Page 30 of The Golden Enclaves
Orion still hadn’t come out of the hut, but once I’d cut down the big section, most of the branches shading him had come down, and he was just left there standing behind the half-height stone walls, almost completely exposed in all his dubious glory—and more of it likely to be on display soon, given the precarious state of his rags.
“Are you going to help me, or do you fancy just standing there being useless?” I said to him coldly. I pushed away the loose broken chunks of the lintel, clearing off the threshold, and then I started going round the hut, clearing the brush back a bit and picking up any fallen stones and putting them back up. I wasn’t going to find a new lintel just lying on the ground, but at least I could firm up the walls. After a little while, Orion did start helping, but from the inside, as if he still didn’t want to risk coming that near to me.
When I’d done as much as I could see to do, I went back to Mum, who’d got a bit of color back in her face, thankfully. Orion got over himself enough to come out, but he stood off to one side watching me work out some way to carry her, twitching forward a few times as though he wanted to helpbut couldn’t, presumably because he was so horribly contaminated that Ishould have left him there,and with every twitch he made, I grew furiouser and furiouser, because Aadhya was bloodyright,it wasn’t my fault, none of it had been my fault, it had beenhisfault,he’dshoved me out, he’d done all this to me, and he wasstilldoing it to me, and I stood up and snarled at him, “Youtake her, and mind you don’t drop her.” After a moment he came jerkily towards us, and I stood with folded arms, glaring until he got Mum up in his arms.
It took much longer for me to get us back to the yurt than it had taken Mum to take us out. Precious sat on my shoulder and gave me nips to the ear to make sure I didn’t go the wrong way blundering through the woods, but her vigilance wasn’t sufficient. Orion didn’t drop Mum. He didn’t even ask for a pause until we finally straggled out two hours later, at midmorning.
Aadhya and Liesel were sitting out in front of the yurt arguing about what to do. Liesel’s expression when she saw Orion walking carefully behind me with Mum was so utterly disbelieving that it would almost have been funny if it hadn’t been very clear that what she couldn’t believe was that we were all such colossal idiots and yet had somehow survived, and that she wasn’t sure it was a good thing, either.
Orion brought Mum inside the yurt and put her down on her bed when I showed it to him, and then went out again in a hurry. I got her to drink a little water from her jug and settled her under the covers, and meanwhile he put himself at the far side of the small campfire and sat down on a log. He didn’t say a word to Liesel or Aadhya at first, until I overheard Aadhya saying to him, “Orion, don’t get me wrong, I’m super glad you’re not in mindless hunting mode anymore, but you’re still looking kind of freaked out. Are you okay?” I looked out through the doorway to listen in—I was fairlycurious about the answer myself—but he only stared at her as if he hadn’t noticed she was there until then. “Yes? No? A complete sentence, maybe?” she prompted. “If you need an idea,Thanks for saving me from certain doomwould work.”
“I should have stayed there,” he said flatly instead.
I surged out ready to do battle, now that Mum was taken care of, but before I could sail into him properly, Liesel said, peevishly, “You weren’t going to, no matter what we did. Your mother was organizing a search party for you.”
“What?” I said, stopping.
Liesel gestured to Orion impatiently. “You said it yourself! Ophelia did this, she gave him this power. She knew none of the maleficaria could kill him. She knew he was alive. That is why she was so insistent about keeping mana going to the school. She meant to get him out. Did you know she was a maleficer?” she demanded of him.
I’d have asked the same question, if I could have thought of a way to word it. Orion hadn’t talked very much about his mum and dad at school, but he hadn’tnevertalked about them. If he’d had any idea that his mum was a maleficer, he’d kept it very close. I’d certainly not had the least idea what I was going to find when I’d gone to New York.
“No,” Orion said: an odd answer. Either he ought to have saidyesor he ought to have indignantly saidmy mom isn’t a maleficer.
“But you know it now?” Liesel said, alert to the same oddness. “What did she do to you?”
Orion didn’t answer her. He just got up and walked away. He didn’t go as far as the next pitch; he just went a few yards away to the nearest big tree and sat down on the other side of it.
“Wow, the tact, it burns,” Aadhya said.
“We don’t have time for tact!” Liesel said.
“Said like someone who never does.”
Liesel scowled at her. “His motherknows! Do you understand what that means? We were surprised.Shewasn’t. She knew we would find Orion and bring him out. Most likely she has people on the way here already. She must have a tracker on that power-sharer.” She gestured at my wrist.
“She can send half of New York if she likes. I’m not letting them take him,” I said.
Liesel threw her hands up exasperated. “And what will you do when she stops the mana?”
“Okay guys, before you start yelling, allow me to point out that no one is taking Orion anywherehedoesn’t want to go,” Aadhya said. “Can we maybe worry less about evil schemes and more about him for a sec? I don’t know whether it’s his mom or killing all those mals or sitting halfway in the void, but he isnotokay, no matter what your mom did to fix him.”
Liesel scowled at her; I could have scowled a bit myself. That was much too sensible and kind, when what I wanted was to shriek at Orion in fury and claw his entire face off for having put me through all of this and having the gall to—not be okay. As he clearly wasn’t.
I sullenly went inside and rummaged through the cupboards and got a bowl of Mum’s vegetable soup and half a loaf of bread and a plate heaped with pickled vegetables and put it all together on a tray and took it down to him where he was still sitting down on the slope. “Eat something.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, except he made it sound like some elaborate doom. And in fact, he didn’t actually look as though he’d lost any weight after starving in the Scholomance for nearly two weeks. As if he’d been filled up adequately some other way.
I swallowed down nausea at the thought. “Eat something anyway and see if it changes your mind,” I said, and pushedit nearer him, then planted myself on a handy stump to wait. After a bit he picked up the soup and drank a swallow out of the bowl, and then he finished the whole thing and ravened through the bread and the vegetables at top speed, leaving nothing but crumbs by the time I came back with another round of larder-raiding.
The cupboards were growing bare, and when he finally stopped inhaling partway through the last packet of half-stale crackers, I was relieved: we were an hour shy of lunch, and I didn’t really fancy going down to the commune kitchens and trying to get an early meal out of the people on rota. They’d have given Mum whatever she wanted, but I’d never succeeded before, and I was wary of what I’d do if they said no.
Then Orion rested his forehead against his hand and said, rawly, “El. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t specify, but I could have enumerated a long list of things I felt strongly he could have been sorry for. I swallowed them all. “Come have a lie-down,” I said instead, because this was what you did for someone who’d just got out of the Scholomance: you fed them a gigantic pile of food and then you put them to bed on clean sheets and then you got them a shower and clean new clothes. The same thing Mum had done for me, the same thing every family in the world did for every one of their returning graduates. And for lack of a better plan, that’s what I was going to do for him.
He didn’t tell me again that I should have left him back in the school, and he didn’t argue. He got up and followed me back to the yurt and lay down on my cot and went to sleep, on the opposite side of the yurt from Mum. I took Precious out of my pocket and left her to stand watch over them both.
I spent the next three days with my head down, following theplaybook, providing regular doses of food and sleep and showers and food all while miraculously—for me—continuing to not gnaw Orion’s face off. Aadhya long-sufferingly took the van into town—after mending the peeled-open side—and got him new things from Primark: a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, new socks and trainers.
