Any Way the Wind Blows

by Rainbow Rowell

  “Is that truly Pippa?”

  “Did Smith cure her?”

  “She didn’t even have a tongue!”

  “She had a tongue—she sold her voice to a sea witch.”

  “How did Smith do it?”

  “He’s the real fucking deal, that’s how.”

  “No!” Pippa shouts in a gravelly voice, looking around the room. “Listen to me!”

  Everyone stops to listen. Including Smith.

  She looks him in the eye. “Smith Smith-Richards is a—is a fraud! His spell ruins people’s magic! Ask Jamie and—and Beth!”

  “Beth? Where is Beth?”

  “Jamie’s right there. We saw him cured.”

  “Smith’s first miracle.”

  “Beth hasn’t returned any of my calls…”

  “Pippa,” Smith says calmly, like he isn’t dripping with cobwebs that prove him a liar. “Why are you so angry? After everything I’ve done for you.”

  “You? Y-you—”

  “The prophecy says there will be false witnesses sent to tarnish me,” Smith says. “I never thought it would be you.” He turns his wand on her.

  Pippa is already casting with Baz’s. “Liar, liar, pa-pants on fire!”

  Smith’s white trousers start smoking. Daphne quickly shoots a stream of water out of her wand to put them out.

  I’m still treading air above them—my left wing is cut up, so I’m working hard with my right. When Smith points his wand at Pippa, I dive in front of it. “Cat got your tongue!” he hisses.

  I’m sure the spell hits me. I don’t feel it. “Enough,” I say, scooping Smith up, my arms under his, and lifting him above the crowd.

  “Put me down, you beast!” he yells. His microphone has come unclipped. “Put me down, Simon!”

  The audience is casting at me again. I seem to be the only thing they can agree on. Everyone is shouting now, spells or otherwise.

  “Take him down!”

  “Protect the Chosen One!”

  “Arrest the apostate!”

  “But Smith must be deceiving us—”

  “Crash and burn!”

  A stream of fire shoots over my shoulder. (That’s concerning. I don’t really want to see if I’m immune to magickal fire.)

  “Stop!” someone shouts. I look down. It’s Jamie. He’s at the altar, holding Smith’s clip-on microphone. “Everybody just stop. Please. Pippa’s telling the truth—my magic is gone. Smith’s spell wears off, and leaves you with … It left me with…” He looks miserably around the room. “With nothing.”

  “He’s lying!” Smith screams. He’s trying to squirm out of my hands, which won’t be hard; I don’t have a good grip on him.

  “Calm down,” I say. “I don’t want to drop you.”

  Smith points his wand at Jamie, and I’m not sure how to stop him from casting. So I fly straight up, through the broken window—we break it a little more—and into the air.

  BAZ

  It was Bunce’s idea to fetch her mother, when Smith-Richards wasn’t where Snow said he would be.

  We ran up the flight of stairs and burst into Headmistress Bunce’s office, interrupting what was clearly a heated conversation with her husband.

  They stopped talking, red-faced, when they saw Penelope.

  “Penny?” her father said.

  Her mother looked at Shepard and put her hand on her forehead. “Penelope Bunce, please tell me you didn’t bring a Normal to Watford.”

  “Daddy!” Penelope ran to her father. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Smith-Richards!” I said. “Where is he?”

  “They’re all in the White Chapel…” Professor Bunce said, hugging Penelope and still looking confused.

  I turned to his wife. “We have to stop him! That spell of his shuts off people’s magic.”

  No one will believe me later when I tell them that Headmistress Bunce jumped from a window at the top of the Weeping Tower, but I saw it with my own eyes. She used the same spell I used once on the ramparts—“Float like a butterfly.”

  The rest of us could never manage that spell from such a height. We took the (damnably slow) lift.

  When we finally got to the Chapel, Headmistress Bunce was standing in the doorway threatening to nullify anyone who cast a spell or tried to leave. Daphne was at the altar, with Pippa and Jamie.

  Simon and Smith-Richards were gone.

  75

  SMITH

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  I knew there would be challenges—antagonists, red herrings, meaningful struggle—but nothing like this. Not chaos and disgrace. They made a fool of me. How am I supposed to redeem myself?

  And now him.

  Hauling me around like a rag doll.

  My Simon Snow chapter was over.

  I’m clinging to him. He knocks my wand from my hand. (More disgrace.) (I’m the Chosen One. How do I bounce back from this? What is destiny doing?)

  He drops me onto the flat roof of a nearby building. I hate to think about how good he looks doing it. Against the green hills, the castle walls. Those fucking red wings.

  “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  I refuse to answer.

  He touches my shoulder, and I roll away. I’m not hurt. I’m just at a loss. I hide my head in my arms. “That was a debacle.”

  “I don’t know what you expected to happen,” Simon Snow says. “People were going to figure out that your spell doesn’t work.”

  I sit up to face him. He’s standing over me with the sun at his back. One of his wings is pulled in; the injured one is hanging. It’s asymmetrical. It works for him, damn it. “The spell does work,” I snarl. “You’ve seen it with your own eyes, Simon!”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me—or anyone else—that it wears off.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” (It doesn’t! It’s practically irrelevant!)

  “It matters to the people who lost their magic!”

  “Oh, for Merlin’s sake,” I shout at him, “they hardly had any magic to lose!”

  He puts his hands on his hips. He’s wearing jeans. And an artfully torn T-shirt. “Did you steal it?” he demands. “Is that what this is?”

  “Did I steal it?” I laugh, I sound hysterical—I suppose I am. Simon Snow is interrogating me. He looks like he just rolled out of bed. I’m the Chosen One. I am. “No,” I say. “I gave it to them.”

  I gave them all of their magic, all at once. That’s what my spell does. Draws their magic up, so they can reach it. And then … they run out. Sometimes in a month, sometimes in a week. It depends on how much they started with.

  (I’d never cast the spell on a Normal before. I never will again, not if it makes them immune to me.)

  “No one else can do what I do,” I say. “No one. My magic begets magic. It’s unheard of—it’s a miracle.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a lie!”

  “It’s not a lie!”

  “Everyone was going to figure it out, Smith!”

  “Not immediately!”

  Not until it was too late to turn back!

  I was going to give the people in the White Chapel the best day of their lives.

  And then, tomorrow, their friends would line up at my door. All the weakest wands, all the weakest wills.

  And the next day, more.

  I’d clear them all out in the kindest way possible. I’d make some very strategic edits.

  “They were going to see the truth in the end,” the boy says. “And then what?”

  And then, Simon Snow, a new age would dawn for the World of Mages …

  A new stage, with only the most powerful and canniest players left standing. A new era. Of adventure, of high stakes, and glory—just like in the stories Evander told me.

  All the best stories are old … Why is that? When did magicians stop doing anything worth writing down or repeating?

  They wrote me down.

  I was foretold.

  I still am.

  O
ne day at a time, Evander always says. One chapter.

  There’s a scraping noise across the roof. A trapdoor opens. And the headmistress—Martin Bunce’s wife—comes through it, wand first.

  (She’ll never line up for my spell. She’ll stay in the narrative.)

  “You’re under arrest,” she says to me. “And you…” She looks at Simon. “… will wait for me in my office.”

  I raise myself to my feet and put my hands in the air. I’m wearing white. I’m singed and sooty. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this—but I don’t fear destiny.

  76

  AGATHA

  The second kid slides out, just the way it’s supposed to. I catch it—I can already feel it squirming inside its bag. “It’s alive!” I shout. “Niamh! Look!”

  “You’re doing so well,” she says, handing me another clean towel.

  The kid kicks its way out of the membrane, while I scrub at it. The doe cranes her head back, too exhausted to reach it. I bring the baby over to her face, and she licks away the gunk. “There you are, mother,” I say. “Good work, darling.”

  I’m crying.

  I’m laughing.

  Niamh lays her hand on my back. “You saved them both, Agatha.”

  “I didn’t—” I turn to Niamh. For once, she doesn’t look angry. Niamh is looking at me the way lots of people do sometimes, but she never has. Like I’m … well, like I’m …

  “You’re amazing,” she says.

  I’ve turned right into her arm. Her hand stays on my back. Niamh’s eyes are royal blue. Her eyelashes are short and dark. Her colour is high. Here, in the clearing, under the solid gold sun.

  “Agatha,” she says.

  My hands are covered in goo and jelly. I lift up my chin, so it’s there, if she wants it …

  She does. She kisses me.

  Niamh.

  Her long nose in my cheek. Her chin as sharp as it looks. Her lips the softest part of her, surely.

  Niamh.

  I would like …

  Niamh.

  More of this …

  Niamh.

  Please.

  Niamh kisses me.

  “Agatha,” she says, “you saved Watford.”

  77

  BAZ

  Smith-Richards has been arrested. He’ll be kept in a tower until his trial.

  There’s an emergency Coven meeting; three members were already here for Smith-Richards’s rally. (Which I find alarming.)

  Headmistress Bunce makes everyone in the Chapel stay to give a statement. Even Penelope and me.

  “I’m not telling you anything until you tell me where Snow is,” I say when it’s my turn.

  “Easy, Baz. He’s in my office.”

  “Is he under arrest?”

  “Not yet.” The headmistress narrows her eyes. “Should he be?”

  “No. He should be given a medal. And a pension.”

  “We’ll take that under advisement.”

  When the Coven is done with me, I go looking for my stepmother …

  I find her on a bench in the courtyard, looking like she’s run out of tears. I sit down next to her. “Are you all right?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Daphne says, her eyes cast down.

  I look more closely. She’s wearing a lovely floral garden-party dress. High-heeled jute sandals. Her cheeks are red and chafed.

  “Did you…” I’m not sure how to say it. “Were we too late?”

  She looks up at me. “Oh. No. Simon stopped him. No one took Smith’s spell today. But … I would have.” She starts crying again. “Oh, Basilton, I’ve been such a fool.”

  I put my arm around her and fish a handkerchief out of my pocket. “There, there.”

  “I believed in him.”

  “I know.”

  “And now … oh, and now…” She sniffs. “Basil, will you just take me home?”

  Thank fucking Crowley. “Of course. As soon as I’ve spoken to Simon.”

  Daphne nods, wiping her eyes.

  A shadow falls over us. We both look up. It’s Penelope’s father, holding a stack of three empty glasses. “Hello, Daphne. Gin and tonic?”

  She smiles up at him and nods her head, laughing tearfully. “Thank you, Martin.”

  Professor Bunce takes a glass and taps it with his wand. “Dutch courage!” He casts it again on a glass for himself. (In my good opinion, anyone who can cast that spell twice in a row doesn’t need a power upgrade.) He holds the last empty glass out to me. “Basil?”

  “No, thank you, sir. I’m driving.”

  “Could I trade places with you for a moment?”

  “Yes, of course.” I stand, and Professor Bunce takes my place on the bench.

  “Shepard has lemonade,” he says.

  I nod and catch Daphne’s eye. “I won’t go far.”

  Shepard does have lemonade. And Penelope has tea and biscuits. They’re moving through what’s left of the crowd, offering refreshments. (Shepard may be the first true Normal on Watford grounds—it’s a spectacular transgression.) (How many history books is Penelope going to end up in? And for how many reasons?)

  I take the biscuits from Bunce and do my part to help. Now that the danger has passed, people seem glad for the chance to gossip. And now that Smith-Richards has been disgraced, people are quick to say they only came today out of curiosity, and didn’t they get a show for their trouble. They’re already talking about the other prospective Chosen Ones …

  My own Chosen One has been in the headmistress’s office for ages. We run out of tea and biscuits, and go to wait for him outside of the Weeping Tower.

  I’m pacing the tiled pathway. Penelope is sitting cross-legged on a bench—never mind her short skirt—anxiously plucking leaves off a rosebush. Shepard is staring up at the Tower, probably wondering why it doesn’t fall over.

  “She won’t hurt him,” Penny says, to herself, as much as to me.

  “But she doesn’t like him,” I counter. “He says she’s never liked him.”

  “Oh, she likes him fine—she just thinks he’s a bad influence on me.”

  Shepard and I both laugh.

  Bunce frowns at us.

  “Maybe we should leave before your mom comes down,” Shepard says. “I don’t want to be here while she’s still putting people in towers.”

  “I’d break you out,” Penny says dismissively.

  “Almost nothing you say is reassuring,” he says, somehow still smiling at her.

  “Being reassuring isn’t one of my core competencies,” she tells him. “Breaking people out of towers is.”

  Maybe I should go check on Simon. I could wait outside Headmistress Bunce’s office. She likes me, I think.

  I was so terrified when I realized that Simon had gone to the Chapel by himself … Then I was irate that he’d lied to us … Now I don’t know what I am. I’ll decide after I see him again. After I’ve had a chance to inspect him for damage.

  Someone pokes me in the back, and I whip around, reaching for my wand—

  I find myself at the end of it.

  Pippa is standing there, holding my ivory wand out to me. “Here you go.” Her voice is rough, but it sounds like it’s settled into her chest.

  “Pippa…” I say.

  She frowns. “I didn’t mean to steal your wand. Not initially.”

  “You can have it.”

  “I—I don’t need it.”

  I stand taller and adjust my cuffs. “Pippa, I’m ready to face whatever consequences I deserve. We can talk to the Coven right now.”

  “Crowley, Pitch. Just—just shut up.” She shoves the wand into my chest and lets it go.

  I catch it. “I don’t expect you to forgive me—”

  “Good!” she snarls. “I don’t forgive you. I—” She shakes her head and presses her lips together, like she doesn’t have words for how much she hates me. “I never want to see you again.”

  I nod.

  Pippa stares at me for a second, with her arms folded and
her face still hateful. “Tell Simon I said thank you,” she says, then walks away.

  Penelope touches my arm. She’s standing just behind me, her right fist subtly pointed at Pippa’s back. “All right, Baz?”

  I put my hand on her wrist. “All right, Bunce.”

  78

  SIMON

  I wait for Penny’s mum in her office. She sends the school nurse, Miss Christy, to tend the wound on my wing.

  “There’s a familiar face.”

  “Hello, Miss Christy.”

  “The headmistress says I’m not to cast any spells on you. Let’s see that wing.”

  I spread it out and try not to flinch when she touches it. I trust Miss Christy. She’s patched me up more times than I can count. And she never seemed to blame me for it.

  “Ran out of bones to break, so you had to give yourself wings, is that it?”

  “I reckon, miss.”

  “You won’t need stitches, but this’ll sting.”

  She cleans the cut and leaves me with a bottle of Ribena and two scones. “These are from yesterday, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t mind,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “The headmistress says you’re to keep waiting here for her.”

  I nod.

  Miss Christy looks around the office. “Strange to think he’s gone, isn’t it?”

  She means the Mage, but I’m afraid to acknowledge it. Is she angry with me? Were they close? Miss Christy was at Watford when I started, and she’s at least as old as the Mage. How long did they work together?

  I nod, carefully.

  She pats my hand. “I was sorry for your loss, son.”

  Oh …

  I’m still afraid to speak. I nod again. And watch her leave.

  The sun shifts, and the room falls into shade.

  Penny’s mum hasn’t changed everything in here … There’s still a painted Watford coat of arms hanging by the door. (I suppose those could be goats.) And a sturdy iron rack where the Mage used to hang his green woollen cape. An honest-to-Merlin cape.

  I wonder where the Mage’s capes went … And his knee-high boots with the big leather cuffs. Probably to his cousins in Wales. He had a belt I always coveted. Brown leather with a silver buckle that looked like a yew tree.