Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow, #3)(52)

I’m scrubbing at my hair; it’s probably driving Baz mental, but I can’t seem to stop. “Is this, like, something that most magicians believe now?

That’s there’s a new Greatest Mage?”

“I think it’s more a thing that most magicians like to gossip about,” she says. “The various candidates, the evidence for and against, who’s having a cocktail party where you can meet one of them … Plenty of mages are still loyal to you, Simon.”

“To me?”

“Oh, yes”—she smiles—“‘Snowvians.’”

“No,” I say. “That’s not a thing.”

“They think you’ll get your powers back and rise higher than ever.”

“Hmm,” Baz says, looking down his nose at me. “I think I might be a Snowvian.”

“I’m a bit of a Snowvian myself.” Lady Salisbury smiles at him.

“No…” I say. “Just, no.”

“Well,” she goes on, “there’s another school of thought that says the time hasn’t come yet for the Greatest Mage, and that when that person does come, it will be obvious.”

I huff. “Doesn’t anyone think that maybe all of this is bollocks?”

Baz elbows me.

“Excuse my language,” I tack on. “But maybe there is no Chosen One.

Maybe the prophecies were made by people like the Mage who just wanted to take advantage of everyone.”

Lady Salisbury doesn’t look convinced.

Baz looks even less convinced. “We can’t just stop believing in prophecies. Our whole culture is built on them. Watford itself was prophesied.”

“How do we know that?” I ask.

“They taught us about it at Watford,” he says.

“Penny would call that circular reasoning. I’m guilty of it all the time.”

At the mention of Penelope, Baz looks back at his notebook. “So … Jamie was interested in the Chosen One theories?”

“Yes,” Lady Salisbury says, “I think in a way he was especially interested because he’d been so removed from the World of Mages. This was something he could participate in, just like everyone else. As I said, I didn’t think Jamie was taking any of it seriously, but maybe you can’t spend so much time engaging with nonsense without taking it seriously…” Lady Salisbury presses her fingers to her forehead, like she has a headache coming on. “One name started to come up more and more … Smith Smith-Richards.”

“That’s a hell of a name,” I say.

“I have cousins who are Smiths,” Baz says, “but I’ve never heard of a Smith-Richards.”

“No one seems to have heard of him until recently,” she says. “Born in Yorkshire apparently.”

“I see.” Baz is writing that down. “And what made Smith-Richards stand out? To your son?”

Lady Salisbury looks so genuinely troubled, I think she might start to cry.

Properly this time. She looks away from us. “Smith Smith-Richards is promising people magic.”

BAZ

“Magic?” Snow and I both say at once.

Lady Salisbury pulls a tissue from her cardigan pocket and wipes her eyes. “Yes.”

“He’s giving them magic?” Simon asks, and I know he’s thinking of those days when he pushed his magic into me—it shouldn’t have been possible. Or perhaps he’s thinking of the Mage’s last moments, when the man tried to drain Simon’s magic into himself. Would it have worked?

“Not exactly,” she says. “Smith-Richards claims to be healing their magic. Helping them realize their true potential.”

“And your son believed this?” I ask.

“He didn’t at first,” she says, “or he acted like he didn’t. But Smith-Richards’s name kept coming up. Jamie started to get very agitated talking about the other Greatest Mage contenders. He’d say they were swindlers, obvious frauds—that only Smith Smith-Richards was saying anything interesting…”

She wipes her eyes again. “Jamie started going out more,” she says, “in the evenings. Before all this, he’d spend every night upstairs, on his computer. I tried to tell myself that it was a good thing, him getting out a bit, meeting new people—but it made my blood run cold …

“Finally,” she says, “I confronted him. Oh, we had such a row!” She smiles ruefully at us, blinking away tears. “Me asking him if he was getting too involved in all this Chosen One hullabaloo, and him telling me he’s an adult who can do what he likes. Me saying I was worried, and him saying…”

Lady Salisbury looks down at her teacup again and slowly shakes her head. “Well. He said I didn’t want him to be a success. That I liked him being a failure because it kept him here with me.

“‘ Mum,’ he said, ‘what if Smith can fix my magic?’

“‘ Your magic isn’t broken!’ I told him, and I meant it! Jamie isn’t broken. ” She looks at Simon and me, like she’s pleading for someone to believe her. “It’s always been more nuanced than that. Magic didn’t come easily to him, and then he wasn’t trained, and then he built up all of these behavioural ways to cope with it … Maybe he just didn’t have much access to magic in the first place! Call it genetics or call it circumstance. It happens.