“I should have stayed there,” he said flatly instead.
I surged out ready to do battle, now that Mum was taken care of, but before I could sail into him properly, Liesel said, peevishly, “You weren’t going to, no matter what we did. Your mother was organizing a search party for you.”
“What?” I said, stopping.
Liesel gestured to Orion impatiently. “You said it yourself! Ophelia did this, she gave him this power. She knew none of the maleficaria could kill him. She knew he was alive. That is why she was so insistent about keeping mana going to the school. She meant to get him out. Did you know she was a maleficer?” she demanded of him.
I’d have asked the same question, if I could have thought of a way to word it. Orion hadn’t talked very much about his mum and dad at school, but he hadn’t never talked about them. If he’d had any idea that his mum was a maleficer, he’d kept it very close. I’d certainly not had the least idea what I was going to find when I’d gone to New York.
“No,” Orion said: an odd answer. Either he ought to have said yes or he ought to have indignantly said my mom isn’t a maleficer.
“But you know it now?” Liesel said, alert to the same oddness. “What did she do to you?”
Orion didn’t answer her. He just got up and walked away. He didn’t go as far as the next pitch; he just went a few yards away to the nearest big tree and sat down on the other side of it.
“Wow, the tact, it burns,” Aadhya said.
“We don’t have time for tact!” Liesel said.
“Said like someone who never does.”
Liesel scowled at her. “His mother knows! Do you understand what that means? We were surprised. She wasn’t. She knew we would find Orion and bring him out. Most likely she has people on the way here already. She must have a tracker on that power-sharer.” She gestured at my wrist.
“She can send half of New York if she likes. I’m not letting them take him,” I said.
Liesel threw her hands up exasperated. “And what will you do when she stops the mana?”
“Okay guys, before you start yelling, allow me to point out that no one is taking Orion anywhere he doesn’t want to go,” Aadhya said. “Can we maybe worry less about evil schemes and more about him for a sec? I don’t know whether it’s his mom or killing all those mals or sitting halfway in the void, but he is not okay, no matter what your mom did to fix him.”
Liesel scowled at her; I could have scowled a bit myself. That was much too sensible and kind, when what I wanted was to shriek at Orion in fury and claw his entire face off for having put me through all of this and having the gall to—not be okay. As he clearly wasn’t.
I sullenly went inside and rummaged through the cupboards and got a bowl of Mum’s vegetable soup and half a loaf of bread and a plate heaped with pickled vegetables and put it all together on a tray and took it down to him where he was still sitting down on the slope. “Eat something.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, except he made it sound like some elaborate doom. And in fact, he didn’t actually look as though he’d lost any weight after starving in the Scholomance for nearly two weeks. As if he’d been filled up adequately some other way.
I swallowed down nausea at the thought. “Eat something anyway and see if it changes your mind,” I said, and pushed it nearer him, then planted myself on a handy stump to wait. After a bit he picked up the soup and drank a swallow out of the bowl, and then he finished the whole thing and ravened through the bread and the vegetables at top speed, leaving nothing but crumbs by the time I came back with another round of larder-raiding.
The cupboards were growing bare, and when he finally stopped inhaling partway through the last packet of half-stale crackers, I was relieved: we were an hour shy of lunch, and I didn’t really fancy going down to the commune kitchens and trying to get an early meal out of the people on rota. They’d have given Mum whatever she wanted, but I’d never succeeded before, and I was wary of what I’d do if they said no.
Then Orion rested his forehead against his hand and said, rawly, “El. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t specify, but I could have enumerated a long list of things I felt strongly he could have been sorry for. I swallowed them all. “Come have a lie-down,” I said instead, because this was what you did for someone who’d just got out of the Scholomance: you fed them a gigantic pile of food and then you put them to bed on clean sheets and then you got them a shower and clean new clothes. The same thing Mum had done for me, the same thing every family in the world did for every one of their returning graduates. And for lack of a better plan, that’s what I was going to do for him.
He didn’t tell me again that I should have left him back in the school, and he didn’t argue. He got up and followed me back to the yurt and lay down on my cot and went to sleep, on the opposite side of the yurt from Mum. I took Precious out of my pocket and left her to stand watch over them both.
* * *
I spent the next three days with my head down, following the playbook, providing regular doses of food and sleep and showers and food all while miraculously—for me—continuing to not gnaw Orion’s face off. Aadhya long-sufferingly took the van into town—after mending the peeled-open side—and got him new things from Primark: a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, new socks and trainers.
Liesel spent the three days preparing mystical fortifications and defensive strategies, and having hissed consultations over the phone with Alfie, apparently wanting to establish a back channel for negotiations when New York came at us and was repulsed with one of her dozen plans. She tried repeatedly to share them with me until I finally snapped at her over the fire and said crossly—I’m not very good at taking care of people, and between Mum and Orion I was having to do a lot more of it than I ever had before—“Liesel, it’s not three days to New York! If they were coming, they’d be here.” We all realized as soon as the words came out that I was perfectly correct, and her face went baffled with indignation: how dare Ophelia not come after us.
So of course, later that day, she did.
That morning Mum had been able to sit up and walk for a short distance without getting out of breath, but she certainly wasn’t up to cooking. My and Aadhya’s joint attempt, the first night, had ended up with the fire gone out in a gush of water and all of us trying to choke down half-cooked beans. “My grandmothers always make it look so easy,” Aadhya said glumly, putting down her bowl in defeat.
So I’d had to go down to the group kitchens after all. The theory had always been that all comers were welcome to a share, none turned away hungry, and you contributed as you could; very lovely and utopian. In practice, coming down without Mum had always been my idea of purgatory: being asked sharply what I thought I was doing, taken to task over how much food I wanted, why I thought I had a right to it.
But now I had too much else to worry about, and maybe it showed on my face. After the bean cataclysm, I marched down the hill and pitched in with the washing-up that was continuously going on in the back, and afterwards loaded up our two biggest pots with rice and beans and vegetable curry, and nobody made any commentary at all. When I came down the next morning, someone even asked me about Mum, and after that I was getting regular inquiries after her, if she was better.