worn a blazer and tie. I felt tall all of a sudden, and posh. Until Baz walked into our room, much taller than me—and posher than everyone.
There are eight years at Watford. First and second years wear striped blazers—two shades of purple and two shades of green—with dark grey trousers, green jumpers, and red ties.
You have to wear a boater on the grounds up until your sixth year—which is really just a test to see if your Stay put is strong enough to keep a hat on. (Penny always spelled mine on for me. If I did it myself, I’d end up sleeping in the damn thing.)
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.
And he always remembers my birthday in June.
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.
My hair’s too short—I shave it every year at the end of term—and my trainers are cheap
Then back at the mirror: Green skin. Red lips. Handsome as a pop star. Goblin.
There’s a rattle at the door, and I jump to my feet, holding my hand over my hip and calling again for the Sword of Mages. That’s three times already today; maybe I should just leave it out. The incantation is the only spell I always get right, perhaps because it’s not like other spells. It’s more of a pledge: “In justice. In courage. In defence of the weak. In the face of the mighty. Through magic and wisdom and good.”
It doesn’t have to appear.
The Sword of Mages is mine, but it belongs to no one. It doesn’t come unless it trusts you.
Even though we go to an exclusive boarding school—with its own cathedral and moat—nobody’s
spoiled at Watford. We do our own cleaning and, after our fourth year, our own laundry. We’re allowed to
use magic for chores, but I usually don’t.
Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.
You get warnings when you’re young: For the first two years, if you try to hit or hurt your roommate, your hands go stiff and cold. I threw a book at Baz once in our first year, and it took three days for my hand to thaw out.
Baz has never violated the Anathema. Not even when we were kids.
Agatha’s the only girl I’ve ever dated. We’ve been together for three years now, since we were 15.
But I wanted her long before that. I’ve wanted her since the first time I saw her—walking across the Great Lawn, her long pale hair rippling in the wind. I remember seeing her and thinking that I’d never seen anything so beautiful. And that if you were that beautiful, that graceful, nothing could ever really touch you. It would be like being a lion or a unicorn. Nobody could really touch you, because you wouldn’t
even be on the same plane as everyone else.
Even sitting next to Agatha makes you feel sort of untouchable. Exalted. It’s like sitting in the sun.
So imagine how it feels to date her—like you’re carrying that light around with you all the time.
“The Veil is lifting,” she says again. “Every twenty years, dead people can talk to the living if they have something that really needs to be said.”
His name is called during my first lesson—Greek with the Minotaur. (Our teacher’s name is Professor Minos; we call him the Minotaur because he’s half-man, half-bull.)
Niall tries to get past me, but I’m impossible to get past if I make the effort. It’s not that I’m big—I’m just bold. And when people look at me, they tend to see everything I’ve killed before.
When the Humdrum first showed up, almost twenty years ago, holes began appearing in the magickal atmosphere. It seems like he (it?) can suck the magic out of a place, probably to use against us.
If you go to one of these dead spots, it’s like stepping into a room without air. There’s just nothing there for you, no magic—even I run dry.
Most magicians can’t take it. They’re so used to magic, to feeling magic, that they go spare without it.
That’s how the monster got its name. One of the first magicians to encounter the holes said they were like an “insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.”
The dead spots stay dead. You get your magic back if you leave, but the magic never comes back to that place.
Magicians have had to leave their homes because the Humdrum has pulled the magic out from underneath them.
Every dark creature in this world and its neighbours would love to see the mages fall. The vampires, the werewolves, the demons and banshees, the Manticorps, the goblins—they all resent us. We can control magic, and they can’t. Plus we keep them in check. If the dark things had their way, the Normal world would be chaos. They’d treat regular people like livestock. We—magicians—need the Normals to live their normal lives, relatively unaffected by magic. Our spells depend on them being able to speak freely.
That explains why the dark creatures hate us.
He got to his feet. He was taller than me—he’s always been taller than me. Even after the summer when I grew three inches, I swear that jammy bastard grew four.
“Fuck off,” I said. Which always means I’ve lost an argument.
Magic words are tricky. Sometimes to reveal something hidden, you have to use the language of the time it was stashed away. And sometimes an old phrase stops working when the rest of the world is sick of saying it.
I’ve never been good with words.
That’s partly why I’m such a useless magician.
Which means you have to have a good vocabulary to do magic. And you have to be able to think on your feet. And be brave enough to speak up. And have an ear for a solid turn of phrase.
And you have to actually understand what you’re saying—how the words translate into magic.
You can’t just wave your wand and repeat whatever you’ve heard somebody saying down on the street corner; that’s a good way to accidentally separate someone from their bollocks.
None of it comes naturally to me. Words. Language. Speaking.
I don’t remember when I learned to talk, but I know they tried to send me to specialists. Apparently, that can happen to kids in care, or kids with parents who never talk to them—they just don’t learn how.
I used to see a counsellor and a speech therapist. “Use your words, Simon.” I got so bloody sick of hearing that. It was so much easier to just take what I wanted instead of asking for it. Or thump whoever was hurting me, even if they thumped me right back.
I’m failing Greek, I think. And I’m lost in Political Science.
I swear I don’t normally lie and keep secrets from my friends like this.
“Answer me!” It comes out an order. It comes out drenched in magic, which shouldn’t even be possible—because those aren’t magic words, that isn’t a spell. The spell for forcing honesty is The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—but I’ve never used it; it’s an advanced spell, and a restricted one. Still, I see the compulsion in Agatha’s face. “No,” I say, pushing magic into my voice.
“You don’t have to!”
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 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.
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.
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.
His ridiculous curls tumble back onto the pillow. Snow wears his hair short on the back and on the sides, but the top is a thatch of loose curls. Golden brown. It’s dark now, but I can still see the colour.
I know his skin, too. Another shade of gold, the fairest. Snow never tans, but there are freckles on his shoulders, and moles scattered all over his back and chest, his arms and legs. Three moles on his right cheek, two below his left ear, one over his left eye.
Baz is in half my lessons. There are only fifty kids in our year; there have been terms in the past when he and I’ve had every lesson together, all day long.
We usually sit as far apart as possible, but today in Elocution, Madam Bellamy has us push all the desks out of the way and work in pairs. Baz ends up right behind me
At this point, eighth year, we’re past all the basic Elocution stuff—speaking out, hitting consonants, projection. It’s all nuance now. How to give spells more power by saying them with fire and intent. How pausing just before a key word can focus a spell.
And the next minute, we were in a clearing in Lancashire. Simon recognized it—he lived in a home there when he was a kid, near Pendle Hill. There’s this big sound sculpture that looks like a tornado, and I thought at first that the noise was the Humdrum.
Just like Simon when I first met him. Eleven years old, in grotty jeans and an old T-shirt. The Humdrum was even bouncing that red rubber ball that Simon never put down our first year.
and big bony wings burst out of his back. Sort-of wings. Misshapen and overly feathered, with too many joints …
There’s no spell for that. There are no words. Simon just said, “I wish I could fly!” and he made the words magic.
(I haven’t told anyone that part. Magicians aren’t genies; we don’t run on wishes. If anyone knew that Simon could do that, they’d have him burnt at the stake.)
Simon picked someone’s pocket at the train station, so we could buy tickets.
“For Christ’s sake,” I say. I only swear like a Normal when I’m at my wit’s end. “Could you just calm down? This is important.”
Baz grabs it from me, scanning the page hungrily, then hurls it back at my chest. “You write like an animal. What did she say?”
There’s nothing in our world more powerful than nursery rhymes—the poems that people learn as kids, then get stuck in their brains forever. A powerful mage can turn back an army with “Humpty Dumpty.”
Snow puts down a book and comes to take the jug of milk off the tray. He lifts it towards his mouth, and I kick his shin.
We get to my next lesson, and I intentionally slam my shoulder into the wall next to the door. (People who tell you that slamming and bashing into things won’t make you feel better haven’t slammed or bashed enough.)
He swallows. Snow has the longest neck and the showiest swallow I’ve ever seen. His chin juts out and his Adam’s apple catches—it’s a whole scene.
Snow was a wreck at dinner.
Which I might have enjoyed if I wasn’t so desperate for him to stay.
Everything on his plate seemed to confuse him, and he alternated between staring at his food miserably and vacuuming it up because he was clearly ravenous.
Snow is still eating dinner. Daphne keeps offering extra helpings, out of politeness, and Snow keeps accepting them.
Baz is walking so slow, I keep kicking the back of his heels.
For a minute, I think about Agatha, and I feel like a bounder, but then I remember that we’re not together anymore, so it’s not cheating. And then I think about whether this, what’s happening right now, means that I’m gay.
He shrugs. Half of Snow’s sentences are shrugs.
“Dunno,” he says. He laces his fingers in mine and holds my hand loosely. “I try not to think.”
“About being gay?”
“About anything. I make lists of things not to think about.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, “it hurts to think about things that you can’t have or help. S’better not to think about it.”
I wind my fingers in his hair. It’s thicker than mine, and curlier, and it shines golden in the firelight.
There’s a mole on his cheek that I’ve wanted to kiss since I was 12. I do.
“No,” I say, turning slightly towards him. “That’s not what I mean. I mean … I’ve always been a terrible boyfriend. That’s why Agatha broke up with me. I basically just did what I thought she wanted me to, but I always got it wrong, and I never put her first. I never once felt like I was getting it right in three years.”
When she opened the door, Simon fell in, and she shrieked.
I don’t blame her. He looked like Satan incarnate. Massive red-and-black wings. A red tail with a black spade at the end. He’d cast some sort of spell on himself that made him glow yellow and orange, and he was covered in snow and debris, and wearing the filthiest, fanciest pyjama bottoms.
He nods quickly, cutting her off. “And when were you born, Simon? You’d think I’d know, but I can’t remember you ever celebrating your birthday.”
I shrug again. Then clear my throat. “I don’t know. I mean … Nobody knows. They just guessed when they found me.”
“But you’re probably eighteen now. Maybe nineteen?”
“They put 1997 on my papers.”
Baz nods. “Good—1997, shortly before the holes were discovered. And when did you realize you were a magician?”
I clear my throat. “I went off.” They both know what that means. But I didn’t, not at 11. I woke up in the middle of the night, during a vicious nightmare—I’d gone to bed hungry, and in my dream, my stomach was on fire. I woke up, breathless, and magic was pouring out of me. Blasting out. The children’s home was burnt to the ground, and everyone in it woke up streets away. Unharmed, but still, streets away.
“Simon,” Penny asks, “when did you go off on the chimera?”
“Our fifth year,” Baz says. “Spring 2013.
“It means, the Humdrum doesn’t take the magic, Simon—you do.”
Penny gasps. “Simon. The first time you went off, you were eleven years old—”
“Exactly,” Baz says. “Probably wearing a shitty T-shirt and cast-off jeans—and bouncing that bloody ball.”
They’re looking at each other now. “Simon went off,” Penny says, “and he sucked up so much magic—”
Baz nods eagerly.
“—he tore a hole in the magickal atmosphere!” Penny says.
“A Simon-shaped hole…,” Baz agrees.
I hold my head in both hands, but it still doesn’t make sense. “Are you saying I created an evil twin?”
“More of an impression,” Baz says.
“Or an echo,” Penny says, still awestruck.
Baz tries to explain it again: “It’s like you tore so much magic out at once, you left fingerprints.…Whole-being prints.”
“This doesn’t make sense!” I say. “Even if I did tear a me-shaped hole, how did it come alive? And why is it a monster?”
“Is it alive?” Penny asks.
“And is it a monster?” Baz wonders.
“We’re talking about the Insidious Humdrum!” I shout.
“We’re talking about a hole,” Baz says calmly. “Think about it. What do holes want?”
“To be filled?” I guess. I know I’m not keeping up.
“Crowley, no,” he says. “To grow. Everything wants to grow. If you were a hole, all you’d want is to get bigger.”
“But…,” I say. There must be more “but’s.” “Why does the Humdrum keep trying to kill me? Why send
every dark creature in the UK after me?”
“He isn’t trying to kill you,” Baz says. “He’s trying to get you to go off.”
“And use more magic,” Penny says.
Baz holds his hand up to the maps behind him. “To make a bigger hole.”
“Not the power,” he says. “You are the most powerful mage who ever lived, Simon. You’re … a miracle.” He cups my face in his wet palm. “But you’re not the Chosen One.”
I’m not the Chosen One.
Of course I’m not.
I’m not the Chosen One.
Thank magic. This is the only thing anyone has said today that makes sense. But it doesn’t make a difference—
I don’t know what to say. So I nod.
I’ve known all along that I was a fraud—it’s such a relief to hear the Mage finally saying it. And to hear that he has a plan. I just want him to tell me what to do.
The Mage is here, too, clawing at Simon uselessly—nothing can move Snow when he looks like that, his shoulders hunched forward, and his jaw pushed out.
He’s still everything else he’s always been—brave, honest, inflammably handsome (even with that fucking tail)—but I don’t think he wants to hear all that.
Simon Snow can’t dance.
The tail isn’t helping. I take the end in my left hand and wrap it around my wrist, holding it against his lower back.
“What?” I say, squeezing his hand. I’ve become very familiar with his hands. Dating Simon Snow hasn’t been the erotic gropefest I’d always imagined—so far, it’s a lot of sitting in silence and thousand-yard stares—but we do hold hands almost all the time. Snow’s like a child who’s afraid of getting lost in the market.
There was a three-month inquiry into the Mage’s death. In the end, I wasn’t charged. Neither was Penny. She had no idea that I’d say what I said after her spell—and I had no idea that what I said would kill the Mage.
I’m seeing somebody, to talk about it—a magickal psychologist in Chicago. She’s, like, one of three in the world. We do our sessions over Skype. I want Baz to talk to her, too, but so far, he changes the subject every time I mention it.
I suppose I am gay; my therapist says it’s not even in the top five things I have to sort out right now.
Sometimes I dream that I still have it. I dream about going off, and I wake up, panting, not sure if it’s true.
But there’s never smoke. My breath doesn’t burn, my skin doesn’t shimmer. I don’t feel like there’s a star going nova in my chest.
There’s just sweat and panic and my heart racing ahead of me—and my doctor in Chicago says that’s all normal for someone like me.
“A fallen supervillain?” I’ll say.
And she’ll smile, from a professional distance. “A trauma victim.”
I don’t feel like a trauma victim. I feel like a house after a fire. And sometimes like someone who died but stayed in his body. And sometimes I feel like someone else died, like someone else sacrificed everything, so that I can have a normal life.
Or it could be a bonety hunter who knows about one of the prices on my head.… (“It’s bounty hunter,” I said to Penelope the first time we fought one. “No—bonety hunter,” she replied. “Short for ‘bone-teeth’; that’s what they get to keep if they catch you.”)
I could cast a Hurry up on the train, but that’s a chancy spell at the best of times, and my first few spells of the school year are always especially dicey. I’m supposed to practise during the summer—small, predictable spells when no one’s looking. Like turning on night-lights. Or changing apples to oranges.
Nobody knows why my magic is the way it is. Why it goes off like a bomb instead of flowing through me like a fucking stream or however it works for everybody else.
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.)
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.
After everything that happened last year, I couldn’t believe the Mage would even pay attention to something like the end of term. Who interrupts a war to send the kids home for summer holidays?
Besides, I’m not a kid anymore. Legally, I could have left care at 16. I could’ve got my own flat somewhere. Maybe in London. (I could afford it. I have an entire bag of leprechaun’s gold—a big, duffel-sized bag, and it only disappears if you try to give it to other magicians.)
But the Mage sent me off to a new children’s home, just like he always does.
No. 4—My school uniform
I put this on the list when I was 11. You have to understand, when I got my first uniform, it was the first time I’d ever had clothes that fit me properly, the first time I’d ever worn a blazer and tie. I felt tall all of a sudden, and posh. Until Baz walked into our room, much taller than me—and posher than everyone.
There are eight years at Watford. First and second years wear striped blazers—two shades of purple and two shades of green—with dark grey trousers, green jumpers, and red ties.
You have to wear a boater on the grounds up until your sixth year—which is really just a test to see if your Stay put is strong enough to keep a hat on. (Penny always spelled mine on for me. If I did it myself, I’d end up sleeping in the damn thing.)
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.
And he always remembers my birthday in June.
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.
My hair’s too short—I shave it every year at the end of term—and my trainers are cheap
Then back at the mirror: Green skin. Red lips. Handsome as a pop star. Goblin.
There’s a rattle at the door, and I jump to my feet, holding my hand over my hip and calling again for the Sword of Mages. That’s three times already today; maybe I should just leave it out. The incantation is the only spell I always get right, perhaps because it’s not like other spells. It’s more of a pledge: “In justice. In courage. In defence of the weak. In the face of the mighty. Through magic and wisdom and good.”
It doesn’t have to appear.
The Sword of Mages is mine, but it belongs to no one. It doesn’t come unless it trusts you.
Even though we go to an exclusive boarding school—with its own cathedral and moat—nobody’s
spoiled at Watford. We do our own cleaning and, after our fourth year, our own laundry. We’re allowed to
use magic for chores, but I usually don’t.
Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.
You get warnings when you’re young: For the first two years, if you try to hit or hurt your roommate, your hands go stiff and cold. I threw a book at Baz once in our first year, and it took three days for my hand to thaw out.
Baz has never violated the Anathema. Not even when we were kids.
Agatha’s the only girl I’ve ever dated. We’ve been together for three years now, since we were 15.
But I wanted her long before that. I’ve wanted her since the first time I saw her—walking across the Great Lawn, her long pale hair rippling in the wind. I remember seeing her and thinking that I’d never seen anything so beautiful. And that if you were that beautiful, that graceful, nothing could ever really touch you. It would be like being a lion or a unicorn. Nobody could really touch you, because you wouldn’t
even be on the same plane as everyone else.
Even sitting next to Agatha makes you feel sort of untouchable. Exalted. It’s like sitting in the sun.
So imagine how it feels to date her—like you’re carrying that light around with you all the time.
“The Veil is lifting,” she says again. “Every twenty years, dead people can talk to the living if they have something that really needs to be said.”
His name is called during my first lesson—Greek with the Minotaur. (Our teacher’s name is Professor Minos; we call him the Minotaur because he’s half-man, half-bull.)
Niall tries to get past me, but I’m impossible to get past if I make the effort. It’s not that I’m big—I’m just bold. And when people look at me, they tend to see everything I’ve killed before.
When the Humdrum first showed up, almost twenty years ago, holes began appearing in the magickal atmosphere. It seems like he (it?) can suck the magic out of a place, probably to use against us.
If you go to one of these dead spots, it’s like stepping into a room without air. There’s just nothing there for you, no magic—even I run dry.
Most magicians can’t take it. They’re so used to magic, to feeling magic, that they go spare without it.
That’s how the monster got its name. One of the first magicians to encounter the holes said they were like an “insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.”
The dead spots stay dead. You get your magic back if you leave, but the magic never comes back to that place.
Magicians have had to leave their homes because the Humdrum has pulled the magic out from underneath them.
Every dark creature in this world and its neighbours would love to see the mages fall. The vampires, the werewolves, the demons and banshees, the Manticorps, the goblins—they all resent us. We can control magic, and they can’t. Plus we keep them in check. If the dark things had their way, the Normal world would be chaos. They’d treat regular people like livestock. We—magicians—need the Normals to live their normal lives, relatively unaffected by magic. Our spells depend on them being able to speak freely.
That explains why the dark creatures hate us.
He got to his feet. He was taller than me—he’s always been taller than me. Even after the summer when I grew three inches, I swear that jammy bastard grew four.
“Fuck off,” I said. Which always means I’ve lost an argument.
Magic words are tricky. Sometimes to reveal something hidden, you have to use the language of the time it was stashed away. And sometimes an old phrase stops working when the rest of the world is sick of saying it.
I’ve never been good with words.
That’s partly why I’m such a useless magician.
Which means you have to have a good vocabulary to do magic. And you have to be able to think on your feet. And be brave enough to speak up. And have an ear for a solid turn of phrase.
And you have to actually understand what you’re saying—how the words translate into magic.
You can’t just wave your wand and repeat whatever you’ve heard somebody saying down on the street corner; that’s a good way to accidentally separate someone from their bollocks.
None of it comes naturally to me. Words. Language. Speaking.
I don’t remember when I learned to talk, but I know they tried to send me to specialists. Apparently, that can happen to kids in care, or kids with parents who never talk to them—they just don’t learn how.
I used to see a counsellor and a speech therapist. “Use your words, Simon.” I got so bloody sick of hearing that. It was so much easier to just take what I wanted instead of asking for it. Or thump whoever was hurting me, even if they thumped me right back.
I’m failing Greek, I think. And I’m lost in Political Science.
I swear I don’t normally lie and keep secrets from my friends like this.
“Answer me!” It comes out an order. It comes out drenched in magic, which shouldn’t even be possible—because those aren’t magic words, that isn’t a spell. The spell for forcing honesty is The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—but I’ve never used it; it’s an advanced spell, and a restricted one. Still, I see the compulsion in Agatha’s face. “No,” I say, pushing magic into my voice.
“You don’t have to!”
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 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.
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.
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.
His ridiculous curls tumble back onto the pillow. Snow wears his hair short on the back and on the sides, but the top is a thatch of loose curls. Golden brown. It’s dark now, but I can still see the colour.
I know his skin, too. Another shade of gold, the fairest. Snow never tans, but there are freckles on his shoulders, and moles scattered all over his back and chest, his arms and legs. Three moles on his right cheek, two below his left ear, one over his left eye.
Baz is in half my lessons. There are only fifty kids in our year; there have been terms in the past when he and I’ve had every lesson together, all day long.
We usually sit as far apart as possible, but today in Elocution, Madam Bellamy has us push all the desks out of the way and work in pairs. Baz ends up right behind me
At this point, eighth year, we’re past all the basic Elocution stuff—speaking out, hitting consonants, projection. It’s all nuance now. How to give spells more power by saying them with fire and intent. How pausing just before a key word can focus a spell.
And the next minute, we were in a clearing in Lancashire. Simon recognized it—he lived in a home there when he was a kid, near Pendle Hill. There’s this big sound sculpture that looks like a tornado, and I thought at first that the noise was the Humdrum.
Just like Simon when I first met him. Eleven years old, in grotty jeans and an old T-shirt. The Humdrum was even bouncing that red rubber ball that Simon never put down our first year.
and big bony wings burst out of his back. Sort-of wings. Misshapen and overly feathered, with too many joints …
There’s no spell for that. There are no words. Simon just said, “I wish I could fly!” and he made the words magic.
(I haven’t told anyone that part. Magicians aren’t genies; we don’t run on wishes. If anyone knew that Simon could do that, they’d have him burnt at the stake.)
Simon picked someone’s pocket at the train station, so we could buy tickets.
“For Christ’s sake,” I say. I only swear like a Normal when I’m at my wit’s end. “Could you just calm down? This is important.”
Baz grabs it from me, scanning the page hungrily, then hurls it back at my chest. “You write like an animal. What did she say?”
There’s nothing in our world more powerful than nursery rhymes—the poems that people learn as kids, then get stuck in their brains forever. A powerful mage can turn back an army with “Humpty Dumpty.”
Snow puts down a book and comes to take the jug of milk off the tray. He lifts it towards his mouth, and I kick his shin.
We get to my next lesson, and I intentionally slam my shoulder into the wall next to the door. (People who tell you that slamming and bashing into things won’t make you feel better haven’t slammed or bashed enough.)
He swallows. Snow has the longest neck and the showiest swallow I’ve ever seen. His chin juts out and his Adam’s apple catches—it’s a whole scene.
Snow was a wreck at dinner.
Which I might have enjoyed if I wasn’t so desperate for him to stay.
Everything on his plate seemed to confuse him, and he alternated between staring at his food miserably and vacuuming it up because he was clearly ravenous.
Snow is still eating dinner. Daphne keeps offering extra helpings, out of politeness, and Snow keeps accepting them.
Baz is walking so slow, I keep kicking the back of his heels.
For a minute, I think about Agatha, and I feel like a bounder, but then I remember that we’re not together anymore, so it’s not cheating. And then I think about whether this, what’s happening right now, means that I’m gay.
He shrugs. Half of Snow’s sentences are shrugs.
“Dunno,” he says. He laces his fingers in mine and holds my hand loosely. “I try not to think.”
“About being gay?”
“About anything. I make lists of things not to think about.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, “it hurts to think about things that you can’t have or help. S’better not to think about it.”
I wind my fingers in his hair. It’s thicker than mine, and curlier, and it shines golden in the firelight.
There’s a mole on his cheek that I’ve wanted to kiss since I was 12. I do.
“No,” I say, turning slightly towards him. “That’s not what I mean. I mean … I’ve always been a terrible boyfriend. That’s why Agatha broke up with me. I basically just did what I thought she wanted me to, but I always got it wrong, and I never put her first. I never once felt like I was getting it right in three years.”
When she opened the door, Simon fell in, and she shrieked.
I don’t blame her. He looked like Satan incarnate. Massive red-and-black wings. A red tail with a black spade at the end. He’d cast some sort of spell on himself that made him glow yellow and orange, and he was covered in snow and debris, and wearing the filthiest, fanciest pyjama bottoms.
He nods quickly, cutting her off. “And when were you born, Simon? You’d think I’d know, but I can’t remember you ever celebrating your birthday.”
I shrug again. Then clear my throat. “I don’t know. I mean … Nobody knows. They just guessed when they found me.”
“But you’re probably eighteen now. Maybe nineteen?”
“They put 1997 on my papers.”
Baz nods. “Good—1997, shortly before the holes were discovered. And when did you realize you were a magician?”
I clear my throat. “I went off.” They both know what that means. But I didn’t, not at 11. I woke up in the middle of the night, during a vicious nightmare—I’d gone to bed hungry, and in my dream, my stomach was on fire. I woke up, breathless, and magic was pouring out of me. Blasting out. The children’s home was burnt to the ground, and everyone in it woke up streets away. Unharmed, but still, streets away.
“Simon,” Penny asks, “when did you go off on the chimera?”
“Our fifth year,” Baz says. “Spring 2013.
“It means, the Humdrum doesn’t take the magic, Simon—you do.”
Penny gasps. “Simon. The first time you went off, you were eleven years old—”
“Exactly,” Baz says. “Probably wearing a shitty T-shirt and cast-off jeans—and bouncing that bloody ball.”
They’re looking at each other now. “Simon went off,” Penny says, “and he sucked up so much magic—”
Baz nods eagerly.
“—he tore a hole in the magickal atmosphere!” Penny says.
“A Simon-shaped hole…,” Baz agrees.
I hold my head in both hands, but it still doesn’t make sense. “Are you saying I created an evil twin?”
“More of an impression,” Baz says.
“Or an echo,” Penny says, still awestruck.
Baz tries to explain it again: “It’s like you tore so much magic out at once, you left fingerprints.…Whole-being prints.”
“This doesn’t make sense!” I say. “Even if I did tear a me-shaped hole, how did it come alive? And why is it a monster?”
“Is it alive?” Penny asks.
“And is it a monster?” Baz wonders.
“We’re talking about the Insidious Humdrum!” I shout.
“We’re talking about a hole,” Baz says calmly. “Think about it. What do holes want?”
“To be filled?” I guess. I know I’m not keeping up.
“Crowley, no,” he says. “To grow. Everything wants to grow. If you were a hole, all you’d want is to get bigger.”
“But…,” I say. There must be more “but’s.” “Why does the Humdrum keep trying to kill me? Why send
every dark creature in the UK after me?”
“He isn’t trying to kill you,” Baz says. “He’s trying to get you to go off.”
“And use more magic,” Penny says.
Baz holds his hand up to the maps behind him. “To make a bigger hole.”
“Not the power,” he says. “You are the most powerful mage who ever lived, Simon. You’re … a miracle.” He cups my face in his wet palm. “But you’re not the Chosen One.”
I’m not the Chosen One.
Of course I’m not.
I’m not the Chosen One.
Thank magic. This is the only thing anyone has said today that makes sense. But it doesn’t make a difference—
I don’t know what to say. So I nod.
I’ve known all along that I was a fraud—it’s such a relief to hear the Mage finally saying it. And to hear that he has a plan. I just want him to tell me what to do.
The Mage is here, too, clawing at Simon uselessly—nothing can move Snow when he looks like that, his shoulders hunched forward, and his jaw pushed out.
He’s still everything else he’s always been—brave, honest, inflammably handsome (even with that fucking tail)—but I don’t think he wants to hear all that.
Simon Snow can’t dance.
The tail isn’t helping. I take the end in my left hand and wrap it around my wrist, holding it against his lower back.
“What?” I say, squeezing his hand. I’ve become very familiar with his hands. Dating Simon Snow hasn’t been the erotic gropefest I’d always imagined—so far, it’s a lot of sitting in silence and thousand-yard stares—but we do hold hands almost all the time. Snow’s like a child who’s afraid of getting lost in the market.
There was a three-month inquiry into the Mage’s death. In the end, I wasn’t charged. Neither was Penny. She had no idea that I’d say what I said after her spell—and I had no idea that what I said would kill the Mage.
I’m seeing somebody, to talk about it—a magickal psychologist in Chicago. She’s, like, one of three in the world. We do our sessions over Skype. I want Baz to talk to her, too, but so far, he changes the subject every time I mention it.
I suppose I am gay; my therapist says it’s not even in the top five things I have to sort out right now.
Sometimes I dream that I still have it. I dream about going off, and I wake up, panting, not sure if it’s true.
But there’s never smoke. My breath doesn’t burn, my skin doesn’t shimmer. I don’t feel like there’s a star going nova in my chest.
There’s just sweat and panic and my heart racing ahead of me—and my doctor in Chicago says that’s all normal for someone like me.
“A fallen supervillain?” I’ll say.
And she’ll smile, from a professional distance. “A trauma victim.”
I don’t feel like a trauma victim. I feel like a house after a fire. And sometimes like someone who died but stayed in his body. And sometimes I feel like someone else died, like someone else sacrificed everything, so that I can have a normal life.