Orion had stayed at exactly the same distance the whole time, following me here, that precious arm’s length of space between us. Having to go closer was as bad as having to go down a tunnel to a waiting maw-mouth. But when I tried, when I took a breath and took a step towards him, he stepped back. I paused, and then tried again, and he did it again, as if he didn’t want me to come any closer either. I stopped, wanting to burst into tears all over again, and then I said, “Just put it on yourself, then!” and set it on the workbench nearest me—well, the half a workbench that was still standing—and moved back. He came by and slowly turned his head to look down at the pendant, and after a moment, he did pick it up and put it on.
I saw him under it in a way I hadn’t before. The pendant was sitting incongruously glowing over the remains of his old T-shirt with the Transformers logo across the front, reduced to tatters hanging on between the bands round the neck and the arms, the edges browned with dried blood. His trousers were torn up too, gaping holes across the legs from seam to seam and both back pockets ripped open and the shredded remnants dangling. His trainers looked more like gladiator sandals, a loop round his ankles and the metal-capped toes all that were keeping them on his feet. He’d only been sitting there in the pavilion; he could have mended them. He hadn’t been able to care. “You’re a mess, Lake,” I said, because I would have said exactly that to him under any other circumstances, only after I did, I burst into tears, and I couldn’t even put my hands over my face, because I couldn’t stand to take my eyes off him, in case he came closer.
“Do I need to put one on you?” Liesel said, caustically.
“Are you serious?” Aadhya said to her, in irritation, but I was grateful. I scrubbed my arms over my face in opposite directions and then accepted a rag from Aadhya to honk my nose and get the worst of the tears and snot off myself.
Then we left the Scholomance and went back to the hotel.
I’m going to leave it at that, because I don’t remember most of it, actually. I got through it one minute at a time, and let each one go as soon as I’d got through it, because here came another one. They were all the same minute anyway, the minute where I could feel Orion alive and at my back, just a few steps behind me, and that feeling was the most horrible sensation in the entire universe, and I had to keep pushing on through crowds of people, mundane ordinary people on holiday, hot and sweaty and laughing or bored, children whinging for drinks, and I knew if I turned round and looked at Orion even once, seen him among that sticky noisy living throng, I would see that he was dead so vividly that he would have been, so I couldn’t look around. I had to keep going, to let him keep following me and my wide open back.
I couldn’t think at all by the time we got to the hotel. If I had, the idea of trying to take him on an aeroplane would have been laughable to the point of hysteria, unless we’d packed him in a box and checked him in as luggage. I vaguely have the sense that Liesel and Aadhya had a conversation about it in the hotel room that I didn’t pay attention to at the time enough to know what they were doing, as though I had stopped being a significant character in my own life and I was only standing in the background of the scene, decorative, staring at Orion. The one saving grace was that the beautiful ornate hotel room didn’t make much more sense than he did, and therefore he could exist in it and stare back at me.
They went out and got a van and put Orion in the back of it, and drove us back to Wales. We were in a ferry for a lot of it: I remember the heaving of the ocean under us, waves of nausea from the outside and not just the inside, crossing over and doubling one another. I must have gone to the loo and slept a bit, or at least passed out now and again, but I don’t remember it happening. I only remember sitting there huddled in the front passenger seat and staring out the windshield at the blank walls of the hold with Orion’s face floating in misty reflection in the glass. Once, Precious crept out of my pocket to come and nose at my ear, trying to give comfort, and crept back in again when it couldn’t be done. And then we were driving again, Aadhya and Liesel taking it in turn, until suddenly the roads became too familiar for me not to recognize them. We pulled into the car park at the commune, and Mum was standing there in the dark, her pale face caught out by our headlights.
We’d barely stopped moving when she ran around to my door and all but pulled me out. She clutched my face in her hands, her whole body shaking as she went gripping my arms up and down my whole body as if she didn’t quite believe I was all there, whole. I wasn’t sure I was, either. Aadhya and Liesel got out, too, and started trying to explain things to Mum, which I was well beyond being able to do myself, but before they got anywhere, Orion came out.
He’d sat quietly unmoving the entire time we’d been driving; he hadn’t drunk any of the water we’d pushed over to him, he hadn’t eaten any of the food. He didn’t burst out of the van dramatically like the Hulk or anything now. He just came out as directly as possible, which in this case meant he peeled open the side of the van along one of the seams and squeezed out as soon as it was wide enough for him to get through. Mum gave a strangled moan of horror in her throat, recoiling, and I grabbed at her in desperation to stop her saying anything, to stop her telling me anything I couldn’t stand to hear. “It’s not him!” I said. “It’s not Orion. It’s not his fault,” trying to explain to her that he’d been trapped with all the mals in the universe and she had to help him.
Mum didn’t let me finish. “Who did this?” she said, her voice a whisper, and I was going to tell her it was Patience, he’d been locked in with Patience, but instead I said, “His mother. Ophelia Lake,” and all the other words backed up in my throat and stopped there, because as soon as her name came out of my mouth, I was sure that it was the truth, even though I didn’t understand what she’d done, or how.
* * *
Aadhya and Liesel stayed behind in the yurt without more than a token argument; they both looked washy and green with exhaustion after the trip. I could have slept for a week myself, but Mum wouldn’t wait an instant, and I shared the same urgency. She led me and Orion straight out to the woods, in the dark, calling moonlight to light our way. If a mundane had been with us, they would only have thought it was an unusually bright night, and their eyes were well adjusted to the dark, and somehow the moon was reaching us despite the trees overhead.
Mum doesn’t always go to the same place with her circle. Whenever she goes out, she listens to the place and doesn’t work there if it isn’t in the mood. I have no idea how trees and grass let her know they aren’t in the mood, but apparently they do. But she does have regular spots she goes back to fairly often, and some that she saves for special occasions. I always knew that someone was really badly off if she took them to the one furthest away from the commune: there’s a round meadow up where an old oak came down in a storm a decade ago. The jagged hollowed-out trunk is still standing, and she has the patient stand inside it with the circle all round.
I expected her to lead us straight there, and for the first part of the way we were going in that direction, but when we got to the turning, she led me straight past it instead, and onward into the woods. After half a mile or so, we came to a massive thicket of brambles that blocked the way completely like a wall. She stopped in front of them and held out her open hands and just said, “Please,” softly. After a moment, the brambles creaked themselves apart, just enough for us to pass.
We were walking for another hour after that. There wasn’t any kind of path or trail, but Mum kept on steadily, as if she knew where she was going, although as far as I could tell, no human being had been this way in at least a decade, and possibly not even a deer. It wasn’t anywhere she’d ever brought me before. All the overgrowth curled slowly out of our way the whole time, and closed back around behind Orion, bringing up the rear, the faint pallid shimmer of Mum’s light making a circle round us.