Chapter Text
SIMON
“Sir,” I say. “You—with, uh, with all due respect, I mean—you can’t be serious.”
We’ve been over this. He brought this up months ago, way back in September, and I refused him.
The Mage frowns at me, leans toward me over his cluttered desk. “I am being perfectly serious. You would be better off away from Watford, somewhere safe where we could be certain that the Humdrum would pose less of a threat to our student body.”
It’s a heavy blow, to suggest that I’m putting everyone in danger just by being here.
“Sir, please. I have to stay. It’s my last year—”
“It could be everyone’s last year,” he snaps. “I humoured you last time. Now I expect you to do as I ask.”
Frustration bubbles in my throat and I have to look away from him. I let my eyes sweep the Mage’s office in all its disarray and will them not to sting. I can’t leave now. It’s my last term. Penny is here, and Agatha. Baz is even back and our truce is going weirdly well and we haven’t solved his mother’s murder yet—
“Simon. Calm yourself. It reeks of smoke in here.”
My eyes burn. “The Humdrum only attacks while I’m at Watford,” I say.
“So it would be in Watford’s best interest for you to leave.”
“No—what if it attacks and I’m not here?” My fists clench at my sides. Please. “I’m the one who’s got to defeat it. I have to be here.”
The Mage’s face is hard as stone. “I won’t hear more of this. Go pack your things. We leave in the morning.”
I’m making the air hazy with magic, it’s pouring out of me like smoke off a green fire. “I can’t leave. I can’t.”
“Simon, calm down!”
Then, with a rush, my ears pop, and the choke of my magic is gone and replaced with the parched, sucking emptiness that only ever means one thing.
“Simon,” the Mage hisses, and leaps to his feet.
Behind me, comically huge in the Mage’s cramped office, is yet another Chimaera.
(How many of these bloody things do I need to explode before the Humdrum picks something else?)
It snarls, hot breath puffing out over my skin and blowing loose papers from the desk, so at least it’s corporeal this time. The Sword of Mages drops into my hand, ready.
The serpent tail swishes and knocks a shelf of books to the floor.
The Mage looks on, weary. “Get this creature out of my office. And for the love of Merlin, don’t break anything else.” He still grips his wand, though it’s useless. My stomach turns with the Humdrum’s emptiness.
I raise the Sword as the Chimaera bares its teeth and roars in my face. It lurches. I slash toward it, and a cupboard door cracks off its hinges. Papers spill out and blanket the floor. Baz would be able to do this tidier, I’m sure.
It growls, and I growl back.
Another sweep of my Sword and the Chimaera leaps left, then right. A globe shatters, then a lamp, and one good toss of its mighty head smashes a glass cabinet full of dainty little artefacts into millions of diamond shards.
“Sorry, Sir!”
“Just kill the beast, Simon,” says the Mage, shrinking against the wall behind me.
I fake left and then slash upward, catching the creature right in the throat. It erupts into glass shards and falls amongst the wreckage of everything else, just another mess to clean up.
The Sword vanishes, and I sigh, spent. The sucking feeling slowly recedes.
The office is a disaster. My trainers are half buried in glittering shards of glass and debris. The Mage looks morosely at the wreckage of the glass cabinet.
I wince. “I hope it can all be fixed.”
He points his wand. “As you were,” he says, and the papers fly back into place, cupboard door straightens, bookshelf repairs itself, and some of the glass melds back together into the cabinet front. Still more stays on the ground. And the cabinet stays empty.
“What was in there?” I ask, gesturing to the bare shelf.
He crouches down and prods his wand into the mess of glass. “Only rare and valuable magical artefacts. Completely irreplaceable.”
I gulp, and my cheeks heat.
He pulls forth what looks like most of an hourglass, a jagged shard of something green, a single, perfect flower petal.
“Well,” he says. “What’s done is done.”
My hands tremble. “Can—can I help you clean it up, Sir?”
He doesn’t look up. “Go back to your dormitory, Simon. We’re done here.”
I move toward the door, and glass crunches under my shoes. “Er—do I have to, I mean, am I staying—”
“Just go. I expect you to perform well in your classes tomorrow.”
I leave quick, before he can change his mind.
* * *
I’ve barely stepped foot into our room before Baz whirls on me.
“Crowley, what the hell happened to you?” His eyes rake over me with displeasure (concern?)
I kick off my shoes. They’re sparkly with glass bits. “Chimaera. In the Mage’s office.”
Baz sneers. “Another one? Has the Humdrum no creativity?”
“Exactly!”
“Stop,” he says, and gets up from his desk. He plucks his wand from his sleeve and points it at me. “You’re making a mess everywhere, you numpty. Clean as a whistle.”
His magic sears me like a grease burn, but I appreciate it anyway.
“How’d you do in this one?” he asks, turning from me and heading back to his textbook. “Go nuclear and vaporize it?”
I collapse face-first onto my bed. Merlin, it’s comfy. “No. That was one time. I did this one the old fashioned way.”
“Hacked it to bits?”
“Not so much hacking, more one good stab.”
“Good man.”
I snort. “Hang on. Was that a compliment?”
He idly turns his page. “No. Hush up, Snow. Some of us care about our studies.”
I grin at the back of his head. (He’s got his hair loose, today. The way that looks nice.)
I don’t have to leave Watford. (I’m pretty sure that’s what the Mage meant.) I get to keep having this. All of it. Penny and scones and this thing that isn’t total animosity with Baz.
It’s stuffy up here, but since our truce I’ve been keeping the window open less. I don’t want that to be the thing that wrecks this fragile peace we’ve established. It’s already dark out, so I won’t open the window now, not without the sun’s warmth to temper the cool breeze. And certainly not when Baz is studying.
Baz clears his throat.
I wait for him to speak up, but he just picks up his pen (he writes everything in pen because he knows he won’t make a mistake, the prat) and keeps working.
My eyelids droop. Maybe I’ll just sleep like this, in my jeans and everything. I just fought a Chimaera. I’ve earned it.
Baz clears his throat again, and straightens in his chair.
“Something the matter?” I ask.
“Hush,” he says. And a minute or so later, he turns his head and coughs, softly, into his elbow.
“Maybe you’re getting sick,” I say.
“I don’t get sick,” Baz says.
“Because you’re a vampire?”
“No.”
“Can vampires get sick?”
“Crowley, Snow.”
“That would be a good perk, I mean.”
“Shut up.”
He coughs again, and reaches for his tea.
I stand up. May as well brush my teeth and all, if I’m about to fall asleep. “Don’t get me sick,” I request, and dig around for some pyjamas.
Baz looks at me. “I’m perfectly fine,” he says, and snaps his book shut. He downs the rest of his tea.
I don’t tell him about my talk with the Mage. I’ll tell Penny at breakfast. But for now I just enjoy the mundanity of being here, the familiarity of roommate bickering, and fall asleep to the sound of Baz breathing.
* * *
“He what?” Penny all but shouts, freezing with her fork halfway to her mouth.
I wipe some crumbs off my lips. “I know,” I mumble around a mouthful of scone. Penny grimaces, so I swallow before continuing. “I didn’t think he’d bring it up again. Not after the first time.”
She hits me with the full force of her Concerned Best Friend Eyes and makes my stomach twist. “I’m so sorry, Simon. He should know that you belong here.”
“Yeah, well. I’m here for now.”
She waits a beat. I can see the gears whirring in her mind.
I butter my third scone. “What, Pen?”
She sets down her fork and wrinkles her nose. “Those artefacts,” she says, almost apologetically. “He said completely irreplaceable?”
My mouth is full, so I nod.
She gazes wistfully past the platter of sausages. “What a shame. Who knows what kind of historical value they held.”
I shrug. “If they were really important they would have been somewhere cooler than the Mage’s office.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“They didn’t look all that interesting, either. One was just a flower petal.”
Penny’s expression stays wistful. “I guess we’ll never know.”
BAZ
Dev’s hand waving in front of my face startles me out of my Simon Snow-induced reverie.
“Mate?” he asks. “You all right?”
My cheeks warm. Thank Crowley for vampirism and my inability to blush. “Fine. Settle down.” I let my mind stay present long enough to make a comment or two in Niall and Dev’s conversation (football, probably?) before I’m swept back up in bronze curls and trailing crumbs.
This truce has tested my patience.
It was one thing to share a room with Simon Snow for years as his enemy who was secretly in love with him.
It’s entirely another to maintain a truce— an increasingly friendly truce— while secretly in love with him. Being civil with him, being polite and unantagonistic (mostly) and actually spending time with him, it all makes it harder to hold back the tidal wave of feelings threatening to spill out. Being his enemy was easy (even when it was hard, which was always.) Being his ally is near impossible.
But Pitches never back down from a challenge.
He looks up from his conversation with Bunce and catches my eye across the dining hall. He grins. That roguish, Simon Snow grin that makes my dead heart hammer.
I fix him with my finest cool stare.
(Only the best for him.)
He looks away first (and I do not mourn the loss of his attention, absolutely not) and Niall refills my tea, bringing me back to my own table.
“Reckon it’s been long enough that I can ask out Wellbelove?” Dev asks.
“Definitely,” says Niall. “It’s been months. She has to be over Snow by now.”
I let myself ignore their inane conversation. Across the room, Simon drags his fingers through his hair and makes a mess of his curls. I want to press my face into them.
“Baz?”
“Hmm?” I say, and sip my tea. My throat tickles again. I cough discreetly behind my hand.
“You sure you’re all right?” asks Niall.
The scratch in my throat persists. I cough again. “Never better,” I tell him, and Simon catches my eye again, mid-laugh. “Really,” I say, and it’s the truth.
* * *
SIMON
By the end of the week I stop looking for the Mage around every corner, sure that he’ll march up and order me to pack my bags. I don’t see him at all, and whenever his Men are on the grounds they don’t so much as look at me. So I figure I’m safe. I’m staying put.
I feel safe enough that I let my mind wander in class again, too. (Just a bit. I don’t really want to remind the Mage that my being here was up for debate.)
Miss Possibelf circulates, offering advice and critique. We’re hunting through old text for 8th year project inspiration. (Penny’s nearly finished hers. I’ve no idea what I’m doing.) Behind us, Rhys suggests, laughing, that Gareth try out “hips don’t lie,” to make use of his magic belt buckle. Penny scoffs. Right in front of Pen and I, Baz sits with Niall and Dev, all idle notetaking and aloofness. He mutters something to Niall, who bursts out laughing and scrambles to cover it, poorly, with a cough.
Miss Possibelf shoots them all a look, and turns back to her inspection of Keris’s work.
Niall’s shoulders keep shaking. Baz elbows him.
Just when he’s about got it under control, Dev slides a piece of paper under Niall’s nose and he snorts.
“Gentlemen,” says Miss Possibelf. “Really.”
“Forgive him,” says Dev. “He’s just got this cough, see.”
I can’t see Baz’s face, but I know from how his head tilts that he’s rolled his eyes.
Niall coughs, unconvincingly, and buries his face in his arms to hide his laughter.
“Very well,” mutters Miss Possibelf. “If you could all take out your books from last— really, Niall? Are you quite all right?”
Niall’s coughing has changed. It keeps going, now, and it sounds a lot realer. He coughs, and coughs, and coughs, leaning over the side of his desk to fold in on himself. He’s not laughing anymore.
Baz raises a pale hand toward him, but a mighty heave from Niall and he pauses, hovers. We’re all watching. Just in case Niall actually hacks up a lung in the middle of class.
He keeps going, until he abruptly stops. He holds a fist to his mouth and goes very still.
“Niall?” asks Miss Possibelf, quietly.
He’s turned just enough that I can see it, clear as day, as he unfolds his hand. For a moment I think it’s blood, but the tiny thing in his palm is light purple. Like a flower petal.
The classroom is silent. Baz startles us all by coughing, softly, himself.
“Gross, mate,” says Dev, and thumps Niall on the back.
Niall grimaces and goes to brush off his hand on his trousers. Miss Possibelf rushes him. Her eyes are very wide.
“Niall,” says. “May I speak to you in the hall, a moment?”
A little unsteady, Niall rises and stalks out into the hall. Miss Possibelf faces us, eyes roving over our faces.
“That will be all for today. Please take care.”
* * *
“What was that all about?” I wonder aloud, while Penny and I head back toward Mummer’s House.
Pen frowns down at the grass. It’s nice out today, and smells like warm spring rain. The trees are budding. “Did you see Miss Possibelf’s face?” Pen says. “She looked like she’d seen a gost.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve all seen a ghost.”
“You know what I mean,” she says. “She looked spooked.”
I’ve seen Miss Possibelf spooked before. (I have a habit of battling dragons on school property.) But Pen’s right— she looked proper spooked, not just ill-student-concerned.
Pen glances around while we walk, scrutinizing something in our surroundings. It all looks pretty regular for springtime at Watford to me. “It was a flower petal, wasn’t it? That Niall coughed up.”
I shrug. “Looked like it.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Maybe he swallowed it earlier. Wind, or something.”
Penny grabs my arm and holds me still. “But where did the petal come from? Nothing grows that colour around here.”
She points around, and sure enough I don’t spot any light purple flowers conveniently growing in our surrounding area. “Sure, Pen. Seems like a lot to get worked up over.”
“Exactly. So there’s more to it. Miss Possibelf knows. We should have followed her.”
“Really? For a petal?”
Penny looks me in the eye. She bites her lip like she does when she’s working hard on something. “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” she says. “But I have a strange feeling.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned at Watford School of Magicks, it’s to trust Penny always, without question.
I nod. “Should we hit the library, then?”
Penny thinks. She adjusts her glasses.
“No. I wouldn’t even know what to look for.” She sets off again for Mummer’s. “Just keep your eye out, okay?”
And I figure that’s that.
* * *
But of course, it’s not.
At breakfast the next morning, Niall’s fit starts back up, and he spits out tiny purple petals all over the floor. Loads of them. They spray out of his mouth and flutter to the stone like confetti. Miss Possibelf pulls him up by the shoulders and drags him away, and we don’t see him for the rest of the day.
And then Penny tells me that a sixth year girl who lives the floor below her coughed up little white petals, long and droopy like daisies, all over the stairs on her way down to class.
We head straight to the library as soon as we have a moment free.
“Here,” Penny says, dropping down a tower of books each thick as my arm. The table shudders under their weight. “You start on these while I go pull some more.”
I grab a book off the top of the pile and get to it. I’ve scoured this book for answers before. These are the usual suspects in our spell-breaking projects.
“What kind of spell would that even be, anyway?” I ask, an hour or so later.
Penny shrugs, not looking up from her book. “Could be a number of things. Everything’s coming up roses? Flowery speech? Oopsy-daisy? Who knows. Keep reading.”
I do. We read.
And read and read.
But supper ticks closer and closer and we find absolutely nothing.
I close the book I’m on and shove it away from me. “I’m starving. And we’re not getting anywhere.”
Pen looks morose, but she shuts her book too. “Honestly? I feel exactly the same. Let’s go eat.”
And halfway through her meal Penny’s fork clatters to her plate and she whips to face me, startling me with a mouthful of potatoes.
“We’re going about this all wrong!” she says.
Baz looks up, across the dining hall. He raises an eyebrow at me. Maybe he has an idea about all this.
“Simon! It’s not a spell— at least, I don’t think it is.”
I meet her eyes. “Yeah?”
She shakes her head, with that bright-eyed look she gets when Baz debates with her in class. “Yeah. The coughing. That’s what it is. I think it’s a sickness.”
“A sickness? Niall and that girl have a wicked cold with a side-effect of flower petals?”
“Oh, eat up, Simon. We need to get back to the library.”
* * *
The next book stack is taller than the first. And older, and dustier.
I heave open the first one, which I’d bet was written by Merlin himself on ye olde parchment. It looks to be some sort of medical text, but it still refers to blood as one of the humors.
Dust tickles my nose. “Pen? I think this book is a bit out of date.” And it just might come apart under my fingers if I’m not careful.
Penny rolls her eyes. “I’m aware. Get to work.”
She sits down with a glossy copy of the Modern Mage’s Guide to Maladies, Unabridged Second Edition, and delights in being the first to crack the pristine spine.
I glower a little. “Really?”
But mine does seem to be at least a little more interesting, so I set to work.
And as it turns out, my ancient book has our answer.
“Pen,” I say, and point. “Here.”
It’s downright medieval looking picture, probably hand painted. (Really, this has got to be the oldest book at Watford.) But it depicts a man bent over a bowl, vomiting red flowers.
Penny scans the text and immediately reaches for a different book in the middle of her pile. She flips through it, muttering, and then lays it open to a page with a similar (if more recent-looking) image, of a woman spitting flowers into her hands.
“Unusual and scarcely-documented phenomenon…” Penny reads, eyes whizzing over the page. “Cause unknown, origin unknown… no studies have been conducted… very few known cases…”
“Pen?”
“Shh. Referred to colloquially as Hanahaki Disease. A mysterious and highly dangerous magical affliction. Affected individuals suffer from flowering plant growth in the lungs and chest cavity, culminating in eventual suffocation and death. Though not proven, it is believed that those vulnerable to the ‘disease’ suffer from unrequited love.”
There’s silence as Penny rereads the passage and the words sink into my mind.
“Well, that can’t be right,” I say. “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. There’s no way that’s real.”
Penny nods a little. But then she opens another book, and another, and a third, until she spreads out a whole tapestry of the Watford library’s medical information, with picture after picture of flowers spilling from peoples’ mouths.
“I agree with you,” Penny murmurs. “It’s completely bizarre. But I think it’s real.”
Over and over, the pages read growth in the lungs, and suffocation and unrequited love.
It’s bonkers. It’s completely bloody mad.
(Of all the things that can kill a mage— chimaeras and dragons and evil vampires, for starters— unrequited love?)
But if it’s real, and these books are correct, then Niall and that sixth year girl are in grave danger.