Page 32 of The Golden Enclaves
“El,” Mum said, gentle, meaningplease stop hitting my patient with a stick,but why should I, since that was the only thing that seemed to be doing any good?
I stormed after him, and as if he understood he wasn’t getting out of it, he kept going until he reached one of the inconvenient pitches further up the hill that had been abandoned, well out of sight, with the firepit overgrown and a couple of saplings going up inside through the falling-in roof of the old yurt. He wasn’t trying to get away from me, I don’t think, but I also didn’t care if he was. At least he sat down on one of the logs and didn’t get up and flee when I sat down next to him.
I probably oughtn’t have given him the letter then, either, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I didn’t actually think he was ready for it, but he wasn’t ever going to bereadyfor Ophelia to twist a knife in his gut. And at least I’d know what I was up against, I thought; so after a few moments of stewing, I pulled it out and handed it to him.
He turned it over in his hands, looking at his mother’s handwriting for a while before he opened it, and I watched his eyes skip over it, tiny reflection of cream paper in the pupils, and then he folded it back up and creased it over and just sat there without saying anything. I held my hand out for it, and he gave it to me without the least objection, which made sense after I’d read it, because it didn’t give me the slightest information.
My star boy,
I don’t know if you’ll let me call you that anymore, but this once I will.
I know you must be angry and upset with me. You have every right to be, and I can’t even apologize, because if I had made other choices, I wouldn’t have you. So I can’t ever be sorry. I want you not to be sorry either. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you fear, I need you to believe in yourself, and if not, believe in me and Daddy. We love you and trust you, and if you need help trusting yourself, know that you can always come to us and we’ll do whatever it takes to help you.
We’ve met El. She’s an extraordinary person. I only wish I’d found her sooner. But you found her yourself instead. I know she’s afraid of me. But she’s not afraid of you. That’s a gift. I don’t think you need me to tell you to treasure it and be careful of it. I’m just happy that you have it.
Don’t be afraid. When you’re ready, come home. We love you.
Mom and Dad
I was near tearing it into shreds after the first outraged pass. I could tell there was all sorts of hook-yanking going on in there, only I couldn’t follow it, because Ophelia had planted all of her hooks years ago, out of my sight. It was like watching her trundle a wheelbarrow full of paving stones and landmines into a garden, hearing her digging busily on the other side of the hedge, until out she came to cheerily show off the delightful path she’d laid, and now I had to walk down it without any idea which step was set to blow me to bits.
“What is she talking about?” I demanded, even though I already knew Orion wouldn’t say, and he didn’t, not a word. “You’renotgoing back to New York,” I told him savagely. He didn’t even raise his head. I grabbed him by the shoulders and made him look at me. “We’re taking the sutras to Cardiff,” I told him. “You’re going to hunt down whatever random mals are scattered round, and I’m going to put up a Golden Stone enclave for the circle there, and then we’ll move along to thenextplace. Just like we planned.”
His face crumpled a bit and he said, “El…”
“Shut up unless you’ve got anybetterideas.” I shook him. “You’realive.You’re not in the Scholomance anymore. And that’s more than any reasonable person could hope for—that’s more than any reasonable persongot,the last century and more, so whatever else you think is wrong, whatever else is the matter inside your head, you haven’t any excuse to moan about it. Stop trying to put yourself in the ground. You’re alive, so get on withliving!” I was snarling in rage by the end of it, and he put his arms around me and pulled meclose and buried his face on my shoulder. He smelled of sweat and smoke and the woods, and I put my arms around him, and he shuddered all over. Tentatively, slow and lurching, he raised his head. My breath was catching with hope as his cheek and his lips went bumping soft and warm over my skin, until he reached my mouth and he was kissing me.
Only just barely, the lightest brush, but I didn’t leave it there; I caught him round the back of the head and kissed him harder, kissed him without bothering to get my breath in between until I had to stop, gasping, and he’d got the idea by then and he had his arms round me and was kissing me wildly, kissing me all over, along my jaw and down my neck, like he’d been desperate to be kissing me all along and now had just let himself go. He yanked loose the drawstring neck of my dress and I wriggled my arms in from the sleeves and out the top of it, letting it slide down to my waist; he went on kissing me, down between my breasts, as I clawed his T-shirt out of his jeans and paused only so we could get it off over his head.
I stood up and let the dress fall the rest of the way off me. He stood up to meet me, and we got straight back to kissing while I unbuttoned his jeans and shoved them down off him, and then we stopped again to grab my dress and spread it out on a thick patch of grass in the sunlight, and we lay down together, and with his body against mine, so unbelievably warm and good, I said, gulping for air, “You absolute bastard, I could kill you,” because we could have been doingthis,we could have been here together, in the sunlight and the grass and the world, instead of the horrors he’d put himself and me through. He made a choked gasp, something between a sob and a laugh, and said, “El, I love you,” and impossibly hewasalive, he washere,and we’d made it out; we had got out of the Scholomance after all.
Mum looked at me with worry and sorrow when we came back to the yurt. There wasn’t any great mystery about what we’d been doing; the dress was going to need a good laundering, and so were the two of us, really, glowing and sweaty. But I could forgive her, because she was worried for usboth,and she even smiled at me a little when I asked her how she was. “I’m better, love,” she said, and when I told her my plans, our plans, she still looked sad, but she nodded and didn’t tell me it was a terrible idea.
I brought the box with the sutras to the fireside and opened it up, and they were still in there, the gilt and leather shining richly, and I put my hand on it with a lump in my throat. I brought out the leather oil Mum had on her shelf and some rags and gently cleaned and buffed the cover, every inch, just as I’d promised them ages ago, and I told them softly, “Sorry for leaving you alone so long. I won’t do it again. We’re for Cardiff soon—maybe even the day after tomorrow,” and then Aadhya said, “El, get over here,” from the other side of the fire, where she’d been on her phone. Her face was stricken.
“Something’s happened to your family,” I said, horror gripping me—Ophelia had gone after them? Why hadn’t I thought of that, why—
“No, it’s Liu, and something’s seriously wrong,” Aadhya said, and I scrambled over to the other side of the fire with the sutras still in my arms, and Aadhya put Liu on speaker.
It didn’t really help. She was crying softly, small gulps over the line, wordless. “What’s happened?” I said, panicky, still thinking of Ophelia. “Has New York come after you? The war’s started—?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Aadhya said. “I talked to her on the drive from Portugal. She was in Beijing. Her family made the deal, Beijing enclave was going to give them all theenclave-building spells they still needed, and they were going to put up their new enclave attached to what’s left of Beijing enclave and shore it up.”
“Then what’s gonewrong?” I said. It was certainly a good plan for Liu’s family on the face of it: they were based around Xi’an, so they’d have to collectively move away from home, but that’s nothing compared with saving the thirty years of work and the healthy ration of luck they’d have needed otherwise to finally get up their own enclave.
“I don’t know!” Aadhya said. “She literally hasn’t said anything! I’ve called her twice in the last two days, she didn’t pick up, and this time she answered but she’s just crying!”
Liu still didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably; it was barely more than breathing, tiny soft gasps that sounded oddly far away, and then Precious jumped out of my pocket and squeaked shrilly at Pinky, who came out too and ran up Aadhya’s arm to the phone and put his paw out to press the button to start a video call. A moment later the video came up, with Xiao Xing’s pink nose almost filling the screen; he pulled back a moment later, and behind him we could see Liu, her face tear-streaked and reddened, looking back at us. I thought the phone must have been propped up on a desk or a table somewhere; she was sitting across from it on a wooden bed with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped round them. The room had a certain bare uninhabited quality, but it didn’t look like a prison, and she wasn’t bleeding or beaten or chained up. But she still didn’t say a word; she didn’t even make a gesture. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know we were there, calling. She was looking straight back at us, tears spilling over.
“Okay, what the actual fuck is goingon!” Aadhya said, staring at her.
“She is under a compulsion, obviously,” Liesel said, havingcome to peer over our shoulders. “She cannot tell you anything or ask for help.”
“There’s no one in there with her!” Aadhya said. “Is there, Xiao Xing?” Xiao Xing could talk, or at least squeak in what sounded like confirmation to us all; Precious and Pinky both set up their own chorusing squeaks of agreement. “I’ve never heard of a compulsion spell that can stop anyone from even whisperinghelpwhile you’ve just let it keep going from another room.”
As it happens, I knew seven, but it wasn’t any of those, because all of them essentially turned the person into a mindless zombie minion. That said, Aadhya wasn’t wrong about the basic principle. It’s really difficult to both completely compel someone and yet let them keep their own feelings on display. If you’ve left them that much control over their own face, they usuallycanmanage at least a whisper, or for that matter pushing a button to pick up the phone, or some other clever little workaround. This wasn’t like that. Liu’s own brain was working for the enemy, and there’s only one way to get that kind of a hold on someone.
“She consented,” I said. “She agreed up front not to tell anyone anything about whatever is happening.” And as soon as I said that, I knew the rest.Enclaves are built with malia,Mum had said to me. “It’s the enclave spells. Beijing gave them the enclave spells, under a compulsion of secrecy, and there’s something awful in them, but Liu can’t tell us about it.”
