Page 31 of The Golden Enclaves
Liesel spent the three days preparing mystical fortifications and defensive strategies, and having hissed consultations over the phone with Alfie, apparently wanting to establish a back channel for negotiations when New York came at us and was repulsed with one of her dozen plans. She tried repeatedly to share them with me until I finally snapped at her over the fire and said crossly—I’m not very good at taking care of people, and between Mum and Orion I was having to do a lot more of it than I ever had before—“Liesel, it’s not three days to New York! If they were coming, they’d be here.” We all realized as soon as the words came out that I was perfectly correct, and her face went baffled with indignation: how dare Ophelianotcome after us.
So of course, later that day, she did.
That morning Mum had been able to sit up and walk for a short distance without getting out of breath, but she certainly wasn’t up to cooking. My and Aadhya’s joint attempt, the first night, had ended up with the fire gone out in a gush of water and all of us trying to choke down half-cooked beans. “My grandmothers always make it look so easy,” Aadhya said glumly, putting down her bowl in defeat.
So I’d had to go down to the group kitchens after all. The theory had always been that all comers were welcome to a share, none turned away hungry, and you contributed as you could; very lovely and utopian. In practice, coming down without Mum had always been my idea of purgatory: beingasked sharply what I thought I was doing, taken to task over how much food I wanted, why I thought I had a right to it.
But now I had too much else to worry about, and maybe it showed on my face. After the bean cataclysm, I marched down the hill and pitched in with the washing-up that was continuously going on in the back, and afterwards loaded up our two biggest pots with rice and beans and vegetable curry, and nobody made any commentary at all. When I came down the next morning, someone even asked me about Mum, and after that I was getting regular inquiries after her, if she was better.
And that third afternoon, Ruth Marsters came in while I was there and said to me—almost as though I were just another person, with only a very faint air of resentment—“There’s a letter for you,” and handed me the envelope, smooth and creamy thick paper, the New York seal pressing it closed, addressed toGaladriel Higgins.
I took it back up to the yurt holding it between two fingers and opened it out in the woods far away from anyone else, with Precious anxiously watching at a distance in case some sort of smoke or poison came out of it. But nothing did; there was only a small note inside, wrapped around another envelope:
Dear El,
I’m very grateful to you for bringing Orion out. I hope he’s doing well. Please give him the enclosed letter when you think he might be ready to read it.
All my best,
Ophelia Rhys-Lake
Her handwriting was slanted and elegant and easy to read, the signature flourishing just a bit, tasteful and elegant. Iglared at it speechlessly. She really was an evil monster. If she’d told me to give Orion the letter, full stop, I’d cheerfully have set it on fire; if she’d threatened me, asked me for anything, I’d have told her out loud where she could get off, and then set it on fire. Instead she’d invited me to keep it from him, as though we were chums on the same side, taking care of poor dear Orion who didn’t get to decide for himself, the wayshehadn’t let him decide. It was a tidy bit of manipulation, and even seeing it plainly didn’t let me out of it.
Liesel nodded over it in admiration. “And if you withhold it, she will eventually get it to him another way, and ensure he knows you chose to keep the first from him.” She thought I ought to open Ophelia’s letter at once and read it for myself, without Orion, but I couldn’t stomach doing that; then she thought I ought to give it to him at once, and get him to show it to me, so I’d know what Ophelia was after. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that either.
Orion wasn’t wiped out physically the way Mum was, but he still wasn’t anything likeokay.If allowed, he would have spent his days huddled next to the woodpile on the far side of the yurt like a goblin, trying to pretend hehadbeen left behind in the Scholomance. I wasn’t having it, so I’d aggressively reorganized the woodpile round him, scattering crawling bugs and bark all over him, and handing him stacks of logs to hold for me and making pointed comments about how we’d need more laid in for the winter, until he actually said words, namely, “Do you want me to get you more wood?”
“That would be lovely,” I said sweetly, and handed him a hatchet.
He then brought back an armful of green saplings that he’d mangled apart, combined with some completely rotten chunks of a fallen tree, already half eaten and probablydripping termites, and I just barely managed to head him off before he popped it onto the rest of the pile. But after that, he went off into the woods on his own each morning, which seemed to me like an improvement, although I hadn’t got any more words out of him since; he only came back to eat monosyllabically on the far side of the fire and sleep again. Aadhya had got herself a long twiggy stick that she used to jab Liesel whenever the urge to start another interrogation began to come over her. It didn’t get used above five times a night.
Yes, all right, I got jabbed regularly too. If Mum had been able to stay awake for longer than it took to go to the loo, she would have approved of everything I was doing: living in the moment, one to the next, getting a meal, going to sleep, not thinking about the future. I hated it. The first night we’d laid out yoga mats for sleeping, and after that first night, Aadhya and Liesel had gone down to the commune offices and paid to stay in the nice tourist cottages instead. Wewereon holiday, having a rest cure after the success of our impossible quest. But it wasn’t going to last. Sooner or later—sooner—Aad was going home to her good sensible loving family and her good sensible healthy future; Liesel was going back to London and Alfie and her thirty-year plan, from which this was only a brief detour. And I was going to—? There was an enormous blank space at the end of the sentence. I didn’t have any baseline to go back to.
I could have made one up. I could have gone over to the box on Mum’s worktable and taken out the sutras. I could have told them we’d be getting started soon, getting on with the grand project. Or I could have started building a stockpile of weaponry and bleeding mana off the power-sharer, if I was going to go back to New York and pick a fight with Ophelia. In theory, at least; I doubt that particular plan wouldhave got past Mum if I’d actually started in on it, but I could have tried.
Or I could have told Liesel I’d go back to London with her after all. At leastshe’dhave been well chuffed. After the letter turned up, she cornered me privately for a conversation about the future, and I let her, mostly because I was sure Mum would look at me disappointedly if we didn’t talk about our feelings at all under the circumstances, although personally I felt I’d had far too many feelings lately and would have liked to repress a lot of them. I had barely started on grieving for Orion, and now he wasn’t dead, and while I still intellectually believed in all my extremely sensible ideas about seeing other people, all I actually wanted to do right now was keep seeinghim.Although at the moment that was less a romantic impulse than the literal sense of wanting to have my eyes on him regularly until the still-gibbering inward part of me calmed down and finally accepted that actually hewasalive. It still felt unbelievable every time I looked at him. Also I hadn’t lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.
So where that left me and Liesel, I hadn’t any idea. Thankfully, this was Liesel I was dealing with, who only said with a tone that was the equivalent of eye-rolling, “What dofeelingsmatter right now? There is about to be an enclave war. What are you going todo?” She made absolutely no secret of what she thought Ishoulddo, either. “We should all go back to London and help Alfie’s father secure control over the council and repair the damage. Then we will have one of the most powerful enclaves in the world supporting us.”
“You know I won’t, so stop suggesting it just because it annoys you that I won’t be sensible!” I said, which was accurate enough to make her glare at me. “Look, Liesel, you can makeyourself Domina of London if you like, and get back at your horrible dad and his horrible wife, and odds are, you won’t be any worse than Christopher Martel or Sir Richard orthem,” which made angry red color come into her cheeks, her lips pressing tight, “but Ican’t,and you know it!”
“So whatcanyou do?” she bit out, and of course I couldn’t answer that question, because I hadn’t any idea what Orion was going to do with himself, and it seemed that I couldn’t work out what I was going to do with myself in the absence of that information. I couldn’t even decide what Iwantedto do. Which was infuriating on multiple levels. I halfway wanted to give Orion the letter, to make something happen, and I didn’t trust the impulse.
Mum was finally well enough the next morning to ask me to help her out to the nearest clearing in the woods, where she sat for several hours with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, and after that she came back to the yurt slowly on her own and sat down by the fire with a long sigh instead of going back to bed. But she couldn’t give me any advice. “I don’t know,” she said, a whisper, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, a chill in deep July, when I asked her what had been wrong with Orion, what Ophelia had done to her own child to get an unstoppable mal-killing machine for New York. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, I couldn’t do anything about it.”
I stared at her. “You did do something! Orion’s all right now!”
Mum looked at me, her face still a little pouchy with exhaustion, her blue eyes small and tired, but she reached out and put her hand on my cheek and shook her head a little in apology. “I couldn’t set him right. I could only give him hope. And I don’t know if I should have.” She closed her eyes, drewa deep breath, and then she got up and went into the yurt and went to sleep again.
The next day when I came up from the kitchens with lunch, she’d taken Orion out into the woods with her. I went hunting them, and it’s possible that I crept more quietly than usual for the chance of listening, but I might as well have gone trampling round like elephants. He was kneeling in front of her in the woods, and she had her hands on his head, tears running down her face, and when she took them off, she said, “No, love. I’m sorry. It’s not something that I can bring out of you.”
Orion bowed his head like someone had told him he was going to be executed. “It’s just me.”
Mum looked down at him, sorry, so sorry, the same kind of sorry she is when she’s telling someone their child is going to die, and she can’t stop it. “It’s not all of you. It’s not the part of you that’s asking. The part of you that loves El.”
Orion stood up. “But it’s the part that matters.” He turned and saw me.
“Whatpart?” I said, but he only stared at me and then shook his head and walked past me. “Lake, you plonker, bloodytellme!” I yelled after him, but I didn’t get a response.
