Page 44 of The Golden Enclaves
“You are the balance,” Deepthi said softly. “The gift that Arjun and your mother gave the world, to bring light out of the dark.”
There were tears coming down my face. Deepthi reached out and stroked my hair back behind my ear, looking into my face like she was searching it for something that she’d lost.
“I saw many paths where Arjun would come out of school,” she said. “Many things that I could have said, warnings, that would bring him home. But not for long. Because in all of them, he would still have loved your mother, and he would have seen her taken instead. And so…he would have gone back to the school. He would have gone through the doors, and let the maw-mouth take him, too.”
“What?” I said in horror. “Why?”
“Because he understood my gift,” Deepthi said, low and terrible. “The Arjun who followed my warning, who lived,would have understood that I had made a choice. That I could have savedone—and so she, and you with her, had been taken in his place. And he refused that choice. There was no future in which he let me save him. So I didn’t warn him. I only gave him my blessing, and let him go.”
Let him go despite her own grief, to have a brief time of love uncomplicated by fear, and to make the gift that he’d after all chosen eyes wide open to hand to Mum and to me, in every possible future that Deepthi could see. Her and Dad and Mum, all of them one after the other in a line putting love and courage and the deep mana of willing self-sacrifice into the universe.
They hadn’t got the sutras because they’d handed me over in trade, after all. When Mum and Dad had asked the universe to give them the sutras—huddled together in the dark depths of the Scholomance library, in the tiny circle of light they’d made for one another in that horrible place—what they’d really wanted was to findanother way.To stop the horror of enclaves being built on maw-mouths. And when they’d offered themselves up, wide open, in return for that request, they hadn’t just got a spellbook. They’d got what they really wanted. A child who could destroy the maw-mouths, and lay foundations of golden stone instead.
And part of the reason they’d got what they’d wanted was that at the same time, back in New York, Ophelia had been making a terrible gaping wound in the world—tearing malia out of hundreds of lives to build her perfect, perfectly efficient tool. A new and improved maw-mouth that would go round vacuuming up all the scattered maleficaria in the world, accumulating the power they’d devoured from wizard children and pouring it back into her power bank, tidy and sanitized. And hoovering up councils of rival enclaves, for that matter. A maw-mouth that she could raise up properlyand train with flash cards to know who really mattered, which people you oughtn’t eat.
“Orion,” I said, my throat tight. “How do I help Orion?”
But Deepthi only trembled a little, her shoulders hunching in: the same terrible, shuddering look that I’d seen on Mum’s face. “I cannot see him,” she said. “I never knew what she had done. I saw only the darkness.”
“I have to…” I put my hands up to my face, wiping tears away to either side. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I only knew I had to do something. “I have to go to New York—”
“No,” Deepthi said, turning on me with a startling jerk of speed. Her hands didn’t have much strength to them, but she seized mine and closed them both around them, clutching clawlike as if she were trying to shelter all of me between them. “You must never go there again while she lives.Never.That is the place of her power, and now she knows about you. She will be ready.”
“I can’t just leave him there!”
Deepthi was shaking her head, urgent, leaning towards me; her mouth was downturned and sagging in deep folds on either side. “Galadriel. I have never been able to give you anything but pain. But listen to me. Listen: I loved Arjun. I knew what he had given for you, not only in this lifetime but in a thousand others he might have lived. I wanted with all my heart to give you and your mother all the love he could not, and so did all of us. Instead I cursed you with my own mouth, so terribly that none of our family would stretch out a hand to help you, and sent you both away in the night, alone, to live among strangers.”
I flinched, salt on the wound that was still raw, and her face crumpled as she saw it, more tears rolling down. “I know,” she said. “I know you lived in fear. Every time a cruel death came near you, I saw every one. Because of the future that Ispoke over your head, my own grandson Rajiv, Arjun’s father, might have torn you from your mother’s arms that very night. He would have taken you up to the top of the mountain and still holding you in his arms, he would have leapt. Isawthis. In many paths, it happened. And still I spoke. Becauseit was better.”
There was an absolute, iron finality to her words, like metal stakes going into the ground: nailing down the boundaries of possibility. She never let go of my hands. “If ever Ophelia tries to lure you back there,” she said, “whatever she does, whatever evil she threatens, youmust not go.You must hold tight to the memory of the pain I gave you, and all the love and comfort we would have given you and never did, and know that this is true:it was better.You must never fall into her power.”
She didn’t tell me exactly what she’d seen, but I didn’t need her to. I’d lived with it, every day since she’d first spoken the words of her prophecy. She’d seen the maleficer I could have become, the dark queen I’d spent my whole life struggling not to be. That was what Ophelia would have made of me. What she’d still make of me, if I ever gave her the chance.
Deepthi had me push her chair along the next colonnade and into the biggest wing of the house. I smelled the incense first, then heard the chanting, and we came into a hall with everyone gathered round a raised altar in a many-ringed circle of power, singing together, spells of shielding and protection, still holding the wards up against the maw-mouth that was gone. The children were gathered in the center round the altar, a handful of them old enough to be afraid, huddling near their mothers. They noticed us at the back of the room, and one of them called out, “Aaji! Aaji!”
People began turning to look without breaking the circle or the chant, but then a woman turned, and it was my grandmother Sitabai. Even after the prophecy, she’d secretly kept in touch with Mum by email for years, begging her for photos like table scraps. I’d never wanted to see the ones Mum asked for in return, but I’d glimpsed enough of them to recognize her. And as soon as she saw me, she gave a loud cry, and the circle fell apart in confusion.
Just as well I’d taken out the maw-mouth already.
There was rather a lot of shouting on multiple fronts, until they quieted enough to listen to Deepthi and grasp that the maw-mouth was gone, and also that it was time to welcome Arjun’s daughter home with open arms. As you might expect if you’d just asked someone to get a cuppa for Pol Pot, there were a handful of initially bewildered looks, but they very quickly started to shift into realization. They all understood Deepthi’s power too, like my father had:when you speak the future, you shape the future.They must have been used to her prophecies coming true in unexpected sidelong ways.
But my grandfather went rigid and motionless, something awful in his face, and even as people started to murmur, he came up to face her at arm’s length and cut through the rising noise, saying in a terrible voice, “We are leaving your house forever.” He turned to my grandmother and told her to pack, and then he turned to me and said, “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me,” and then put his face in his hands and wept like someone had torn out his vital organs.
It was almost down to the exact words a match for one of the many dozens of delightful fantasies I’d had over the years: me swanning in triumphantly, an acclaimed noble sorceress of great renown, having saved them all from some horrid fate and dramatically proving the prophecy false, everyone falling over themselves to apologize for having believed it andcondemning my great-grandmother, only it was awful instead. I reached out to him and pried his hands away from his face, and when I got them he put his arms around me instead, and my grandmother ran in and wrapped hers round us both.
I woke up at four in the morning with my eyes sticky and dry with salt, and when I turned on my mobile there were thirteen voicemails, twenty-seven missed calls, and nearly forty texts from Ibrahim, starting with alarm andhow do you knowconfusion, moving intowe’ve checked but no one’s broken in,andwe’re guarding the foundation to make sure.I nearly howled at past-him in rage. Then the texts moved on into the terror ofsomething’s happening! the whole enclave is shaking!andwe’re still inside!and pleas for help and where was I, please come back, how soon could I get there, settling only a few minutes later intothe shaking has stopped,andit’s over it’s overandit’s all rightandthe enclave’s staying up! Only a few of the—and I deleted that and all the rest of his messages without reading them, the ones that would have told me how many people I’d killed, what I’d destroyed, when I’d ripped the maw-mouth out from under their feet.
There were a couple of messages from Aadhya, too, telling me Liu had woken up and was okay, and then another demanding to know what was going on and why was I in India; I wasn’t sure how she even knew where I was until I inspected my mobile settings and discovered that at some point she’d quietly turned on my location sharing.
I didn’t turn it off. But I didn’t call her back right away, either. I didn’t think I could tell her over the phone. Or at least, not by calling her. I could probably have managed a text:everything ok, made up with my dad’s family, btw turns out I’m the maleficer destroying enclaves, just had a go at Dubai, talk soon.But I didn’t really think that was the best idea. So I settled forlongstory there sooninstead, and as soon as I’d sent it, I wanted to make it true; I wanted to get on a plane and get to Aadhya and Liu and tell them everything, as if I could pour it out of me and into them and be shot of every last feeling for a little while.
Next were half a dozen texts from Liesel, all telling me to stop behaving like a child and to call her back if I wasn’t in a hospital with heatstroke. But the last one was hours after the others, and it just said:So now you know.I stared at it, and then I called her back.
“Yes,” she answered, as if she’d expected me to call, which I suppose she had.
“How long haveyouknown?” I demanded, a bit waspishly. “Didn’t occur to you to mention?”
“It was betternotto mention,” she said, very pointedly, and fair enough; I didn’t actually want all the enclaves of the world to know that I was the one blowing them up. I didn’t think they’d care that I hadn’t been doing it on purpose. “I wasn’t certain anyway until yesterday. What are you going to do now?”
