Carry On by Rainbow Rowell Page A

somewhere.”
    â€œIf we can’t see him here, magician, neither will you.”
    I pick up my sword and sheathe it at my hip. “But you’ll tell me if you hear anything?”
    â€œProbably not.”
    â€œYou’re impossible.”
    â€œI’m improbable.”
    â€œThis is important,” I say. “A very dangerous person is missing.”
    â€œNot dangerous to me,” she hisses. “Not dangerous to my sisters. We don’t bleed. We don’t play petty games of more and most.”
    â€œPerhaps you’ve forgotten that Pitch is the House of Fire.” I gesture to the woods behind her, all of it flammable.
    Her head snaps up. Her smile creaks down. She switches her umbrella to her other shoulder. “Fine.”
    â€œFine?”
    â€œIf we see your handsome bloodeater, we’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
    â€œNot. Helping.”
    â€œWe’ll tell the golden one, then.”
    â€œThe golden one … Am I the golden one?”
    She scrunches her nose and shakes her mossy hair. Flowers bloom in it.
    â€œWho, then?”
    â€œYour golden one. His golden one. Your pistil and stigma.”
    â€œPistol … Do you mean Agatha?”
    â€œSister golden hair.”
    â€œYou’ll tell Agatha if you see Baz?”
    â€œYes.” Her umbrella twirls. “We find her peaceful.”
    I sigh and rub the back of my hand into my forehead. “I’ve saved you at least three times. This whole forest. You know that, yeah?”
    â€œWhat do you seek, Chosen One?”
    â€œNothing.” I throw my hands in the air and turn to leave, kicking at the nearest sapling. “Nothing!”
    Nothing good ever happens in the Wavering Wood.
    *   *   *
    I walk the Wood.
    I walk the fields.
    I cover the school grounds between classes, poking through empty buildings, opening long-closed doors.
    Sometimes Watford seems as big on the inside as the walled grounds and the outer lands combined.
    There are secret rooms. Secret hallways. Entirely hidden wings that only reveal themselves if you know the right spell or have the right artefact.
    There’s an extra storey between the second and third floors of the Cloisters. (Penny calls it “bonus content.”) It’s an echo of the floor above it. All the same things happen there, a day later.
    There’s a moat below the moat.
    And warrens in the hills.
    There are three hidden gates, and I’ve only got one of them to open.
    Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life looking for the map or key that would make Watford—the whole World of Mages—make sense.
    But all I ever find are pieces of the puzzle. It’s like I’m in a dark room, and I only ever have enough light to see one corner of it at a time.
    I spent most of my fifth year wandering the Catacombs below the White Chapel, searching for Baz. The Chapel’s at the centre of Watford; it’s the oldest building. No one knows whether Watford started as a school or something else. Maybe a magic abbey. Or a mages’ settlement—that’s what I’d like to believe. Imagine it, a walled town with magicians living together, practically out in the open. A magickal community.
    The Catacombs sit beneath the Chapel and beyond it. There are probably lots of ways down, but I only know of one.
    In our fifth year, I kept seeing Baz slip off towards the Chapel after dinner. I thought it must be some plot—a conspiracy.
    I’d follow him to the Chapel, through the high, arched, never-locked front doors … Back behind the altar, behind the sanctuary and the Poets Corner … Through the secret door, and down into the Catacombs.
    The Catacombs are properly creepy. Agatha would never go down there with me, and Penelope only went with me at first, when she still believed Baz might be up to something.
    She stopped after a few months. She stopped going to