Page 3 of The Golden Enclaves
They all stared at me as if I were a stranger. And they surely had to be strangers, too, even though they did look and sound almost exactly like the women who collectively between them had told me ten thousand times or so that I was a sad burden to my saint of a mother. Everyone who lived here had a reason, something that had driven them to shut themselves away from the rest of the world. Mum had come to live here because she wasn’t willing to compromise with selfishness, but these three women, and a lot of the other people here, they hadn’t come here to do good, they’d come here to have good done for them. And they’d looked at me and saw a perfectly healthy child, with this magical being lavishing love and attention and energy upon her, and they all knew what it would have meant to them to have that same unbounded gift, and here I was, apparently sullen and ungrateful, soaking it up to no good end at all that they could see.
Which wasn’t an excuse for being nasty to a miserable lonely kid, and just because I understood their reasons didn’t mean I was ready to forgive them. I should’ve enjoyed it so much, I should’ve spoken to them with contempt:That’s right, I’m back, and I’ve grown; have any of you accomplished anything in the last four years besides horrible gossip?Mum would have sighed when she heard about it, and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have floated out of the bathhouse on a cloud of mean greedy pleasure.
But I couldn’t do it. Apparently, if I wasn’t going to be angry at Orion, I couldn’t be angry at anyone.
I didn’t say anything to them, and they didn’t say anythingto me, or to each other. I turned and dried off with their silence behind my back and put on the clothes Mum had left for me on the hook next to my shower stall: actual new cotton knickers fresh from the cellophane, and a linen shift with a drawstring at the neck, big and loose enough to fit me; one of the people in the commune made them for medieval reenactors. A pair of handmade sandals from one of our other neighbors, just a flat sole cut out of wood with a leather cord. I hadn’t worn anything this clean in four years, except the day I’d first put on Orion’s shirt. The last clothes I’d grudgingly bought were a couple of pairs of lightly used underwear off a senior at the start of my junior year, when there just wasn’t enough left of my last pair to cast make-and-mend on them.Newunderwear went for insanely exorbitant prices inside: you could’ve bought an all-round antidote potion for a pair of unworn pants, and now here I was with untold riches.
I couldn’t enjoy them any more than I could enjoy a round of delicious payback. I put them on, because it would have been stupid not to, and of course it felt better, it felt wonderful, but I looked at the ragged filthy ruin of Orion’s shirt, which wasn’t fit for anything but the bin, and feeling better felt worse. I tried to make myself chuck it along with the rest of my old things, but I couldn’t. I folded it up and put it into one of my pockets—it was so worn thin, half made of magic at this point, that I could get it to the thickness of a handkerchief. I cleaned my teeth—new toothbrush, fresh minty paste—and walked out. It was dark outside by then. Mum had a small fire going outside the yurt. I sat down on one of the logs next to the pit and after a bit, I cried some more. It wasn’t original or anything, I realize. Mum came round and put an arm around my shoulders again, and Precious climbed into my lap.
I spent the next day sitting blankly by the dead firepit. I was clean, I was fed, I was sitting outside in sunshine and a brief shower—I didn’t move—and sunshine again. Mum puttered around me quietly, handed me food to eat and tea to drink, and left me alone to process. I wasn’t processing. I was trying very hard not to process, because there wasn’t anything to process except the raw horrible truth that Orion was somewhere off in the void screaming. I could almost hear him, if I thought about it too long: I could almost hear him saying,El, El, help me, please. El.
Then I looked over, because it wasn’t just in my head anymore. There was a small odd bird standing on the log right next to me: purple-black, with an orange beak and bright-yellow marks around its head, and a big round beady black eye it tilted up towards me. “El?” it said to me again. I stared down at it. It stretched its head out long and made a sound like a person coughing, then straightened up again. “El?” it said again. “El? El, are you okay?” and it was Liu’s voice: not exactly the same sound maybe, but the accent and the way she’d have said the words; if it had spoken from behind me, I’d have thought she was there.
“No,” I told the bird, honestly. It tilted its head and said, “Nihao,” and then, “El?” again, and then it said, in my voice, “No. No. No.” Abruptly it took wing and darted away into the trees.
We’d had an agreement, me and Aadhya and Liu: I was going to go and get my hands on a phone, as soon as I made it out, and text them both. They’d made me memorize their numbers. But that had all been part of theplan,and I couldn’t make myself do any of it.
It had been a perfectly good plan. I had the Golden Stone sutras all ready: they were snugly bundled together with all my notes and translations inside a soft bag I’d crocheted out of my last threadbare blanket, to pad them inside my painstakingly carved book chest, which had itself been bundled into my waterproof shower bag. I’d slung it on my back when the gears first started to turn. They were the only thing I’d taken out with me, my prize—the one truly wonderful thing I’d got out of the Scholomance. I would have swapped them for Orion if some higher power had made me the offer, but it would’ve taken me two heartbeats instead of one to agree.
The plan was, if I made it out alive, I was going to hug Mum half a million times, roll around in grass for a while, hug Mum some more, and then take the sutras and head to Cardiff, where there was a decent-sized wizard collective near the stadium. They weren’t powerful enough or rich enough to build an enclave of their own, but they were working towards it. And I’d have offered to take the mana they’d saved up and build them a little Golden Stone enclave outside the city instead. Nothing grandiose, but a space good enough to tuck their kids in at night and keep them safe from whatever stray mals had been left behind by the purge.
Orion hadn’t been part of the plan. Yeah, it had occurred to me that he could find me in Cardiff, if he came looking. But he would have been landing in his own parents’ arms and the wider embrace of the united New York enclave. They’d all have fought him leaving with every clinging vine of sentiment and loyalty they could wrap around him. So I really sincerely hadn’t expected Orion to come: I’m good at pessimism. And I hadn’tneededhim to come, either. I’d been ready to go on with my own life.
I don’t know that I’d even needed him to make it out alive.I had been fairly sure before we began on our objectively lunatic plan of escape that I’d end up dead myself, and at least half the people I cared about along with me, with Orion topping the likely list. If our plans had gone pear-shaped, if the maleficaria had broken loose from the honeypot illusion and started slaughtering us, and we’d all had to run for it, and in the chaos he’d been one of the people who hadn’t made it out, I think I’d have cried and mourned him and gone on.
But I couldn’t bear this. I couldn’t bear that he’d been theonlyone who’d died getting all of us out. Gettingmeout. Even if he’d chosen on his stupid own to turn round and face Patience, even if he’d chosen to shove me away, still being the hero he thought he had to be to be worth anything. I couldn’t bear for that to be his story.
So I wasn’t okay. I didn’t go and get a phone, and I didn’t try to call Aadhya and Liu. I didn’t go to Cardiff. I just sat around, inside or outside the yurt mostly at random, and kept trying to change it in my head, play the whole thing out again, as if I could change what had happened by finding some better set of things I should’ve done.
I can say from experience that it was very much like when you’ve been humiliated in the cafeteria or the bathroom in front of a dozen people, and because you couldn’t think of any clever comebacks at the time, you keep daydreaming about all the viciously witty things you might have said. As Mum had pointed out to me several times during my childhood, really what you’re doing is bathing yourself endlessly in the humiliation all over again, while your tormentor sails on perfectly unaffected. She was right, and I’d known it even then, but knowing had never stopped me before. It didn’t stop me now. I stayed stuck, going back and forth on the rails, trying to find a way to shove the train that had already arrived off the tracks somehow.
After a few more days of trying to rewrite history on the inside of my own head, I came up with the magnificent and highly original idea that maybe I could do it on the world instead. I went into the yurt and dug up one of my old notebooks from primary school that Mum had saved in a box, and I found a blank page towards the back and scribbled a few lines down, something somethingl’esprit de l’escalier.The idea felt very French, just like my best and most elegant killing spell, and if that doesn’t sound like a recommendation to you, I can’t imagine why.
I can’t tell you what I was thinking when I started creating a spell that would let me literally alter the fabric of reality. That sort of thing just doesn’t work on a long-term basis, no matter how powerful you are. Reality is more powerful, and it will eventually bounce your attempt off, generally disintegrating you personally along with it. But you can certainly have a nice long run—at least from your own perspective—in your own personal fantasy universe, and the longer you go and the more power you have to keep it going, the more havoc you’ll wreak on yourself and others in its final implosion. And if I’d stopped long enough to think about it, I’d haveknownall that: both how useless it would ultimately be and how much damage I’d do if I tried it. But I didn’t. I was just trying to find an exit from the agony, like I was in the maw-mouth with Orion, mindlessly desperate to escape.
Mum found me looking for the next line of the spell, which I was almost certainly going to find. I’m very bad at writing spells of my own devising unless they cause vast amounts of destruction and terror, and then I’m absolutely unmatched. Her tolerance for the grieving process didn’t extend to watching me tie the whole planet into knots and eradicate myself along the way. She got one look at what I was writing and tore it out of my hands and threw it into thefire, and then she went down on her knees in front of me, caught my hands tight, and pinned them against her chest. “Darling, darling,” she said, and then she freed one of her hands and put her palm against my forehead, pressing hard between my eyebrows. “Breathe. Let the words go. Let the thoughts go. Let them slip away. They’re already going, out on the next breath. Breathe. Breathe with me.”
I obeyed her because I couldn’t help myself. Mum had almost never used magic on me, even when I was exactly the howling furious storm of a child that any other wizard parent would have been spelling into calm every other day. Most wizard kids can fend off their parents’ coercion spells by the age of ten, but when I was four and screamed because I didn’t want to go to sleep, I got three hours of lullabies, not a spell to make me go quietly to bed; when I was in a kicking rage at seven, I got understanding and space and patience, even when what I would’ve liked much better was a screaming match and a good dose of soothing potion. I don’t actually advocate for this approach—in retrospect I still think I would quite have appreciated a dose of soothing potion once in a while—but it did mean that I wasn’t any good at blocking Mum’s magic, at least not instinctively, and instinct was the only thing I was running on in the first place.
Anyway, Mum’s magic feels good, because it’s only ever meant to be good for you, and I leaned straight into the relief of it. By the time I did manage to wrench myself loose, she’d knocked the beginnings of the spell out of my head and also made me feel better enough that I could recognize I’d been doing something incredibly stupid.
Not that I was grateful for her help or anything. It only made me feel worse knowing she’d been perfectly right. After she let me go, I was too unwillingly calm to storm off into the ongoing rain, but I also didn’t want to do anythingunendurably horrible like talk about my feelings or say thanks for saving me from unmaking myself and blowing up the commune if not half of Wales. I had to find another way to escape, so I got out my book bag and took out the sutras.
Mum had gone to the other side of the yurt to wash pots with her back turned, to give me space. But after a while she glanced back and saw me reading and said in her peacemaking voice, which I both loved and hated passionately, “What are you reading, love?”
Of course I wanted to boast of them and show them off, but instead I just muttered surly, “It’s the Golden Stone sutras. I got them at school,” except I didn’t finish the sentence because Mum made a noise like someone had stabbed her repeatedly and dropped the plate she was cleaning to thump on the ground. I stared at her, and she was staring back, wide and terrible and frozen, and then she fell to her knees and put her hands over her face and literally howled like an animal on the floor.
I panicked completely. She was in roughly the same state of hysteria as I’d been myself, half an hour before, but I’d had her for help, and she had me, and I’m not very useful unless you’re under attack by an army of maleficaria. I hadn’t any idea what to do. I literally ran round the yurt twice looking at things wildly before getting her a cup of water. I begged her to drink it and tell me what was wrong. She just kept keening. Then I got the idea she had been poisoned by the washing-up liquid and tried to test it for toxins, found nothing, decided I had to cast an all-heal, didn’t have enough mana, and started doing jumping jacks to build it, all while she wept. I must have looked a proper twat.
Mum had to pull herself out of it. She gulped a last few times and said, “No, no,” to me.
I stopped, panting, and went on my knees facing her andcaught her shoulders. “Mum, what is it, just tell me what to do, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I forgave her everything, I forgave her for not loving Orion, I forgave her telling me to keep away from him, I forgave her for making me feel better. None of it mattered in the face of this upheaval, as if my awful half-written spell had somehow already begun to take the whole world apart underneath me.
She made a slow drag of breath that was a moan and then said, “No, love. Don’t. It’s not for you to be sorry, it’s me. It’s me.” She shut her eyes and squeezed my shoulder when I was going to say something inane like no it’s all right, and then she said, “I’ll tell you. I’ll have to tell you. I have to go to the woods first. Forgive me darling. Forgive me,” and she got up like an old woman pushing herself off the floor slowly and went outside straight into the pouring rain.
I sat on the bed hugging the sutras to me like a stuffed bear, still in a restrained panic that only stayed restrained because Mum did go into the woods all the time, and came out again with calm and healing and care, so some part of me could cling to the hope that she’d come out with them again this time, but nothing like this had ever happened in my life, and the bad things in my life were always my fault. I nearly cried when Mum did come back, only an hour later, wet through with her dress plastered in tissue-paper bunches to her legs and muddied all up the front and over her face like she’d lain in the dirt for a while. I was so desperately relieved to see her, all I wanted was to hug her.
But she said, “I have to tell you now,” and it was her deep, far-off voice, the one that only comes when she’s doing major arcana: when a wizard comes to her who’s trying to be healed of something really awful, a deep curse or magical illness of some kind, and she’s telling them what they have to do, only this time she was tellingherself.She took my hands for amoment and held them, and then she pulled my face down and kissed me on the forehead like I was going away, and I was half sure that Mum was about to tell me that she’d been wrong all these years and I really was doomed after all to fulfill the prophecy of death and destruction and ruin that’s been hanging over my head since I was a tiny child, and that I had to leave her forever.
