In all of my frenzy to get her to help Orion, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to let Mum go in there with him, alone. I’d only thought about how I could persuade her; I hadn’t thought about what I was asking her to do. But she didn’t give me a chance to say wait, no, which I suppose was better than having to decide whether to say it or not. She let go and went straight inside the hut, and the yew branches lowered back down behind her.
I didn’t sleep at all, by which I mean I sat down on the ground outside the hut to wait, lay down on my side two minutes later, and was asleep almost instantly. I got up again when Precious bit my ear to wake me, leaping to my feet half asleep with my hands moving to cast a shield spell on instinct, pointlessly. The yew was groaning deeply overhead and light was pouring out of the hut, out of the roof between the leaves and branches, out of every crevice between the stones, turning all the moss into glowing green embers: a light that made my eyes water and my mouth feel cool and refreshed, a light I only remembered seeing once before in my entire life. The moment when Mum had chosen to save me from the teeth of prophecy and had carried me to safety in her arms, in her heart, giving her own life over to making herself a shelter to protect me from my own terrible destiny.
There wasn’t anything attacking me; there wasn’t anything for me to do. “Mum!” I called desperately. No one answered. I couldn’t see her or Orion at all. Inside the hut there was only light, and all of a sudden it was fading back down to nothing, so quick my eyes couldn’t keep up and I was left in pitch darkness with the muddled glowing afterimages of the light still imprinted on my vision.
When my eyes finally cleared, there were still a few streaks of light left: the dawn was breaking. All the leaves were coming off the yew, curling up and falling with a faint pattering. The bare branches were wizened and thin, dried up from inside, and then abruptly the lintel of the doorway cracked in two with a sound like a gunshot and came crashing down, smashing the branches across the door into kindling and cracking the threshold straight across. I lunged forward, scrambling over it inside the hut, and Mum was lying in the middle of the floor in a small curled heap.
“Mum! Mum!” I squalled, grabbing for her and heaving her over into my arms, my arms that could completely encircle her huddled body, hideously fragile and light. She was breathing, and when I’d got her over, she opened her eyes and looked at me, glazed over with exhaustion. She didn’t reach up and touch my cheek, but her arm twitched a little as though she wanted to and just couldn’t quite manage it, and then she tipped her head against me and sank into something between sleep and unconsciousness. I clutched her to me and tried to manage my breathing, and then I looked over at the one small place still shadowed by the lattice of dying branches, and Orion was standing there with his back against the wall.
Orion was standing there: it was him. Mum had done it. I could have screamed, I could have burst into tears; instead I reached out my hand to him, in joy, in longing, in the first moment of believing that the miracle might actually have happened, that I might actually have got him out, and he said, his voice hoarse and ragged, “You should have left me there.”
I could have torn him limb from limb, honestly, but instead I heaved Mum up and snarled at him, “Then stay in here and rot if you like,” and marched out of the hut.
I wanted to go straight home, but I haven’t been raised by wolves, so even though I was blazing up with all the anger I hadn’t been able to feel until relief had let it out, I didn’t keep going; I stopped outside in the clearing and turned to face the broken doorway and the yew and said, “He might be an ungrateful git, but I’m not. Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure of anything else to do. I felt deeply that I ought to do something: the poor yew was still shedding withered leaves in a small grey rain, and I was sure Mum would have told me what to do if she’d been conscious. But I didn’t have any ideas, and if I’d had one, I would have been suspicious of it doing more harm than good. I looked down at my pocket. “Any ideas?”
Precious climbed down me and scampered around and over the tree, sniffing along the bark with her pink nose, until she found a place she apparently liked, low on the trunk, just by the largest forking. She put her paw on the place and looked up at me. I was more than a little dubious, but she squeaked at me firmly. “If you’re sure,” I said. I put Mum down carefully in a mossy spot, pillowing her head on some dried leaves, and then I laboriously transmuted a fallen branch and a stone into a small hatchet.
I whacked away at the trunk for the better part of an hour, the sun gradually creeping up into the sky, until finally, with a creaking groan, the whole massive forked section cracked and fell, shattering like wood that had been dried and seasoned for a decade. Where I’d chopped it off, though, a tiny trickle of living sap oozed from the trunk.
Orion still hadn’t come out of the hut, but once I’d cut down the big section, most of the branches shading him had come down, and he was just left there standing behind the half-height stone walls, almost completely exposed in all his dubious glory—and more of it likely to be on display soon, given the precarious state of his rags.
“Are you going to help me, or do you fancy just standing there being useless?” I said to him coldly. I pushed away the loose broken chunks of the lintel, clearing off the threshold, and then I started going round the hut, clearing the brush back a bit and picking up any fallen stones and putting them back up. I wasn’t going to find a new lintel just lying on the ground, but at least I could firm up the walls. After a little while, Orion did start helping, but from the inside, as if he still didn’t want to risk coming that near to me.
When I’d done as much as I could see to do, I went back to Mum, who’d got a bit of color back in her face, thankfully. Orion got over himself enough to come out, but he stood off to one side watching me work out some way to carry her, twitching forward a few times as though he wanted to help but couldn’t, presumably because he was so horribly contaminated that I should have left him there, and with every twitch he made, I grew furiouser and furiouser, because Aadhya was bloody right, it wasn’t my fault, none of it had been my fault, it had been his fault, he’d shoved me out, he’d done all this to me, and he was still doing it to me, and I stood up and snarled at him, “You take her, and mind you don’t drop her.” After a moment he came jerkily towards us, and I stood with folded arms, glaring until he got Mum up in his arms.
It took much longer for me to get us back to the yurt than it had taken Mum to take us out. Precious sat on my shoulder and gave me nips to the ear to make sure I didn’t go the wrong way blundering through the woods, but her vigilance wasn’t sufficient. Orion didn’t drop Mum. He didn’t even ask for a pause until we finally straggled out two hours later, at midmorning.
Aadhya and Liesel were sitting out in front of the yurt arguing about what to do. Liesel’s expression when she saw Orion walking carefully behind me with Mum was so utterly disbelieving that it would almost have been funny if it hadn’t been very clear that what she couldn’t believe was that we were all such colossal idiots and yet had somehow survived, and that she wasn’t sure it was a good thing, either.
Orion brought Mum inside the yurt and put her down on her bed when I showed it to him, and then went out again in a hurry. I got her to drink a little water from her jug and settled her under the covers, and meanwhile he put himself at the far side of the small campfire and sat down on a log. He didn’t say a word to Liesel or Aadhya at first, until I overheard Aadhya saying to him, “Orion, don’t get me wrong, I’m super glad you’re not in mindless hunting mode anymore, but you’re still looking kind of freaked out. Are you okay?” I looked out through the doorway to listen in—I was fairly curious about the answer myself—but he only stared at her as if he hadn’t noticed she was there until then. “Yes? No? A complete sentence, maybe?” she prompted. “If you need an idea, Thanks for saving me from certain doom would work.”