Page 51 of The Golden Enclaves
“I don’t have the moral high ground, and I won’t pretend to,” Shanfeng said, with horrible determined gentleness. “What I do have is an experience, a piece of information, that Ophelia did not have. Because I, like you, have stood inside a maw-mouth. And so as soon as I knew what Ophelia had done, I understood that she hadn’t found a solution at all. She had only hastened the end for us all. Because a maw-mouth can’t ever be satisfied. It can’t ever be controlled. As you yourself must know.”
He stood up and walked out of the pavilion opening, pastme. I wanted to just curl up in a ball or even better run away somewhere to the other end of the earth. He was right. I did know. I followed him out, each step dragging.
We’d only been in the pavilion a few minutes, a few sentences, but outside, everything had changed. Aadhya and Liu and the rest of our small group were still in what I thought was the same place—peering anxiously in my direction—but the entrance to the well behind them had vanished. The cavern wall was smooth and unbroken. There wasn’t any way out.
And the two sides had almost completely swapped their positions. New York and their allies were swinging their fortifications aside, hauling up offensive weapons instead; on this side, all round me the siege engines were being pushed unceremoniously away and defensive walls were coming up. It was as though the whole thing had been a double bluff, on both sides, and now all the bets had been called and the real cards were coming out onto the table.
“Thiswasa trap,” I said. “The whole thing’s a trap.”
“Yes. For all of us.” Shanfeng waved his hand in a sweep across the chamber, taking inallthe assembled wizards, everyone in the place. “There are no real sides, for Ophelia. We all hunger, so we are all the enemy, in the end. She wants to intimidate and control her own allies as much as those of us who oppose her. But I knew she would spring the trap as soon as I came myself.”
“So why did you come?”
“Becauseyoucame,” he said, simple and dreadful. “El, when we realized what Ophelia had done—we had to make a choice. When we chosenotto act,notto follow her path, we knew that we were giving up the power to stop her. But we also knew that she had created a vast and terrible imbalancein the world. So all these years since, we have been watching—and hoping—for the counterbalance. We were growing very worried,” he added, dryly.
“And now here I am?” I said through my teeth. “What do you think I’m going todofor you, exactly?” I didn’t need to ask. I already knew what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to do what I was made for, the thing I alone could do. He wanted me tokill Orion,and I was going to make himsayit, I was going to make Shanfeng look me in the face and ask me to do it, to kill my friend, so I could tell him to go to hell.
“But it’s not just you,” Shanfeng said, gently.
I stared at him, taken aback, and for one incredibly stupid moment, I thought he was giving me some kind of hope, some chance of a reprieve. “There’s something else—”
But he wasn’t. “It’sbothof you,” Shanfeng said. “You, and the child Ophelia made. The boy we heard about from our own children as they came out of the Scholomance each year of the last four. The boy who saved the lives of others, who took no payment, and paid no attention to which enclave they were from. Ophelia got—not the hero she wanted, but the hero she deserved.”
There was a sudden flaring of light on the other side that jerked my head round: a hideously expensive portal opening. Ophelia came out through it onto the big central platform among all the other leaders of the Western enclaves, perfect serenity in her body language. They all moved towards her with eager smiling welcome, ready to court the queen; Martel was in the lead, putting on that same avuncular face. And Ophelia was turning back, holding out an ushering hand, as Orion came through the portal right behind her.
He was wearing an outfit that might have come straight from the closet in the fake boy’s room Ophelia and Balthasar had made him, aged up appropriately: expensive ironedtrousers and leather shoes and a crisp shirt. The only wrong fashion note was the watchbands on both his wrists, as if she’d decided they needed a bigger pipeline going to the mana store. ButOrionwas all wrong, inside it: his shoulders were rigidly stiff with tension, his jaw clenched and his hands shoved deep inside his pockets, a figure held together by wire.
Every last Dominus of all those enclaves was eyeing him with the same exact calculation as every kid in the Scholomance ever had, in the library and the cafeteria and the classrooms, trying to think about how they could get him to sit down at their tables. And he was paying them exactly as much mind as he had then, which was to say none. Less, really; they were all saying things to him, I could see their mouths moving, and Ophelia was trying to introduce him round, but he wasn’t even being dutifully polite. He turned his back on all of them and went to the edge of the platform.
I could see him more clearly with every passing moment: they were getting closer. Ophelia’s arrival had been a signal to their side. Ruth had stood up from her folding chair with her palms towards the ground, concentrating in real effort. She wasshrinkingthe cave, reeling all of us in closer for the fight that was clearly about to start. The fight New York was sure they were going to win, with their new unstoppable weapon.
“We knew that you had to exist,” Shanfeng said, next to me. “Some power in the world that could balance what she did. That would have the power—”
“Tokill Orion?” I spat, wheeling on him in rage: I wasn’t patient enough to wait until he got round to saying it himself, after all. “To murder the person who saved all your kids, everyone who came out of the Scholomance—”
“He is already dead,” Shanfeng said, steady, gentle; not an ounce of malice, and as brutal as if he’d slapped me hard across the face.
I stopped. My ribs were a cage around my chest as I tried to keep breathing. There wasn’t enough air in this cavern, in the whole world.
“I was six years old when the maw-mouth came to my home,” Shanfeng continued, and there were tears trickling down his face, along with that horrible, unbearable sympathy: the weapon he’d found that could be used against me. “My father carried me in his arms. My mother ran on ahead, holding my sisters’ hands. And then the maw-mouth reached out of a corridor between us. My father turned and ran the other way. Over his shoulder, I saw it take them. El, I would have given everything I had, I would have left all Shanghai enclave to fall into the void, if I could have brought my mother and my sisters back out. But I couldn’t. There is only one gift that you can give to the devoured. The gift only you can give him.”
I could have beat Shanfeng’s face in with my fists. Because he was right. Orionwasthe hero Ophelia hadn’t wanted, the hero who had understood finally what she’d done to make him—and wouldn’t go along with it. Who wouldn’t agree to feed a maw-mouth just to keep the rest of him alive.I can’t be all right,he’d said to me. Not unless Ophelia could undo what she’d done.
But she couldn’t. The parts of him that loved me, and wanted to be a hero, and had asked for help, couldn’t be separated out from the rest. Because those were the parts of him that had been fed to a maw-mouth in the very beginning, the parts that the maw-mouth was holding up in the void, like a horrible which-came-first puzzle where the answer was it didn’t matter, because in the end, it all went into the pit.
Ophelia had gone over to talk to Orion, a small frown on her forehead, a hint of mild concern. I could imagine the conversation they’d had when he’d come home to her. She’dbeen completely straightforward and honest in that letter after all. She trusted him. She had confidence in him. She believed he’d use the powerwell,the power she’d gone to all these lengths to give him. She’d even been honest withme,too. She wanted exactly what she’d told me: she wanted to stop wizards cheating, and she wanted to stop new enclaves—with theirunique costs—from being built, and she wanted the ones already out there toshare.
All the very best ends in the entire world, only she’d used them to justify the very worst means. And when Orion had come home and begged her to undo them, I was sure that she’d explained to him very kindly but firmly that she couldn’t, and then she had probably told him that he oughtn’t fuss, and to think about the greater good. As if the bloody wanker had ever once in his entire life stopped to think about anything but the pathetically small good directly in front of him: the child that needed saving right now, the mal that needed stopping.
I expect he hadn’t bothered arguing with her for long. What was the point? She didn’t have the necessary information. She’d never stood inside a maw-mouth and felt it trying to get at her, trying totake everything.You couldn’tusea maw-mouth. You couldn’t keep it fed to its satisfaction. It never got full. All you did, each time you fed it, was grow its hunger for more. Ophelia didn’t know that. But I knew, and Shanfeng knew, andOrionknew. So when she’d asked him to come here, to help her with her grand design of crushing half the enclaves of the world and terrifying all the rest into meek submission, he’d come along, but he wasn’t here to help her. Even as Ophelia was talking to him, he was scanning the rest of the room, looking at faces.
Looking forme.
And when he found me in the crowd, all the way acrossthe rapidly shrinking cavern, the worst part of it was—his shoulders came straight down. Our eyes met, and for a single clear bright moment—it wasn’t longing in his face, it wasn’t even love; he’d’ve needed hope for anything like that. He looked at me and only me, and all I saw was—relief. Relief, andtrust,the utter bastard,trustingme to— And then he relaxed just as if he’d taken a good long deep breath and let go of some terrible burden he’d been carrying. Only what he let go of was—himself.Of the thin fragmentary shreds of hope that Mum had given him, in that tiny hut deep in the woods: the only thing she’d been able to do for him. The relief slid down over his face like a lowering blind that took all emotion with it, and what it left behind was the thing—themaw-mouth—that I’d found sitting quietly alone in the Scholomance, because it didn’t have anything left to hunt.
But there was a full buffet laid on here.
Ophelia frowned and reached out a hand to Orion, as if she’d noticed something had gone wrong, and then paused, just before she touched him. The thing with Orion’s face glanced at her bright-eyed and empty, and she took a step back. It didn’t immediately go at her. After all, she was only a single wizard, and a strict-malia maleficer at that, who didn’t have any mana of her own and rationed the amount of malia she pulled. She wasn’t more than a single broken crisp by maw-mouth standards.
