I stared at her. “You did do something! Orion’s all right now!”
Mum looked at me, her face still a little pouchy with exhaustion, her blue eyes small and tired, but she reached out and put her hand on my cheek and shook her head a little in apology. “I couldn’t set him right. I could only give him hope. And I don’t know if I should have.” She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and then she got up and went into the yurt and went to sleep again.
The next day when I came up from the kitchens with lunch, she’d taken Orion out into the woods with her. I went hunting them, and it’s possible that I crept more quietly than usual for the chance of listening, but I might as well have gone trampling round like elephants. He was kneeling in front of her in the woods, and she had her hands on his head, tears running down her face, and when she took them off, she said, “No, love. I’m sorry. It’s not something that I can bring out of you.”
Orion bowed his head like someone had told him he was going to be executed. “It’s just me.”
Mum looked down at him, sorry, so sorry, the same kind of sorry she is when she’s telling someone their child is going to die, and she can’t stop it. “It’s not all of you. It’s not the part of you that’s asking. The part of you that loves El.”
Orion stood up. “But it’s the part that matters.” He turned and saw me.
“What part?” I said, but he only stared at me and then shook his head and walked past me. “Lake, you plonker, bloody tell me!” I yelled after him, but I didn’t get a response.
“El,” Mum said, gentle, meaning please stop hitting my patient with a stick, but why should I, since that was the only thing that seemed to be doing any good?
I stormed after him, and as if he understood he wasn’t getting out of it, he kept going until he reached one of the inconvenient pitches further up the hill that had been abandoned, well out of sight, with the firepit overgrown and a couple of saplings going up inside through the falling-in roof of the old yurt. He wasn’t trying to get away from me, I don’t think, but I also didn’t care if he was. At least he sat down on one of the logs and didn’t get up and flee when I sat down next to him.
I probably oughtn’t have given him the letter then, either, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I didn’t actually think he was ready for it, but he wasn’t ever going to be ready for Ophelia to twist a knife in his gut. And at least I’d know what I was up against, I thought; so after a few moments of stewing, I pulled it out and handed it to him.
He turned it over in his hands, looking at his mother’s handwriting for a while before he opened it, and I watched his eyes skip over it, tiny reflection of cream paper in the pupils, and then he folded it back up and creased it over and just sat there without saying anything. I held my hand out for it, and he gave it to me without the least objection, which made sense after I’d read it, because it didn’t give me the slightest information.
My star boy,
I don’t know if you’ll let me call you that anymore, but this once I will.
I know you must be angry and upset with me. You have every right to be, and I can’t even apologize, because if I had made other choices, I wouldn’t have you. So I can’t ever be sorry. I want you not to be sorry either. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you fear, I need you to believe in yourself, and if not, believe in me and Daddy. We love you and trust you, and if you need help trusting yourself, know that you can always come to us and we’ll do whatever it takes to help you.
We’ve met El. She’s an extraordinary person. I only wish I’d found her sooner. But you found her yourself instead. I know she’s afraid of me. But she’s not afraid of you. That’s a gift. I don’t think you need me to tell you to treasure it and be careful of it. I’m just happy that you have it.
Don’t be afraid. When you’re ready, come home. We love you.
Mom and Dad
I was near tearing it into shreds after the first outraged pass. I could tell there was all sorts of hook-yanking going on in there, only I couldn’t follow it, because Ophelia had planted all of her hooks years ago, out of my sight. It was like watching her trundle a wheelbarrow full of paving stones and landmines into a garden, hearing her digging busily on the other side of the hedge, until out she came to cheerily show off the delightful path she’d laid, and now I had to walk down it without any idea which step was set to blow me to bits.
“What is she talking about?” I demanded, even though I already knew Orion wouldn’t say, and he didn’t, not a word. “You’re not going back to New York,” I told him savagely. He didn’t even raise his head. I grabbed him by the shoulders and made him look at me. “We’re taking the sutras to Cardiff,” I told him. “You’re going to hunt down whatever random mals are scattered round, and I’m going to put up a Golden Stone enclave for the circle there, and then we’ll move along to the next place. Just like we planned.”
His face crumpled a bit and he said, “El…”
“Shut up unless you’ve got any better ideas.” I shook him. “You’re alive. You’re not in the Scholomance anymore. And that’s more than any reasonable person could hope for—that’s more than any reasonable person got, the last century and more, so whatever else you think is wrong, whatever else is the matter inside your head, you haven’t any excuse to moan about it. Stop trying to put yourself in the ground. You’re alive, so get on with living!” I was snarling in rage by the end of it, and he put his arms around me and pulled me close and buried his face on my shoulder. He smelled of sweat and smoke and the woods, and I put my arms around him, and he shuddered all over. Tentatively, slow and lurching, he raised his head. My breath was catching with hope as his cheek and his lips went bumping soft and warm over my skin, until he reached my mouth and he was kissing me.
Only just barely, the lightest brush, but I didn’t leave it there; I caught him round the back of the head and kissed him harder, kissed him without bothering to get my breath in between until I had to stop, gasping, and he’d got the idea by then and he had his arms round me and was kissing me wildly, kissing me all over, along my jaw and down my neck, like he’d been desperate to be kissing me all along and now had just let himself go. He yanked loose the drawstring neck of my dress and I wriggled my arms in from the sleeves and out the top of it, letting it slide down to my waist; he went on kissing me, down between my breasts, as I clawed his T-shirt out of his jeans and paused only so we could get it off over his head.
I stood up and let the dress fall the rest of the way off me. He stood up to meet me, and we got straight back to kissing while I unbuttoned his jeans and shoved them down off him, and then we stopped again to grab my dress and spread it out on a thick patch of grass in the sunlight, and we lay down together, and with his body against mine, so unbelievably warm and good, I said, gulping for air, “You absolute bastard, I could kill you,” because we could have been doing this, we could have been here together, in the sunlight and the grass and the world, instead of the horrors he’d put himself and me through. He made a choked gasp, something between a sob and a laugh, and said, “El, I love you,” and impossibly he was alive, he was here, and we’d made it out; we had got out of the Scholomance after all.
* * *