Page 43 of The Golden Enclaves
She and the other two people at the desk all stared at me in confusion. “Is this some sort of joke?” she said.
“I just need to get to Mumbai,” I said. “How would you do it?”
“I’m going to call security,” she said.
“Why?” I said. “You can just say no. I’m not going to punch anyone and shove my way on board.”
I think she was about to do it anyway, but one of the people hanging round the desk was an attendant; he laughed and said, “Wait, no,” to stop her, and then went inside the plane for a quick conference with the captain. Apparently one person had called in sick, so now they were shorthanded, andthey quietly snuck me on board in exchange for helping out in the galley during the flight. I wasn’t surprised, somehow. It almost felt like the way things worked out for Mum, when she wanted to go somewhere. It hadn’t occurred to me that she paid for that help, all the time, giving away her own work and help to anyone who asked her. The way I’d helped, now; in London, in Beijing, in Dubai. Even to the people I didn’t want to help.
And the universe wasn’t giving me back a ride on a private jet, but I didn’t mind that. I preferred hanging out in the galley and working with the crew to having to be nice to the owner of a private jet, and for that matter to sitting in a first-class seat without anything to do but think, and absolutely nothing tried to kill me on the way, which put it well up on the many times I’d been on maintenance duty in the Scholomance.
On the other end the attendant who’d brought me on board said to me half apologetically, “I’d better take you to security now and sort out where you belong.”
That would have been a tall order. I looked at him and said, “Thanks, but you’re better off forgetting I was ever on board,” and it wasn’t a spell exactly, but I put some mana behind it, and the statement was so obviously true that his brain got on my side and helped; he turned away a moment frowning in thought, and I slipped into the stream of people disembarking and out of his memory at the same time.
It was nine hours all told before I made it to the compound. If you’re thinking maybe that was enough time for me to cool down, you’d be wrong. I was only angrier and angrier with every step of the last three miles, which I had to walk, a litany of rage running over and over inside my head. I didn’t know what I’d say to Deepthi, to any of them, except to call her a liar, a monstrous liar who’d weighed my wholelife down with false prophecy, and tell her I wasn’t having any more of it.
I knew where the compound was, because Mum still had the letter from Dad’s family, the one they’d sent her all those years ago, asking us to come. It was tucked inside the small flat box, waterproofed with beeswax, where she kept our birth certificates and all the notes Dad had written to her on the inside, and the sketch she’d made of him after graduation, the paper worn down in places because she’d had to erase and try again and again, on paper she’d cried over, trying to make a memory that she could give me when I was born. I never looked in the box, except for all the times I went and looked in it; I never read the letter, except for all the times I took it out of the envelope and read the false promise of it,We will love you and her as we loved Arjun,and tried desperately not to wish that I was someone else, someone to whom they could have kept that promise.
And now I was someone else, someone who had proved that Mum had been right all along, right to save me, right to love me, the way they’d chosen not to; now I was someone who had proved them wrong, because I was saving people, even saving enclaves, one after another all round the world, and I was going to rub their faces in it and make my great-grandmother admit that she’d been wrong about everything to do with me, over and over again.
I promised it to myself with every step, panting up the drive walled in on either side with the lush chirping of vegetation and life, cicadas and birds and small monkeys squabbling with one another all round, a surrounding jungle of protection from the skeptical eyes of mundanes. My head was pounding at the temples with fury, and I was ready to get to the gates and smash them to pieces, tear them apart andmake them listen, only I came over the final crest and then had to stop, because I was second in line.
There was a maw-mouth at the gates.
It hadn’t made it through the warding yet. There was a faint golden glimmering over the surface of the doors and the walls to either side, tracing each of the tentacles splayed out across them. Everyone inside the walled compound had to be casting together, holding up the shields as long as they could. But that wasn’t going to be for much longer. The golden light was pulsing and fading all along the line, a sense of struggling and growing weakness. The maw-mouth had been at it for some time, patiently working away on the lock. It wasn’t in any hurry. It would get through eventually.
You’d have thought that a great prophet would have been able to warn her own family that they needed to move house, or else they’d all go into the belly of a maw-mouth. And the only reason they wouldn’t was because I was here to rescue them, the child they’d betrayed for nothing but a false prophecy:she will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world,and now here was a maw-mouth at their gates that one of those enclaves had sent out into the world to roam freely, and if I hadn’t been here to destroy it—
I stood there a long, blank moment staring at the maw-mouth as it probed at the gates, trying to poke its way inside. It wasn’t anywhere as big as Patience, or even the one I’d killed in London, but it was bigger than the one I’d killed in the library. Loads bigger than the little one I’d killed at graduation. But then, Bangkok and Salta had been young enclaves. There probably hadn’t been more than two hundred wizards in Salta when the whole place had gone down, taking all of them with it.
I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it back on.It started piling up notifications in stacks, but I ignored them all and called Ibrahim. “El!” he said, picking up instantly; I heard a background babble of voices pick up round him at once. “El, where are you? We’ve all been worried, are you all right? Everyone wants to thank—”
“The attack’s about to happen,” I said. “I don’t know how well the new foundation will hold. You’ve got half an hour to get clear.”
“What?” he said. “El, how do you know? El!”
“Sorry,” I said. I hung up and turned the mobile off again, and sat down on a rock to wait for half an hour before I destroyed the maw-mouth, the maw-mouth that had been made forty years ago, in the dark, in Dubai enclave.
Ipushed open the doorsafter the maw-mouth finished draining away down the road. They opened easily. The wards didn’t stop me, and there wasn’t a physical bar across them. I had a hazy memory of the colonnaded courtyard on the other side: the fountain gurgling, flowers exploding in profusion over the walls and climbing up the archways. When I came in now, the flowering vines had all withered, and the fountain was silent, but even as I came inside, the water made a choked splutter and then started again, a few brief spurts at first and then back into a steady shimmering fall, and new leaves and even a few flowers began to open off the woody vines.
It was empty, except on the far side, a very old woman was sitting alone in the shade under the awning, waiting for me. I crossed the courtyard and went to stand over her, and she looked up at me, her eyes and the wrinkled folds of her face full only of sorrow and not fear, and she reached out with her trembling wizened hands to close them around one of mine, the skin papery-soft and thin, all the bones pokey through it.I let her have it. I let her have it, and I didn’t howl at her, I didn’t scream. I couldn’t call her a liar, after all. She’d told the absolute truth. Iwasthe one bringing death and destruction to the enclaves of the world. Each time I destroyed one of the monstrosities that all of them were built upon.
“Why?” I whispered, instead. I couldn’t ask anything more. I could barely make a sound.
“You already know,” Deepthi said. She was stroking my hand, gently, letting the tears drip off her face; they made dark splotches on the fabric of her sari. “To speak the future is to shape the future.”
“Andthisis the one you wanted to make?” I said, raggedly, groping after the shredded remains of my anger. She’d seen the future. She’d known, she’d understood, that I wasn’t going to be a maleficer, and she’d made a deliberately misleading prophecy anyway.
“This is the only one where you ever came home,” Deepthi said. “This is the only one where she did not find you, before you were old enough to protect yourself.”
“Who?” I said, but Deepthi was right; she was right, as she was always right. She’d never been wrong yet, and even while I was asking, I did know.We’ve met El. She’s an extraordinary person. I only wish I’d found her sooner.That was what Ophelia had written to Orion. Ophelia, who had made her own child into a maw-mouth, a creature that only I could kill. “I wasn’t killing maw-mouths at five!”
“She was searching for you already,” Deepthi said. “She knew you must exist, someone or something like you.” She brought my hand to her face and pressed the back of it to her cheek, closing her eyes a moment, and then she straightened up and reached out to pat a low cushioned seat that had been set next to her chair, like a footstool. I sank down on it, my knees wobbly. “She made a great working of darkness. Sogreat she took the lives of many children to make it. A year where no one left the Scholomance at all.”
I’d heard about that year. But in the history books, it was a dramatic cautionary tale reminding us to keep a sharp look out for maleficers among us. Supposedly a dozen maleficers had banded together and revealed themselves in the graduation hall, and had taken out the entire senior class for malia to make their own escape. They’d quickly been hunted down by all the vengeful enclavers; that made it also a cautionary tale to any would-be maleficers reminding them to avoid enclavers’ children in future. And in those history books—Ophelia Rhys-Lake had been the chairwoman of the Board of Governors. She’d overseen the effort to hunt down the vicious maleficers.
And during that following year, in New York enclave—Orion had been conceived. And so had I. Because Mum and Dad had been in the next year after at school.
