“He saved my life,” I ground out at her. “He saved my life thirteen times,” and I gasped on a breath of agony: I’d never have the chance to catch up now.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t argue with me, just sat there with her eyes shut and her arms wrapped around herself, breathing through it in shudders. She only whispered, “My darling, I’m so sorry,” and I could hear she truly was, she was so very sorry for hurting me with this supposed truth of what she’d seen in Orion that I wanted to scream.
I laughed instead, a horrible vicious laugh that hurt me to hear it in my own ears. “No worries, he’s gone for good now,” I said, jeering. “My brilliant plan took care of that.” And I went out of the yurt.
* * *
I walked around the commune for a while, staying in the trees just past the limits of where anyone had a pitch. My head ached from crying and banging it against the roof and from pouring an ocean’s worth of mana through my body, and from four years of prison before that. I didn’t have a handkerchief or anything. I was still wearing my filthy sweaty leggings and T-shirt, the New York T-shirt Orion had given me, threadbare with four holes and still the only wearable top I’d had left by the end of term. I pulled up the hem and wiped my nose on it.
I wanted to go back to Mum, but I couldn’t, because I wanted to ask her to hug me for a month, and I wanted to scream at her that she didn’t know anything about Orion at all. What I really wanted was to not have asked her in the first place. It was worse than if she’d told me she’d foreseen it all, and if I’d only listened to her warning, instead of pulling him into my magnificent scheme to save the whole school, he’d have made it out fine.
I could guess what Mum had seen: Orion’s power that let him pull mana out of mals, and the empty well inside him because when he took the power, he gave it away. The power so terrifyingly vast that it had forced him to become exactly the kind of stupid reckless hero who’d face an entire horde of maleficaria alone, because for every moment of his life, people had made him feel like a freak unless he was putting himself out in front of them.
He’d been the most popular boy in the Scholomance, but I’d been his only friend, because when everyone else looked at him, that was all they saw: his power. They pretended they saw a noble hero, because he’d tried so hard to fit himself into that picture, and they loved the picture: that made his power something for them, something that would help them. The same way everyone looked at me and my power and saw a monster, because I wouldn’t play along with what they wanted. But they’d loved Orion only in exactly the same way they’d hated me. Neither one of us were ever people to them. He just made himself useful, and I refused to.
But I’d never imagined that Mum, of all people—who’d never let me see a monster in my own mirror, even when the whole world was trying to convince me that was all that was there—would look at Orion and see his power, and decide that he was a monster. I couldn’t bear it that she hadn’t been able to look at him and see a person. It made it feel like she was lying about seeing me as one.
So I could have gone back to scream at her, to tell her the only reason I was alive for her to dream of was because Orion had killed the maleficer who’d gutted me, and had risked his own life spending the night in my room killing the endless stream of mals who’d come to finish the job. But the way I really wanted to prove her wrong was by having Orion walk up the path to our yurt next week, the way he’d promised he would, so she could see for herself that he wasn’t either the terrible power she’d glimpsed or the gleaming perfect hero everyone else wanted him to be. That he was a person, he was just a person.
Had been a person. Before he’d got himself killed at the very gates of the Scholomance, because he’d thought it was his job to make a way out for everyone else but him.
I kept walking around as long as I could. I didn’t want to feel anything as small as being tired and filthy and hungry, but I did. The world did in fact insist on going on, and I didn’t have the mana to make it stop. Precious finally came and got me, darting out from underneath a bush to pounce on my foot when I circled back closer to the yurt again. She refused to let me pick her up. She ran away from me a little way towards the yurt, and sat up on her haunches and gave me a scold, her white fur practically glowing in an invitation to the large number of cats and dogs who roamed the commune more or less freely. Being a familiar doesn’t make you invulnerable.
So I followed her back to the yurt and let Mum give me a bowl of vegetable soup that tasted like it had been made with real vegetables, which might not sound very exciting to you, but what do you know. I couldn’t help eating five bowls of it, even seasoned with agony and sour resentment, and almost all of a loaf of bread and butter, and afterwards I let Mum coax me to the bathhouse. There I spent a full hour in the shower, very much against commune rules, trying to dissolve into the hot water I was gluttonously consuming. I wasn’t even mildly worried that an amphisbaena might erupt out of the showerhead.
Claire Brown turned up instead. I had my eyes shut under the spray when I heard the shockingly familiar voice saying, “So that’s Gwen’s daughter back, then,” not with enthusiasm, and deliberately loud enough to be overheard.
It didn’t make me angry, which was odd and uncomfortable; my supply of anger had never run dry before. I shut off the shower and came out hoping to find some, but it didn’t work. The showers let out onto a big round dressing room, only that had also shrunk while I’d been away. The commune had built it when I was five, and my toes knew every weird uneven inch of the floor, so I knew the cramped little room with its one bench was the same place, but it still didn’t seem believable that it could be. And there on the bench was Claire, with Ruth Marsters and Philippa Wax, waiting together in their towels as if I’d been in their way even though there were two other cubicles.
They all stared at me as if I were a stranger. And they surely had to be strangers, too, even though they did look and sound almost exactly like the women who collectively between them had told me ten thousand times or so that I was a sad burden to my saint of a mother. Everyone who lived here had a reason, something that had driven them to shut themselves away from the rest of the world. Mum had come to live here because she wasn’t willing to compromise with selfishness, but these three women, and a lot of the other people here, they hadn’t come here to do good, they’d come here to have good done for them. And they’d looked at me and saw a perfectly healthy child, with this magical being lavishing love and attention and energy upon her, and they all knew what it would have meant to them to have that same unbounded gift, and here I was, apparently sullen and ungrateful, soaking it up to no good end at all that they could see.
Which wasn’t an excuse for being nasty to a miserable lonely kid, and just because I understood their reasons didn’t mean I was ready to forgive them. I should’ve enjoyed it so much, I should’ve spoken to them with contempt: That’s right, I’m back, and I’ve grown; have any of you accomplished anything in the last four years besides horrible gossip? Mum would have sighed when she heard about it, and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have floated out of the bathhouse on a cloud of mean greedy pleasure.