Page 28 of The Golden Enclaves
I could have vomited or screamed, but I couldn’t, because he was coming at us, and what I mean was, he was coming tokill us.Liesel scrabbled at Aadhya behind my back until she let go of my other arm, setting me loose, as if she thought I was going to have to fight Orion. And the worst part was, I thought so too. “Orion,” I said. “Orion, it’sme,it’sEl!” my voice rising to a yell, but he didn’t even break a single stride. Just as if he’d been locked up alone with all the mals in the universe, with the worst mals in the universe, and he’d killed and killed and killed until there was nothing left in him but killing, and the power of wanting anything, ofdoinganything, besides hunting mals, had been stripped out of him. Exactly what everyone else in the world had ever wanted out of him.
I couldn’t imagine actually fighting him, but I also couldn’t imagine standing here and letting him kill us. So I did the only thing I could: I shoved Alfie’s evocation of refusal into Orion’s face. I didn’t even cast it properly; I just pushed it out and said, “No.No,thank you,” with all the absolute profound revulsion in me for the horrible killing machine he’d been turned into.
Orion ran straight into it and was halted in his tracks. He paused for a moment, stymied, but then he put both his hands on the surface of the dome and my whole stomach heaved over, because it felt likePatience.It was just Orion, justhis two hands, but that touch felt exactly like a maw-mouth enveloping my shield, trying to get through to me, oozing over the surface and pushing on it to test for weaknesses.
There weren’t any. My entire being was behind that dome, a solid unbroken wall ofno,with the endless vat of New York’s mana behind me. Except for one small opening: I was looking through the faint golden glitter of the spell at Orion’s face, and Ididwant him. I wanted Orion to come straight to me and let me howl at him for being a colossal idiot before I let him pull me into his arms so I could wail against his chest for a month or so. And the Orion on the other side prodding the wall of my shield, the Orion that I didn’t want even a little, paused, his gaze narrowing. And then he put both his hands on the dome again and started to push his way through on the strength of that longing, which I couldn’t have helped if my life and the lives of everyone I loved depended on it.
Not that far off from the current circumstances. “El!” Liesel said through her teeth, but I didn’t need a bloody reminder. I would have closed up the vulnerability if I could, but I might as easily have popped open my rib cage and taken my heart out for a bit. Mana was pouring through the New York power-sharer and out of me into the dome, holding off the grotesque sucking hunger on the other side as hard as I could, the hunger that wasn’t Orion, as if he’d somehow killed Patience and then hadbecomePatience.
I remembered with horror when I’d reached him through the scrying water, back in Wales, on graduation day—that moment when I’d tried to grab him and had got a handful of maw-mouth instead. Orion had never fought a maw-mouth before. I’d killed the only maw-mouth that had ever made it upstairs in the Scholomance. What if his power, his power that let him pull mana out of mals, had been overwhelmed by taking in that torrent of polluted malia? A century oftorment and malice crammed down his throat all in one rush. I couldn’t help wanting to reach out to him—
And he shuddered all over and pressed his entire body up against the dome and came swimming through the cold honey of the wall, one fingertip after another curling away, making it inside, and then his hands, and his face surfacing out of the gold glitter as it slid away, and then he fought his shoulders through, one after another, and thrashed the rest of the way in, falling through onto the floor. And I couldn’t fight Orion, I couldn’t, but as he got up and came at me, I snarled at him in rage and agony, “Youbastard,if you come any closer, I’ll beat yourskullin,” and heaved up my chair-leg pry bar to bash at him with it, because I could imaginethat,the way I couldn’t imagine dissolving him into maggots or commanding him to stop existing or melting the flesh off his bones. But I could hit him with a stick; I’d been ready for that at almost any given moment since I’d met him, and as if he’d believed me, Orion slowed, mid-stride, and stopped just barely out of range.
His face had stayed serenely untroubled all this while, inhumanly blank, but now the very faintest hint of a frown line wobbled into view on his forehead. We all stood squared off, none of us moving. I was still gulping, cramming rage and horror back down my throat together, and he said, “Galadriel,” moving his mouth wrongly around the sound of my name, breaking it into too many syllables, as if he was trying to remember how to speak. “Galadriel.” It was better the second time, and then he said it again, “Galadriel,” and it wasn’tright,it wasn’t the way Orion had once said my name, where he’d almost made me like hearing it, but at least it sounded like a human being talking.
He stopped after that, as if satisfied he’d got it right. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t come at us again, either. He just stood there, looking at me.
We all stayedfrozen in place there for what in retrospect felt a silly amount of time, until Orion carried onnottrying to kill us for long enough that we finally began to believe he wasn’t going to start again. And once we did believe that, we spent another good long while whispering to one another about what the hell we were going to do with him. Liesel made a case for leaving him in the school while we went and got some sort of help, which Aadhya rolled her eyes at, and I didn’t even bother vetoing out loud. The next obvious answer was to take him straight home to his mum and dad in New York, only that was even more obviously wrong.
“Anywhere else you would take him, New York will come,” Liesel said. “And if not, then someoneelsewill come. Orion Lake cannot be hidden quietly away anywhere in the world.”
“I’ll have a go at it, anyway,” I said grimly. “I’m taking him tomymum.”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what Mum would do with Orion. Based on past experience, she’d want nothing to dowith him, except to get me away from him. Horribly, I could even have seen her point. Orion wasn’t trying to kill us at the moment, but it felt very muchat the moment.My own skin was still crawling with a visceral terror at even being in arm’s reach. It wasn’t just me, either; Liesel wasn’t taking her eyes off him, her hands poised out to her sides just ready to come up into casting position, and Aadhya kept putting her hand out in front of me every time I looked at him, I think out of the same instinct to stop someone leaning a bit too far out over a mortal cliff, a child or a drunk, someone you didn’t quite trust to keep themselves from going over.
Aad was right not to trust me. I’d have immediately done anything, however stupid and reckless, to try to save him, except that I completely understood on a visceral level that I couldn’t do anything of any use. Whatever had happened to him, whatever Patience had done to him, I hadn’t a hope of fixing it. The only spell I could have cast on him that would have worked was the exact spell I’d come in here to cast: I could have looked at Orion and told him he was already dead, and he would have had to believe me, exactly the way Patience would have had to believe me. Of course Orion was dead. He’d been locked alone inside the Scholomance with half the maleficaria in the world, with the single worst mal in the world. I’d come in knowing he was dead, and I still knew it. I could have convinced him, too.
What I needed was someone to convince both of us that he wasstill alive,that he was still somewhere in there, smothering under the weight of a million maleficaria. And the only person I knew with any chance of that was Mum.
“And how are we going togethim there?” Liesel snapped, deeply irritated by my ongoing refusal to negotiate with reality. “Will you take his hand and lead him along? Will you betaking him on an aeroplane perhaps? How will we even remove him from this tourist park?”
I hadn’t answers for any of these really excellent questions. I looked at Orion, his eyes bright and glossy and fixed on me, and I took a step away towards the doors of the gym. His head turned to follow me. I swallowed and took a few more steps, tensed throughout my body, and I barely managed to keep from letting out a whimper when he went into motion again; Liesel and Aadhya both scrambled to stay ahead of me. But he only came a few steps more and stopped again, just out of reach again. I needed a lot of deep breathing before my heart stopped thumping, and I was leaking tears while it did. It was wrong,wrong wrong wrongto be standing hereafraidof Orion. No one in their right mind would ever have been rude to this thing wearing his face.
“I don’t care,” I said, when I could get words out. “I’m taking him to Wales even if I have to walk there.”
Lucky for me and probably a lot of other people, after I made my grand pronouncement, Liesel gave up on trying to persuade me to do anything sensible and instead put her brain on solving all the problems she considered unnecessary that I was nevertheless creating for myself and by extension her. She led us back to the workshop, and Aadhya cobbled together a spell holder for her out of the bits and pieces left around. Fortunately, those included several bits of maleficaria, and Aadhya’s affinity was in working with exotic materials. She put together a pendant out of the teardrop-shaped eyecase that had come off a chitter, surrounded by fragments of the shells of at least half a dozen mournlets tied on with sirenspider silk, and Liesel put a spell of obfuscation into it, and then handed it to me. “Put it on him,” she said.
Orion had stayed at exactly the same distance the whole time, following me here, that precious arm’s length of space between us. Having to go closer was as bad as having to go down a tunnel to a waiting maw-mouth. But when I tried, when I took a breath and took a step towards him, he steppedback.I paused, and then tried again, and he did it again, as if he didn’t want me to come any closer either. I stopped, wanting to burst into tears all over again, and then I said, “Just put it on yourself, then!” and set it on the workbench nearest me—well, the half a workbench that was still standing—and moved back. He came by and slowly turned his head to look down at the pendant, and after a moment, he did pick it up and put it on.
I saw him under it in a way I hadn’t before. The pendant was sitting incongruously glowing over the remains of his old T-shirt with the Transformers logo across the front, reduced to tatters hanging on between the bands round the neck and the arms, the edges browned with dried blood. His trousers were torn up too, gaping holes across the legs from seam to seam and both back pockets ripped open and the shredded remnants dangling. His trainers looked more like gladiator sandals, a loop round his ankles and the metal-capped toes all that were keeping them on his feet. He’d only been sitting there in the pavilion; he could have mended them. He hadn’t been able to care. “You’re a mess, Lake,” I said, because I would have said exactly that to him under any other circumstances, only after I did, I burst into tears, and I couldn’t even put my hands over my face, because I couldn’t stand to take my eyes off him, in case hecame closer.
“Do I need to put one onyou?” Liesel said, caustically.
“Are youserious?” Aadhya said to her, in irritation, but I was grateful. I scrubbed my arms over my face in oppositedirections and then accepted a rag from Aadhya to honk my nose and get the worst of the tears and snot off myself.
Then we left the Scholomance and went back to the hotel.
I’m going to leave it at that, because I don’t remember most of it, actually. I got through it one minute at a time, and let each one go as soon as I’d got through it, because here came another one. They were all the same minute anyway, the minute where I could feel Orion alive and at my back, just a few steps behind me, and that feeling was the most horrible sensation in the entire universe, and I had to keep pushing on through crowds of people, mundane ordinary people on holiday, hot and sweaty and laughing or bored, children whinging for drinks, and I knew if I turned round and looked at Orion even once, seen him among that sticky noisy living throng, I would see that he was dead so vividly that he would have been, so I couldn’t look around. I had to keep going, to let him keep following me and my wide open back.
I couldn’t think at all by the time we got to the hotel. If I had, the idea of trying to take him on an aeroplane would have been laughable to the point of hysteria, unless we’d packed him in a box and checked him in as luggage. I vaguely have the sense that Liesel and Aadhya had a conversation about it in the hotel room that I didn’t pay attention to at the time enough to know what they were doing, as though I had stopped being a significant character in my own life and I was only standing in the background of the scene, decorative, staring at Orion. The one saving grace was that the beautiful ornate hotel room didn’t make much more sense than he did, and therefore he could exist in it and stare back at me.
They went out and got a van and put Orion in the back of it, and drove us back to Wales. We were in a ferry for a lot of it: I remember the heaving of the ocean under us, waves of nausea from the outside and not just the inside, crossing overand doubling one another. I must have gone to the loo and slept a bit, or at least passed out now and again, but I don’t remember it happening. I only remember sitting there huddled in the front passenger seat and staring out the windshield at the blank walls of the hold with Orion’s face floating in misty reflection in the glass. Once, Precious crept out of my pocket to come and nose at my ear, trying to give comfort, and crept back in again when it couldn’t be done. And then we were driving again, Aadhya and Liesel taking it in turn, until suddenly the roads became too familiar for me not to recognize them. We pulled into the car park at the commune, and Mum was standing there in the dark, her pale face caught out by our headlights.
We’d barely stopped moving when she ran around to my door and all but pulled me out. She clutched my face in her hands, her whole body shaking as she went gripping my arms up and down my whole body as if she didn’t quite believe I was all there, whole. I wasn’t sure I was, either. Aadhya and Liesel got out, too, and started trying to explain things to Mum, which I was well beyond being able to do myself, but before they got anywhere, Orion came out.
He’d sat quietly unmoving the entire time we’d been driving; he hadn’t drunk any of the water we’d pushed over to him, he hadn’t eaten any of the food. He didn’t burst out of the van dramatically like the Hulk or anything now. He just came out as directly as possible, which in this case meant he peeled open the side of the van along one of the seams and squeezed out as soon as it was wide enough for him to get through. Mum gave a strangled moan of horror in her throat, recoiling, and I grabbed at her in desperation to stop her saying anything, to stop her telling me anything I couldn’t stand to hear. “It’s not him!” I said. “It’s not Orion. It’s not hisfault,” trying to explain to her that he’d been trapped with all the mals in the universe and she had to help him.
Mum didn’t let me finish. “Whodidthis?” she said, her voice a whisper, and I was going to tell her it was Patience, he’d been locked in with Patience, but instead I said, “His mother. Ophelia Lake,” and all the other words backed up in my throat and stopped there, because as soon as her name came out of my mouth, I was sure that it was the truth, even though I didn’t understand what she’d done, or how.
