Page 29 of The Golden Enclaves
Aadhya and Liesel stayed behind in the yurt without more than a token argument; they both looked washy and green with exhaustion after the trip. I could have slept for a week myself, but Mum wouldn’t wait an instant, and I shared the same urgency. She led me and Orion straight out to the woods, in the dark, calling moonlight to light our way. If a mundane had been with us, they would only have thought it was an unusually bright night, and their eyes were well adjusted to the dark, and somehow the moon was reaching us despite the trees overhead.
Mum doesn’t always go to the same place with her circle. Whenever she goes out, she listens to the place and doesn’t work there if it isn’t in the mood. I have no idea how trees and grass let her know they aren’t in the mood, but apparently they do. But she does have regular spots she goes back to fairly often, and some that she saves for special occasions. I always knew that someone was really badly off if she took them to the one furthest away from the commune: there’s a round meadow up where an old oak came down in a storm a decade ago. The jagged hollowed-out trunk is still standing, and she has the patient stand inside it with the circle all round.
I expected her to lead us straight there, and for the firstpart of the way we were going in that direction, but when we got to the turning, she led me straight past it instead, and onward into the woods. After half a mile or so, we came to a massive thicket of brambles that blocked the way completely like a wall. She stopped in front of them and held out her open hands and just said, “Please,” softly. After a moment, the brambles creaked themselves apart, just enough for us to pass.
We were walking for another hour after that. There wasn’t any kind of path or trail, but Mum kept on steadily, as if she knew where she was going, although as far as I could tell, no human being had been this way in at least a decade, and possibly not even a deer. It wasn’t anywhere she’d ever brought me before. All the overgrowth curled slowly out of our way the whole time, and closed back around behind Orion, bringing up the rear, the faint pallid shimmer of Mum’s light making a circle round us.
But it wasn’t anything like moving through the forgotten places, halfway in the void. It was the opposite, as though we were moving deeper into thereal,into a place that didn’t want to allow any magic at all, and was only grudgingly letting us slip past while it looked the other way.
The brambles finally let us out into a small clearing with the last traces of an ancient roundhouse standing: the upper half of the wall rotted away but the round stone ring of the foundation remaining. The doorway was still there, two big stone slabs and a third across the top. The roof was long since gone, but in its place a massive old yew tree was standing next to the foundation, almost bent over the walls. Two large branches were spread out over the top of the walls, sheltering, with a third low one stretched across the doorframe blocking the way in. It was too shadowed to see inside.
I knew at once that someone had lived and died here along time ago. Someone like Mum. Someone powerful, who’d lived here all their life, offering that power to anyone who came to their door, but who had made a choice not to use it for themselves when death had come knocking on their own door. Someone who hadn’t taken the enclavers’ bargain, maybe even before there had been enclavers to offer it. I knew, because it felt just like the yurt, only deeper.
“I’m sorry to ask,” Mum said. I’m not sure if she was talking to the ancient yew, or to the hut, or to the spirit of that healer who’d lived here long ago. To all of them, I think; this was a place of power, of generosity, of life, and you couldn’t pick it apart into one single thing. They were all a part of it. The healer had built the hut, and planted the yew, and the stone walls and branches had sheltered and shaded her and those who’d come for healing, and now they still remembered her, long after she’d gone out of the world and all human memory. “But I can’t do this alone. Will you help me?”
She turned and gestured to Orion, and everything in the clearing drew back from him somehow, the same way Mum had recoiled, an instinctive flinching: twigs and leaves curling away, the yew itself going still despite the stirring wind. For a moment, nothing moved, and I felt the visceral refusal. I would have yelled, but there wasn’t anyone for me to yell at. I understood what Mum had found here, how she’d connected to it, but I couldn’t do it myself. If I yelled at the tree, I’d just be random noise in the forest, nothing that the tree would understand or even notice. What was here couldn’t have been yelled into submission, or taken by force. Some greedy idiot might have come here and sucked the mana out of the place, and left the tree dying and the rocks crumbling away, but they couldn’t have made it heal them or anyone else.
But Mum stood there looking up at the yew with her hands spread open and said, “I know. I’m afraid too. But he didn’t choose it. It was done to him.”
There was another unbearable endless silence, and then the branch in front of the door slowly creaked up and out of the way. Mum turned to Orion—the first time she’d looked at him since he’d come out of the car, and her whole face flinched all over again. Her voice barely made a whisper. “You have to go inside,” she said to him. “No one can make you. You have to choose to try.”
Orion stood there as if he hadn’t heard her. He was still only looking at me. “The hut!” I said, and pointed with both arms. He slowly turned his head to follow the gesture and looked at the mystical ruined hut as if he hadn’t really noticed its existence before now, and when I went over to it and made even more exaggerated gestures ofGOING IN,throughthe doorway,he finally took a step or two towards it. I started nodding wildly like someone encouraging a toddler or a puppy, yes, well done! He kept coming until he was just before the threshold.
I was so relieved to have got him that far that I didn’t realize he was gettingnear meuntil he was there, right next to me, and he looked at me and wasn’t Orion at all. He was only hunger, a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied and that was only following me round because it wanted to swallow me up, and was hoping for a chance: was this one?
I flinched back from him, from it. I could have destroyed it. Iwantedto destroy it, right now, before it could ever get near me or Mum or any living thing in the world. The only sane thing to do was destroy it, and that was what Liesel had really been trying to tell me to do, when she’d said to leave Orion in the Scholomance, or send him to New York, or just get away from him; she’d been telling me to destroy thisthing that shouldn’t exist, that should never have existed, and let it go back into the void where it really belonged. The words were in my mouth.You’re already dead.
“Orion,” I said instead, despairing, wanting to make his name into a different spell, but he just stood there. If it would have done any good, I’d have shoved him through. It was only fair, since he’d shovedmethrough the Scholomance doors. I’d have gone inside to lure him in after me. But I didn’t even need to ask Mum to know none of that would have worked. We weren’t trying to physically get him into the hut so some magical power could work on him that couldn’t reach outside. The power was already here, all around us. It was his choice that mattered now. He had to choose to go in there, to reach out for the healing. Because this power couldn’t do anythingtosomeone. Even someone who wasn’t well enough to make a choice. If he couldn’t, if there wasn’t enough left of Orion in there, then there was only my choice left, my solitary horrible choice: to let him stay in the world until hedidstart hunting again, or send him out of it forever.
“You said you’d come to me in Wales,” I said to him. “And you’re not here, not really, so go in there andcome to me.Do you hear me, Lake? You promised me. Iletyou promise me, you wanker! Will you go into the bloody hut?”
I was yelling by the end of it, and in a frenzy I grabbed a stick off the ground and whacked him across the rump. He jumped a little and then looked at me with a flash of something human in his face, of Orion, and before I could react, he looked back into the hut—and he was afraid.
I’d never seen Orion afraid of anything, even when a sane person ought to have been terrified out of their mind; not of monsters or heights or late schoolwork. But he looked into the tiny empty hut, and itwashim, it was Orion, and he was terrified of whatever was in there. I whacked him again in myown absolute terror, only magnified by the instant of hope. “It’s a pile of rocks, not the whole school crammed full of mals, stop being such a coward andgo in there!” I howled, and maybe he heard me, because he squeezed his eyes shut, the first time he’d closed them at all, and heaved himself over the threshold.
The whole clearing went utterly silent and still. Mum gave a short deep gasp of terror, and then she came to me and took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead and said, “My darling, I love you, whatever happens.”
In all of my frenzy to get her to help Orion, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to let Mum go in there with him, alone. I’d only thought about how I could persuade her; I hadn’t thought about what I was asking her to do. But she didn’t give me a chance to saywait, no,which I suppose was better than having to decide whether to say it or not. She let go and went straight inside the hut, and the yew branches lowered back down behind her.
I didn’t sleep at all, by which I mean I sat down on the ground outside the hut to wait, lay down on my side two minutes later, and was asleep almost instantly. I got up again when Precious bit my ear to wake me, leaping to my feet half asleep with my hands moving to cast a shield spell on instinct, pointlessly. The yew was groaning deeply overhead and light was pouring out of the hut, out of the roof between the leaves and branches, out of every crevice between the stones, turning all the moss into glowing green embers: a light that made my eyes water and my mouth feel cool and refreshed, a light I only remembered seeing once before in my entire life. The moment when Mum had chosen to save me from the teeth of prophecy and had carried me to safety in her arms, in her heart, giving her own life over to making herself a shelter to protect me from my own terrible destiny.
There wasn’t anything attacking me; there wasn’t anything for me to do. “Mum!” I called desperately. No one answered. I couldn’t see her or Orion at all. Inside the hut there was only light, and all of a sudden it was fading back down to nothing, so quick my eyes couldn’t keep up and I was left in pitch darkness with the muddled glowing afterimages of the light still imprinted on my vision.
When my eyes finally cleared, there were still a few streaks of light left: the dawn was breaking. All the leaves were coming off the yew, curling up and falling with a faint pattering. The bare branches were wizened and thin, dried up from inside, and then abruptly the lintel of the doorway cracked in two with a sound like a gunshot and came crashing down, smashing the branches across the door into kindling and cracking the threshold straight across. I lunged forward, scrambling over it inside the hut, and Mum was lying in the middle of the floor in a small curled heap.
“Mum! Mum!” I squalled, grabbing for her and heaving her over into my arms, my arms that could completely encircle her huddled body, hideously fragile and light. She was breathing, and when I’d got her over, she opened her eyes and looked at me, glazed over with exhaustion. She didn’t reach up and touch my cheek, but her arm twitched a little as though she wanted to and just couldn’t quite manage it, and then she tipped her head against me and sank into something between sleep and unconsciousness. I clutched her to me and tried to manage my breathing, and then I looked over at the one small place still shadowed by the lattice of dying branches, and Orion was standing there with his back against the wall.
Orion was standing there: it washim.Mum had done it. I could have screamed, I could have burst into tears; instead I reached out my hand to him, in joy, in longing, in the first moment of believing that the miracle might actually have happened, that I might actually have got him out, and he said, his voice hoarse and ragged, “You should have left me there.”
Icould have torn himlimb from limb, honestly, but instead I heaved Mum up and snarled at him, “Then stay in here androtif you like,” and marched out of the hut.
I wanted to go straight home, but I haven’t been raised by wolves, so even though I was blazing up with all the anger I hadn’t been able to feel until relief had let it out, I didn’t keep going; I stopped outside in the clearing and turned to face the broken doorway and the yew and said, “He might be an ungrateful git, but I’m not. Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure of anything else to do. I felt deeply that I ought to dosomething:the poor yew was still shedding withered leaves in a small grey rain, and I was sure Mum would have told me what to do if she’d been conscious. But I didn’t have any ideas, and if I’d had one, I would have been suspicious of it doing more harm than good. I looked down at my pocket. “Any ideas?”
Precious climbed down me and scampered around and over the tree, sniffing along the bark with her pink nose, untilshe found a place she apparently liked, low on the trunk, just by the largest forking. She put her paw on the place and looked up at me. I was more than a little dubious, but she squeaked at me firmly. “If you’re sure,” I said. I put Mum down carefully in a mossy spot, pillowing her head on some dried leaves, and then I laboriously transmuted a fallen branch and a stone into a small hatchet.
I whacked away at the trunk for the better part of an hour, the sun gradually creeping up into the sky, until finally, with a creaking groan, the whole massive forked section cracked and fell, shattering like wood that had been dried and seasoned for a decade. Where I’d chopped it off, though, a tiny trickle of living sap oozed from the trunk.
