“That there’s a great Mage coming.”
“Like the children’s song,” I said. “And one will come to end us, and one will bring his fall, let the greatest power of powers reign, / may it save us all.”
“Yes.”
“My grandmother used to talk about the Greatest Mage.”
“There are dozens of prophecies,” Davy said. “All about one mage, the Chosen One.”
“How do you know they’re all about the same person?” I ask. “And how do you know he—or she—hasn’t come and gone already.”
“Do you really think we’d miss someone who saved our whole people? Someone who fixed our world?”
“Does it say what they’ll fix?”
“It says there will be a threat, that we’ll be dark and divided—that magic itself will be in danger, and that there will be a mage who has power no one else has ever dreamt of, a magician who draws his power from the centre of the earth. ‘He walks like an ordinary man, but his power is like no other.’ One of the oracles describes him as ‘a vessel’—large and strong enough to hold all of magic itself.”
Davy was getting more and more excited as he talked. His eyes were shining, and his words were tripping over each other. He gestured towards the stack of books as if their very presence made the prophecies irrefutable.
I felt my chin pull back. “You don’t…”
“What?” Davy asked.
“Well, you don’t think…”
“What, Lucy? What don’t I think?”
“Well … that you’re the Greatest Mage?…”
He scoffed. “Me? No. Don’t be a fool. I’m more powerful than any of these cretins”—he glanced around the library—“but I have the sort of power you can imagine.”
I tried to laugh. “Right. So…”
“So?”
“So why is this so important to you?”
“Because the Greatest Mage of all is coming, Lucy. And he’s coming at the hour of our greatest need. When the mages are ‘scrabbling with clawed hands at each others’ throats’—when ‘the head of our great beast has lost its way.’ That’s soon. That’s now. We should all care about this! We should be getting ready!”
59
PENELOPE
I like my dad’s lab. In the attic. No one’s allowed to clean up here, not even his assistants. It’s a complete mess, but Dad knows where everything is, so if you move a book from one pile to the next, he goes a little mental.
One whole wall is a map of Great Britain—the holes in the magickal atmosphere haven’t spread across the water yet, but they’ve grown over the years. Dad uses pins and string to map the perimeter of each hole, then uses different colours of string to show how the holes have grown. Little flags record the date of measurement. A few of the big holes have merged over the years—there’s almost no magic left in Cheshire anymore.
Dad’s assistants are out on a surveying mission now. He’s just hired someone new, a magickal anthropologist, to study the effects of the voids on magickal creatures. He’d like to study how the holes affect Normals, but he can’t get the funding.
I walk over to the map. There are two holes in London—a big one in Kensington and a smaller one in Trafalgar Square. I hate to think about what would happen if the Humdrum attacked near our house in Hounslow. Plenty of magickal families have had to move, and sometimes it weakens them. Your magic settles in a place. It supports you.
I sit at one of the tall tables. Dad likes to stand while he works, so all the tables are tall. He’s already got a book open, and he’s copying numbers into a ledger. He uses a computer, too, but he still keeps all his records by hand.
“I’m working on a project for school,” I say. “And I was looking through some old copies of The Record.…”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“And I was reading about the Watford Tragedy.”
Dad looks up. “Yes?”
“Do you remember when it happened?”