And they could actually do it, they assured me, because the council members of their two enclaves had offered to give them a wonderful rate on the enclave-building spells.
They went on for several minutes just brimming over with grand plans and idealism before they noticed my expression and also the simmer of storm clouds gathering overhead, and trailed off uncertainly. If it had been anyone else, I’d probably have howled them off the face of the earth; as it was, I told them to go and ask Aadhya or Liesel why that was an extremely bad idea, and they nodded and hurried away and left me to seethe my way through realizing that my career goals had gone obsolete.
If they were left to their own devices, enclaves would go on selling the same old spells, because that was how enclaves got loads of their mana. And wizards on the outside would go on buying them, because they wanted huge modern enclaves, and they wouldn’t know exactly what they were buying—they wouldn’t want to know—until they’d already poured half the mana that they’d raised over decades into the price, and couldn’t get it back out again. And then they’d get to make Shanfeng’s choice: to let their children die in the maw-mouths built by other enclaves, or make a new one of their own.
I’d tried to stop it with words, with explanations. But it was almost impossible even just to tell people about the maw-mouths underneath the enclaves. The compulsion spells were even nastier than we’d realized. All the people in charge of things like, for instance, the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, or the secret Facebook group that all the older wizards were in, were council members, all of whom had needed to sign on to the compulsions before they were allowed to attain those rarefied positions. And it wasn’t just that they couldn’t tell other people, they were compelled to hide the information. Anytime we tried to post something online, it would get taken down or altered, and our accounts kept getting locked and deleted.
And the harder we tried, the worse it got. I was on my third phone now because the two before had been mysteriously fried shortly after I’d used them to group-text a few dozen people. The only reliable way I’d found for sharing the information was literally for one of us who already knew to personally tell people, face-to-face. And we were already being called trolls and overimaginative children, to boot. It wasn’t going to be very hard for people to put that comforting wall back up, in front of their own eyes or someone else’s.
I’d tried going at it from the other direction, too. I’d passed the word to every council member in front of the Scholomance gates that I was willing to replace their foundation stones, too, and all they’d need to do was gather the mana to do it with. And I’d passed the word around to all the independent wizards, too, as best I could: I would build them a brand-new Golden Stone enclave with just a few years’ worth of mana beneath it.
I’d had a grand total of zero takers so far. To get the mana to replace a foundation stone, most of the enclaves would have to open their doors to three times as many wizards. And one of the little golden enclaves wouldn’t have enough room to do more than tuck kids in at night. There were a few wizard circles, mostly ones formed by our classmates, who had started on saving up the mana. But all the ones that already had it—well, they were having a hard time agreeing to spend it on a golden enclave, when the old enclaves were offering the spells to build massive modern ones at cut-rate prices.
It wasn’t going to stop. It wasn’t ever going to stop, not if I left them to their own devices. So someone else would have to do the work that I’d wanted to do, the work of building that sang to me, and I would have to go and do the work I didn’t want, the terrible work that only I could do.
Because there was one and only one thing that would make enclavers throw their doors wide open to all the independent wizards of the world, replace their foundations, and turn their enclaves into shelter for them all. Fear. Of the unknown maleficer, the scourge of enclaves, still roaming the world, about to bring them down. That was why they’d done it in Beijing, and that was why they’d done it in Dubai: because they hadn’t had any other choice. They’d had to share or watch their whole enclave go sliding off into the dark. And when that was your choice, suddenly sharing didn’t look so intolerable after all. That was how Alfie had talked Sir Richard and the rest of London council around to the urgent necessity of replacing all of those eight remaining maw-mouth foundations: he’d persuaded them that their odds of getting hit again were too high for comfort.
So I couldn’t do the work I wanted myself, but I could make room for the work in the world: by fulfilling Deepthi’s prophecy and bringing death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world. By hunting down the maw-mouths that stood beneath them.
And as soon as I got close enough to one of them, once I had a maw-mouth in my sights—then Deepthi, and the four other members of my father’s clan who’d inherited some degree of her gift, would know which enclave was going to go down when I destroyed it. And then they’d tell the enclave, the way she’d told Dubai, and they’d also offer to come over and replace their foundation stone just in time. The way I’d done in Dubai.
So every time I tracked down a maw-mouth, another enclave would have to open up their doors, and one by one they’d absorb all the wizards who would have built new enclaves. Maybe more wizards would even start to work strict mana, over time: my family would share the spells from the sutras freely, and surely other enclaves would want to have the power in-house. And the more maw-mouths I destroyed, the quicker it would happen.
Deepthi was still waiting for an answer: was I content? I took my hand off the sutras, and left them in her lap. “I’ll find a way to be,” I said, firmly, and meant it. I’d told Orion as much myself: I was alive, and out of the Scholomance, and so was everyone I loved, and I hadn’t had any right to expect even half that much.
* * *
So the next thing I did, obviously, was go back to the Scholomance.
I hugged Mum goodbye at the airport; she was going back to Wales. “Maybe you’ll have two homes, now,” she said to me, smiling through tears, and kissed me. “Come soon.” I boarded my own flight to Portugal after she’d gone.
The big placards on the outer walls of the museum park still said CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, and there were polite blank-faced guards on the gates making sure no mundanes got inside. But in the gardens the worst of the mess had already been tidied up, statues returned to their proper places—whether that was by repairing them and putting them back into their niches, or by turning them back into people. One mistake had been made in that direction which had resulted in several people getting chased round the garden with arrows until the single-minded Diana in question had been turned back into stone.
The way to the school was temporarily wide open, by which I mean it was only three spells of concealment to work through and then ten minutes slogging through dank tunnels to get back to the entry plaza. But the doors were back on their hinges, and the repairs in the graduation hall were almost completely finished; the sound of work was echoing down the big maintenance shafts from the upper levels, where massive teams of artificers were hard at work installing the new dormitory levels, almost twice the former size. The rooms would be a bit bigger, too, but not for luxury: from now on there were going to be two students to each one.