Page 2 of The Golden Enclaves
Except for Orion, gone into the dark.
If I’d had any mana left to do anything with, I would have imagined the possibility of doing something for him long enough to try some more. But since I didn’t, all I could imagine was going for help to someone else—his mum maybe, who was on track to be Domina in the New York enclave—and asking her for mana so I could do something, and that was where my imagination broke down: looking her in the face, someone who’d loved Orion and wanted him home, and asking her for mana, for any of the ideas that became obviously stupid and useless as soon as I had to persuade someone else to believe in them. So I did the only thing left to do, and put my face in my hands and cried.
Mum sat beside me the whole time I was weeping, satwithme, caring about my misery without pretending she was feeling it too, or hiding away her own deep joy: I was home, I was alive, I was safe. Her whole body was radiating gladness out into the universe, but she didn’t try to make me join in or smother my own grief; she knew I was deeply hurt, and was so sorry, and ready to do anything that she could to help me, when I wanted it. If you’d like to know how she told me all that without saying a word, I would too. It was nothing I could ever have done myself.
When I stopped crying, she got up and made me a cup of tea, picking leaves out of seven different jars on her crammed-full shelves, and she boiled the water with magic, which she’d never ordinarily have done, just so she didn’t have to go outside to the fire and leave me alone yet. The whole yurt filled with the sweet smell when she poured the water in. She gave it to me and sat down again, holding my other hand between both of hers. She hadn’t asked me any questions, I knew she wouldn’t ever push, but there was a gentle silence between us waiting for me to start talking about it. To start grieving with her, for something that was over and done. And I couldn’t bear to.
So after I drank my tea, I put the mug down and said, “Why did you warn me off Orion?” My voice came out hoarse and roughed-up, like I’d run sandpaper up and down the inside of my throat a few times. “Was this why? Did you see—”
She flinched like I’d jabbed her hard with a needle, and her whole body shuddered. She shut her eyes a moment and took a deep breath, then turned and looked at me full in my face in the way she calledseeing properly,when she really wanted to take something in, and her own face went crumpling into folds along the faint wrinkle lines that were just beginning at the corners of her eyes. “You’re safe,” she said, half whispering, and she looked down at my hand and stroked it again, and a few tears dripped off her face. “You’resafe.Oh my darling girl, you’re safe,” and she heaved a massive gulp and was crying herself, four years of tears running down her face.
She didn’t ask me to cry with her; she looked away from me in fact, trying to keep her tears from me. I wanted to, I wanted so much to go into her arms and feel it with her: that I was alive and safe. But I couldn’t. She was crying for joy, for love, for me, and I wanted to cry for those things too: I was home, I was out of the Scholomance forever, I was alive in aworld I’d changed for the better, a world where children wouldn’t have to be thrown into a pit full of knives just for the hope they’d make it out again. It was worth rejoicing. But I couldn’t. The pit was still there, and Orion was down in it.
I pulled my hand away instead. Mum didn’t try to hold me. She took several deep breaths and wiped her tears away, packing the joy out of the way, tidy, so she could go on being with me, then she turned and cupped my face with her hand. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”
She didn’t say why she’d warned me off Orion. And I understood why at once: she wasn’t going to lie to me, but she didn’t want to hurt me either. She understood that I’d loved him, that I’d lost someone I loved, in the same horrible way that she’d lost Dad, and my grief was all that mattered to her now. It didn’t matter to her to tell me why, or persuade me that she’d been right.
But it mattered to me. “Tell me,” I said through my teeth. “Tell me.You went to Cardiff, you got that boy to bring me anote—”
Her face crumpled a little, miserable—I was asking her to hurt me, to tell me something she knew I didn’t want to hear—but she gave in. She bowed her head and said softly, “I tried to dream you every night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach you, but I tried to anyway. A few times, I thought you were dreaming me back, and we almost touched…but it was only dreaming.”
I swallowed hard. I remembered those dreams too, the faint handful of near-touches, the love that had almost made it to me despite the thick smothering layer of wards blanketing the Scholomance, the ones that blocked every possible way that anything could get in—because otherwise mals would use that way, too.
“But last year—I did see you. The night you used the linenpatch.” Her voice was a whisper, and I hunched up, back in that moment and seeing it with her eyes: the little cell of my room, me on the floor in a puddle of my own blood, with the gaping ragged hole in my belly where one of my especially charming fellow students had shoved a knife into me. The only reason I’d survived it had been that healing patch she’d made me herself, years of love and magic worked into every linen thread she’d grown and spun and woven.
“Orion helped me with it,” I said. “He put it on me,” and I stopped, because she’d dragged in a gasping breath, her face twisting into the memory of a horror worse than my lying on the floor bleeding out.
“I felt him touch it,” she said raggedly, and even as she was speaking, I knew I was going to be sorry I’d asked. “I saw him, so near you, touching you. I saw him, and he was just—hunger—” and she soundedsick,she sounded like she’d been watching a mal eat me alive, instead of Orion kneeling on my floor and pressing healing into my torn body.
“He wasmy friend,” I said in a howl, because I had to make her stop, and I stood up so fast I cracked my skull hard into a crossbar and sat down with my hands on top of my head with a squawk and started crying again a little from the jolt of pain. Mum tried to hold me, but I shrugged her arms off, angry and dripping, and heaved myself off the bed again.
“He saved mylife,” I ground out at her. “He saved my lifethirteen times,” and I gasped on a breath of agony: I’d never have the chance to catch up now.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t argue with me, just sat there with her eyes shut and her arms wrapped around herself, breathing through it in shudders. She only whispered, “My darling, I’m so sorry,” and I could hear she truly was, she was so very sorry for hurting me with this supposed truth of what she’d seen in Orion that I wanted to scream.
I laughed instead, a horrible vicious laugh that hurt me to hear it in my own ears. “No worries, he’s gone for good now,” I said, jeering. “My brilliant plan took care of that.” And I went out of the yurt.
I walked around the commune for a while, staying in the trees just past the limits of where anyone had a pitch. My head ached from crying and banging it against the roof and from pouring an ocean’s worth of mana through my body, and from four years of prison before that. I didn’t have a handkerchief or anything. I was still wearing my filthy sweaty leggings and T-shirt, the New York T-shirt Orion had given me, threadbare with four holes and still the only wearable top I’d had left by the end of term. I pulled up the hem and wiped my nose on it.
I wanted to go back to Mum, but I couldn’t, because I wanted to ask her to hug me for a month, and I wanted to scream at her that she didn’t know anything about Orion at all. What I really wanted was to not have asked her in the first place. It was worse than if she’d told me she’d foreseen it all, and if I’d only listened to her warning, instead of pulling him into my magnificent scheme to save the whole school, he’d have made it out fine.
I could guess what Mum had seen: Orion’s power that let him pull mana out of mals, and the empty well inside him because when he took the power, he gave itaway.The power so terrifyingly vast that it had forced him to become exactly the kind of stupid reckless hero who’d face an entire horde of maleficaria alone, because for every moment of his life, people had made him feel like a freak unless he was putting himself out in front of them.
He’d been the most popular boy in the Scholomance, butI’d been his only friend, because when everyone else looked at him, that was all they saw: his power. They pretended they saw a noble hero, because he’d tried so hard to fit himself into that picture, and they loved the picture: that made his power somethingforthem, something that would help them. The same way everyone looked at me and my power and saw a monster, because Iwouldn’tplay along with what they wanted. But they’d loved Orion only in exactly the same way they’d hated me. Neither one of us were ever people to them. He just made himself useful, and I refused to.
But I’d never imagined thatMum,of all people—who’d never let me see a monster in my own mirror, even when the whole world was trying to convince me that was all that was there—would look at Orion and see his power, and decide thathewas a monster. I couldn’t bear it that she hadn’t been able to look at him and see a person. It made it feel like she was lying about seeingmeas one.
So I could have gone back to scream at her, to tell her the only reason I was alive for her to dream of was because Orion had killed the maleficer who’d gutted me, and had risked his own life spending the night in my room killing the endless stream of mals who’d come to finish the job. But the way I really wanted to prove her wrong was by having Orion walk up the path to our yurt next week, the way he’d promised he would, so she could see for herself that he wasn’t either the terrible power she’d glimpsed or the gleaming perfect hero everyone else wanted him to be. That hewasa person, he was just a person.
Had been a person. Before he’d got himself killed at the very gates of the Scholomance, because he’d thought it was his job to make a way out for everyone else but him.
I kept walking around as long as I could. I didn’t want to feel anything as small as being tired and filthy and hungry, butI did. The world did in fact insist on going on, and I didn’t have the mana to make it stop. Precious finally came and got me, darting out from underneath a bush to pounce on my foot when I circled back closer to the yurt again. She refused to let me pick her up. She ran away from me a little way towards the yurt, and sat up on her haunches and gave me a scold, her white fur practically glowing in an invitation to the large number of cats and dogs who roamed the commune more or less freely. Being a familiar doesn’t make you invulnerable.
So I followed her back to the yurt and let Mum give me a bowl of vegetable soup that tasted like it had been made with real vegetables, which might not sound very exciting to you, but what do you know. I couldn’t help eating five bowls of it, even seasoned with agony and sour resentment, and almost all of a loaf of bread and butter, and afterwards I let Mum coax me to the bathhouse. There I spent a full hour in the shower, very much against commune rules, trying to dissolve into the hot water I was gluttonously consuming. I wasn’t even mildly worried that an amphisbaena might erupt out of the showerhead.
Claire Brown turned up instead. I had my eyes shut under the spray when I heard the shockingly familiar voice saying, “So that’s Gwen’s daughter back, then,” not with enthusiasm, and deliberately loud enough to be overheard.
It didn’t make me angry, which was odd and uncomfortable; my supply of anger had never run dry before. I shut off the shower and came out hoping to find some, but it didn’t work. The showers let out onto a big round dressing room, only that had also shrunk while I’d been away. The commune had built it when I was five, and my toes knew every weird uneven inch of the floor, so I knew the cramped little room with its one bench was the same place, but it still didn’t seembelievable that it could be. And there on the bench was Claire, with Ruth Marsters and Philippa Wax, waiting together in their towels as if I’d been in their way even though there were two other cubicles.
