“And you think the Coven cares about ‘good people’ and ‘what’s important’? You think Natasha Grimm-Pitch cares about your idealism?”
“No,” Mitali said. “But if I’m on the Coven, I’ll have as many votes as she does.”
Davy laughed. “The names on the Coven haven’t changed in two hundred years. Only the faces. They might as well carve ‘Pitch’ onto the headmaster’s chair at Watford. All they care about, all any of them care about, is protecting their own power.”
Mitali wasn’t cowed. In her wide-legged jeans and her wine-coloured velvet jacket, her hair falling to her shoulder blades in messy dark curls, she’s the one who looked like a radical. “They’re protecting all our power,” she said. “The whole World of Mages.”
“Are they?” Davy said. “Ask Natasha Grimm-Pitch about suicide rates among low-magicians. Ask your Coven what they’re doing to fight pixie sticks and every other magickal disease that doesn’t affect their own sons and daughters.”
“How is a revolution going to help the pixies?” Mitali huffed. “How is throwing aside centuries of tradition and institutional knowledge going to help any of us?”
“We’ll build better traditions!” Davy shouted. I don’t think he realized he was shouting.
“We’ll write new rules in blood?”
“If need be! Yes! Yes, Mitali—does that frighten you?”
We left shortly after that. I said I had a headache.
Davy was still flushed from the wine, but he wouldn’t let me drive. He didn’t notice me casting Stay the course on him from the passenger seat.
*
We never went back to London after that.
We rarely left the cottage. We didn’t have a phone, or a television. I bought chickens from the farmer down the road and spelled them not to wander away. I wrote long letters to my mother. All fiction. Davy stayed inside most days with his books.
I called them his books, but they were all stolen from Watford. He’d go back and take more whenever he needed them. He was so powerful, he could make himself nearly invisible.
Sometimes Davy would go away for a few days to meet with other magickal activists. But he always came back more dispirited than when he’d left.
He gave up on a revolution. No one read his papers.
He gave up on everything except the Greatest Mage. I think Davy must have been the greatest Greatest Mage scholar in the history of magic. He knew every prophecy by heart. He wrote them on the stone walls of our cottage, and diagrammed their sentences.
When I brought him his meals, he might ask for my opinion. What did I think this metaphor meant? Had I ever considered that interpretation?
I remember a morning when I interrupted him to bring him eggs and oatmeal. Crowley, we ate so much oatmeal—which I was also feeding to the chickens.
You can extend food with magic, you can make food out of pillows and candles. You can call birds down from the sky and deer in from the fields. But sometimes, there’s nothing.
Sometimes, there was just nothing.
“Lucy,” he said. His eyes were lit from inside. He’d been up all night.
“Good morning, Davy. Eat something.”
“Lucy, I think I cracked it.” He wrapped his arm around my hips and pulled me closer to his chair—and I loved him then.
“What if the oracles kept having the same visions because they weren’t prophecies at all? What if they were instructions? Lucy—what if they’re meant to guide us to change, not foretell it? Here we are, just waiting to be saved, but the prophecies tell us how to save ourselves!”
“How?”
“With the Greatest Mage.”
*
He left again. He came back with more books.
He came back with pots of oil and blood that wasn’t red. I’m not sure when he slept—not with me.
I went for long walks in the fields. I thought about writing letters to Mitali, but I knew she’d fly here on a broom if I told her the truth, and I wasn’t ready to go.
I never wanted to leave Davy.