Then she said, “Your father’s family were from one of the Golden Stone enclaves.”
“The ones built with the sutras?” I said it in a broken whisper, not really a question. I’d known my father’s family, the Sharmas, had once lived in an enclave—an ancient strict-mana enclave in the north of India somewhere—that had been destroyed a couple of centuries ago during the British occupation. The Golden Stone sutras were old, old Sanskrit spells, and I knew they’d been used to build a whole slew of enclaves in that part of the world, ages ago. So that was a bit of a coincidence, but it didn’t seem anything bad. I was still terrified: I could feel something absolutely horrible was coming.
“Enclaves are built with malia,” Mum said. “I don’t know how they do it, but you can feel it when you’re there, if you let yourself. All of them, except the Golden Stone enclaves. Your father told me about them.”
“But, that’s good, then,” I said, high and begging; I held the sutras out to her like an offering. “There’s no malia in building them, Mum. I’ve read all of it, I can’t cast it all yet but I’m sure—” but her face was crumpling in as she looked down at the beautiful book. She put out her hand over it trembling, fingers hovering a little bit away as if she couldn’t bear to actually touch it, and then they curled back into her palm again without even brushing the cover.
“Arjun and I, we wanted to build a new golden enclave,” she said. “We thought, if we could only show everyone a better—” She cut herself off and started over, in a familiar way: she always reminds people not to explain when they’re trying to ask forgiveness, not to offer excuses until they’re invited. “We wanted to build a golden enclave. We wanted to find the sutras,” she said, and I think maybe by then I was beginning to understand, but my head was going blank, full of white noise. “We thought our best chance was there in the school, in the library. My darling, I’m so sorry. We cast a summoning spell. We summoned the sutras, and we left the payment open.”
“We thought it hadn’t worked,” Mum said. “We thought they’d just been lost or destroyed.”
I’d already sat back down on the bed by then. I was still clutching the sutras to me. Maybe the right reaction should have been to set them on fire, but at the moment they felt like the only thing in the universe that I could rely on.
I’m not sure if it was better or worse than Mum telling me that she had changed her mind about me and was now convinced I was in fact doomed to go mortally evil. I’ve been preparing myself to hear that my entire life. It would have smashed me into pieces, but I was braced for it. I wasn’t ready to be told that Mum had, that she and Dad had—I didn’t even know what to call it.
Summoning is like make-and-mend. There’s a basic version of it in any given language, which you then elaborate on, depending on what you’re asking for and what you’re offering up in return. You can use a summoning to get almost anything you want—including unwilling sacrificial victims— as long as the thing you want exists. But you have to pay for it—and more than what the average wizard would call its fair market value. If you do a summoning and you lowball the offer, don’t put enough mana in or make enough of a sacrifice, then you lose whatever you have put up, and the summoning doesn’t work anyway.
But there’s another way to cast a summoning. You don’t have to put in any mana or make an offering at all. If you don’t, if you just leave the payment wide open, you’re offering anything and everything you have, including your life. Or, in this case, offering to have one of you spend a dragged-out eternity screaming in the belly of a maw-mouth, and offering to have the other crawl out of the Scholomance gates alone and sobbing to bear and raise your child.
And you’re offering up the life of that child herself. That handful of cells so completely dependent on your body that you can offer her up without even realizing you’re doing it. Making her a burdened soul as my great-grandmother colorfully put it in her prophecy, signed onto the family mortgage from birth, a vessel to be filled up with terrible slaughtering power and a hideous destiny of murder and destruction, the balance for your pure idealism. All of you paying together, just so that one day that child will earn a chance, just a thin sliver of a chance, to jump up and grab a copy of the spellbook you’re after, off a library shelf at school, to accomplish your dream of generosity and freedom.
I still had my arms wrapped around the sutras, my fingers tracing the embossed pattern in the leather without thinking about it. I’d known that they were a windfall, luck beyond anything I’d earned; I had just held on to them all the tighter, and never asked questions. And now it turned out actually I’d been paying for them my whole life, without ever having agreed to it up front. I’d been paying in the single worst moment of my life: when I’d had to face the maw-mouth in the library, the one that had been waiting at the end of the stacks after I’d made that jump and got the sutras off the shelf. The last chunk of my parents’ debt.
I suppose I’d had a choice about that. I hadn’t had to fight the maw-mouth. I could have let it go and kill several dozen freshmen instead. I could have paid off the debt of my parents’ courage with that cowardice, sending a pack of children to go down screaming into ten thousand years of hell, and set the balance right that way. I’d paid with my own screaming instead. I didn’t want to remember, but I couldn’t help it, queasy and shivering on the cot, clammy-skinned with the memory. Some part of my brain would still be screaming, still in that maw-mouth, the rest of my life.
And that was why I’d told Orion we couldn’t fight Patience, why I hadn’t been able to imagine trying. So—maybe that was why he’d shoved me out. Because I’d told him we couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t do it, and so he’d thought he had to save me from it, too. From the horror he’d known I couldn’t bear to face. Maybe that meant he’d been part of the price, too.
I looked down at the sutras in my lap, paid off in full. I’d loved them, so much. I’d been ready to build my whole life upon them. Now even that—all my plans for the future, my own dream of golden enclaves—suddenly felt like something I’d inherited instead of something I’d chosen. I wanted to be angry about it; I felt I had a right to be angry.
Mum did too. She was standing in front of me like she was waiting for me to deliver a verdict. Intent doesn’t matter, she’d say, when you’ve really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you’re ever to make things whole between you. Only I couldn’t find any to give her. She and Dad hadn’t offered me up as a sacrifice in their place—they’d both paid worse than I had, and they hadn’t even known I was there to be offered in the first place.
But if I couldn’t be angry, I didn’t know what to be. I didn’t even quite believe it yet really, not in my gut. I don’t mean I thought she was lying or making it up; it just wasn’t something that I could fully believe that Mum had done. She could hurt me, could make me angry. I’d harangued her for half my childhood to take me to an enclave, and she’d refused: she hadn’t been willing to make that bargain even to save my life, although she’d have died to protect me. But she couldn’t have done this. She couldn’t have put me on the hook for a summoning without my full knowledge and consent. She’d have cut her own heart out first.