As I’m not completely dim, I’d asked Deepthi for advice before I’d gone. She’d put her hands on my head and sung a soft blessing over me, and then she’d shook her head and told me, “Ophelia will be there, and I cannot see past her shadow.” So the only rough plan that I had formed was to find out whatever Ophelia was doing and stop it, on principle, and regardless of anything else happening. It had the virtue of simplicity, if nothing else.
How I was going to carry it out was a much thornier question. Deepthi and my grandmother and great-grandmother had loaded me up with golden bangles: heavy and clinking round my wrists with the work that had gone into each one: hours of meditation and focus. The love and strength of my family—my family, and I still hadn’t stopped feeling my eyes smart from the idea—were in them. But for both good and bad, they were nothing like the power-sharer on top of its oceanic well of smooth, unlimited power, the ones that everyone on Ophelia’s side would be using.
But it was the only plan I had to go on, so I got myself out to Sintra on the train—there were absolutely no other wizards on it with me; I assume everyone else was coming by luxurious private car if not helicopter—and then hiked up to the estate on foot, dodging the bored mundane security guards who had been hired to patrol the outer perimeter. It was easy enough to get into the park this time, since there were no mundanes beyond them to stop you from just walking through walls, and unlike most of the other guests, at least I knew where I was going.
I had only barely squirmed through onto the grounds when four different spells came straight at me. They weren’t meant for me personally; all four of the wizards I assume had been told by their respective enclaves to watch the perimeter and do what they could to make sure only allies made it through, and raise the alarm otherwise. They saw me coming in solo and hadn’t any idea who I was, so they all made the exact same decision: to take me out first and ask questions after. None of the attacks were killing spells; one was in fact a really clever spell of happiness that made you feel so delighted with your situation that you didn’t want to change a thing about it, and therefore stopped right where you were. But that one and the nastier spell of equally intense depression would probably have canceled each other out when they’d hit me: hazards of throwing attacks wildly in the middle of a general firefight.
The other two were of the physical variety; one strangled you until you just fell over unconscious, and squeezed down again anytime you started to wake; the other one went straight to cutting off blood flow to the brain at precisely timed intervals. I caught them all, and I was about to just send them back where they’d come from when instead I thought of Deepthi telling me, Your gift is to bring light out of the dark, and I tried to just hold them instead, as if I could take the mana out of them and use it for something else later, almost like what I’d done with the reviser spell in the Scholomance gym.
It didn’t quite work. I accidentally squashed the four workings together, which essentially turned all of them into miscastings, so instead they rebounded in bits and pieces all round, to what sounded like the discomfort of all four wizards. But I did get a few driblets of mana out of the process, enough to think that if I was only working with one spell at a time, I might be able to manage it. The attempt at least got me past that set of border guards, and into the dark and winding circuit of the gardens.
Where I discovered almost immediately that I had no idea where I was going after all. Under ordinary circumstances, when magic meets mundane, the mundane wins by miles. It’s so hard to cast a spell in the face of casual disbelief that most wizards don’t even try. But you can do it if you pour enough mana behind it and keep going, or if you’ve got enough wizards around, with our total confidence that magic really does work. And with a battlefield-full, the world began to change around us.
All those circling garden paths, which had been meant to make you feel as though you were wandering lost in the wilderness, were spreading out along those lines of intent, almost as if they were in an enclave, new branches uncurling to make room for still more wizards hurling still more mana profligate in every direction. Trees were putting out clawed arms or growing unnatural fruit that tried to persuade you to stop and eat; the many statues were coming off their plinths and out of their niches to join the fighting. Strange pieces of artifice were growing up out of the ground—the kinds of impossible structures that defied the laws of physics so forcefully that ordinarily they couldn’t be put up outside an enclave. If a single ordinary person did slip through that perimeter right now, or if there was some poor bastard living rough behind one of the bushes, they would find themselves in the middle of a world that had stopped making sense.
I crept round trying to find the initiation well, while silent terrible killing spells went flying overhead so fast and thick that some of them had to be going at the wrong targets. I got all the practice in harvesting bad intentions that I could want without finding a single fight of my own. I caught murder and maiming and agonies out of the air, stuffing them into my metaphorical sack until the gems on all my bangles were glowing vivid red, the crystal hanging round my neck was full as well, and I felt like my skin was going to split like an overripe plum.
By then I had realized that all of us were caught in a working, some spell of endless wandering that was encouraging us to stay lost. I suspect none of the other wizards had ever been round here; no sane wizard would have come anywhere near the Scholomance entrance. So they didn’t know what to look for, other than someone to fight, and there wasn’t any shortage of them in the twisted gardens. But even full-up on mana, I couldn’t get out of it.
Or rather, I could have got out, but I couldn’t get in. After that time of getting lost inside London enclave, I’d made a point of looking up a proper wayfinding spell and memorizing it carefully—it wasn’t intended to kill or mangle anything, so I had to work to get it to stick in my head—but when I tried it now, I only got back to the front entrance of the park, where the gates were standing wide open and the fire engine lights going in the distance and the park behind me shrouded in dark: an invitation to be on my way, if I didn’t like to stay and be a part of the festivities. I gnashed my teeth and turned round and plunged back into the rising confusion of the battlefield.
Mostly no one was paying any attention to me; your assumption if you saw a teenage wizard trying her best to sneak quietly round the battlefield would be that she was a recent graduate who’d clumsily got separated from her enclave’s team, and not worth your notice. But the enclavers certainly did notice that none of their deadliest spells were landing, and neither were the ones their enemies were flinging. I was overhearing people debating whether New York or Shanghai had put some sort of muffling enchantment over the grounds.
But they only got more aggressive in response. More and more wizards were turning up, and all of them went on doing their best to kill each other with the hoarded mana they’d all piled up inside their enclaves. I couldn’t hold it all, so I started turning people to stone instead. Each time someone lobbed another attempt, I caught it and took the mana and returned fire, and fairly soon the paths I was wandering began to fill up with elaborate replacement statuary.