“All right, fellas?” I answer.
Rhys nods at Penny. Penelope has never had time for most of our classmates, so they don’t really have time for her. It would bother me if everyone ignored me like that, but she seems to appreciate the lack of distractions.
Sometimes when I’m walking through the dining hall, just saying hello to people, she’ll drag me by my sleeve to hurry me up.
“You have too many friends,” she’ll say.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not possible. And, anyway, I wouldn’t call them all ‘friends.’”
“There are only so many hours in the day, Simon. Two, three people—that’s all any of us have time for.”
“There are more people than that in your immediate family, Penny.”
“I know. It’s a struggle.”
Once, I started listing off all the people that I truly cared about. When I got to number seven, Penelope told me I either needed to whittle down my list or stop making friends immediately. “My mother says you should never have more people in your life than you could defend from a hungry rakshasa.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I told her, “but I’m not worried; I’m good in a fight.”
I like having people. Close ones like Penny and Agatha and the Mage and Ebb the goatherd and Miss Possibelf and Dr. Wellbelove. And just friendly ones like Rhys and Gareth. If I followed Penny’s rules, I’d never find enough people for a football match.
She waves halfheartedly at the boys, then sits between me and them, turning towards me to close off our conversation. “I saw Agatha with her parents,” she says, “earlier, in the Cloisters.”
The Cloisters is the oldest and largest girls’ house, a long low building at the other side of the grounds. It only has one door, and all the windows are made up of tiny panes of glass. (The school must have been mega-paranoid when it started letting girls in back in the 1600s.) “You saw who?” I ask.
“Agatha.”
“Oh.”
“I can go get her if you want,” she offers.
“Since when do you pass notes for me?”
“I thought you might not want to talk to her for the first time in front of everyone,” she says. “After what happened.”
I shrug. “It’ll be fine. Agatha and I are fine.”
Penny looks surprised, then dubious; then she shakes her head, giving up. “Anyway,” she says, tearing off a piece of her sandwich, “we should track down the Mage after lunch.”
“Why?”
“‘Why?’ Are you playing dumb today because you think I’ll find it cute?”
“Yes?”
She rolls her eyes. “We need to track down the Mage and make him tell us what’s been going on all summer. What he’s found out about the Humdrum.”
“He hasn’t found out anything. I already talked to him.”
She stops mid-bite. “When?”
“He came to my room this morning.”
“And when were you going to tell me this?”
I shrug again, licking butter off my thumb. “When you gave me a chance.”
Penny rolls her eyes again. (Penny rolls her eyes a lot.) “He didn’t have anything to say?”
“Not about the Humdrum. He—” I look down at my plate, then quickly around us. “—he says the Old Families are causing trouble.”
She nods. “My mum says they’re trying to organize a vote of no confidence against him.”
“Can they do that?”
“They’re trying. And there’ve been duels all summer. Premal’s friend Sam got into it with one of the Grimm cousins after a wedding, and now he’s on trial.”
“Who is?”
“The Grimm.”
“For what?”
“Forbidden spells,” she says. “Banned words.”
“The Mage thinks I should go,” I say.
“What? Go where?”
“He thinks I should leave Watford.”
Penny’s eyes are big. “To fight the Humdrum?”
“No.” I shake my head. “To just … go. He thinks I’d be safer somewhere else. He thinks everyone here would be safer if I left.”
Her eyes keep getting bigger. “Where would you go, Simon?”
“He didn’t say. Some secret place.”
“Like a hideout?” she asks.