I sigh and dig my sword deeper into the ground. “Well, I’m not sure at all.”
“You’re burning up goodwill here, magician.”
“How many times do I have to save the Wood to win you people over?”
“There’s no use saving it if you’re just going to hack it down.”
“I’m looking. For my roommate.”
“Your enemy,” she counters. She has grey-brown skin, ridged and rippled like bark, and her eyes glow like those mushrooms that grow deep in the woods.
“It doesn’t matter what he is,” I say, “you know who I’m talking about—how can you be sure he isn’t here?”
The dryad tilts her head back, like she’s listening to the trees behind her. Her every move sounds like a breeze blowing through branches.
“He isn’t here,” she says. “Unless he’s hiding.”
“Well, of course he’s hiding! He’s hiding bloody somewhere.”
“If 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?”
“Probably not.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m improbable.”
“This is important,” I say. “A very dangerous person is missing.”
“Not dangerous to me,” she hisses. “Not dangerous to my sisters. We don’t bleed. We don’t play petty games of more and most.”
“Perhaps 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.”
“Fine?”
“If we see your handsome bloodeater, we’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
“Not. Helping.”
“We’ll tell the golden one, then.”
“The golden one … Am I the golden one?”
She scrunches her nose and shakes her mossy hair. Flowers bloom in it.
“Who, then?”
“Your golden one. His golden one. Your pistil and stigma.”
“Pistol … Do you mean Agatha?”
“Sister golden hair.”
“You’ll tell Agatha if you see Baz?”
“Yes.” 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?”
“What do you seek, Chosen One?”
“Nothing.” 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.