And every last item was as pristine as if it were still in that advert waiting to be shipped off to some lucky happy boy who would use it, just as soon as someone had dusted it off a bit. The kits were still in cellophane.
The only thing in the room that showed any sign of use, besides the bed, was a single large cardboard box tucked away in the corner, fairly battered, and full of weapons. At first glance, they might have been toys, too: the swords sized for a child, the coiled whip, the assortment of maces and flails. But they weren’t toys. Actually some of them still had vivid purple ichor stains, which is what you get when you don’t properly clean the corporeal surfaces of your weapon after you’ve used it to kill a psychic mal, which based on my personal experience of Orion’s dorm room was extremely unsurprising.
It hurt to look at it and see everything he’d ever told me, everything Chloe had ever told me, that I hadn’t wanted to believe. I never wanted anything except to hunt, he’d insisted. Chloe and the other New York seniors had literally offered me a spot in this enclave, their single most valuable bargaining chip to recruit help and resources for graduation, just because Orion had made a friend of me for the span of two weeks. Also they’d tried to murder me, mostly by accident, on the suspicion that I was a maleficer who was enchanting him. But now I didn’t mind that nearly as much as the looming possibility that they’d had some real reason to be worried, after all.
This had been Orion’s life, this awful stale barren room full of plastic and desperation, a mass of sacrificial offerings his parents had made to try and turn him into a normal person, and instead had only managed to make him recognize he wasn’t one. And I’d have liked to comfortably keep on hating them for that, only I couldn’t hate them for that and also hate them for letting a ten-year-old hunt maleficaria. I couldn’t have it both ways, and I had the sinking feeling I also couldn’t have it one way or the other, either.
But if I couldn’t blame them—then there was something I couldn’t understand here, a gaping void between the Orion who’d lived in this room and the Orion I’d known, the boy who’d made a friend of me because I didn’t suck up to him, who’d squabbled with me over the lunch tables when I told him to do his homework and smugly counted points for every time he’d saved my life, who’d listened to me and cared about me and loved me. El, you’re the first right thing I’ve ever wanted, he’d told me, and I hadn’t wanted to believe that, or at most I’d wanted to believe that he’d been trained that way. But if it was true, then I didn’t understand how to put the two halves of his life together, the one his parents and his friends had been holding, and the one I’d held myself. It was a puzzle with an enormous missing piece, and I stared into the room as if I could somehow save him after all, if I only found it now, too late.
“El?” Balthasar said, and I looked down the corridor. He was standing at the other end. I pulled Orion’s door shut—I hadn’t even let go of the knob—and walked back towards the sitting room. It was oddly hard to do, my steps coming slower, one after another, elongating almost as if I were back in the stretching staircases of the Scholomance. It was only a short corridor in a small flat, so I couldn’t stretch it out very far, but I took as long as I possibly could have; I didn’t want to get to the other end, and I didn’t even understand why, until I came into the sitting room and Orion’s mum was standing there talking to my friends. She turned when I came in, and there wasn’t any more difficulty seeing where Orion had come from.
She was a maleficer.
I’ve always had a really remarkable nose for picking out maleficers. I knew Jack was a mana-sucker with human blood under his fingernails even when everyone else in our year thought he was a charming lad, friendly and generous by Scholomance standards. I knew Liu was dabbling—in a much more restrained way—when everyone else only considered her a bit aloof and awkward.
Malia isn’t like drugs. When you first start messing with the stuff, that’s when it leaves marks—blackened fingernails and milk-white eyes, an unpleasant sticky aura, things like that; Mum calls them symptoms of lesions in the anima, which is the badly defined word we use for whatever it is in wizards that lets us build and hold on to mana, unlike mundanes. The term has as much scientific validity as aether or the four elements or humors—a fair number of wizards have gone in for medicine and neuroscience trying to find the anima, and no one’s had much luck yet—but everyone hates not having a name for it, so anima it is. What we do know perfectly well is that the more you mess with malia, the more damage you do to whatever it is, and the harder it becomes for you to keep building and holding on to mana of your own. Sometimes people with damage of that sort show up at the commune, wanting Mum’s help. She doesn’t help them the way they really want her to; she doesn’t do spirit cleanses and patch them up and send them off to do it again. All she’ll do is give them a chance to spend however many months or years it takes, working off their debt in the woods with her. Mostly they go away again, but a few of them have stuck it out.
But when you commit to the maleficer lifestyle, give up making mana of your own at all and switch to using malia exclusively, that’s when the path really smooths out before you. Serious maleficers don’t have to worry about people getting uneasy round them, or even any outer signs, at least not until they cross the finish line far up ahead and the worn-thin outer fa?ade peels away, years of accumulated psychic pollution exposed all in a rush, and they graduate to their final form, the ancient stringy sorcerers and hideous crones that show up in fairy stories, mashing bones in a mortar and pestle. It’s a puzzle no one’s going to solve: do they look that way because that’s what people think of when they think of evil mage, or have the stories been told because at that stage the maleficers get desperate enough to even go after mundanes, having to work harder and harder and more grotesquely to extract enough malia from hapless victims to keep themselves from falling apart entirely?
Ophelia wasn’t in the end stage, certainly. Oddly, she also wasn’t especially beautiful, which most maleficers are until they aren’t anymore. She was an ordinary, well-kept middle-aged woman, slim in a way that suggested she exercised every day and practiced portion control, with a smooth cap of short-cropped brown hair and clear grey eyes horribly like Orion’s, with posh mundane clothing and a light coating of expensive makeup. Or rather, that’s the woman she looked like. At the commune, a lot of the regulars would sneer when those women turned up for the yoga weekends; I’d liked that it wasn’t just me sneering for once. But Mum had always said that it was good to care for yourself, however you chose to do it.
That wasn’t what Ophelia was doing. She was just wearing the skin of it on the outside, like camouflage. It was really good camouflage, too. Aadhya and Chloe and even Liesel were smiling, charmed and made welcome, until they saw my face. Aadhya immediately put her hand in her pocket, I’m guessing because she had some kind of protective artifice in there, and Liesel shifted a step back, putting herself in a position to fire off an offensive spell from behind a shield. Poor Chloe’s face went almost comically horrified.